Montana Women's Prison

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[edit] Native American Women in Prison (Montana Women's Correctional Center)

There is a lack of knowledge about the problems that women of color face while incarcerated, and it is assumed that all incarcerated women are equally affected. “Because our society is stratified by race, class, and gender, different categories of people experience life in unequal ways” (Ross 17), and this includes the life of a prisoner. Native American women and specifically women of color experience prison differently than white women.

Native women tend to receive longer sentences, than white women. Although, Native women tend to commit more “male-type” crimes, although it was found that when a white woman and a Native woman were convicted of the same crime the Native woman still received a longer sentence. Native women often are overrepresented in prison populations. For example in Montana's Women's Correctional Center the Native woman population was 25% of the population, when in the state they are 6% of the total population.

Racism and sexism influences the treatment of women of color more so than anything else. “Mechanisms of exclusion are built by Euro-American society to maintain a pattern of subordination. In this way, privilege becomes institutionalized and embedded in informal rules and social positions. This pattern is characterized by its indirect method and by the salience it ascribes to the institutional or structural roles over individual attitudes” (Blauner 1972). “Racism and sexism have emerged in the United States as systems of oppression used to control people of color and women” (Ross 20). Other ways of institutionalized control of the Native women's behavior in the Women's Correctional Center, is the prescribing of mind altering drugs. When medical aide was needed they were often denied or not taken care of correctly. Guards would make false write-ups to prevent prisoners from receiving approval to be released early because of good behavior. An example of this is found in Ross's article Race, Gender, and Social Control: Voices of Imprisoned Native American and White Women, when one of the prisoners was falsely written up for simply running up the stairs two at a time.

The prisoners are also forced to do whatever the guard tells them to do and “the guards seemed to be deliberately provoking prisoner's and perhaps baiting them to justify time in lockup” (22). It was also found that most Native women prisoners believed that their race influenced how the white guards treated them, “enforcement of the rules changed depending upon which guards were on duty” (21). Among all of these things that Native women had to encounter and deal with a major one was sexual abuse. Many of the Native American prisoners said that the white male guards would watch them undress, and some said that they were raped by white male jailers, sometimes more than once by the same jailer. It is also proven that Natives are more likely to be raped than white women because they are generally modest. Some white women prisoners would trade sex with guards for marijuana and alcohol. To conclude many women prisoners in the Woman's Correctional Center “believed the guards purposely picked on them; this was particularly true for the Native women who maintained that, because they were a cohesive group, they were threatening to prison staff” while in those groups (21).

[edit] References

• Blauner, R. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
• Ross, Luana. Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Autumn, 1994), 17-39.
• Ross, Luana. Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998.