[ Golden Gater Online - December 4, 1997 ]
Amy Hulsen
Staff writer
Erika Huggins and Aida McCray glide into the classroom on the third floor of the Humanities building every Tuesday and Thursday. The room is at capacity for every class meeting, but non-enrolled students continue to wander in, many times sitting on the floor or leaning against the door jamb.
What impacts the course most are Huggins and McCray's personal histories. The women have spent a combined total of 12 years behind bars as political prisoners. Their shared experiences qualify them as experts in the issues surrounding women in prison.
The course, entitled Incarcerated Women, is not your average classroom experience; there are no memorization or multiple-choice exams. Huggins and McCray ask students to look inside themselves to awaken and face their own stereotypes and prejudices about prisons, imprisonment, racism and sexism. The class discussions center around alternatives to jails and prisons and the intricacies that arise when a woman is imprisoned.
Huggins is a tall, elegant woman who expresses an inner spirituality that contradicts the years of violence and tragedy that affected her during the 60's and 70's. She was inspired by the 1963 speech of Martin Luther King and made a vow to herself to help others. This led to a 14-year tenure as a leader and a member of the Black Panther Party. Today, she is an educator and advisor at the Mind/Body Medical Institute.
McCray spent 10 years as an inmate at the federal women's prison in Dublin. She is a live wire with a pile of dreads and a huge smile. She spent her early life as a prison activist and currently runs a program called Families With a Future, which brings the children of incarcerated women to the prisons for weekend visits.
The class philosophy, according to the syllabus, is designed to educate students in the various forms of incarceration that women and girls experience in jails, prisons, reformatories, orphanages and group homes. The class instruction focuses on major issues affecting women in these institutions, what effect incarceration has on children and families and what can be done in the continuing prison reform movement in this country.
The course was initiated at SF State in 1986 by Chinosole and Angela Davis who taught courses in the women's studies department prior to co-teaching the Incarcerated Women class. Davis said she became personally interested in issues surrounding women in prison because of her own incarceration in 1970.
"Very little attention was accorded to women and women in prison at the time. The goal was to explore the history of women prisoners and the reform efforts. We attempted to discern the difference between men's and women's prisons, and how race, gender and class intersect in women's prisons," said Davis.
Davis was charged with conspiracy to commit murder after guns registered in her name were used in an attempt to free Black Panther leader George Jackson from a Marin County courtroom. Four people, a judge, two inmates and Jackson's brother were killed in an ensuing shoot-out.
Davis fled underground and was placed on America's 10 Most Wanted List. She was found and arrested in 1970 and spent two years in jail. She was eventually found not guilty of all charges. Davis has become a revolutionary icon known for her involvement and activism in the 60's and is a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Chinosole is currently an associate professor in the women's studies department. She was the first dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at SF State and has been instrumental in creating new courses in the women's studies department
One of the main issues discussed in this semester's class has been the astronomical rise of incarcerated women, especially women of color. In 10 years, that figure has soared 256 percent, according to Katherine Watterson, author of Women in Prison, who gathered her information from American Correctional Association statistics. Many involved in prison activism blame the war on drugs for the increase. From 1986 to 1991, the rate of women imprisoned for drug crimes went up 432 percent, but the use of drugs remained fairly constant. More than 60 percent of the women prisoners are black or Hispanic, although they do not commit crimes at a higher rate than white women. Nationally, blacks are imprisoned nine times more than whites. Women of color also have sentences that are approximately 20 percent longer, according to Watterson.
According to Huggins, poverty is one of the main factors causing women to end up in jail. Women are convicted of "economic crimes" like prostitution and shoplifting and minor drug offenses, which tend to be committed in an effort to feed their families. Poor people make up the vast majority of prisoners. Nearly 60 percent of those coming in were unemployed at the time of their arrest. Once in jail, they can no longer care for their children, who then become part of the system and often criminalized themselves, by being sent to juvenile centers.
To meet the increase in prison population, the government is spending approximately $85 billion annually on corrections, according to the Criminal Justice Yearbook, making it the fasting growing industry in the United States, and one of the few industries that benefit during a recession, said McCray.
Although Huggins and McCray do not deny that women are committing crimes, they encourage students to look at alternatives to jail or prison for minor offenses that are economically based. Nor do they deny that some people are criminals and need to be locked away.
The course looks at the corrections system which was designed to rehabilitate inmates, and how it is not working. For instance, most prisons are filled with drug offenders, yet most lack any sufficient drug counseling. College programs have been removed entirely from the federal prison system even though the Pell Grant specifically included inmates, according to McCray.
"The change I hope the students make is not so much working to finding ways to blame the government, but to prompt them to view rehabilitation. Students are in school to affect change and become educated. Why not rally around prisoner programs, perhaps innovative programs, to create change?" said Huggins.
Erika Huggins is a guest lecturer whose career has always been surrounded by education. She was trained as a teacher on the elementary/secondary level and has taught for many years in the Oakland school system as well as in prisons. She first taught the course with Davis in 1992.
"Both my prison teaching and personal experience was behind me teaching with Angela," said Huggins
Huggins is no stranger to the complexity of the government's criminal justice system which she experienced as a member of the Black Panther Party.
The BPP was formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, while both were students at Mills Junior College. They outlined a ten-point program that addressed the needs of black people in America, who were continually marginalized and oppressed, and vowed for revolution by any means necessary. As the organization grew, so did its interest to the government, especially J. Edgar Hoover. He initiated a program called Cointelpro (counter intelligence program), whose purpose was to infiltrate and monitor revolutionary groups and their leaders, according to Huggins. This program relied on infiltration by FBI operatives within these organizations, including the anti-war movement and BPP, to create friction among the members or rival groups.
Huggins and her husband, John, moved to Los Angeles to begin their work in the Panther Party in 1967. Huggins had just given birth to their first child when John and Alprentice Carter were gunned down at the University of California at Los Angeles campus in 1969. Huggins returned to Connecticut to bury her husband and was asked to start a new chapter of the BPP in New Haven.
When a BPP member was murdered in New Haven, Conn., Seale and Huggins were arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. They spent nearly two years in jail awaiting a trial which finally resulted in a hung jury, and all charges were dropped.
When Huggins was first jailed, her daughter was less than a year old.
[ Golden Gater - December 4, 1997 ]