On the University in/and Crisis

By the University in/and Crisis Working Group

The following piece is a discussion after the University in/and Crisis working group’s public event on , Freedom and Insurgence: Recalling Fanon, which hosted a conversation on insurgent educational and archival practices that challenge us to think about the problem of democratic education and the crisis of the university in our times.

We inaugurated our University in/and Crisis working group on September 17 with a talk by Dylan Rodríguez on Frantz Fanon’s work and insurgent intellectual practices at the Harlem School of the Arts with a response by Ezekiel Dixon-Román. Anchored to the archive as a first site of exploration, the talk drew from Fanon’s framework for understanding colonialism as a problem of species in order to situate modern counterinsurgency warfare within the colonial, plantation time-space. Because the colonial ruler is a perpetual outsider, the goal of countersinsurgency warfare is to “vindicate and legitimize the existence of a colonizing species.” As a struggle for restoring legitimacy, Rodríguez argued counterinsurgency warfare must take on an experimental edge, always ready to abandon and update previous strategies to repair any fissures in its project for legitimacy; a legitimacy that requires constantly updating and reworking the racializing assemblages that perpetually disappear the Indigenous in order to naturalize settler ownership over the land and violently capture the Black body as fungible. Through these relationships of domination, the white settler is able to produce racialized differences that become encoded into categories of citizenship and humanity that shape who gets access to the university. As an epistemological authority, the university, thus, emerges as a key steward of power tasked with producing, reproducing, and ensuring the cohesiveness of a counterinsurgent narrative.

As Robin D. G. Kelley argues in his article “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide,” published in the Boston Review’s Summer 2025 issue, the university is part of a larger assemblage of institutions tasked with creating the “intellectual scaffolding” to legitimize the white supremacist nation-state project. In the case of normalizing and reproducing the genocide in Gaza, Kelley points us towards organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Canary Mission, The David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Heritage Foundation, which mobilize the labels of antisemite, communist, terrorist, and Hamas-supporter to not just undermine any critiques of the Zionist project but simultaneously ensure the continuation and completion of the genocide in Gaza. It’s important to note that both Rodríguez and Kelley repeatedly remind us to not lose sight of the material, embodied stakes of this counterinsurgent intellectual work, to refrain from abstracting the carnage and violence it enables, what Rodríguez means when he speaks of ‘lexical warfare’ and the shifting terrains of counterinsurgency. Rodríguez locates the theoretical underpinnings of lexical warfare in a Black feminist tradition, specifically citing Hortense Spillers’ 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In a clear continuation from her 1982 paper “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” Spillers lays out the process through which the Black enslaved body is captured, unmade, ungendered, and reduced to mere flesh for the white gaze’s consumption, ultimately, allowing for the Black female body to become a blank slate on which all racial and gendered anxieties are worked out. She offers up the myriad arbitrary identifications assigned to Black women to critique the conditions of articulation, the possibility of uncovering a self beneath the layers of prescribed meanings attached to Black womanhood. Rodríguez mobilizes this text as an example of lexical warfare, such that the very language used to define, categorize, and know Black womanhood through porntroping and dismemberment enacts a permanent war against the Black subject in order to maintain the sociopolitical order of racial capitalism.

For Rodríguez, lexical warfare addresses the ways “language itself actually forms the conceptual and institutional terrain on which war is waged.” Crucially distinct from the strategic mobilization of certain words in the weaponization of language, lexical warfare contends with the structural narratives organizing what counts as a livable and grievable life. As long as Palestinians can be construed as ‘terrorists,’ ‘antisemites,’ and as the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant once proclaimed, ‘human animals’ Israel can justify and enact its genocidal campaign of colonial expansion. Consequently, university administrators in the United States’ imperial core investing in the war, can absolve themselves from any accountability while still profiting off of death and destruction by claiming genocide to be much more nuanced than one might think. And, ultimately, invert the claim of semantic violence by charging students calling for divestment as antisemites. In the swift move through which Barnard and Columbia have formally equated anti-zionism to antisemitism by incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into policy, we are made aware of the power language has in normalizing and justifying carnage. 

