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- Title
CENTERING WOMEN IN PRISONERS' RIGHTS LITIGATION.
- Authors
Baylor, Amber
- Abstract
The women in a housing unit at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women watched as a cadre of prison guards with tear gas canisters made their way towards Carol Crooks' cell. Crooks, a woman in the prison, was a vocal dissenter of the prison's treatment of women. Earlier that day Crooks refused to comply with a prison administrator's order to relocate to a solitary confinement unit. She demanded written notice of any alleged misconduct.' The officials declined to provide noticed Instead, they pushed into Crooks' cell, overcoming her efforts to keep the door shut. The other women watched the guards fight Crooks, then throw her down half a flight of stairs and drag her to the prison's solitary confinement row.' They would later learn that Crooks was stripped and laid bare on the solitary cell floor. The women in the unit who witnessed the takedown feared for Crooks' safety. Crooks had survived solitary many times before, but this time the guards' actions seemed to flouta recent court order directing the prison not to return Crooks to solitary confinement without a hearing or notice of new charges. Crooks' fate would indicate whether or not the women in the prison could hope to rely upon the prison's compliance with courtordered disciplinary protections in the future. On that August night, a collective of women in the upstate New York prison had an urgent choice to make: allow Carol Crooks to be held, yet again, on the solitary row, in violation of a federal district court order--or else rebel. The next day newspaper reports read: "43 women inmates at Bedford Hills Correctional Institution held seven employees' against their w ill' for 2.5 hours last night. . . they surrendered of their own volition." The uprising at Bedford Hills marked a pivotal moment in women's collective work challenging prison conditions. The women at Bedford Hills advanced the struggle for recognition of their rights in federal courts, forging a path fo r modern prisoners' rights claims. Their litigation, and similar work of women at other institutions, was a critical contribution to modem constructions of prisoners' rights in the United States.
- Subjects
BEDFORD Hills (N.Y.); WOMEN prisoners; PRISONERS' rights; PRISONS; SOLITARY confinement
- Publication
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, 2018, Vol 25, Issue 2, p109
- ISSN
1095-8835
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.36641/mjgl.25.2.centering