Women's Rights behind Bars

Women's Rights behind Walls [1]

Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland

Abstract:

In the 1990s a global political consensus emerged that ‘women’s rights’ are also ‘human rights.’ In particular, the Beijing Women’s Conference set forth an ambitious agenda and activist-scholars in the global South began circulating ideas and papers on “putting women in the center of analysis.” I believe this focus is necessary, especially, when it comes to critiquing the current prison system world-wide. Globalization has altered family relations and consumer behaviors, further marginalizing women in caste and class societies. There has been little research done on the impact of globalization on incarcerated women in Africa—with, perhaps, the notable exception of sex work and trafficking of girls and women from West Africa. The focus of this paper will be a comparative approach of issues faced by criminalized and imprisoned women in several African countries. I will also highlight the voices of resistance, especially women political prisoners of South Africa.

Keywords: African female prisoners; polygamy; political prisoners; social prisoners; women’s human rights; abolition.

African Women and the Global Human Rights Agenda

When we -feminists in the global north- talk about women’s rights in Africa, inevitably the first thing that comes to mind is the topic of female circumcision, or in feminist charged speak: female genital mutilation.[2] This may be followed by other discussions of sexualized violence, such as trafficking, AIDS, and occasionally by discussions on customary practices, such as polygamy and land tenure. On the bright note, the UN Millennium Goals have broader and explicit gender perspectives affecting women in Africa, including economic and educational rights. Yet, overall, despite the important shift of the human rights agenda to do more than lip service to women’s rights, African women get short shrift.

Feminist writer and educator Abena Busia tries to shift the discourse about women in Africa through a new academic endeavor, Women Writing Africa, sponsored by Rutgers University. She shares the following insight in an interview with WHRnet:

In Women Writing Africa we collect women’s cultural production-- oral and written, formal and informal, sacred and profane. We try to collect whatever we can lay our hands on, as far back as we can get. We are looking at things that we know were written or spoken in female-centered spaces, about things that only women could say or in circumstances that women can control. What we are trying to do is get a sense of the way women have agency and control over their lives and negotiate their lives differently.

We just so tired of our non-existence as women of power and agency in Western discourse where are viewed as perpetual victims—a barefoot pregnant woman holding a baby in our hands, or a barefoot pregnant women with a baby on our back and hoe in our hand. We are labeled endlessly. That sense of missing many things-- such as no agency, no affective space, no human negotiation--all those things, which in fact, everybody knows are profoundly central to our existence and shape our lives (whrnet 2003, my emphasis).

Given the colonizing lens that Busia describes so well, the outsider expert continues to label and exoticize the hapless African woman and knows what remedies work best for African women and children (cf. Mohanty’s seminal essay “Under Western Eyes,” 1990; Nagel 2001). This patronizing “speaking for” attitude has come under criticism in particular with respect to vociferous attacks on female genital mutilation by non-African feminists (Welch 1995; Butegwa 2002). In the emerging women’s rights decade of the 1990s which culminated in Beijing, it turned out that the African regional committee provided much food for thought for the UN conference on women, Beijing 1995. The final platform for action drew much of its content from the preparatory African meetings. No longer would African women be silent bystanders who have to be represented by “well-meaning” Northerners, but rather, under the leadership of Gertrude Mongella, dubbed in Africa as “Mama Beijing,” they have joint the center of discussions and shaped the platform for women decisively.

Now, having argued that one should take care not to “speak for” but on the other hand to “speak with” African women, this paper suffers from a particular epistemological and political dilemma: how does one address human rights violations concerning non-elite women without falling into the patronizing trap? How do women, who are walled in, either in their families’ compounds or in the state’s carceral structures, participate when they do not get the chance of speaking out? Butegwa (2002) argues sensibly that outsiders may speak on behalf of the oppressed only if it is impossible for the inside group to agitate: “I can see a role for capacity-building, including skills in problem analysis, organizing and advocacy. The content of their advocacy efforts, including definition of issues and possible solutions, should remain entirely for those working from within” (126). In describing women’s imprisoned or “walled in” experiences, this paper will attempt to stay clear of normative claims that find little basis in lived experiences. Yet, it is difficult, admittedly, to write about women prisoners and not thematize their enormous victimization.