If we stay with Spillers’ in that “We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us,” we must not lose sight of the embodied dimension of language. Speaking to an audience of scholars, students, faculty, and community members, Rodríguez’s concept of lexical warfare asked audience members to reflect on their attachments, citational practices, investments, and complicities via the university. The tricky part, however, is seeing past the university’s experiments into social justice and its institutionalization. What Roderick Ferguson captures in The Reorder of Things (2012)  by attuning us to the ways the institutionalization of minority discourse through the development of ethnic, africana, and gender studies departments served as a means of regulating and commodifying insurgent speech to further the institution’s accumulative, governing purposes, ultimately, limiting minority claims to a model of social recognition rather than questioning the conditions of recognition itself. 

Rodríguez offers the logic of, what he calls, the liberal counterinsurgency bloc, as a comfortable orientation in the university centered around social justice insofar as it does not materially disrupt the status quo. He gets to the experimental, creative quality of current university-level counterinsurgency efforts that find some sort of resolution in the fact that the Columbia “Contemporary Civilizations” core class that all undergraduates must take has students read “The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 1804,” Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” whilst the university simultaneously funds racial-colonial projects near and far, whilst it simultaneously calls the NYPD on its Black and brown students and displaces Harlem residents from their homes (“Contemporary Civilization”). The core class/university teaches them about anti-colonial struggle elsewhere expecting them not to find their praxis along the way. Rodríguez lists 5 premises guiding the liberal counterinsurgency bloc: 1. Compulsory operational pacifism: “ selective condemnation or disavow[al] of insurgent force destruction or violence in confrontation with oppressive power,” 2. The infantilization of violent or destructive political activities, making no attempt to critically theorize their motives and potential, opting for automatically categorizing them as rash and immature, 3. Emphasizing the political and affective necessity of so-called winnable victories, which is tied to the imperative to be realistic, when an abolitionist perspective is always already world-shattering and world-making, 4. Exclusive/nearly exclusive concentration on reforming, transforming, and/or fractionally seizing state power: assumes the state and its institutions as the primary terrain for transforming oppressive relations of power, and ultimately, affords it legitimacy, and 5. An avoidance and opposition to autonomous extralegal and insurrectionist activities, experiments, and praxis. 

One need not look far to recognize the experimental quality of counterinsurgent work at the university in the rash implementation of novel governance and disciplinary structures that frequently contradict themselves or belie the whole set of implications that come along with. Often ignoring and overriding existing governance structures, a lack of transparency further envelops these strategies: allowing Columbia to silently update the University Event Policy and Student Group Event Policy and Procedure web pages seventeen days before suspending the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace back in November 2023;  or the Board of Trustees to retroactively change the Rules process twice, on July 23 and August 13, 2025, without consulting faculty and students and without even communicating such change had taken place, in ways that critically transformed the stakes of ongoing disciplinary proceedings that had been initiated in May. In a way, this unpredictability is terrifying: in the blink of an eye the rights of students, staff, and faculty can be annulled. However, it also beckons us: if they can act unpredictably, so should we. A call Rodríguez heeds at the end of his presentation: “What happens when we enter a time and place of being that the counterinsurgency machine and in particular the liberal and social justice machine, can no longer infiltrate, repress, extract, or domesticate because all they can detect is the smoke.” Rodríguez’s prompt continues to replay in the minds of students like our working group assistant who is applying to graduate school and attempting to define the parameters of their relationship to the university. Knowing well how blurry that line can get the deeper you invest yourself in these institutions, they are attempting to find the breathing room, the fugitive undercommons born out of and kept alive by Black study that continues to find ways to subvert the university’s mission, steal its resources, and produce insurgent knowledge. An underground site of collective resistance that Harney and Moten describe as “being in but not of” the university. What embodiments and affects proliferate in the undercommons—finding creative new ways to keep an insurgent front running, to clog up the machinery of counterinsurgency or, at the very least, expose its cracks? How do the undercommons persist and escape capture today? Our working group’s public programming arrived at that question through its second event’s focus on the conceptual site of the experiment—inviting us to think about the ways insurgent aesthetic practices, particularly within a radical, abolitionist Black tradition, resist and disrupt the scripts given to us by institutions.

If Rodríguez beckoned us to think critically about the ways academia captures insurgent potential, Saul Williams’ performance and conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond offered Black cultural production as a site of evading capture. Hosted at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, our second event began with Williams performing a selection of his poetry, partially aided by a small, dog-eared book to re-mind himself. It’s worthwhile to mention the shifting crowds that attended each event, the first being immensely populated by students anxiously seeking some living room within the institution and the second drawing artists and film enthusiasts eager to discuss the process of creation. Our ability to bring these two contingencies together around the central concern of the university in/and crisis demonstrates both the importance of reckoning with the communities outside the university, and in the case of Columbia displaced and neglected by the institution, and the potential an engagement with the arts holds in imagining alternative futures.  

