Najat Vallaud-Belkacem fighting racism and sexism in France for real equality

September 5, 2014 by 1 Comment

 

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem

Not long ago, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, then the French Minister of Women’s Rights, introduced and successfully defended a bill entitled “For Real Equality Between Women and Men.” This bill supported the normalization of parity. After the recent reshuffle of the government, Vallaud-Belkacem has become France’s Education Minister. This position is the fourth most important in the ranking of ministers in France. She is also the first woman to hold this major ministry.

Her nomination could have been a sign that something was working toward real parity in the highest political representation in France, but alas no. Immediately after her nomination, Vallaud-Belkacacem was targeted in right wing magazines by sexist and xenophobic attacks. These attacks used her dual Moroccan and French citizenship, her Muslim origin, her youth (she is 36), her sex, her support for same sex marriage, her support for the inclusion of gender theory in regular primary and secondary education, and, finally, her active feminist support for women’s rights.

Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that the former president Nicolas Sarkozy uses regularly to make statements about his eventual return to politics, staged her as “the Ayatollah” on its front page, with an edited photo that accentuates the darkness of her eyes, making the portrait loaded with negative representations of Islam. The subtitle uses play on words to suggest that she is going redesign the National Education system. The title of another magazine “Minute” does the rest: “A Moroccan Muslim at the National Education, the Najat Vallaud Belkacem provocation.”

None of these displays of hatred is new. The latest was Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice, whose origins and skin color sparked off racist and sexist slurs. Both women epitomize the fight against all inequality, including gender, ethnic and social inequality. Christiane Taubira reacted and wrote to her colleague in a tweet, “They must have nothing in their heads, be empty in their heart, and have hardened souls. Najat, you’re flying high with our ambitions for schools. Thanks.”

Meanwhile, the line between right and extreme right becomes increasingly blurred. In a tweet by a right wing city counselor of Neuilly sur Seine, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem was accused of using her femininity, also called “skirt promotion”, to access this position. The counselor, of course, added a suggestive picture. Another right wing enclase, the city of Puteaux, in a charity effort to support families with children returning to school, distributed strong blue backpacks to boys and strong pink one to girls, making clear the separation in colors and roles of girls and boys in a binary society.

“Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the ideal target for all those who would like to distill the idea that an immigrant woman could not legitimately be part of a government” says SOS Racism, an association that denounces all sorts of racism. These attacks go beyond that. They exploit the old demon of colonial countries to block advances in women’s rights and human rights and to achieve various goals: controlling the population at large, curtail all debates, policing the whole of the neoliberal environment.

When Najat Vallaud-Belkacem was Minister of Women’s Rights, she declared that we needed to be politically proactive to address gender inequalities. She was right about that. When she said that gender, class, ethnicity are the bases of inequality and that hatred is the way “to emptied hearts and hardened souls” where inequalities grow, she was right again.

 

 

(Photo Credit: RTL.fr)

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In France, for the real equality between women and men

August 15, 2014 by 4 Comments

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s minister for women’s rights

On July 23, 2014, the French Parliament passed a bill entitled “for the real equality between women and men.” The bill covers nine fields of societal life and avoids the pitfall of opposing private and public life that has always kept women invisible. Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s Minister for Women’s Rights who introduced the bill, explained, “Because inequalities are everywhere, we’re having to act everywhere.”

Here is a quick summary of the nine parts that address parity and professional equality as well as precariousness and violence.

* Pregnancy and employment.

Women already enjoy maternity leave from 6 months for the first child to a possible 3 years after the second child. With the bill there will be an additional 6 months for paternity leave. Jobs will be guaranteed during maternity and paternity leaves. Today only 3.3% of fathers take some kind of parental leave. Commonly, men argue that they don’t want to suffer career consequences in taking parental leave. This law may help reverse this trend by first forcing paternity leave and reducing the impact of parental leave on parent’s career. However, the financial compensation is still meager compared to what is given in countries like Sweden where 90% of fathers take their parental leave, but it is a start.

*Professional equality.

Women are paid an average of 25% less than men for equal qualifications and have a harder time finding jobs that are labeled masculine. A broad range of measures in the bill address this issue, from subsidies to penalties for companies, public administrations, etc. In addition, a campaign has been launched in order to support jobs’ desegregation and fight gender stereotypes that affect women’s education. According to France’s Department of Labor, in order to have professional parity, 52% of the workers should change jobs. Studies suggest that in 60% of the cases educational segregation is responsible for discrepancies. Although in France women hold more degrees than men, they are more under employed.

