Over 200 community members, organizers, scholars, and formerly incarcerated people and their families release a letter opposing the construction of a new women’s jail in Harlem, NYC
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: nonewwomensjailnyc@gmail.com
The Columbia University Justice Lab, the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, the Women’s Community Justice Association, and real-estate consulting firm HR&A Advisors are proposing a “Women’s Center for Justice” to be installed inside the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem, a former state prison that was closed in 2019.
On Jul 26, 2022, an open letter opposing the construction of a new women’s jail in Harlem was released. In this letter, over 200 signatories, including Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, emphasize the urgency to address the humanitarian crisis and the suffering of incarcerated people in Rikers, end the malignant plan to build four new borough based jails, and reject the notion that a new women’s jail could solve the problems of the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail on Rikers.
Instead, the letter demands an alternative plan that begins with universal pretrial release and divests money from incarceration to invest in non-carceral, non-custodial community-based resources for Black and brown, native, working class and poor, immigrant, disabled, and trans communities most impacted by criminalization, policing, and jailing. In addition, the letter addresses demands to the academic and nonprofit organizations and public feminists supporting the jail construction plan to rescind their support for the plan, and to New York Governor Hochul, NYC Mayor Adams, and the New York State Legislature to reject the jail construction plan and pursue a future for New York beyond the brutality and violence of incarceration.
Though the proposed plan projects that fewer than 100 trans and cis women and nonbinary people will be incarcerated when the jail opens, Lincoln Correctional Facility has the capacity to incarcerate almost 300 people. Since the population incarcerated there will fluctuate based on DOC policy, policing, and prosecutions, the jail plan is not a path toward decarceration. While groups endorsing the new jail focus on its alleged innovative superiority over current and former jails, emphasizing social services, trauma-sensitivity, and gender-responsivity, signatories to the letter note that the history of women’s incarceration in New York City is the history of the failure of “progressive” jail reform that produces the same fatal and racist outcomes. As the letter emphasizes, the proposed jail continues the inherent brutality of incarceration through policing, arrest, and community and family separation. These institutions of state violence undermine racial and gender justice.
The letter asserts that there can be no true alternative without community consultation and participation in envisioning possibilities beyond criminalization and incarceration. Our coalition is urging the city and state to consult the people at Rosie’s and the broader community to envision what racial and gender justice futures beyond jailing are possible.
Below are quotes from prominent signatories of the letter:
Ms. Sue Gabriel, a long-standing community activist and member of Communities of Color United for Racial Justice (CCU), which was part of the broad based coalition that defeated a similarly proposed jail in Austin, Texas, commented, “Prisons and incarceration do harm to individuals, families, communities, and taxpayers. The prison industrial complex itself is traumatic in more ways than one. It provides absolutely no rehabilitation or safety to anyone. The City of New York should use its money wisely by putting ‘Community Over Commodity.’ It is more effective to address women’s needs before, and instead of incarceration. Women’s needs include livable wages and benefits, affordable and low-income housing, equitable educational opportunities, childcare, treatments for mental illnesses and addictions, and to be treated with dignity.”
Dr. Snehal Patel, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, and also a member of CCU asserted, “‘Trauma-informed’ and ‘jail’ are inherently contradictory, and it is misleading and dangerous to attempt to sell it to the public using language co-opted from public health and mental health professionals.” Patel continued, “We know that incarceration is an underlying cause of trauma, not only for incarcerated individuals, but also for their families and communities. If public leaders want to address root causes of trauma and improve public safety, we must shift resources away from new jails that will perpetuate trauma and toward community-based services and resources, including expanded public health, mental health and health care services, more funding for public education, affordable and supportive housing, and direct economic relief.”
According to Andrea J. Ritchie of Interrupting Criminalization, “There is no such thing as a feminist jail — over the past several decades abolitionists, led by feminists at Justice Now, INCITE!, Critical Resistance, and the Transgender Intersex Justice Project, among others, have critiqued the notion of “gender-responsive” jails as efforts to pinkwash and expand the reach of the carceral state under the guise of meeting the needs of people they cage, control, and separate from their families and communities. No one should be incarcerated anywhere, no matter how close to home, as a condition of meeting basic needs. Safe, stable, and accessible housing , violence interruption, poverty alleviation, voluntary, accessible and affirming treatment and care of all kinds, alongside opportunities to prevent, heal, and transform harm, have been shown over and over as necessary to address the conditions that lead to incarceration in prisons and jails for women. Instead of building new jails, the city should invest in creative, community-led and accountable initiatives that will actually create greater safety and collective wellbeing, and bring us closer to a future without incarceration of any kind.”
Iris Morales, a lifelong neighborhood resident and activist comments, “A jail doesn’t stop being a jail when you name it ‘the Women’s Center for Justice’ or label it ‘feminist.’ It’s still incarceration — part of the prison industrial complex.” Morales, who has lived in the community where the Lincoln Facility sits for her entire life continued, “We don’t need the jail to provide services, we need the services in the community, and outside of jails. This is an opportunity for leadership that rejects the same old song with a new name, and commits to fight for the dignity and future of low-income women and families. Let’s invest public funds in services we desperately need outside of jail confinement, such as education, jobs, childcare, and health care.”
Romarilyn Ralston, A black feminist abolitionist with an incarceration experience and Project Rebound, Cal State University Fullerton, Director and Chair of the Project Rebound Consortium Policy and Advocacy Committee and the Coordinating Committee for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, says “Women need power and respect! Women need safe affordable housing, good paying jobs, affordable childcare, access to high quality medical care and mental health services, and access to quality education and vocational training. This is what women need and deserve…women need care, not cages!”
Project LETS, an organization devoted to building peer-led, non-carceral responses to mental distress, explains their opposition to the proposed jail: “As an organization working to be in conscious alignment with the principles and values of Disability Justice and Mad liberation, we reject the building of this new jail for women and gender-expansive people. We do not need new prisons. We need a cadre of access-centered, holistic, cultural and trauma responsive resources for our criminalized community members, led by and for directly impacted folks. Healing will never happen inside of a cage, even a nicely decorated cage. We know that incarceration creates distress, Disability, Madness, and endless opportunities for death. We know that psychiatry and social work historically and to the present-day have enacted untold levels of structural violence against the very communities they purport to care for, and this is only doubly true against those communities locked in cages.
We urgently need places of sanctuary, where our community members can meet their material needs, in addition to their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. If we continue to build more prisons, prisons will look like the answer to everything. We cannot possibly find the healing we deserve in a carceral system that claims to care about the well-being of criminalized people, but in actuality is built on white supremacist, anti-Black, ableist, patriarchal, and eugenicist notions of what it means to be sane and ‘well’. It’s time to burn it to the ground and build something new.”