 We were particularly moved by Williams’ recitation of “Bloodletting,” and how the room almost seemed to levitate for a few moments as audience members inched towards the edge of their seats, holding their breath. The practice of bloodletting, originating in ancient Egypt and reworked by Hippocrates in connection to his theory of humors, involves the extraction of blood from the body to purify and heal ailments and illnesses. In the poem, bloodletting emerges in the context of the afterlives of slavery and colonialism as a sacrificial ritual  by which the settler colonial nation-state ‘purifies’ itself through violence enacted on the bodies of Black and Indigenous peoples. Williams turns a critical eye towards the taken-for-granted, unnamed narrator of settler hegemony by repeatedly asking: 

Where is that voice from nowhere, that 

god of Abraham?

Can he be heard over the gunfire, the 

whiz of passing missiles

The crash of buildings, the cries of 

children

The crack of bones, the shriek of sirens? 

Or is that His mighty voice?

In these lines, bloodletting is encountered in the religious framework of an all-seeing God and the evangelizing, civilizing project of settler colonialism. Williams invokes the sensorial life of empire—the sonic ensemble of apocalypse and self-fulfilling crisis—to implode the unnamed subject, the taken-for-granted lexicon of Western civilization’s origin story. By attuning us to the soundtrack of destruction accompanying the end of empire, Williams breaks open the assumed innocence and moral ground upon which the patriarchal, racial-colonial sociopolitical order comes to be. Embodying a preacher-like demeanor, Williams continues:

Your angry God craving the sacrifice of early generations' sons degenerate

Your holy books written in red ink on burning sands

Your prayers between rounds do no more than 

fasten the fate of your children to the hammered truth of your trigger

A truth that mushrooms its darkened cloud over the rest of us

So that we too bear witness to the short-lived fate 

of a civilization that worships a male God

Your weapons are phallic, all of them

By imploding the figure of a benefactory God and absolution amidst the destruction of entire lifeworlds, Williams is drawing attention to the inevitable collapse of racial capitalism and its inability to resolve and appropriate the accumulated excesses it produces. Invoking the figure of the child of settler colonialism brings to mind the reactionary insistence upon protecting the elusive figure of ‘the children’ often evoked in the holy war against gender ideology and critical race theory, which is determining the bounds of what types of knowledge are allowed to proliferate in educational institutions today. The way Williams plays with the very symbols that make up the racial-colonial lexicon, including its phallic guns, places his work within a Black cultural tradition that is framed by racial-colonial violence and its scripts but is ultimately subversive to it. And thus, Williams concludes: 

We have exited your coliseum and are encircling your box-office

demanding our families back, our cultures back

our rituals back, our gods back

so that we may return them to their proper source

The source of life, the source of creation

Our mothers womb, the great goddess

We will cut through the barbwire hangers and chastity belts

We will climb in and incubate our spirits to the winter

We will wait through the degenerate course of your repeated history

We will wait for the past to die

To experience the weight of the room when Williams finished uttering these closing lines, his voice growing louder and louder with every ‘we’ witnessing the spectacular end of the racial-colonial project,  was enrapturing. In a move that collapses past, present, and future, Williams models the experimental temporal orientation of liberation. We return to Spillers, as we often do, and Hartman’s “The Belly of the World” in Williams’ call for re-appropriation centered around the figure of the mother. 

The second half of the evening convened Saul Williams in conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond as they moved together through the art of resistance. Conjuring the spirits of Paul Robeson, Assata Shakur, and D’Angelo, and dedicating  McFadden & Whitehead’s “Aint No Stopping Us Now” to Shakur, the conversation insisted upon the ceremonial, revolutionary potential of music. As Williams recalled the first time he ever cried to music when studying abroad in Brazil, to the rhythm of the drums animating a Brazilian samba narrating a story of Afro-Brazilian resistance, he called on the audience to recall too the affective links made possible at the site of collective artistic expression. He also spoke about his work in the 2025 film Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, and, specifically, the scene towards the middle of the movie in which the protagonist preacher boy Sammie summons the spirits of past and future Black music through his blues performance. Some of us recalled watching the movie on opening weekend at the Magic Johnson theatre in Harlem, which was packed, and finding ourselves perplexed when Williams mentioned that that scene had almost been cut by studio executives who claimed white audiences did not respond well to it during test screenings. That it was drawn out and far too speculative—why would a techno DJ and a Delta blues player and a ballet dancer and girls twerking and African tribal dancers and an electric guitar solo find themselves in the same place, at the same time? That it went over their heads. What happens when we enter a time and place of being that the counterinsurgency machine and in particular the liberal and social justice machine, can no longer infiltrate, repress, extract, or domesticate because all they can detect is the smoke? Here is where we locate the meeting of our first two public events: through the relationship between the archive and the experiment. An insurgent experiment that rejects the premise of the official, institutionalized archive and instead builds upon and activates histories of resistance and embodied expression. A relationship that makes clear the stakes of insurgent aesthetic expression in Audre Lorde’s reminder that poetry is not a luxury:

 for there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths. 

Across both events and both speakers, we struggle to see clear distinctions between our conceptual sites. We see the archive leaking onto the experiment leaking onto the lexicon, a third conceptual site we are currently exploring. And we each stand, conducting our own archival projects, attempting to find our lexicons of resistance. What do we make of this assemblage in regards to the university in crisis? 

We convened our final event of the fall semester—our first closed group meeting— following our two public events, circling back to the question of the university through the works of Robyn Kelley, Jacques Rancière, and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney. For those who attended the first two events, this was our return to the belly of the beast, ‘tapping’ back into the institution and its infrastructures of surveillance, which determines who and what can enter the ever-encroached upon space of Columbia. The Gordon Institute graciously hosted us in their suite at Teachers College, a critical example of an undercommons committed to disruption in its fugitive study of racial-colonial power structures in urban education. With an understanding of our role as scholars and faculty within these institutions in mind and the compelling ways the folks at the Gordon Institute are not just verbalizing these relationships but doing something about it, our conversation moved from the responsibility of the intellectual in times of fascism to the concrete steps and projects we could undertake to take accountability for our investments in an institution that displaces, dispossesses, and funds settler colonial projects. Along the way, however, the stakes of an abolitionist project became clearer, attending to Moten & Harney’s understanding of abolition as “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Knowing that true revolutionary action cannot and will not come out of the university, we also recognize that radical work has always already been occurring outside the university, outside the North Atlantic world. Participants shared accounts of their shifting relationships to the institution as they seek scholarly pursuits outside the university. We discussed the compounding crises and attacks on different dimensions of the university, understanding that despite escalating attacks on trans and queer people, the university has never been a home to them. Similarly, there is a Black radical tradition of being in but not of the university, channeling its resources into fugitive missions, that endures. How then, do we navigate the fact we are still physically present in the university and that we, or at least most of us, will have the privilege of continuing to do so? What do we owe students, staff, and our community members? 

Perhaps it's a matter of understanding that the university as we know it has always been in crisis, caught up in the crises of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. What would happen if rather than finding ways to subdue the crisis and do the work of counterinsurgency, we listen to what it’s trying to tell us, we lean into crisis. Janet Roitman critically examines the ways the language of crisis is mobilized in narrative constructions as a means of accessing a presumed historical truth and, in doing so, produces a particular temporal orientation towards time. Crisis assumes a before and after of crisis and thus “a moral demand for a difference between the past and future such that prognosis and the very apprehension of history are defined by the negative occupation of an immanent world: what went wrong?” Abigail Boggs et al. explore the particular rhetorical pull of invoking crisis within the context of the university—a present trend recognized not just in the naming of our working group but formalized by the House Committee’s April 2024 investigation on Columbia University titled “Columbia in Crisis.” In “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” the authors invoke a Black abolitionist tradition to critique critical university studies’ use of a crisis consensus as means of acknowledging the current shortcomings of the university while still contending with the possibility of returning to the fantasy of the pure, post-WWII democratizing university. By reckoning with the U.S academy’s historical investment and foundational participation within racial-colonial regimes of accumulation—how the midcentury expansion of the university “was underwritten by militarized funding priorities, nationalist agenda, and an incorporative project of counterinsurgency"—Boggs et al. invite us to resist the crisis' invitation to return to business as usual. 

Ultimately, what emerged from our conversations on the responsibilities of the intellectual during times of intersecting crises, was a renewed attention to the student-teacher relationship, what the university owes to the Harlem community, and how we can make the breathing space to dream together about what lies beyond the institution and its logics. Inspired by the alternative modes of knowledge-production that arose in the encampments and the necessity of including community members in the greater Harlem community in conversations of what the university should be, the group is moving forward in the spring semester with a student symposium and a community town hall. 