In human rights campaigns, almost inevitably pure and deserving victims are sought out who become the poster children of the campaign. Similarly, in the prison literature about women, one tends to find fervent appeals to the women’s virtual innocence and rationalizations of a woman’s particular offense. I don’t claim to do anything different from that paradigm, but I also would note that men’s criminal acts could easily be justified by drawing on the environmental hypothesis: most violent offenders tend to have been victimized in their childhood by family members or others. Vivien Stern (1998) points out that there is a major difference for women’s and men’s imprisonment. Unlike men, few women resort to violence and most commit property offenses due to poverty. The world over, women’s rate of imprisonment is about 5% (or less) of the total imprisonment of a country; the exception is the United States (due to its “war on drugs” policy which has targeted women).

I would venture to argue that there are two types of women prisoners: the imprisoned intellectuals, borrowing a term from Joy James (2003), and social prisoners.

On the one hand, there are women who politically organize and oppose family and/or state power, of the stature of a Winnie Mandela (South Africa) or Wangari Maathai (Kenya), who may find political clout thanks to their international connections and even win prestigious prizes for their daring opposition to patriarchal, kleptocratic and dictatorial regimes. On the other hand, there are invisible women who are criminalized and become social outcasts; women who have born out of wedlock (Amina Lawal, Nigeria, as one of the most prominent of castigated, fallen women) and who may turn their luck around thanks to energetic African lawyers (Hauwa Ibrahim, Nigeria) and local NGOs (e.g., Women Living under Muslim Laws). But most women who end up as social or common prisoners do not have high-end representation and face a number of challenges rarely addressed by human rights agencies.

African Human Rights Discourse: Colonial Paradigm or Liberatory Practice?

In recent years several conferences and books have been devoted to the question of human rights in Africa. Does it make sense to focus on a ‘rights discourse’ or is it more prudent to use ‘other languages of resistance’ (An-Na’im 2002)? The human rights declarations that evolved from the global north focus almost exclusively on the negative rights of the individual against state power: from the British and American Bill of Rights, the French and UN Declarations of the Rights of Man, these “universal” rights focus on individualized freedom to pursue self-interested ideals, separate and apart from community needs. Such ideology is alien (and therefore not universalizable) to the majority parts of the globe where community interests trump individual, especially possessive individual pursuit of happiness. Thus, John Mbiti (1970) rearticulates the ego-centric Cartesian Cogito into a socio-centric variant: “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.” Very clearly, a Eurocentric “rights discourse” devoid of sensitivity towards cultural practices won’t be applicable in an African context of sociality and responsibility towards one’s community, customs, and elders. However, due to the colonial legacy, the rights discourse has firmly been instituted in the legal instruments of the African countries.

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1986) weaves together different traditions where the outcome has been assailed as a contradictory mix of rights and duties of the individual and groups (Mutua 2002). However, as Mutua emphasizes, western human rights experts have underestimated the reality of individual rights of Africans before colonial conquest. Mutua’s cursory view of pre-colonial practices of adjudication highlights the high respect for human life and the dignity of the person; guaranteeing equal protection of individuals (cf. the Akamba of East Africa); the ability to dismiss a chief who rules oppressively (in Akan society of West Africa); the presumption of innocence and relishing in the juridical process (cf. the Amhara of East Africa). Mutua is careful not to romanticize the historical record of pre-colonial Africa and points to cases where human rights of individuals, and especially the rights of women, were not safe-guarded. So, in what ways can individual and group rights coexist in harmony as the African Charter imagines? The new South African constitution (1994), too, commits itself to this ideal of co-existence. However the last decade bore out serious tensions in particular in customary family law (Chanock 2002). In 2005, the South African Supreme Court has ended some aspects of the debate by ruling that customs which discriminate on the basis of gender have to be abolished. The debate is still going on in the Northern states of Nigeria which have ushered in Shari’a law in 2000.

