marjaerwin

"Kim Love: …I’ve had them put me in a shock holdin’ cell, and I told them I did not want to be there. They told me that’s gonna be your husband, and that’s where you’re going to be and you’re going to love him. And I did my time with him…Without the sexual tension being brought down, the prisoners would probably overturn that place. Because there’s more prisoners than there is COs. They use us.

…As Kim Love’s experience shows, it is a prison industrial complex norm to use women’s bodies in unsafe ways to pacify male inmates. The prison staff and the PIC create sexually opportune environments (e.g., cage women in the same cells as straight men), coerce women into having unsafe sex with their cell-mates because there are few if any barriers for the sex acts, then validate the sexual roles with toiletries or medical favors (exchange of goods or services).

Forced boarding by a third party for sexual contact, or in prison “V-coding,” on the streets would be seen as pimping, as Kim Love called it. The placement of such coercion inside of prison, however, serves to locate pimping as a central part of a transwoman’s sentence. Most acts performed by prison staff, violent or not, are unfortunately upheld as the norm of prison culture. The vision of “sexual tension being brought down, to where there’s no sexual tension—they would probably overturn that place” screams to Love’s understanding of prison staff using her body to pacify her “husband.”

…Emmet Pascal witnessed many women attempting to resist or refuse being “V-coded,” but guards only turn a blind eye. The refusal of prison guards to acknowledge such violence (deliberate indifference), if not to directly coerce it, places the guards in a pimping position. Legal definitions of pimping consistently include intentionally inducing another to become a prostitute or soliciting a patron for sex acts with the sex provider. At what point do prison staff members receive such direct immunity from pandering or procuring customers (“husbands” or men they want to silence) for a sex act?

In an equally abusive placement, gender-variant women are being V-coded close to the end of their sentences. This location works to keep women incarcerated because if they defend themselves against rape or other violence that occurs with their “husband” or cellmate, it is common for them to be charged with assault then placed in the “hole.” The assault charge then shreds the previous parole possibility or release date."

"No One Enters Like Them: Health, Gender Variance, and the PIC" by blake nemec in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. by Nat Smith and Eric A Stanley

Where are anti-trafficking activists when it comes to activism against trans women being trafficked like this in prison? Of course, without even going into how many of them are terfs, anti-traffickers would never side with prison abolitionists, seeing as how their carceral/governance feminism is about direct support of the prison industrial complex.

(via marginalutilite)

(via taleth)