“My Body a Prison Cell”
A History of Washington State Women’s Prisons
The Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), opened in 1971, is the first and largest women’s prison in the state. Located in Gig Harbor, Washington, the prison’s neatly mowed lawns, circularly trimmed bushes, and seemingly welcoming front doors—propped open in warm weather underneath the words “United in Purpose, Devoted to Excellence”—starkly contrast its chain-linked and barbed wire fences, surveillance towers, and uniformed inmates. As with women’s prisons across the U.S., the external appearance of the WCCW mirrors college-campus and home-like aesthetics in an attempt to mask violence, punishment, and even the language of imprisonment under the guises of rehabilitation and benevolence. Portrayals of women’s prisons as modern, sophisticated, and peaceful not only justify their existence, but also expose their underlying purpose: to uphold violent, binary constructions of femininity and criminalize deviance and difference. The ideologies that support women’s prisons are rooted in an early 19th-century understanding of white femininity, and perpetuate the criminalization of people along the constructed lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and ability. The WCCW is a prime example of how the women’s prison in the U.S. is inherently tied to historical notions of gender binary, and the disciplining, and even definition, of modern sexuality. Examining the history of the WCCW exposes the ways in which women’s prisons have acted, and continue to act, as sites of gendered domination, definition, and violence.
Interior shot of the WCCW. Image from NPR.
The Seatco Prison in Bucoda, Washington, was a territorial institution operated privately between 1874 and 1887. The prison has been described by historians as “hell on earth” and a “contract prison of evil;” it also housed the Territory of Washington’s first woman prisoner (Washington was not granted statehood until 1889). Mary Philips, a 50-year-old Indigenous woman, was arrested for manslaughter in Port Townsend, Washington. Mary Philips was the only woman incarcerated in Seatco at the time. Since then, the number of women, and particularly Indigenous women, in prisons has increased dramatically. According to a report compiled by the Lakota People’s Law Project from 2015, Indigenous women are now incarcerated at six times the rate of white women throughout the country. Women’s prisons are historically rooted in colonialism, and continue to perpetuate the criminalization of Indigeneity.
Image of the WCCW from Inmate Aid.
The Washington State Penitentiary, the first official state prison, was constructed and opened in 1887 in Walla Walla, Washington. At its foundation, the penitentiary was not equipped with accommodations for women prisoners. However, after it was argued in the penitentiary’s first report that it was unacceptable for the “male and female prisoners” to be incarcerated together, a separate facility for women was proposed. In 1890, rooms on the second floor of the new building were set up to house the women prisoners, and by 1892, the Washington State Penitentiary population included five women.
1869 marked the beginning of a 30-year national movement towards the construction and use of women’s reformatories proposed for the “custody, training, and treatment of delinquent and diseased women.” On September 1, 1920, the Washington Women’s Industrial Home and Clinic opened in Medical Lake, Washington. It was the state’s first and only women’s reformatory—an institution for women convicted of milder offenses emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment. The majority of the inmates of the Industrial Home were white women; many were single or divorced. The governor vetoed legislature-appropriated funds to continue supporting the Industrial Home, closing it down on April 1, 1921. For the next few decades, prisons and jails continued to utilize makeshift facilities, floors, and hospital wings to separate inmates by gender.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, seven women’s prisons were constructed in Western states due to the overcrowding and degradation of women’s wings in the main prisons. The seventh prison to be built was the Washington Corrections Center for Women. In July of 2018, the Washington Corrections Center for Women (with a capacity of 764 inmates) had an Average Daily Population (ADP) of 1,002. Resources such as healthcare (both mental and physical), education, vocational training, and even adequate space remain insufficient.
While early 19th-century anxieties concerning public health contributed to increases in the criminalization and incarceration of people deemed “unhealthy,” in many cases little-to-no concern was shown for the health of people inside prisons. According to annual reports from the first few years of the Walla Walla Penitentiary, inmates were confined in rooms that were separated from the prison hospital by only board partitions, making healthy prisoners more susceptible to illness and disease due to their proximity to the patients. Hospital wings within the prison were also used as places of confinement, especially for people incarcerated for having syphilis or other STIs.