When it comes to the adjudication of rights, whether as group/culturally based rights or as individual rights, one has to look at individual cases on what perspective might be advantageous to women who have committed transgressions against a person or against social standards. Here I’d like to contrast practices in two different parts of West Africa: Mali and Northern Nigeria.

1. Mali: A woman killed her husband because he had married a second wife. The first wife poisoned the husband on the day of the naming ceremony of the second wife’s child. The family’s jeli (i.e., a bard who engages in informal conflict resolution) intervened, and it was agreed to banish the offender from the village who had to seek exile at her paternal home. Nobody proposed turning her in to the police, despite the severity of the crime (Kone 203). The police, too, when called to arrest an offender, will ask whether people have tried to resolve the conflict in the customary way. This may be a bewildering gesture if one is accustomed to the western world view that an offense is done against the state, first and foremost, who then steps in to intervene on behalf of the victim; and it may seem that victims’ rights are disregarded in communally based adjudication. However, one ought to see the other side, too. When British colonialists started to prosecute persons for crimes against the Crown, such as property theft or murder (of another African), victims were bewildered when they did not receive the customary restitution from the offender’s clan. “Doing time” in a penitentiary serves no purpose from the point of view of the aggrieved. Mali is a predominately Muslim country, which does not condone Shari’a law, but on the other hand, it allows indigenous practices of mediation by the jeli caste and joking relatives to restore peace in the community and solve conflicts between persons and clans. “Cultural justice” may not have to clash with secular “criminal justice” (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2004) but the next case shows that it certainly can.

2. Nigeria: The Zamfara State government adopted the Islamic legal system, the Shari’a, in January 2000, in disregard of the secular nature of the Nigerian constitution and of other religious minorities living in this state. Shari’a was declared by the governor being “not just a penal code but a way of life” (Abdullah, 2002). All women would soon be banned from sporting activities and single women received an ultimatum: Get married within three months or lose your job! The controversy about the law heated up when the first penal sanctions were delivered: limb amputation (for theft) and public flogging of prostitutes and a male procurer. International attention came along with the conviction and flogging of seventeen-year old Bariya Ibrahim for the offense of fornication. Proof of the offense was based on the fact of her pregnancy and her unmarried status. Such proof, however, is quite spurious given that Shari’a stipulates third party eye witnesses of the transgression of fornication, which did not occur (Abdullah, 2002). Amina Lawal’s case of adultery followed two years later, but her conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Shari’a court of appeals.

These two cases show that it is impossible to differentiate between (pure) custom and traditional practices on the one hand and politically expedient customs on the other. Customs are always open to contestation and interpretation; they can be read in a progressive or in a reactionary way. This is meant as a caveat to liberal feminist human rights experts, who jump to the defense of a woman cast as a victim of customary practices. I simply wish to point out that a human rights adjudication which relies on imprisonment as its main instrument may also be harmful to women.

A Brief History of Prisons in Africa[3]

Prisons in Africa are an un-African institution. In pre-colonial African societies, one of the harshest sentences faced by an offender was expulsion; exile equated to social death. When the European colonialists arrived in the “scramble for Africa,” they converted slave forts along the Atlantic coast into gaols or cachots (Bernault 2003). Achebe’s anti-colonial novel Things Fall Apart describes well the trauma incurred by political leaders of the community who faced incarceration by the colonial power. For the African psyche it was simply unimaginable to utilize prisons as a form of punishment. West Africa’s measures for crime control tended to be restorative and retributivist justice, and collective punishment, rather than individualized punishment, was also common. Where an individual defrauded a member of another clan, the offenders’ entire clan may have to pay restitution, as is still commonly practiced in Mali (Kone 2003).

During colonial times, sexual assault and gang rape was particularly prevalent because women were not given separate quarters from men’s prison. In Senegal, African women were expected to cook for the entire prison population and sleep in the kitchen or on the porch of the fort or prison compound (Konate 2003). Colonial prisons enforced racial segregation, and European prisoners were housed in the vicinity of the warden’s office or compound (Goerg 2003).

