Lucy Blackplume is, by all accounts, a dangerous offender.
Since 2008, she has been convicted of, among other things, sexual assault, attempted sexual assault with a weapon, assault causing bodily harm, and, most recently in 2019, completed sexual assault with a weapon. She also suffers, most likely, from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, “functions cognitively at the level of a 9- or 10-year-old child,” lacks the ability to exercise self-control or appreciate the consequences of her actions, and suffers from a range of personality disorders.
And in 2021, the Alberta Court of Appeal sentenced her to what will, in all likelihood, be a life sentence.
The sentence is controversial.
Two years prior, a lower court judge found that it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment to lock Lucy, an Indigenous woman, away for life. “There is no secure hospital setting available” for a life sentence, she concluded. Moreover, “there is limited, if any, availability of music, pet, [or] play therapy” in correctional centres. Lucy would not receive the round-the-clock monitoring necessary to keep her from acting on her suicidal ideation. And, being “biologically male,” Lucy would likely be housed in a men’s prison despite identifying as female.
The appellate court disagreed. Lucy’s many struggles are no different from those of other dangerous offenders, and her transgender identity is irrelevant for sentencing. What matters, in deciding what to do with her, is not what’s best for Lucy or even other inmates, but rather what’s necessary to ensure public safety. In this case, “the Crown has adduced ample proof that a sentence [of indeterminate and likely lifetime length] is required to provide adequate protection of the public against Ms Blackplume’s committing a serious personal injury offense.”
But you know what? If we were serious about public safety, Lucy wouldn’t end up in prison at all.
***
Her sentence is controversial in another respect.
Correctional Service Canada (CSC) policy since 2017 has been to house inmates according to their gender identity, provided that is their preference. And to do so irrespective of “their anatomy (sex) or gender on their identification documents, unless there are overriding health or safety concerns which cannot be resolved.”
Apparently, Lucy didn’t express a desire to be housed in a women’s prison; hence she found herself bound for a men’s facility, instead.
That will be good news for certain activists. For here, as in other jurisdictions like California with similar policies regarding the placement of transgender offenders, housing trans-women inmates in women’s prisons has drawn strong opposition from trans-exclusionary radical feminists (“TERFs”).
In June 2021, a group of criminalized women sent an open letter to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies calling on the organization to support a blanket ban on what they transphobically characterized as “male transfers to women’s prisons.” Indeed, the authors asserted, “every one of us knows a woman who has either been harassed, sexually harassed, assaulted, or sexually assaulted by a male transfer to a woman’s prison”—a claim that played on the anti-trans trope of the predatory trans woman. The inclusion of trans women inmates in any woman’s “prison that is already damaging and oppressive is triggering for us.”
Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (”CAWSBAR”), the country’s most active TERF organization, has likewise made keeping trans women out of women’s prisons one of its key issues. Many women inmates have a history of being victimized by men, CAWSBAR’s website argues. Consequently, “forcing [those inmates] to be imprisoned with violent male [sic] predators constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” presumably because their trans women co-inmates have an inherent predisposition towards re-victimizing them. Together with We the Females, a radical feminist organization, CAWSBAR has staged a number of protests at prisons across the country against CSC’s gender self-identification policy.
I don’t deny the possibility of a trans woman inmate committing sexual violence in a women’s prison: Any inmate can do so, regardless of their gender identity. And as a rape survivor myself, I am strongly inclined to believe other women who report being the targets of sexual violence even when such reports have problematic ideological undertones.
But I admit to being perplexed by the TERF obsession with removing trans women from women’s prisons, for a simple reason: In what world is it “radical” to argue for a different distribution of prisoners amongst penal institutions, rather than for the abolition of those institutions themselves?
The one TERFs inhabit, apparently.
I should think, instead, that a truly radical feminist politics would be an abolitionist one.
***
Abolition is “an overarching movement to dismantle the carceral system and reimagine what public safety could look like by addressing the root cause of crime.” It’s anti-prison, anti-police, anti-punishment; and pro-accountability, pro-community change, and pro-healing.
The feminist case against prisons is one that recognizes that the criminal justice system is itself a vector of settler-colonial patriarchal violence.
Consider the over-incarceration of Indigenous women. Indigenous women account for 4 per cent of Canada’s female population, but 43 per cent of all women admitted to penal institutions during the last year for which data is available. These statistics are all the more striking given that, while reported crime rates have nearly halved since 1990, “admissions to women’s federal correctional facilities more than tripled” over the same period. Small wonder that Canada’s prisons have come to be described as the “new residential schools.”
Within prisons themselves, guards commit violence against inmates along disproportionately racial lines. The most recent report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator found that “BIPOC women account for more than two-thirds of all women involved in uses of force,” in particular, Indigenous women who made up 60 per cent of all victims of use-of-force incidents. The Office also found that, overall, women’s prisons continue to suffer from “inadequate infrastructure, over-securitization, lack of programming and services, poor community reintegration practices” and a governing “framework that puts security and control at the forefront.”
Women’s prisons, in short, are sites of settler-colonial state violence against racially marginalized women. Plain and simple.
All of this would be an indictment of the criminal justice system even if Canada’s current approach to incarceration could be shown to reduce and prevent crime, especially violent crime.
The problem? It can’t.
Ignore for a moment the fact that most crimes are property offenses or victimless “quality of life” offenses that target homeless people in particular for things like loitering. Even if we focus only on violent crimes, the research shows that incarceration does little to promote public safety.
The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yet one recent study found that “sentencing someone to prison [for a violent crime] had no effect on their chances of being convicted of a violent crime within five years of being released from prison,” indicating that prison does nothing to rehabilitate violent offenders or prevent future offenses. Indeed, the United States’ sky-high incarceration rate has decreased neither crime rates in general nor gender violence more particularly.
If prisons kept us safe, our southern neighbour would be the safest country in the world. But they don’t. Indeed, as one Australian activist put it back in 2009, “if all our organizations had the extended failure rate that the prison system has, we would [all] be de-funded and out of work.”
What prisons do is isolate inmates from the support networks and community resources that can actually make a difference in preventing crime, rehabilitating offenders, and helping victims.
Abolishing them, not reforming them, needs to be a priority for every feminist who’s serious about protecting women.
***
Any alternative to prisons that’s worth its salt must emphasize the social nature of crime. Those who commit violent crimes aren’t monsters who exist separate from the community in which they offend; they are part of that community and products of it.
Every violent crime is thus an indictment of the society that created the conditions for it to happen in the first place.
An abolitionist approach to violent crime, including violent sexual crimes, is one that holds the whole of society accountable for perpetuating rape culture and misogyny; as well as for failing to provide the mental health, addictions support, affordable housing, and other community-level interventions that actually prevent crime in the first place.
In that spirit, abolitionist justice responds to violent acts by calling for both individual and societal changes to ensure that neither a particular offender nor society at large reoffends.
***
What, then, do we do with someone like Lucy Blackplume?
Help them.
Disinvest in structures that perpetuate settler-colonial violence against women like her; and invest, instead, in structures that help both victims and offenders.
Lucy’s case is a miscarriage of justice not because she probably wound up in a men’s prison. It’s a miscarriage of justice because she wound up in prison at all and was denied the care she needs to overcome her many struggles. It’s a miscarriage of justice that she’ll be further pushed to the margins of society, but nothing about her society—our society—will change in response. Unless, that is, we fight for change to occur.
The TERFs are right: trans women like Lucy shouldn’t be housed in women’s prisons. But that’s about all the TERFs get right. Because no one should be housed in women’s prisons: women’s prisons shouldn’t exist at all.
Want to get serious about radical feminism? Push for prison abolition.
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