A Cell in the WCCW. Image from the Department of Corrections, Washington State.
In the Washington Women’s Industrial Home and Clinic, Dr. J.D. Windell was hired as a genitourinary and gynecological specialist. According to a letter sent to the governor by the board of managers, Windell reportedly “got results” through his medical practice and methods of discipline. This combination of reproductive healthcare and punishment demonstrated the beginnings of invasive and inadequate medical care in women’s prisons. The implication of “getting results” through medicine and discipline alludes to the experimental nature of gynecology in prison, and the transformation of inmates into available subjects to be studied and experimented on.
“‘Prisons and jails were never set up to do healthcare, and by and large, healthcare is being provided by for-profit corporations,’ all of those imprisoned are viewed as potential coins in the funding well”
According to Anastazia Schmid, an artist, activist and scholar currently incarcerated at the Madison Correctional Facility in Indiana, during the 19th-century development of gynecology, “captive women were the prime candidates for experimental gynecological surgeries due to their invisibility, and due to the voicelessness of their social position.” Violent and painful experimentation was performed on enslaved women during the mid-1800s, and on incarcerated women throughout the later part of the century. The medical experimentation and torture of prisoners in women’s prisons included medical rape and induced abortion, demonstrating what Schmid refers to as the “fear and obsession with women’s bodies and sexuality at the heart of gynecology.” The entangled histories of gynecological violence and incarceration position the prison as a fundamental foil to reproductive justice.
Queer inmates, and particularly queer inmates of color, have an enormous amount of revolutionary potential within prisons. In April of 1974, KRAB FM Lesbian Feminist Radio conducted interviews with a support group for incarcerated lesbians about the WCCW. In the discussion, the group described the prison administration’s attitude towards lesbian relationships as dismissive, stating that when the WCCW first opened, the administration claimed that there were “no lesbian relationships within the institution.”
Women incarcerated at WCCW making calls. Image from NPR.
However, sex and intimacy inside early carceral institutions and spaces actually had an influential effect on the organizational and structural makeup of prisons, including not only their physical layout, but also the ways in which prisoners were interacted with and confined. Early 19th-century reformers and prison administrators feared that cohabitation between inmates of different genders would not only lead to extramarital sexual relationships and sexual deviance, but also to the corruption of the femininity of the women inmates that reformers were attempting to cultivate. This anxiety equated criminality and criminal potential with masculinity—the “cure” for which was a complete denial and separation from these influences that could only be achieved through an isolation of the genders. Within the women’s prison space, masculine-presenting people were often viewed as more deviant. Following this rhetoric, people of color, particularly Black women, were perceived as more masculine and therefore also more deviant. These dual constructions of criminality as masculine and innocence as feminine (and white) upheld by women’s prisons directly resulted in the hypersexualization and criminalization of Black women and other QTPOC inside and out of the prison. Additionally, after the official separation of inmates based on the gender binary, the continued presence of sex inside prisons, in the form of queer relationships and intimacies, caused additional anxiety and fear for reformers, administrators, and the public. In addition to worries about the corruption of white femininity, preoccupations with queerness inside women’s prisons were also rooted in anxieties about the destabilization of heterosexuality itself.
Despite institutional dismissal of queerness—in the form of memos, surveillance, and punishments in response to displays of affection—queer relationships remained a source of resistance and community. The members of the 1974 WCCW lesbian support group also noted that, in response to the institution’s discouragement of lesbianism, “relationships seem[ed] to be in spite of all of that—a source of strength and warmth.” While WCCW prison administrators attempted to hide the presence and perseverance of queer community inside their prison, queer activists and allies both inside and out organized to combat this erasure, spread awareness, and provide support for the individuals affected through publications in local newspapers, the creation of support groups, and more.