In postcolonial Africa, several notorious prisons were shut down, and some serve as memorials for a haunted past, such as Robben Island, where South Africa’s anti-apartheid activists were imprisoned. Due to the international pressures of the United Nations and human rights organizations, a few countries have opened separate prisons for women and adolescent men. However, most African prisons house men, women and children, and may merely provide separate sleeping quarters for men and women.

Since the 1990s, a few African governments have also invited an inter-governmental, regional agency to inspect their prisons. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on Prisons and Conditions of Detention in Africa. “This [appointment] provides a unique opportunity to take a more holistic approach to the problems in prisons which an individual appointed to consider torture or inhuman treatment, for example, may not” (Murray 2002). The rapporteur has noted in published reports that many African prisons face the following challenging conditions: severe overcrowding, unsanitary living quarters, inadequate diet, mixed gender facilities, and high percentage of prisoners on remand.[4] The rapporteur visited Malian prisons several times and acknowledged improvements made after his recommendations. This however is a rare case of encouraging news. Most African countries prefer to take the walls behind which their citizens disappear to stand for ‘walls of silence’ rather than offering their prisons to inspection and critique to an outside rapporteur. Given enormous budgetary constraints, governments are also under pressure by the public to invest in schools and health care before ameliorating the conditions of least desirable subjects: prisoners.

General Issues of Women’s Human Rights behind Customary Walls or Prison Walls

1. Demographics of Criminalized Women

Even in Africa, prisons have turned into “homes” for young, socially displaced, undereducated and poor women, many of whom are also mothers. Social displacement is an effect in part of globalization and structural adjustment. More single women leave their rural homestead and venture into the cities for gainful employment. Unlike their male counterparts, female convicts’ crimes tend to be of a non-violent nature, such as theft. Certain occupations, such as sex work or domestic work and, to a lesser extent, drug dealing, expose women to a higher risk of sexual abuse and criminalization. Domestic workers tend to be young, rural, unmarried women who may risk being assaulted or raped by their patron: in countries where abortion is illegal, they may commit infanticide out of despair. In some women’s prisons, such as in Bamako, Mali, the majority of prisoners and remanded women are accused—or convicted—of infanticide. Mali does not sanction legal medical procedures of abortion of an unwanted child. The social sanctions of having a child out of wedlock are severe. Unfair and sexist trial procedures put women at further risk, such as a divorced woman whose baby was stillborn; she was charged with murder because her doctor’s evidence was not introduced to the court (Amnesty International 2004).

In several African countries, the familial practice of polygamy seems to be an additional stress factor, but it affects more women who have never received formal education and those who dropped out of primary education. Polygamy seems to be losing wide-spread support due to Westernization, urbanization, and Christianity. A recent Ugandan study (Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza 1999) actually notes the higher prevalence of female criminality (targeting their husband, junior co-wife or the co-wife’s child) in rural regions where polygamy is a prevalent practice. Prisoners, in particular those who were senior wives, note the disparities in asset sharing by their husbands; many times, these convicts rationalize their violent offenses by accusing the husband of total economic and emotional abandonment of her and her children and devoting all the jointly earned resources towards the new co-wife (Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza 1999). The majority of women who are convicted of violent crimes have been in abusive relationships (cf. the battered women syndrome, Walker 1984) and it is only since the UN women’s conference at Beijing (1996), that domestic violence is taken seriously as a public health concern.[5] Yet, women who kill their abusive partners in self-defense or in premeditation receive punitive sentences, including capital punishment, rather than leniency and compassion.

2. Custodial Conditions

The United Nations rules that only women should guard women is widely followed in Africa (unlike in the global North). Male guards or visitors may enter women’s quarters only in presence of other female guards, or, as in Nigeria, men can only enter in exceptional circumstances, such as medical personnel providing healthcare (Stern 1998). Male prisoners can be a threat to women’s well being, which makes it necessary not only to insist on separate sleeping quarters, but separate institutions, which was instituted in the capital of Mali in the late 1990s. The women’s prison at Bolle (near Bamako) now serves as a model prison, not only in Mali but on the continent (Nagel, forthcoming). Few separate women’s prisons due to the fact that it would not be economical to run a separate institution. Women’s sections tend to be merely cordoned off by a high wall or housed in makeshift buildings. They are treated as an afterthought (Stern 1998).