What is a feminist jail and why shouldn’t we fall for it?

By Nia Paz-Diaz

On November 13th, the Center for the Study of Social Difference hosted an event for abolitionists, activists, and academics interested in dismantling the concept of "feminist" jails.  The event, How to Abolish Prisons: Gender as Analytic, featured three speakers with varied expertise in abolitionist work: Dr. Sarah Haley, a historian at Columbia University who specializes in carceral history; Rachel Herzing, the executive director of the Center for Political Education; and Romarilyn Ralston, the executive director of Project Rebound, which supports formerly incarcerated students across the California State University system. The following piece builds on the discussion initiated at the event. 

What is a “feminist” jail? Can a jail ever be truly “feminist”? Campaigns for gender-responsive jails have risen significantly in the US, as advocates wish to improve the lives of women inmates while incarcerated. The campaigns entail a placid environment, betterment programs to increase employability, and less male guards. In various cases, these campaigns are attempting to construct entirely new jails. Abolitionist feminists reject these campaigns: although the lived realities of women inmates is deleterious and cruel, using such reforms to justify new jails is deceptive and continues the violence of the carceral state. 

As the terms feminism and abolition become increasingly popular, and campaigns for gender-responsive jails arise, abolitionist feminist scholars remain committed to untangling the concepts to provide a clear framework on enacting liberation for all incarcerated people (Davis, 2022). Feminism, per definition, is the fundamental right of individuals – especially women and gender minorities – to control their own bodies, identities, lives, opportunities, and resources free from patriarchal control. Feminism centers the ideals of autonomy and self-determination. Thus, jails are inherently incompatible with feminism: incarceration redacts an individual’s autonomy and economic independence, ultimately subjecting them to a future with decreased opportunities and resources. Incarceration strips women of their right to control their own bodies, which are often subject – in most cases, violently – to decisions made by others. Angela Davis writes that the very meaning of the term abolition feminism includes a relationality and an interruption – abolitionist practices are most compelling when they are also feminist, and conversely, a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times (p. 1). Abolition and feminism are fundamentally intertwined. Therefore, any gender-responsive reform, by definition, can never be feminist. 

Which begs the question – how can campaigns for feminist jails exist? 

Campaigners tout these gender-responsive approaches as a means to address the realities of imprisoned women and non-binary people, their unique pathways into the system, and their differences from cis-gender men (Columbia Justice Lab, 2022). The mythical gender-responsive jail’s mission is to provide programming that stimulates trauma healing, increases community ties, and enhances post-incarceration employability. A gender-responsive jail would function independently from men's prisons, feature operational equipment suited to women and non-binary people,  prioritize mental health care, and include family visitation centers. Additionally, such a facility might employ predominantly women guards and attempt to cultivate a safe physical environment for women and non-binary inmates (p. 5). 

The gender-responsive approach emerged as a remedy to the violent realities that plague our carceral system. Although a harsh environment for every inmate, prisons additionally punish women and non-binary inmates through a profound failure of responding to and a neglect of gender-based needs. Prisons neglect women’s basic needs as a form of punishment, as exemplified by the lack free menstrual hygiene products, close proximity to male prisons, invasive bodily searches, plenitude of male guards, solitary confinement for women with a sexual abuse history, inadequate infrastructure for expecting or current mothers, sexual abuse by guards, etc. Thus, prison campaigners have mobilized this negligence to justify the building of new jails supposedly rooted in feminism. 

Abolitionist feminists worry and fight to improve the dangerous lived realities of inmates; they know that these issues should not go unresolved. However, these negligences are being employed to increase the plethora of jails under the guise of an illusory gender-responsive jail – which will ultimately be prone to the same systemic issues as its predecessor. We have seen these campaigns in the past fail (including that of the Riker’s Island Singer Center). This leads us to the following questions which arose during our discussion: How has feminism been weaponized inadvertently (or, intentionally) to expand the carceral state? And how is this feminist rhetoric expanding jail construction campaigns in New York City? 