*Breaking the glass ceiling to support access to decision-making position in public administration and companies for women.

Starting in 2017, there will be mandatory 40% women candidates to positions of executive manager in the public sector.

*Protection of single mothers.

For single mothers who don’t receive regular child support from the father of their children, a public trust will be granted to women to protect them from financial loss while measures to recover child support will be taken.

*Protection of women against domestic violence.

Women who are victim of domestic violence will have full protection, and their violent “partners” will be removed immediately. The bill reinforces the anti-abuse laws in the military and at university. It also provides better protection for immigrant. The law provides a wider array of possibilities for the sentencing of perpetrators of domestic violence to avoid repeat offences, with more education programs. The bill ensures nationwide of the very successful free emergency hotline.

*Better access to information on abortion.

The bill changes the language of the abortion law from a situation of distress to not pursuing an unwanted pregnancy. It also reinforces protections against anti abortion activists.

*Act against gender stereotypes.

France’s media regulator CSA will now have the authority to assure that women are not diminished with sexist statements or degrading representation. This measure will include sensibility training for journalists.

*Addressing hyper-sexualization of girls.

Beauty contests for children under the age of 13 are banned, and authorization is needed between the age of 13 and 16.

*Political representation

The bill increases fines for political parties that do not meet equal representation objectives. In 2012 with 40% of women candidates to the National Assembly, only 26.9% were elected.

All these measures tackle the various reasons that keep women in precarious positions. They also work on language and symbols as patriarchal references. For instance, the bill removed some gender-loaded language, such as “the good family man”, from the Civil Code. It also works on societal symbols, equaling marriage and civil union.

These measures are a start and were long due. Still, as Vallaud Belkacem declared, “I don’t believe that history is going to spontaneously take us forward, so going towards more equality needs us to be politically proactive.” Meanwhile, the French government barely respects the bill’s call for parity since men hold the all main ministries.

The opposition to the bill was small. However groups that have a conservative vision of family and nation argue that women should keep their role and it will cost too much to the state to support these changes. This type of opposition reveals once again that the unpaid, unrecognized work of women has been sustaining the civil society at the cost of women’s rights and well-being.

After all, at the time of the French revolution, the French Revolutionary Congress did not include women as citizens in its Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Rights of Man. Instead it sent revolutionary women to the guillotine and banned women from debating men as equals.

Two centuries and a half later the Parliament finally showed signs of change. Clearly, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is right. We need proactive political actions to address gender inequalities , and we need to remember that class and ethnic inequalities are linked to gender inequalities and must be addressed politically.

 

(Photo Credit: RFI / Reuters / Jacky Naegelen)

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France’s twisted road to restorative justice

July 22, 2014 by 1 Comment

 

Christiane Taubira

Christiane Taubira, France’s Minister of Justice, epitomizes the tensions and dilemmas that the neoliberal world order produces. The moment Taubira was nominated, she suffered countless personal attacks. Originally from the former French colony Guiana, she early on took strong positions for social and racial justice. Her career is marked by her independence from the establishment, and she has ruffled feathers on the right and the left.

Two years ago Christiane Taubira promised a profound transformation of the penal system. She posed the question of punishment from an angle that departed from the neoliberal mass incarceration common sense. She questioned the role of prisons in connection with citizenship, affirming that prison cannot be the only response in a penal system. In fact, although the public has been bombarded with populist rhetoric and images about punishment, a recent poll showed that 77% of the French said that prison is not a deterrent. She worked with a Consensus Conference that produced recommendations to diminish repeat offenses.

Her bill encountered a multitude of trials and negotiations. She faced constant opposition from the right, as was to be expected. However the President and his Prime Minister Manuel Vals, who has developed a “tough on crime” political persona, had open conflicts with many aspects of her bill.

Her commitment was rehabilitation and reinsertion in society, or simply de-insertion from the lock-up logic. Despite the many roadblocks encountered in the parliamentary process, the bill passed last week. One deputy from the right wing UMP voted in favor of the bill. Immediately after the last vote the opposition filed a complaint to the Constitutional Council to repeal it. Many feel that case will go nowhere

The bill includes a new system of probation for those sentenced to less than five years. This frees judges from the mandatory minimum sentences introduced by Sarkozy that has sent many to hopeless overcrowded prison. Taubira’s initial proposal did not link probation to eventual jail-time. A compromise was adopted giving the penal system the leeway to change probation to jail-time.