In many countries, unsentenced detainees held for more than five years comprise over 70 percent of the prison population. What is often deemed “death by natural causes” by prison officials is actually caused by the following factors: lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, dietary deficiency, lack of adequate health care, and overcrowding. Mortality rates increase dramatically during the rainy season. Often prisoners’ families have to supply food, soap, hygienic products and blankets for the prisoners. African governments are loathe to spend the national budget on prisoners’ amenities in part because of the public’s outcry of undue favoritism towards criminals. In Kenya, warders also live in prisons, with their families, and dwell in squalid conditions as well, which very well may turn them into brutes who torture or kill prisoners (Muiruri 2005).

A recent Zimbabwean study (Musengezi et al 2003) problematizes the lack of

gender-specific consideration. Men’s prisons are the standard according to which women are housed in sections of men’s prisons or—more infrequently—in separate facilities. Therefore, women will not receive any extra items which are not allocated to male convicts, e.g. basic sanitary items. South African women common law prisoners were particularly denigrated by being denied panties and cotton from the prison system in the 1970s (Kuzwayo 1985). The lack of basic health and dietary needs is particularly grave for pregnant women. In most prisons in Africa, pregnant convicts get minimal or no pre- or perinatal care; child mortality, as a result, is higher in prisons than in civil society. Most prisoners are mothers, and young children often stay with their mothers, in part because the father has abandoned the wife upon her incarceration or because the mother’s family is ashamed of her convict status and refuses to take the child. In some prisons, no extra clothing is provided for the child, and children suffer from the same poor diet as their mothers; so that the children are literally punished along with their mothers (Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza 1999; Taylor 2004). “Women with babies in prison seem to carry a double punishment of coping themselves and fending for their children” (Musengezi et al. 2003). Measures of rehabilitation are minimal and prison chores are overwhelmingly of domestic nature—reinforcing a gendered division of labor. Many women are illiterate and have very minimal formal education. Linguistic difficulties may impact adversely ethnic minorities and immigrants, who do not understand the lingua franca of the courts and the prison staff (cf. de Klerk et al. 2001).

In South Africa, where there is now an active prisoners’ rights association (SAPOHR) which even won the right to vote for convicts in the 1990s, rules seem to be selectively enforced with respect to sexual illicit practices. Since 1996, in male prisons condom dispensers are ubiquitous and condom use is encouraged in order to curb the spread of AIDS. On the other hand, in women’s prisons perceived lesbian convicts are being reported to prison staff and lesbians may also fear reprisals by other convicts (Dirsuweit 1999). This is not to say that relationships in men’s prisons are of a consensual nature, and adolescents housed in adult prisons are vulnerable to assaults and sexual exploitation.

3. Political Prisoners

From the onset of the colonial conquest, the carceral compound was used for political control of Africans. However, after de-colonization, many governments continued with the practice of incarcerating political opponents (Bernault 2003), even those leaders, who were themselves political prisoners under colonial rule, enthusiastically locked up the opposition (Asumah 2001). Many women’s political imprisonment is predicated on their participation in liberation struggles during the colonial and apartheid era. Women instigated revolts against poll taxes (Nigeria) and fought with men for national liberation (e.g. Mau Mau members in Kenya; pass laws resisters in South Africa). Many women faced sexual assault, rape and other forms of torture and murder in detention camps and prisons cells (Harlow 1992; wa Wamwere 2002; Kuzwayo 1985; Tesfagiorgis 1992). Women political leaders also faced house arrest and banishment, which turned the banned person into a self-policing docile body (Ramphele 1995). Winnie Mandela, who experienced banning during apartheid, was so acutely aware of her exceptional status in the apartheid regime that she was always prepared to return to prison by having a suitcase ready at all times (Mandela 1985). Similarly, Gambo Sawaba readied her loin clothes because she was incarcerated more than a dozen times for her defiant stance (Shawalu 1990).

