“First, feminism took me to prisons, then prisons took me to the abolition movement, and then to bringing feminism and the anti-prison struggle together,” the Spanish lawyer and activist Alicia Alonso Merino summarizes. She had been taking part in feminist collectives in her hometown, Valladolid, since she was young when, at age 35, she started to mediate workshops on violence against women in women’s prisons. “Working in prisons has made me see how women are neglected by the system—the discrimination, the fact that they are not considered. So I started to denounce this discrimination, working with different organizations,” she argues.
Alicia has lived in Argentina and Chile, and currently lives in Italy. Wherever she goes, she engages with human rights organizations and helps raise awareness among people in prison about their rights. She says prisons are useless to respond to social conflicts in every country: “prisons produce much more social, personal, and indivudal damage, and do not solve any of the problems for which people are in there,” she adds.
The interview below was granted to Capire and Brasil de Fato when Alicia was in São Paulo to promote the Brazilian edition of her book Feminismo anticarcelario: el cuerpo como resistencia (Anti-Prison Feminism: The Body as Resistance).
What is the connection between feminist struggles and anti-prison struggles? Why do you consider the body as a key element of resistance?
Prison takes all your autonomy from you. Everything is regulated in prison. It intantilizes you. You cannot decide on anything—whther the time you wake up, the time you can make a phone call, the time you shower, or the time you eat. You have to ask permission for everything. When we don’t have any autonomy, the little that is left is our own body. And it is with the body that many women express their pain. By cutting themselves, for example. Very often, to relief a greater sorrow, like being away from what they understand as their care duties, away from their children, they have to feel physical pain to silence the pain in their soul.
Very often, the only instrument of political struggle to draw attention is to stage a hunger strike. The body becomes a site of resistance. So one of the points of our criticism against the prison system is that, as feminists, we want autonomy over our lives and bodies.
This is actively done through what we call re-education programs, which often replicate gender roles, with hairdressing, cleaning, and hospitality courses, so that we continue to play our roles after we leave prison. And it is done through sanctions, when inmates disobey. The research I did is about the sanction policy. Women in prison are proportionally more punished than men, even though their criminal profiles are completely different. Usually women who are in prison have committed poverty-related offenses. They are rarely violent crimes—usually it’s minor drug trafficking or theft. That has to do with their financial situation. You could think they are much more dangerous because they face more sanctions, but what happens is that the system is also patriachal, so it is less tolerant of their disobedience when compared to men.
I see the prison system as a drive belt for the systems of oppression. There is an overrepresentation of racialized women, diverse women, Indigenous women. This has to do with criminal selectivity, with punitive populism.
What are the similarities and differences between the prison systems in the global North and global South?
I see that they are the same. The differences are aesthetics, so to speak. They are important, because they are the material conditions that lead to more overcrowding, more violence, more preventive detention. But all around the world poverty is incarcerated, and there is overrepresentation of majority populations that are treated as minorities. This happens all around the world. In the Spanish state, for example, most women who are in prison are immigrant and Roma women, who are racialized. In Brazil, most incarcerated women are Black.
What also happens nearly everywhere in the world is that most women are in prison for two types of offenses: minor drug trafficking and crimes against property. There is a general overprotection of the right to property, which has to do with the origins of the penal codes in 1800s France, which were then replicated by the rest of the world. It was a time when property had to be strongly protected, and lawmakers were people with the power to enforce the law on others—never themselves. In a way, that hasn’t changed.
A prison is a prison anywhere: it causes pain, it breaks families apart, and it does not resolve social conflicts. On the contrary—it replicates inequalities and oppressions.
You are Spaniard, you’ve been to Chile, Argentina, and Italy. What anti-prison movements do you find interesting in these places?
What I am most interested in and what I admire the most is the feminist anti-prison movements from Latin America, which are different groups in different countries. They now have a network and have recently held a meeting in Ecuador. There are women from Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico. These are women who started working in prisons holding feminist workshops. What they do is dilute the walls that separate the in and the out. The sisters that leave eventually join these organizations, so it is not those on the outside that work with those on the inside, but it is the union of different realities that ultimatelly results in the anti-prison struggle. I believe it is one of the most interesting things, and I greatly admire it.
There are small networks in Italy, like the “No prison” movement. In the Spanish state, we are now trying to build an abolition network and there are anti-prison groups that work by denouncing the conditions endured by people in prison. It is really hard to coordinate a network between these groups.
And the fact is that anti-prison feminism is made up of two words that are very uncomfortable for the more institutionalized feminist movement, and also for the anti-prison movement, where the word “feminism” is sometimes off-putting. So it is complicated, these two words together lead to some resistance, but they are also a provocation.
You say that, to struggle against the penal system and the culture of punishment, it is not enough to abolish pisons—we must conceive preventive or transformative forms of justice. Can you provide examples of experiences that you consider to be interesting in this sense?