Minimum sentencing is now completely eliminated.

The correctional court for minors, established during the previous administration bringing the treatment of underage offenders closer to the one in the United States, has not been terminated yet as promised. However, Christiane Taubira gave assurances that these exceptional courts will disappear in the next series of bills concerning minors.

The bill guarantees more actual aid to victims, including financial aid.

In the midst of this important process, Anne-Sophie Leclere, a candidate for local election for the far-right Front National, posted on Facebook a photomontage comparing Christiane Taubira to a chimpanzee and then confirmed her racist views about Taubira on French television. A complaint was filed by an association and received. Neither the offender nor her lawyer deigned to appear in court for the trial. A French court in Cayenne in Guiana sentenced her to nine months in jail, and 50 000 Euros fine with a ban from running for office for five years. Her party, that excluded her later, was also fined.

Some have criticized the sentence as overly harsh. If so, let’s ask if probation should be an option here and if a rehabilitation is possible for Anne Sophie Leclere? Racism is a very serious offence that has been continuously trivialized while other petty offences have condemned thousands to years in jail.

Of course, the Sarkozy administration was not tough on financial crimes as it cut the power of the financial courts, which resulted in a decrease of sentencing for financial crimes from 101 cases in 2007 to 37 in 2010.

The debate over the reworking of the penal system in France is a reflection of the struggle against the controlling neoliberal world-order that uses insignificant figures to operate racist mechanisms in order to humiliate and discredit serious reformers. Incarceration has been normalized as a business to deal with the superfluous bodies of this market/debt economy. The latter relies on violence for a constant destabilization of a civil society. It is crucial to bring to light every fight that has a chance to change this irrational penal violence.

 

(Photo Credit: Libération / Stéphane de Sakutin / AFP)

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Alert: No time to rest. Women’s rights are still not rights!

June 27, 2014 by 3 Comments

 

In the 21st century, women are still disembodied bodies.The US Supreme Court just ruled against a buffer zone around medical/abortion centers that could have made the trip for women to reproductive care services devoid of abuses and threatening slurs. In addition in many states (such as Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota) access to abortion services is technically rendered impossible. Then, the Hyde Amendment still undermines the promise of Roe v Wade. In addition, even pregnant women may feel that their fetuses come first, as politicians don’t hesitate to declare that women are just host bodies.

In Spain, The Organic Law for the Protection of the life of the conceived and the rights of the pregnant women, first adopted by the Spanish government in December 2013, still threatens women’s rights. In January, this decision immediately triggered European opposition with thousands demonstrating in the streets of European cities and across Spain.

Who thought that the Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy and his ultraconservative government would have withdrawn their bill meant to send back women’s reproductive health to fascist time? They want to have it passed in the parliament in July, counting on the summer distractions.

With this bill, women will lose their right to make decisions about their bodies. 86% of Spanish people oppose this bill. The bill betrays the government’s mandate to not curtail women’s rights, which includes the right to life, dignity and auto-determination as inscribed in the Spanish constitution. These points are what the Politica Feminista Forum, an association of Spanish feminists, are pressing along with the incompatibility of this bill with Resolution 1607 of the European Council, with CEDAW’s recommendation 24 article 31c, with the International Conference on Population and Development and simply with EU laws that stipulates members state should provide safe access to abortion.

Now the attack on women’s reproductive rights is more than a trend. It goes with the doctrine of austerity to curtail public services, with growing inequalities affecting women first, not to forget criminalization of petty offences matched by the increase of police power within countries and at the borders.

One should wonder if reproduction should work like factories, since the same power is attacking labor rights. That must be a dream for neo liberal elite theorists!

Women and men in Spain, and elsewhere, are watching and acting. For Spain a petition has been circulating.

Active solidarity is needed to support resisting people in Spain, in the United States and anywhere women’s rights are compromised on the ground of morality that in fact defends financial profitability for the elite. That is not what a human society should be.

 

 

(Image  Credit: Mundubat)

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Les Lilas, and women everywhere, are under attack

June 16, 2014 by 3 Comments

In France, women’s health and autonomy are under attack. When Francois Hollande ran for office, he made great promises. He promised that the maternity hospital “Les Lilas,” would not close down after having been the target of the conservative financial restructuration. Now he’s backtracking, and women’s reproductive rights are likely to be compromised.