Political detainees and prisoners differentiate themselves from common or social detainees and convicts. They report of serving their sentences with pride and determination. They instigate hunger strikes and launch grievances, never coming to terms with the label of prisoner; some refuse to work and all refuse to be “rehabilitated.” Some women are erroneously detained for participating in illegal political movements, yet upon release, they actually join the liberation movement that they were falsely accused of belonging to (Tesfagiorgis 1992). In South Africa under apartheid, political prisoners attempted to make common cause with common prisoners, who were condemned to hard labor (Meer 2001). Sometimes, the warden placed common prisoners with a political prisoner to press them into service to inform on the latter (Makhoere 1988). However, political prisoners were often able to educate common prisoners about their lot and understanding the oppressive situation. Northern Nigerian political prisoner and Muslim Gambo Sawaba counseled other Muslim women to say they were practicing Christians to evade harsh sanctions of Shari’a court (Shawalu 1990).

But at times, political prisoners distance themselves from the “unfortunate drunks” and outcasts (First 1989). This hierarchy is reinforced by the warden’s “fear of infectious belief”: Political detainees and political prisoners tend to get totally segregated so that they cannot incite the mass of social prisoners to rise up and organize for better prison conditions or worse, to conscientize (to use South African vernacular) them about party politics. Almost all political prisoners, who have written memoirs, have participated or organized a hunger strike to protest prison conditions. Caesarina Kona Makhoere reports that her cohort instigated the first strike in South Africa’s women’s prisons in 1976—a time of mass arrests, deaths in detention of school children in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising. After 1976, isolation of detainees increased. Being in segregation for only a short time already attacks the soul of the political prisoner; once sense of time breaks down, sensory deprivation creates psychopathic and somatic responses; one ages faster and may have long term health problems as a result of isolation (Mashinini 1989; Makhoere 1988; First 1989; Mandela 1985). Sometimes, political prisoners are allowed no other literature but the Bible or the Qur’an; they use the scriptures in order to make light of their own situation (Makhoere 1988; Meer 2001), in particular when they faced psychological torture, such as interrogation (First 1989). Makhoere (1988) discovered the subversive messages of the Bible, when she adorned a complaint letter to prison authorities with pithy quotes from the Scripture. The letter was torn up by the apartheid prison officials. One political prisoner reports that male activists considered women’s imprisonment to be a lighter affair than what the men experienced (Middleton 1998). While it is the case, as First and other admit to, that white women had much better conditions (especially regarding hygiene and food) than Black women, it cannot in general be said that women suffered less from their imprisonment and especially isolation from other prisoners.

4. Release

There are long-term physical and psychological negative effects associated with most incarceration experience. Many former political prisoners complain of heart problems, growth of tumors and other diseases affecting their health in the long term. Mashinini’s account (1989) of her six month solitary detention reveals an intense level of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her isolation was only interrupted by extended interrogations by her tormentors. For social prisoners, the return to civil society also involves an inordinate ordeal of shame, another form of social death. In the Bolle prison in Mali, women who are going through an apprenticeship program (e.g. learning soapmaking or typewriting) are told that they could return after their release to complete the program. Few however, opt to do that because society would judge them of being imprisoned again (Nagel forthcoming). On the other hand, in Kenya some prisoners refuse to leave after their official release date, because prison has become a home after the vice-president in charge of prisons has instituted a series of reforms since 2003 (Obonyo 2005). Release may not necessarily be associated with freedom and instead ex-convicts face “hostility, rejection and disdain from their families and society” (Ayieko 2005). Elizabeth Mwita, released June 2005 after 16 months jail time, was served with divorce papers from her husband who would not want to consort with somebody convicted of a criminal charge. He never visited her once in prison, which is a fairly typical experience for married women prisoners. (In Bolle women’s prison, Mali, women are allowed family visits but rarely does the family come, whereas the men’s prison downtown Bamako, is bustling every day with wives visiting and bringing food to their incarcerated husbands.) In addition, children of convicts and ex-convicts find themselves stigmatized and have difficulty in finding work in Kenya (as elsewhere) (Ayieko 2005). Very clearly the stigma of incarceration has huge repercussions on the extended family and kin networks. While the shame of imprisonment is felt by men and women alike across the continent, women and their children bear the brunt of a jail sentence—many studies the world over have shown the psychological, social, and economic costs associated with the incarceration of women who not only carry the main responsibility of parenting but also of subsistence living for their (extended) families (Taylor 2004).

