Mos Eisley? The Texas Senate? Washington DC?
No, today I'm talking about California's Prison system. And not those behind the bars. Yesterday, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee and other papers around the state, we learned from the Center for Investigate Reporting how California has been illegally sterlizing its female inmates.
California has a dark history... of sterilizing at least 20,000 people who were deemed too poor, too drunk, too promiscuous, too criminal or too feebleminded to reproduce between 1909 and 1964. But a recent investigation finds that even in the 21st century, some female inmates are still being pressured to undergo tubal ligation...
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. (Not).
Between 2006 and 2010, 150 women underwent tubal ligation without the required state approval for the procedure.
No one is being strapped to a guerney and wheeled into an operating room for the procedure against their will - at least as far as we know. But they've come pretty close.
Christina Cordero, 34, gave birth to a baby boy in October 2006 while she was in prison serving a sentence for auto theft.... "The closer I got to my due date, the more he ((her doctor)) talked about it. He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn't do it..."
Some were even pressured to get a tubal ligation on the operating table. Kimberly Jeffrey, 43, was asked if she wanted the procedure while she was sedated. Though she resisted, she said that the experience jarred her: "Being treated like I was less than human produced in me a despair."
This kind of pressure is supposed to be illegal. Forced sterlizilation has been banned since 1979, and federal law prohibits sterilizations of any kind if federal funds are involved. In California it is not illegal per se, but
Since 1994, there is supposed to be approval on a case-by-case basis from top medical officials. But since then, the state hasn't officially approved a single procedure - although there have been at least 150 cases.
Not knowing when to leave bad enough alone, one of the doctors performing these sterlizations, James Heinrich, had this to say
"They all wanted it done. If they come a year or two later saying, 'Somebody forced me to have this done,' that's a lie. That's somebody looking for the state to give them a handout. My guess is that the only reason you do that is not because you feel wronged, but that you want to stay on the state's dole somehow."
And Heinrich says... he looks at the procedure as a service for the state, "Over a 10-year period, that isn't a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children - as they procreated more."
Those kind of arguments seem familar. Oh so familar.
This alone wouldn't qualify California's prison system as an unsurpassed hive of scum and villiany. No, it takes more than that.
Like condemning more than 10,000 prisoners (approximately 1 in 15) to years and years of solitary confinement (the average period of time in hell is seven years). Like guards boiling the flesh off one such inmate just for fun. Like creating a system so oppressive that those in solitary feel the need to go on a hunger strike and if necessary starve themselves to death to effect any kind of change.
Like having a medical system so bad that it was declared unconstitutional, and then having California's highest officials do everything in their power to resist the changes demanded by Federal judges to bring it into constitutional compliance.
Throw in coercive sterilization (and who knows what else).
What you see manifest is a state's pervasive mentality. A mentality that insists on spending more on prisons than education, and building twenty prisons in the last 33 years while creating only one new college campus. A mentality that drives an attitude towards prisoners that you know reaches down to the lowliest prison guard and janitor working at these facilities, and is transmitted to the communities in which the jailer's live and across the state.
Today, as you read this, hundreds if not thousands of male prisoners are commencing the hunger strike I mentioned and have diaried about. With them will be other prisoners engaged in a solidarity work stoppage, including perhaps some at women's prisons both in solitary (SHU) and not:
Originally built to hold 60 people, California Institute for Women's SHU went from 64 women in September 2012 to 112 in April 2013 with two women in each SHU cell. One family member reported that "Belinda," who went on a solidarity hunger strike in 2011, has completed her 15-month SHU sentence for possessing tweezers but, because of overcrowding, will remain in SHU until her 2014 release date. "Belinda" now suffers from agoraphobia and cannot leave her cell during her allotted one hour in the yard.
As word seeps out to inmates about these unauthorized, coerced sterilizations perhaps women prisoners in California will begin their own, parallel protest. It's about forty years past time.