The maternity hospital “Les Lilas” is located in a diverse area in the North of Paris. Les Lilas was built in 1964 with the feminist agenda to serve women’s needs. A privately run not-for-profit hospital, Les Lilas serves and participates in the public health care system. Les Lilas has historically been the symbol of women’s struggles for reproductive rights.

Today, the team of medical staff offers, with equal enthusiasm, obstetrical, gynecololical and abortion services to all women regardless of their social status or ethnicity. Their approach is integrative, making women’s needs and desire a priority. The feminist and militant aspect of the care they deliver departs from the current trend of cutting public services, including health care.

During the Sarkozy years the idea of profitability was extended to medical care. This was new for the French health care system. Sarkozy’s administration introduced a tariff arrangement that relegated care behind accounting. Now, President Hollande, having forgotten promises to save Les Lilas, has submitted the hospital to the same neoliberal profit motive.

Les Lilas needed funds for necessary renovations. These renovations were delayed making the hospital more dependent on credit for financing. Then, a tariff system was implemented devaluating abortion, which is a great part of its activity. Basically, the tariff devalued all health care services offered to women. This conjunction of devaluations typifies how women’s lives are undervalued in general.

Then, more regulations came to unfairly impose medical services upon Les Lilas, which forced the maternity hospital to invest money it did not have. These measures increased the hospital’s debt.

Across France, these conditionalities have forced many maternities to regroup, turning hospitals into “usines a bébés,” or baby factories.

When Les Lilas first needed some renovations, it had no debt. In fact, it was financially stable and had agreements to secure the future. With a debt forced upon it, the services provided to women are only measured in financial terms. With that shift, the hospital loses value.

The community, women and men, have joined together to counter this evolution. A collective committee has been formed; the staff of Les Lilas has been active using many media to show what this struggle means. Demonstrations have been organized with the support of many feminist and political groups. The last demonstration gathered 3000 people.

Isabelle Louis, of the French Movement for Family Planning and a member of the collective committee, told me that the negotiations with the regional health authority were difficult. Although the fund for renovations had been promised, the health authority now argues that running a deficit makes the delivery of that fund impossible. They use a new language of neoliberal accounting to confuse negotiations. The people used to be the actors and now they have become the developers. Isabelle Louis remarked how this neoliberal economic language has negated the social. This language talks of indicators of success, progress, and realization to respond to deficit with efficiency. However, this language has no term to analyze the health and well-being of the women who rely on “Les Lilas.”

Isabelle met with socialist Claude Evin, former minister of health and now general director of the regional health agency. He admitted that his obsession is to build more retirement medical homes than maternity hospitals. Of course, retirement facilities, unlike maternity hospitals, are part of a great market open to private investments. Isabelle has found the solution, “Let’s deliver babies in retirement medical centers!”

This tale is exemplary of the massive undertaking of neoliberal ideology on public systems. Women are under attack. In France, the progressive health care system and the reproductive health policies are threatened. France today, the United States yesterday, tomorrow … ? All of us, everywhere, need to pay attention to these signs.

(Photo Credit: La Maternité des Lilas Vivra)

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Can Christiane Taubira move France from repressive to restorative justice?

June 2, 2014 by 4 Comments

 

Two women are making headlines in Europe and in France: Marine Le Pen and Christiane Taubira. Marine Le Pen leads the Nationalist party “Front National”(FN) that got 25% of the French votes, with a very low turnout, at the recent European Elections in France. Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice, will introduce her reform of the penal system for debate at the parliament in June.

These two women have a dramatically different vision of society. Le Pen developed her message using leftist critiques of neoliberal policies and then proposing xenophobic and populist solutions that actually end up benefitting those who thrive on the policies. Her communication technique is based on political spectacle to discourage any kind of debate. Given the opportunity, she would send any opposition to jail. Marine Le Pen participates in the creation of a nationalist right that openly accuses migrants; the poor and any and all marginalized populations of being responsible for any capitalist crisis. Similarly, the Republican Party in the United States has absorbed the extreme tea party branch and normalized the same type of approach of political spectacle in the political debate.

In this context, the coming debate over the penal reform bill will stage a political spectacle with no intention to actually address the question of incarceration and justice. The right and extreme right have shown no inhibition in attacking Christiane Taubira on racist and disrespectful terms.

