This semester, I took a class with Professor Doran Larson called “Curating Prison Witness.” For years, Professor Larson has dedicated his time and passion to bearing witness to the atrocities committed by the United States incarceration system after his exposure to the issues through a creative writing course he taught at Attica Correctional Facility. In this course, he introduced us to the American Prison Writing Archive, a space he dedicated to all who care to read the submissions he gathers from incarcerated individuals around the country.

Throughout this course, I have read many collections of prison writing and organic stories in the archive, and the strikingly traumatic experience of women in prison really stood out to me. Though women make up a minority of the United States incarceration system at around 7% of the incarcerated population, this number is rising quicker than that of incarcerated men. Few people are aware of the atrocities of the United States incarceration system, which adds to the efficacy of the system.

In an effort to bear witness to the human rights abuses United States prisons commit towards women, Ayelet Waldeman and Robin Levi interviewed incarcerated women across the United States, compiling Inside This Place, Not Of It with harrowing, nonetheless real, stories of the narrators they met. I read this collection with a dwindling sense of grit and a crystalized reality of my rights as a woman outside the walls of America’s prisons. Rampant sexual violence, medical maltreatment and the struggle to find a voice are a few themes the women touch on.

For the crime of faking refunds at Pep Boys to pay her bills as a single, pregnant mother of two boys, Olivia Hamilton served 18 months. The experience of Olivia’s birth in prison includes a prison doctor forcibly inducing her, shackles on her swollen ankles during the late stages of active labor and a non-consensual Cesarean section. The United States incarceration system is built on a model specified for males, leaving prison medical care greatly lacking specializations in obstetrics and gynecology, creating a rise in preventable female-specific diseases and inadequate reproductive care. There is also a dire need for reproductive justice, to avoid the separation of mothers from their infants and to ensure that their children are not displaced outside of the prison.

After a childhood filled with rampant sexual and violent abuse from her mother’s partner, Teri Hancock was later sentenced to four to fourteen years in prison after serving her initial 2 years, where she was subject to even more violent and sexual abuse at the hands of prison staff. According to a study done by Human Rights Watch, more than 50% of all incarcerated women have experienced some form of sexual abuse prior to incarceration. Once in prison, these women have limited access to trauma care, counseling and support services. Combined with more sexual abuse at the hands of prison staff and unsatisfactory prison living condi-

tions, the prison exacerbates negative health outcomes and poor mental health.

Olivia and Teri’s stories, which bear witness to the extreme trauma they experienced both before and during incarceration, is the horrifyingly common truth of incarcerated women throughout the fifty states. Giving space and time to the words of these incarcerated women is only the first step in enacting change in our twisted system of justice. Serving time in prison is supposed to be the only punishment, yet our incarceration

system does not stop there. Sexual violence, medical maltreatment and crimes against human rights are the additional punishments for commiting a crime in the United States, civilly tucked away behind concrete walls and metal bars.

Why should you care? Reading about horrible practices in the world can often feel hauntingly sad and overwhelmingly unassociated to you, but the malicious treatment of women incarcerated in the United States is happening all around us. Attica Correctional Facility, although a prison for men, is a mere few hours away. The Attica Uprising in 1971, where incarcerated people revolted to demand better living conditions and political rights and resulted in dozens of people murdered, happened a mere few hours away. In most cases, incarcerated people did commit a crime, but the problem is they might not be convicted for the crime they actually committed, and the United States has an arbitrary and racist judicial system that criminalizes things most countries do not. The War on Drugs, for example, only increased and stiffened the penalties for drug possession and trafficking, overcrowded United States’ prisons and disproportionately criminalized people of color. Meanwhile, the War on Drugs did effectively nothing to combat drugs.

Bearing witness to the atrocities committed in the “land of the free” is the first step toward holding the system accountable and unveiling its own crimes. To bear witness to a few of the many women incarcerated in the United States today, please read Waldeman and Levi’s Inside This Place, Not Of It. To learn more about the United States’ brutal racist history that pipelined into today’s carceral system, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. To read many more stories of incarcerated people, visit the American Prison Writing Archive at prisonwitness.org.