The following essay, “When Prison Becomes Another Abuser,” is written by incarcerated writer Kwaneta Harris, and appears on her Substack, Write or Die.
Excerpts appear below.
(TW: rape, sexual assault)
Reflexively, everyone cringed when gunshots rang out. When prison staff practices shooting at their gun range, it triggers trauma responses from incarcerated women: self-harm, nausea, vomiting. But Raynisecia M., convicted of theft and mother of two, always rubs the tattooed portrait on her arm, tremors, and closes her eyes.
With her light eyes and caramel skin, people say Raynisecia resembles me, but it’s the tattoo of her deceased mother that really looks most like me. It’s not only the volley of gunfire that makes this prison environment mirror the abuse many of us experienced before incarceration. It’s being stuck in a place we can’t remove ourselves from during the triggers.
State violence is normalized outside and inside prison walls. State-sanctioned harm is not just about what the state does, but also what it doesn’t. Outside, it fails to provide vulnerable women with a strong social safety net to help build autonomous lives. Inside, we’re forced to relive the same sexual traumas that we can’t refuse or report. We are disbelieved in both settings when reporting sexual violence.
The state actively and passively damages us. The active harm: taking someone who is already traumatized and placing them into a trauma factory, where state agents inflict specific kinds of harm that trigger the trauma people have already experienced. The passive harm: not providing any kind of treatment or opportunity to process, in a safe and supportive environment, the trauma that people bring with them. Even though no one is physically abusing Raynisecia now, the state is doing active and passive damage to her and others in response to a crime committed as a direct result of trauma already experienced.
Why does society continue to accept the prevalence of institutional violence in women’s prisons? The broader societal implications extend beyond these walls. The system ignores that the harm-doers employed in women’s prisons are your neighbors. We all must address the broader societal issues that contribute to women’s vulnerability during incarceration.
You can read the full essay, “When Prison Becomes Another Abuser, by Kwaneta Harris on her Substack, Write or Die.
Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Movements Against Mass Incarceration Social Change Fellow. In her writing, she illuminates how the experience of being incarcerated in the largest state prison in Texas is vastly different for women in ways that directly map onto a culture rooted in misogyny. Her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence.