Meanwhile, Christiane Taubira and her collaborators have undertaken the difficult task of reinserting human values into a penal system that had evolved to serve neoliberal policies. The previous Sarkozy administration responded to calls for prison as the only solution. These policies were fueled with a rhetoric of fear and security, which produced a fertile terrain for the development of political parties such as the FN. Under the aegis of security, the goal was to normalize the punitive control of populations increasingly marginalized by the reduction of social protection and public services, and increasingly precarious working conditions.

Taubira’s ministry has worked on this project since the beginning of her appointment. Consultations were broad and produced a great number of recommendations, especially from the Conference of the Consensus. This multi layer review system brought comprehensive recommendations largely directed at lowering the rate of repeat offenders with more productive solutions for offenders, moving away from mandatory sentencing.

According to Christiane Taubira, the central aspect of the bill is to establish restorative justice. The bill would abolish minimum sentencing, deemed one of the worst legacies of the previous president. It promotes case-by-case individual sentencing. Victims would benefit from a more distributive and generous support system. The bill would reduce “dry release” from prison, which means release without supportive measures for reentry.

The key is the criminal coercion measure, which supplies the judge with an array of sentencing possibilities, including injunction to care. Prison would no longer be the only resource available. This measure was to be applied to all offences. Many voices opposed this measure including within the government, from Prime Minister Manuel Vals to Minister of Interior Bernard Cazeneuve and finally to President Hollande. The men of State united to demand that the criminal coercion measure be limited to offences shorter than five years. The problem is that the criminalization of drug use has lengthened sentences beyond five years. A parliamentary technicality allowed representatives to amend the text so that Taubira’s initial bill could be restored. After the council of ministers on Friday, the President made clear that he would not tolerate this part of the bill without a five-year ceiling.

For these three leading men from a Left government, what is the basis of their vision of criminal law? Is it that incarcerating bodies is the best means to render justice, or is it that the climate of intolerance and suspicion, brilliantly exploited by right and extreme right nationalist elites, has forced them to compromise?

Marine Le Pen and the right in general, have accused Christiane Taubira of defending migrants and delinquents. They made this myth the main argument of their campaign. There is nothing new here. Ronald Reagan used mythologies of the welfare queen to win election. This simplification of social debate to mythical images erases the complexities of the current political economy.

This is the climate that awaits Chritiane Taubira as she engages parliament in a debate about the role of incarceration in connection with the protections of civil society, which implies a reduction of inequalities. As labor and social laws are being compromised to serve a financial market that has no desire to protect society but rather seeks to fragment it in order to utilize it, Taubira begins a national debate on mass incarceration as a function of a political economy of growing inequality.

Hopefully, the President, who claimed to be a progressive change agent, will support his Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira in her attempt to transform the criminal justice system and abandon repressive justice in favor of restorative justice and a restoration of civil society protections. We’ll see.

 

(Photo Credit: Libération / Joël Saget /AFP)

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European Elections: Let’s organize hope with a feminist voice!

May 24, 2014 by 8 Comments

The campaign for this weekend’s European elections has seen the formation of lists that express a strong resistance to conservative, neoliberal and nationalistic attempts to control the European Parliament. Among these newly formed political entities is the Feminist Party for a Europe of Solidarity. This election is an opportunity for feminists to argue in the political realm. The public campaign system allows them to have their campaign clip filmed by professionals and mandates space for them in the media.

Each country in Europe will vote to elect their Members of the European Parliament (MEP). Then the MEPs regroup according to political visions and agreements to form groups. In the past Parliament several issues concerning women’s rights were downplayed.

The 2008 Parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1607 showed how the EU has delayed a clear positioning on women’s rights to control their own bodies. In December 2013, the European parliament failed to vote for the Estrela report that stated that reproductive rights are human rights. The reports spoke about the role of access to contraception and abortion especially for young women in the advancement of gender and economic equality in Europe. These lists demand the right to abortion to be inscribed in the European Charter, which, ideally, woud constrain the countries (Poland, Ireland and Malta) that have no such right to take action.

In France, Caroline de Haas, the top candidate for the Paris region, affirms that public policies are not neutral. In the rise of neoliberal debt economies, women are the most vulnerable to their policies. The austerity measures that have swept European countries recommend cuts on public services. Women are the most dependent on public services, which include reproductive services. Across Europe, women constitute an average of 70% of civil servants. When pay cuts and hiring freeze are the economic tools that governments adopt, the consequences for women and ultimately for society are dire. We have seen the devastation of these policies in Greece. In this destabilization of the civil society, violence against women has increased and the difficulties to report these crimes remain significant across Europe.