For imprisoned intellectuals the return to their community is experienced differently. Many prisoners’ testimonials note with pride that they endured persecution, banishment, and prison life and at times even “confess” to their interrogators that “everything I had done I would willingly do again” (First 1989, 90). Fatima Meer, a former president of the Black Women’s Federation of South Africa, reports that she would not want to miss the experience of five months detention, despite the fact that she was already a banned person by the time she was detained (Meer 2001). But she enjoyed great spiritual and material support from her family during her prison stint, and thus she did not endure the social ostracism that common prisoners have to deal with.

Women, who are politicized due to group membership and subsequently tortured and who have to adhere to an honor codex, find it difficult to talk about their experiences, especially with their spouses. They often suffer from severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Wenk-Ansohn 2002). According to psychologist Wenk-Ansohn, men, who have gone into prison due to their active participation in a liberation movement, tend to have less severe PTSD problems, even though they may have severely been tortured, too. Their conviction in the cause tends to help them adjust to new circumstances, e.g. as refugees in a foreign country and culture, and their healing and social readjustment are more easily assured. Ex-prisoners who write about their detention experience may experience that writing is a therapeutic process (Pross 2002). Rarely do we find accounts by social prisoners. South African Pumla Mkhize (1992), who was forewarned by her mother about prisons being “A Snake with Ice Water,” clearly is exceptional in discussing frankly not only the reasons for her incarceration, but also how she gained favors inside (and early release) by snitching on other convicts. Snitching is considered to be one of the worst forms of transgression within the prison and violates the prisoners’ own moral codex.

Some Concluding Remarks regarding Criminal Justice

This paper has discussed in broad strokes human rights issues of African women, in particular of those who are “walled in” by “culture” or by “criminal law” statutes. Let me return to the un-African custom of incarceration by the state.

Without question, women who enter the criminal justice system have experienced serious victimization prior to arrest and incarceration. While the reasons for their incarceration may be country specific, victimization coupled with poverty are major factors in pushing a woman into a difficult situation. It is then quite easy to argue for more lenient sentences for women victims-turned-perpetrators. One could argue that women should not face incarceration, because it aggravates her already poor social status and gives her fewer choices when she returns to civil society. Furthermore, the sentence disconnects her from her children, who then in turn are likely to become felons and prisoners, too. However, it is quite another matter to argue for leniency towards other perpetrators, say, men. Nevertheless, this is what some feminist prison activists are prepared to do. From the classic Instead of Prisons (Faith et al.1976) to the manifesto Prisons and Social Control (Kinesis, 1987), activists have argued for the abolition of the criminal justice system, in particular curtailing the sentencing of people to prisons and making people into “slaves of the state” (Muntaquim 2003; Nagel 2003). Human rights are only safe-guarded when people are indeed treated with humanity and the 200 year long tinkering with the experiment of caging people has shown us that prisons are not only “crime schools” but prepare people for savagery and despair, not penitence and rehabilitation. Minimum standards for prisoners ought to be guaranteed, but this should not be the end of one’s advocacy. It is merely a starting point of acknowledging that nobody forfeits rights, not even a prisoner on death row, and much more has to be done to encourage prison reform and eventual abolition.

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Bio:

Dr. Mechthild Nagel is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at State University of New York College at Cortland and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of African Development at Cornell. Published works include Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality (2007), Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (2002) and Race, Class, and Community Identity (2000) and articles on the prison industrial complex. A recent research trip included studying prisons in Mali (2002) and in her current research, she is engaging in a comprehensive approach to studying women's prison conditions in Africa and the efficacy of decarceration efforts through restitution and other peacemaking strategies. She is also editor in chief for the online journal Wagadu. She can be reached at nagelm@cortland.edu.