"The Influence of the Women's Movement Cannot Stop at the Prison Door": Prisoners' Rights in Michigan Correctional Facilities for Women

Abstract

"The Influence of the Women's Movement Cannot Stop at the Prison Door":Prisoners' Rights in Michigan Correctional Facilities for Women Bonnie Ernst In 1976, the Detroit House of Correction received a woman whose name would become synonymous with the fight for gender equality in American prisons.1 Just twenty-one years old, Mary Glover faced three concurrent, as opposed to consecutive, life sentences. Her new home was bleak.2 She recalled how "on arrival at the prison, I could not believe my eyes. The 180-bed institution was completely uninhabitable. The building had been condemned and the housing 'cottages' were filthy. I was processed as a new commitment and taken to the hospital dining room for lunch. It was crawling with cockroaches and mice. … They fed me black, burned hot dogs and beans. It was hot and muggy. Flies were everywhere. I was sick and in shock."3 Glover's cell held urine-soaked mattresses. In the winter, incarcerated women endured sporadic heat. They suffered through sweltering temperatures in the summer.4 Like prisoners across the country, incarcerated women in Michigan navigated dilapidated and overcrowded buildings. They lacked access to education, vocational training, and legal services, which made them vulnerable to arbitrary and cruel punishment. In contrast, incarcerated men could enroll in college courses and job [End Page 61] training in factories and farms. Men had little control over where they were imprisoned, and the programs varied widely among facilities.5 Their female counterparts all landed in the Detroit House of Correction, located in the rural town of Plymouth and managed by the City of Detroit. These discrepancies fueled discontent and inspired activism in the state's only women's prison. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, uprisings in New York and California drew global attention to racism and prison conditions. Informed by the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, and other political movements, prisoners garnered national media attention that showcased racialized violence.6 Scholars of the prisoners' rights movement have focused on Northeastern and Sunbelt states, and they have depicted prison organizing as normatively masculine. Girlfriends, wives, mothers, and female activists appear in historical accounts of reform in men's prisons.7 For example, historian Heather Ann Thompson has detailed one of the most well-known prison protests, the Attica prison uprising of 1971, which inspired a new generation of activists who were critical of prisons and devoted to acknowledging the civil and human rights of incarcerated people.8 In Michigan, activism was especially influential in women's prisons. This article examines how incarcerated women carved new pathways for reform based on their interpretation of the women's movement. They infused prison reform with critiques of gender-based discrimination, allowing the prisoners' rights movement for women to create avenues for incarcerated people, attorneys, and activists to propose reform and interrogate the purpose of imprisonment through the lens of gender, race, and class. As their attorney Charlene Snow argued, "the influence of the [End Page 62] women's movement cannot stop at the prison door."9 Launched in Michigan, the prisoners' rights movement for women was effective in igniting political consciousness among prisoners. It also facilitated a prolonged legal battle for gender equality that started in the 1970s and concluded in the early 2000s. This article traces how the women's movement and feminist jurisprudence influenced prison activism in Michigan in the 1970s. Conceptions of gender equality, as articulated by incarcerated women through testimony, grievance reports, and a federal class-action lawsuit, gained traction in courts and prisons. The multiple ways in which incarcerated women fought for gender equality expands upon Emily Thuma's "history of the carceral state from below," in which activists from inside and outside prison pursued "broad horizons" of the feminist movement.10 Incarcerated women asserted their constitutional right to equal opportunity by grounding their legal claims in the Fourteenth Amendment. They compelled the federal courts to prohibit gender-based discrimination in state prisons with the lawsuit Glover v. Johnson (1979), the country's first major case addressing gender inequality in prisons. The litigation inspired incarcerated women to launch similar cases in other states.11 The impact of mass incarceration by the 1980s...