The Feminist Party program demands that the EU protect migrant women’s work conditions, whether for pay or not. Women are generally underpaid compared to their male counterparts, but when their immigration status is uncertain, the gap increases. The “ represent half of the migrants residing in Europe. Feminists in the Green party have also been critical of the immigration and refugee’s policies resulting in mistreatment of migrants.

The European feminist candidates, half of whom are men, assert that the feminist project is a political project in which both women and men must work together. That project is vast. The lists have been formed in Sweden with one candidate likely to have a seat, as well as Germany and France. In other countries, feminist political voices are heard in the Green Party, in other smaller progressive lists and in socialist coalitions. Feminists are realistic and clear: “Before changing the mentalities, which will take a long time, direct actions have to be taken. That is why feminism has to become a political matter.” The goal is to fight for new majorities and new solidarities and to fight the political apathy that the TINA (there is no alternative) doctrine has encouraged.

The fight is real, as nationalist parties have progressed all over Europe. Feminists know that gender does not guarantee feminism. Angela Merkel has fostered neoliberal policies with dire consequences for women’s rights and reproduction rights. Marine Le Pen the leader of the French nationalist party is promoting hatred and is ready to support the Spanish government’s breach on reproductive rights.

These lists have triggered positive reactions also among other progressive candidates who perceive the importance of building coalitions to force women’s rights and organize resistance to neoliberal infringement on public policies. Clearly, the threats of nationalistic and neoliberal demons are real. But as Paulo Freire stated, “Despair is unconvincing…and hope is reliable.” Let’s organize hope with a feminist voice!

 

(Image Credit: Féministes pour une Europe solidaire)

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French prison guards strike for global incarceration and dehumanization

May 13, 2014 by 19 Comments

May 6, 2014, following other strikes by prison guards across Europe, French prison guards blocked about 100 of the 192 prisons in France. They protested their working conditions in the overpopulated prisons. Several unions joined forces for the occasion. They claimed to have lost authority over the inmates. They advocated against a tolerant approach of managing inmates. At the same time, the automation of prison work has resulted in a substantial reduction of personnel. The rising number of inmates has combined with the rising number of administrative tasks into a rising tide of aggression against guards.

The guards feel that they are at the mercy of this or that policy. None of this is surprising. Many had predicted this crisis. At the same time, the condition for inmates has been aggravated, both in sentencing and detention, which are intimately related.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, modifications of penal laws have sent more people to prison. At the same time, inequality has increased in France and around the world. The economy of debt has allowed transfer of public monies to private hands. The previous Sarkozy administration accelerated the Americanization of the French penal system: increase of incarceration, fewer sentence reductions and longer time in prison, fewer resources for reinsertion programs, longer distance between inmates and their families, higher prices for goods inside prisons, fewer jobs.

Between 2002 and 2012 in France, the politics of security served as an excuse to enact as many as 50 laws. These laws replaced the independence of justice with a political economy that favored building more prisons by so-called private public partnerships. These partnerships were a construction of a debt system through the public sector. For example, an investment of 679 millions of Euros by a private prison builder will generate 2.7 billion Euros for the private lender, paid for by the public over 27 years.

These laws brought more video surveillance into prisons and reduced the number of guards while sending more people to prison, 35.4% more over ten years, especially in recent years with the minimum mandatory sentencing system. The conditions in French prisons are untenable. The laws are ineffective, as evidenced by the rise in repeat offenses.

After her nomination in 2012, the Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira announced that she would end this spiral that serves neither justice nor civil society. She had grand ambitions for a much needed reform of the penal system. The “conference de consensus de la prevention de la recidive” (consensus conference on the prevention of recurrent offenses) worked well and helped her to articulate a better vision.

This situation is endemic in Europe. Although the numbers cannot be compared with the United States’ figures, the change of policies associated with the diminution of financial means for public services, which include prisons, have contributed to a remarkable rise of incarceration in the past 15 years.