In 2022, New Yorkers (including social workers, prison labs, and reformist activists) campaigned for a new jail, named the Women’s Center for Justice, to be built in Harlem (Columbia Justice Lab, 2022). Campaigners argued the jail would be rooted in gender-responsive approaches, such as detaining inmates closer to their communities, detaining women separate from male inmates, and implementing strategies that address the underlying issues driving women and gender-expansive people into the system (p. 3). Some popular feminists even uplifted this campaign (Rayman, 2022). Campaigners contended the Women’s Center would be significantly less expensive to build than other jails. They estimated the cost to build the Women’s Center for Justice at $200 million dollars (p.4). The campaign failed to acknowledge that $200 million could otherwise be put towards developing Harlem’s community resources, low-income housing, accessible mental health services, and other preventive measures to help young women. The city might have rejected spending money allocated for a new jail into such community investments. However, focusing activist efforts into a new jail before such rejection is craven. By honing in on the construction of and implementation of a new jail in Harlem, the activists lacked the focus on the systemic roots of incarceration. $200 million in community investments would shrink the need for prisons in the first place, and deserve the advocacy, effort, and time wasted on a campaign for an entirely new carceral institution. The Women’s Center hasn’t been approved to be built. 

Long before  the Women’s Center for Justice, New York City officials utilized the gender responsive approach in the 1980s to campaign for the Rose M. Singer Center at Riker’s Island. Campaigners advertised a ‘pleasant jail’ where women could renew themselves through economic training and live in comfort (NYC Department of Correction) – appeasing the general public by illustrating that women would be taken care of while in prison. The Rose M. Singer Center was framed as an 800-bed state-of-the-art facility with yellow, blue, mauve and rose-colored walls, featuring a 25-bed ‘nursery’ and job training programs in horticulture, sewing and culinary arts (NYC Department of Correction). However, the campaign did not include critical gender-responsive measures such as pregnancy liaison programs or women guards. The shallow modifications did not substantially address the issues women face in jails. 

As time has passed, the Singer Center has confirmed the brutal inadequacy of gender-responsive jails: multiple women at the Center were sexually and physically assaulted over the years by correctional officers (Hamilton, 2015), have reported unsanitary and unsafe conditions during a global pandemic (Singer, 2020), and have had no access to betterment programming or drug abuse rehabilitation (White, 2020). Even Rose Singer’s family has stated that they wish for the removal of her name from the abusive center (Singer, 2020). Meanwhile, the cost to build the Singer Center was over $100 million tax dollars in 1988 (NYC Department of Correction). 

News about the Rose M. Singer Center Opening on Rikers (NYC Department of Correction.)

The cycle of prison reform and its inevitable failure runs throughout New York City's carceral history. Rikers Island was built to replace the infamous Welfare Island. Over a century ago, prison reformers criticized and unveiled the violent, unsanitary facilities of Welfare Island which housed the city jail, mental health facilities, and what officials deemed “the city’s destitute” (Shanahan, 2017). In 1927, the State Commission of Correction released a report denouncing the penitentiary for its ‘deplorable’ conditions. The report stated “the cells are small, poorly ventilated, and without modern sanitary conveniences” (Shanahan, 2017). The same issues persisted, millions of dollars later, after relocating to a new island. Rikers is closing and plans for new facilities to be replaced by Kew Gardens facility — which would be attached to a men's prison — at an estimated cost of $261 million. The Kew Gardens facility is what the Women’s Center for Justice is attempting to replace (The Women's Center for Justice, p.4). The ignorant cycle continues – at the cost of human lives and tax dollars. Both plans, in Dr. Haley’s words, are a “radical shrinking of imagination and possibility.” 

It is not just new jails that are taking on the gender-responsive mantle. Some existing jails have also begun implementing aspects of gender-responsive strategies: for instance, Los Angeles's largest women's jail recently initiated a gender-responsive staff training, implemented a pregnancy liaison program, and modified the physical environment to improve safety (Olson, 2019). Although gender responsiveness is a necessary stopgap, we must remember that this reform is not enough. No jail has successfully initiated a complete, comprehensive gender-responsive approach; instead, jails select a few, simple elements tobeguilingly demonstrate their dedication to  the spiritual and physical rehabilitation of their women inmates. Although the Los Angeles jail was advertised as a pioneer jail for adopting these gender-responsive measures, it was marked by ample negligence that threatened women’s safety: lack of private spaces for women, lack of information about their individual needs,  lack of permanent funding for the gender-responsive approaches, etc. (p. 440). In addition, the modifications were legally required: the jail was mandated to address these failures and provide access to renewal programs under Title 15 of the California Code of Regulations – but still failed (p. 441). 

