Monthly Review | Cruel but Not Unusual
After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country. Media accounts of overcrowding, lengthening sentences, and horrendous medical care in women’s…
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... the main thing is that I recognized, after the first five years of being imprisoned and on trial a lot, that one tends to build one’s walls. Which means that you begin to censor yourself, so that they can’t censor you.
I censored how I spoke to people, how I interacted. It goes in tandem with, “If I button my shirt the way they want, they won’t attack me for not buttoning my shirt properly.” In some ways, I found myself trying to be a “good girl,” because then maybe they’d see I wasn’t a “bad girl.”
When I got a handle on what I was doing, I was horrified, because how can you be a women’s liberationist and worry about being a good girl or a bad girl? What I believed in my gut was being turned inside out by my actual life. And it made me understand a lot more about how any woman—it doesn’t matter who you are or what you think—can get in a relationship with another person—generally a man, but not always—who can become your abuser, your owner.