In Europe women are more incarcerated than ever before. Their offences reflect their social conditions and are often minor. In France 2 275 women are behind bars. 76% of them are mothers. They represent 3.7% of the total inmates. 50% are under the age of 30, and the duration of time behind bars has increased 50 % in 15 years. They are too many and too few to have adequate conditions of incarceration, if such a thing exists. They are marginalized in prisons built for men. In these quarters, they don’t exist as women but as incarcerated bodies.

Though the guards unions concerns were about the men’s prisons, women have been subjected to the modifications of penal laws in a harsh way.

The guards deal with these new conditions every day, with their own vision of their work and the limits of this system of hyper-incarceration. The demands are real as drug and weapons trafficking are more common than before. However these realities hurt inmates as well. In prison, everything is 30% more expensive; it is difficult to talk and report; where much power resides in a few hands. It is a place to which the general public does not want to be connecte

A prison psychiatrist who was recently taken hostage inside a prison by an inmate, said, “Apart from all the ethical and humanistic considerations, if we want to protect ourselves, we are going the wrong direction. The absence of hope and possibility of release pushes a person to the worst side of himself.”

Christiane Taubira will soon present a reform package to the parliament. The President has forced her to remove what the French section of the International Observatory of Prisons considered the coherence of the project. Nonetheless, some parts remain. For instance, it will overturn the mandatory sentencing and create more alternatives to prisons. The conservatives have already warned that they will oppose it. Taubira, a woman who has galvanized many women’s energy, has also been the target of unthinkable racist attacks. These issues are the reflection of the malaise that the neoliberal order creates and counts on to thrive.

The guards’ demonstrations may bring more populist responses or they might force society to consider what is happening in the penal system. A change of direction is needed in France and in the global prison orchestrated by the politics of impoverishment and control.

(Photo Credit: Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Libération)

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In the land of secrets, the butcher is king

May 4, 2014 by 10 Comments

California sterilized women prisoners without consent; Tennessee criminalizes pregnant women who take drugs. These policies go beyond cruelty; they institutionalize and normalize the dehumanization process in a large scale. Here are three recent examples from inside the border, at the border, and outside the borders of the United States.

In Oklahoma on Tuesday, a death row inmate was scheduled to die.

Since 2005, the European Commission has imposed restrictions on the export of anesthetics that may be used “for capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” But in the United States, executions must proceed. So, States came up with a secret new deadly cocktail of drugs to kill. The recipe is secret, but not the process of keeping it secret, especially since the two Oklahoma inmates sentenced to die challenged the secrecy weeks earlier.

After Tuesday’s execution, reporters and commentators made it clear, the man tortured to death, tased earlier in the day, had committed a heinous crime. And so butchering him was justified. The business of justifying the cruelty came with the help of numbers and statistics. On the PBS News Hour, Roy Engert recommended we put the issue in perspective, since only 3% of executions encountered problems. Engert’s unchallenged remark validates torture cases as just so many numbers in a deficit account.

On the US – Mexico border, US border patrols are under investigation for having recently killed more people than ever before. An independent review, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, considered 67 shootings by US Border patrols at the Mexican border between January 2010 and October 2012. These resulted in 19 civilian deaths.

The report was going to remain secret, as well as the policies and practices that allowed US patrol to shoot at Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, a 16 year-old boy who was on his way home. He was on the other side of the fence, in Mexico. The officers on the US side shot him 10 times. He was killed with two bullets in his head and then butchered with eight more bullets in his back. According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in the past three years, they have shot across the border and killed six people inside Mexico.

U.S Customs and Border Protection explained they opened fire because people in Mexico were throwing rocks and one hit their patrol dog. That explanation exposes the level of dehumanization that has normalized the use of lethal weapons against people who have been made ever more vulnerable, thanks to border fortification, intensified immiseration, and expanded displacement, all in the service of NAFTA and neoliberal development.

Outside the borders, drone strikes, to kill human targets, are carried out by the US Air Force for the CIA with the help of the NSA. As one US Air Force personnel declared, “I cannot tell you what I am doing, but I can tell you that’s super-secret.” The operations are super-secret, but the fact of the secrets is quite public.

What is secret is the name and location of the future victims. The entire process reflects US drone program whose impunity has been intensified and broadened in recent years. In the United States, every week, Tuesday is “Terror Tuesday,” the day when it is decided who will die in Yemen or Pakistan. US agents establish a list of potential victims determined through their “pattern of life,” a series of behaviors identified as potential signs of militant activities.

These various secretive methods are as dubious as the lethal drug cocktail in Oklahoma. Many stories have related how civilians in a wedding, or in a field, women and children, have been butchered by a robotic drone attack.