On the one hand, it is about working to reduce prisons as much as possible, with proposals from the de-incarceration network, addressing the four pillars that support the prison system: cultural, legal, political, and economic. I believe the cultural pillar is the most complicated one, because it is deep-rooted in the culture of punishment that we have so internatlized and that leads us to resort to the police in face of any issue. It is also in this sense of revenge and punishment that we have deeply ingrained in us.
There are also proposals from transformative justice, which are connected to community building. In very individualistic societies, it is necessary to build strong communities that are responsible for conflict resolution, so that conflicts are not experienced as an individual thing, but rather as everyone’s responsibility for the damage caused and the necessary response to it. So that safety is built for the person who has suffered some damage, so that they feel safe and reassured that it will not happen again.
In the community justice experiences of Indigenous people—not idealizing them, but rather looking for elements that can be reclaimed, especially in Latin America—, there are very interesting experiences of self-organization and community response. On the other hand, there is transformative justice, with experiences especially in the United States, where highly criminalized and repressed communities cannot resort to the police, because the police criminalize them. So these communities had to find ways to resolve their conflicts and social damages.
How do you see the recent movement toward privatizing prisons? What is the connection between prison and neoliberalism?
There are experts looking into the industrial-military-prison complex in the United States and how they have turned it into a business that has led the country to have the world’s largest prison population. Keeping people in prison is a business, which is an abomination.
But the connection between capitalism and prison dates back to the very beginning of the history of prisons. There are a couple of Italian authors, Melossi and Pavarini, who have a book called The Prison and the Factory, in which they address how prisons emerged to discipline the masses of bums, people who were doing nothing, and that through solitude and labor, could be “reformed” to become “good citizens.” In women’s case, these origins are also marked by religion, as women’s prisons were managed by religious orders.
This taming aimed to teach domestic chores so that women could be loyal and good servants of the bourgeoisie and the local elites through prayer and labor. Since the beginning, there is a close connection with capitalism, as a way to discipline the working masses, and which now has become a business, with a lot of people making money with prisons—not only those who work directly in them, but also judges, lawyers, and companies that make a profit out of the quasi-slave labor carried out in prisons.
What bank manages the peculium? Peculium is the money of the inmates, who don’t use cash, but have a kind of account, and a bank manages all that. What is that bank? In the Spanish state, it is Santander. There is also the monopoly of phone calls and the sale of products in prisons. There are companies that profit off of all that. They don’t follow the industrial-military complex model of the United States, but they are also a business for a lot of people.
We cannot talk about prisons today without talking about Palestine and the brutal attacks by Israel and its multiple forms of imprisonment, persecution, and human rights violations. We would like you to comment on that.
Before October 7th last year, the situation was already terrible at all levels. First, because Palestinians do not have the legal guarantees that the rest of citizens have in Israel. They are persecuted, arrested, and tried by the military, treated in military courts, even civilians.
The UN Group on Arbitrary Detention establishes that civilians cannot be tried by the military. These are administrative decisions that are also based on laws from the times of the British rule, which are also arbitrary. There are thousands of people under arbitrary detention in Palestine, who are removed from their places of origin and taken to prisons in what is now called the State of Israel. This violates all international standards that establish that you cannot move people from their territories. It violates the 4th Geneva Convention. So Israel is continuously violating the human rights of the people they detain in Palestine.
Since October 7th last year, it all got worse. It is clear that an entire people is being exterminated with no international pressure [to stop it]. Also, Israel is not letting the international press in. From the little that is reported, we see that there are concentration camps. Thousands of people are reportedly “kidnapped” by Israel, we don’t know under what conditions. Pictures show these kinds of “Guantánamos,” as they are being called.
The conditions of the people in prison, both in Gaza and the West Bank, have become worse. They are incarcerating people indiscriminately. There used to be a policy of medical neglect that is now much worse. People are dying due to lack of care. Some are wounded and, when they are incarcerated, they are left to die, and that goes unpunished. Also, there is mistreatment, sexual abuse, overcrowding, and lack of mininum living conditions. It was serious before, it was something to be denounced before. But now the situation is alarmingly worse. We must continue to talk about Palestine, because they want to erase Palestine.
What responses should we have for this situation, from feminism and the anti-prison struggle?
We are aware that, to abolish prisons, the penal law, and the culture of punishment, the world as we know it must be abolished. Another world must be built. There is no other remedy to move forward but to implicate ourselves in this denunciation. What is happening is so atrocious, so unpunished, that we cannot stay silent. As anti-prison, anti-colonialist, anti-racist feminists, we must be equally implicated in this struggle against colonization and Zionism.
O post Alicia Alonso Merino: “Prison Is a Drive Belt for the Systems of Oppression” apareceu primeiro em Capire.