Although a gender-responsive jail might appear as a symbol of progress and betterment for women inmates, this reformist approach inevitably upholds and expands the carceral system and its profits by rendering prisons more palatable, all the while, worsening conditions in impacted communities. Once incarcerated, women’s lives are fundamentally disrupted. They lose their jobs, are unable to take care of their children and family members, and suffer mental health crises due to violent conditions. Incarceration itself is a root cause of unemployability and lack of parental care – render any prison job training and/or family care program futile. By stripping women from their employment and families, prisons are diminishing any chance of economic growth and family care for renewal. 

Dr. Haley remarked during the discussion, “the history of prison is entangled with the history of reform; the history of penitentiary as one of ‘betterment’ and ‘enlightenment’ … we have seen the proof that prisons are violent – and no amount of mauve paint changes that.” Violent conditions are forced upon non-violent women: the majority of incarcerated women have extremely short stays for low-level, non-violent crimes. In 2022, the national average stay for women was 19 days, with about 93,000 women in jail on a given day, compared to 36 days for men (Kenney, 2022). The average jail stay for women within L.A. county jails is just under 2 months (Hare, 2016). In New York City, the mean jail stay was 26 days in 2019, while the median length of stay is 4 days (Tomasack, 2021). According to the latest available national data, 32% of women in jail are incarcerated for property offenses, 29% for drug offenses, and 21% for public order offenses (Swavola, 2016, p. 9). Thus, women endure profoundly traumatic conditions for non-violent crimes If the city’s objective was to uplift women and maintain their employability, they would implement proactive strategies that prevent abounding women from entering the carceral system in the first place.

As we look to the future, abolitionists have shown us that radical imagination and action for the future is possible. Haley, Herzing, and Ralston’s work exemplify the myriad of creative pathways for an abolitionist future. Dr. Haley has been involved in the fight against the Women’s Center for Justice in Harlem, where community organizing has already shifted the terrain of what's possible. A coalition of Harlem residents, Barnard and Columbia students, and academics successfully campaigned to replace the jail with a plan for low-income housing. Their fight exists on the principle of building communities instead of cages. Yet, the fight continues. The city has since shifted toward a cooperative housing model that would serve middle-income residents, not the low-income New Yorkers the community fought for. Organizations like Defend Harlem remain mobilized, pushing to ensure the city honors its commitment to affordable housing. This fight illustrates a crucial abolitionist lesson: dismantling the carceral state requires the fight against building prisons, and also vigilantly ensuring that what replaces prisons serves those most harmed by incarceration. 

Herzing's coalition, Building Community, Not Prisons, is fighting to stop two prisons from being built through imaginative strategies. The coalition is challenging the proposed Letcher prison in Kentucky on environmental grounds. The coalition partnered with the Appalachian Rekindling Project, a women-led Indigenous organization, and raised funds to purchase land on the proposed prison site with the goal of re-matriating it to Indigenous stewardship. Herzing’s work exemplifies self-determination in practice, by uplifting marginalized communities to reclaim land and resources from the carceral state and build their own futures. 

As abolitionist feminists, we do not ask that these gender responsive reforms be ignored – we understand that the lived realities of women inmates is pressing and dangerous. These small changes can surely alter the day to day of an inmate. However, we will not allow these shallow reforms to be the end goal, and subsequently further the carceral state’s construction and proliferation. As Davis notes, “Discovering and in fact embracing this ambiguous terrain located in the space between necessary responses to immediate needs and collective and radical demands for structural and ultimately revolutionary change is a hallmark of abolition feminism” (p.2). The work is ongoing, and the future remains contested — but another world is imaginable and is actively being constructed.

Citations

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Kenney, J. L., & Dolliver, M. J. (2022). Time to Bail out: Examining Gender Differences in the Length of Pretrial Detention Using Survival Analysis. The Justice System Journal, 43(2), 203–217.

Law, V., & Nalebuff, R. (2023, March 29). Prisons Use Menstruation as a Form of Punishment. TIME.https://time.com/6265653/prison-menstruation-punishment/

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Singer, S. (2020, May 12). Opinion | The Women’s Jail at Rikers Island Is Named for My Grandmother. She Would Not Be Proud. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/opinion/womens-jail-rikers-island-covid.html

Swavola, E., Riley, K., & Subramanian, R. (2016). Overlooked: Women and Jails  in an Era of Reform. Vera Institute of Justice.chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://vera-institute.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/publications/overlooked-women-and-jails-report-updated.pdf?dm=1568746265

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