Many antiracist, feminist scholars and activists have theorized, imagined, and even implemented alternative practices for rehabilitation that divert energy, money, and people away from the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). While it is not within the scope of this post, nor within my own ability and positionality to produce solutions to the criminal justice system, I want to draw connections between different theories and actions—both historical and contemporary—that are working towards prison abolition, and that relate to my own historical research.
“Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after
”
In From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice, Mimi Kim points to the importance of language to differentiate reform from abolition, and carceral feminism from transformative justice. Kim writes, “transformation...explicitly recognizes that interpersonal forms of violence take place within the context of structural conditions and systemic forms of violence...while the term restoration implies the desire to return to such conditions, transformation requires moving beyond.” While “restoration” and “rehabilitation” are now used in projects of restorative justice and alternatives to incarceration, they also largely reflect the language of women’s prison reformers—specifically their attempts to “restore” “fallen women” to the constructed ideals of white femininity and womanhood. The “moving beyond” of transformation, referenced by Kim, can therefore be applied not only to the practices of rehabilitation and transformative justice that fight to replace the current prison system, but also to the social constructions and orders through which people are otherized, criminalized, and punished. Dismantling the prison system cannot be accomplished without a complementary deconstruction of notions of normativity and deviance. The logic and language of transformation locates the carceral state as a subject of the past, connecting futurity with abolition and liberation.
Inextricably linked to prison abolitionist rhetoric and action is the connection between the prison and settler colonialism. Women’s prisons in the U.S. originated through tactics of forced feminization and domestication that specifically targeted and criminalized Indigenous women. In response and opposition to the settler colonial project of the U.S. carceral state, a decolonial methodology is a critical part of any prison abolitionist framework. In “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” authors Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Wang argue:
For writers on the prison industrial complex, il/legality, and other forms of slavery, we urge you to consider how enslavement is a twofold procedure: removal from land and the creation of property (land and bodies). Thus, abolition is likewise twofold, requiring the repatriation of land and the abolition of property (land and bodies).
Tuck and Wang point to the multidimensional nature of the prison, especially with regard to its relationship to land, as well as environmental and bodily possession. The prison, as a mechanism of settler colonialism, turned land and people into resources for extraction and exploitation (through prison labor especially). Tuck and Wang’s argument therefore situates decolonization and prison abolition as inseparable in both history and present.
Poster by Critical Resistance.
Tuck and Wang argue that “decolonization is not an ‘and.’ It is an elsewhere.” Prison abolition, similar to and in conjunction with decolonization, is also neither a metaphor nor an ‘and.’ Rather, it is a necessary reality and potential future that reaches beyond and transforms its historical constructions, and looks “elsewhere” for critiques, ideas, and challenges—primarily to the work, activism, and voices of those most marginalized and opposed to the systems of white supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. From the early colonial period to the enduring settler colonialism of our contemporary moment, women’s prisons and gendered incarceration have inflicted the same rigid and violent principles of forced domestication and feminization, racialization, ableism, and the criminalization of non-normativity. Understanding this historical roadmap solidifies the connection between movements for prison abolition and decolonization.
The following untitled poem was written by someone incarcerated in the WCCW in 1977 and published in “Through the Looking Glass,” a Seattle publication that ran from 1976 to 1987. In this work, the poet expresses the power and resilience of those who have been incarcerated inside women’s prisons.
“Untitled
My body
A prison cell. I was taught to be
My own guard, to keep myself
In isolation,
Alone and afraid,
Powerless.
The prison is not of my making.
Those who lock me up
Would have thought I choose to be here
Voluntarily committed.
They have made my body into a cage,
My home an exercise yard,
My life, a maze to run like a rat for food.
I have weapons.
I can see, I can think,
I love women, love myself,
Join with others to unlock, to make
revolution. I survive, I am learning
to build and to destroy
All are crimes
To my keepers.
Those of us still on this side of their walls,
Free to come and go they say,
They lock us in our bodies,
Our jobs, our fears and hates.
Cell by cell, we unlock.
They can’t imprison
Our power.
Slowly, one by one,
We lock ourselves
Together.
They never will have
The key to us.
”