All these stories are linked by what Denis Salas has called the three characteristics of moral indifference: unlimited authorized use of violence, normalization of acts of violence, and dehumanization of targets. These stories reveal the power of secrecy to serve a neoliberal global disorder. Beyond cruelty, the scale of dehumanization is both intimate and global.

 

(Photo Credit: Paul Ingram / Tucson Sentinel)

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Dehumanization beyond cruelty: women’s mass incarceration

April 28, 2014 by 13 Comments

When it comes to women, the shame of neoliberal policies knows no limit. In California women in prison have been sterilized as a way to save welfare money. Tennessee passed a bill making pregnant women who had drug addiction problems eligible for prison time, and thus less valuable than the fetus they carry.

Sterilization has been a weapon of conquest used against American Indian women. It has been a weapon of control over the Black body during and after slavery. Now it has become a weapon for controlling the future of indebted Latina and African and Native American women in California and in Tennessee.

In California, from 2006 to 2010, over 150 incarcerated women were sterilized without consent. Doctors say that they have not forced them and the women say that the pressure was constant and they could not escape it. Although the procedure had a cost about $147, 460, doctors said that the money was well spent and the cost was not significant compared to the money saved on welfare if these women had more children. The majority of women were Latinas and African Americans. The state has the legal authority to sterilize without consent based on a Supreme Court decision allowing “forcible sterilization” in jail (1927). In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

In recent decades, welfare evolved from being a support system against the adversities of life in an industrial society to a debt that poor people of color incur. For poor women of color, their bodies are both collateral and ransom.

Once, the racialized woman’s reproductive body was a source of profit and accumulation of wealth. As Thomas Jefferson argued: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable that the best man on the farm…what she produces is in addition to the capital while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”

Today, that reproductive body has to be locked up.

For one year, Tennessee experimented with a more inclusive approach, The Safe Harbor Act. Its idea was simple: drug dependent mothers need support more than prison. The act was a step toward better care for pregnant women, arguing that they would seek help if medical confidentiality was respected. That approach was given a mere year, nowhere near enough time to reach its goal.

Last week, the Tennessee legislature overwhelmingly passed a new bill that empowers police to investigate drug-taking pregnant women. The bill was justified by the high level of Tennessee babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), which is treatable and does not leave any long-term damage on the child. Sending the child’s mother to jail, however, will undoubtedly have a long-term effect on the mother and the child.

The bill had bipartisan support. From both sides of the aisle, legislators showed no understanding of the process of drug addiction, its biological reality as a chronic relapsing disorder that often emerges from today’s political and social disorder. Loss of jobs and cuts on public services has produced a parallel drug economy. Women of color are more likely to be affected by the reduction of public services. Furthermore, according to Tennessee’s commissioner of health, in 60% of the cases the mothers in question had a prescription for the drugs in their bodies.

With this bill the fetus carries more rights than the living mother to be. The value of the fetus is only there to negate the humanity of the woman, who, as a Virginia state senator stated recently, is less than a full being. But that’s only as a fetus. Once born, that child joins the army of the poor in Tennessee or in California. Poverty for children of color has intensified and expanded. According to a recent Annie E Casey Foundation report, minority children trail behind white children on every social account measured. If children’s safety motivates this bill, then since African American, Latinos and American Indians are way more likely to live in areas where industrial pollution is harmful for their health, why not punish the “polluters” instead of poor women? Clearly, when the child is born, protection of life takes a different meaning according to class, race and ethnicity.

In both states, the war on drugs has targeted women of color. The recent announcement of clemency for inmates that have spent at least ten years in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, is hardly an act of clemency, especially for women, in particular for women of color and poor women whose bodies are again going to be channeled to jail.

In Europe, the debt economy has used austerity measures in Greece to send people to jail for debt. In the United States, the debt economy has used racial discrimination inherited from slavery and genocidal policies to achieve the same level of success through impoverishment.

Martin Luther king once said, “Central to democracy is the fundamental belief that one belongs and one’s voice matters…” These women have no say. They are flesh and bones with reproductive capability devoid of rights. After strict State surveillance, they are to be culled from the herd, neither citizens nor humans.

These policies go beyond cruelty. They institutionalize and normalize mass dehumanization.

 

(Image Credit: Slate / Kostsov / Thinkstock)

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