Notes from a North Carolina Prison

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt of a letter from Janet Danahey, an inmate at North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Janet contacted the Office of Women's Advocacy to subscribe to our mailing list, and I asked if she would be willing to share her reflections on women in prison and our criminal justice system. Janet is 26 years old, serving a life sentence without parole.—Ann Crews Melton

Dear Ann,

Thanks so much for your letter. Your office does some wonderful work from what I see. It is so important to have a group working for women who are Christians. All types of women. I do have a life sentence. It is like a nightmare sometimes. One day you are one person and the next all you understand is gone ... God has been my support and has kept me sane. It is truly amazing to experience the power of God. One way I hope to deal with this place is by helping other women. Every woman here has a story. Most are fundamentally good people, they just never had a chance to blossom. The women in jail are like this too. My experiences have shown that most of the prison population would not be there if more community groups helped people. A lot of women did things to protect or support their families. The drug epidemic has also been a cause.

... There is a breakdown in the system that makes being in prison a waste of time. It is not rehabilitative and it further frustrates the recidivism. It takes community action to reform those sections of a population who come to prison. We must realize our lives are intertwined and we are responsible for each other. It is the least thing God asks us to do. Something like a hurricane happens and the community quickly reacts to help. Something like this is a slower problem but it still is cause for help. People are responsible for their own actions, but if the community could help assist with the education and family support we would be surprised at the change it makes.

One woman I know here grew up in a horrible drug neighborhood. She now has a nine-year-old son, and she is serving a life sentence on a drug crime. She sat me down and said, "I know why I am here. I don't want my son to follow in my footsteps, but I don't know how to change that." We prayed for God's guidance and then she began working to change. It has taken a group like the Boys and Girls Club to help get this boy out of that neighborhood, so he can see a better world ...

Perhaps we can come up with some ways to help women. I send prayers to you too. For peace and guidance. It is great to hear from you.

Sincerely,
Janet Danahey

Learn more about Janet's case and a movement to reform the Felony Murder Rule.

Learn about a similar case and movement to free Lisl Auman in Colorado.

Women in Prison Resources

American Civil Liberties Union

Amnesty International USA

Restorative Justice: Towards Nonviolence
By Rev. Virginia Mackey
A discussion paper that presents responses to crimes, victims and violence, visions of alternative models and information about where restorative justice is happening. To order click on the order button below or call (800) 524-2612, PDS #7263096705, free.

"I wouldn't want to be a superhero. I don't want to be responsible. I don't want to constantly save anyone. I'm fine being myself, super or not."
—Drusilla, from The Beat Within, an arts program for incarcerated youth

Girls in the Juvenile Justice System

By Jenny Lin

In the early '90s, the United States experienced an increasing number of girls entering the juvenile justice (JJ) system. State governments across the nation were challenged (and continued to be challenged today) by the lack of research about girls and their criminal behaviors, as well as inadequate services for girls in the JJ system. Consequently, women began advocating for gender-specific programming in the JJ system, meaning services developed and/or targeted to either males or females.

Correlational Risk Factors
Although girls and boys share many of the same issues, girls' needs present different challenges. Recent research shows correlational risk factors for girls who are at risk or are delinquents. Almost every girl in the JJ system was a victim or a witness to violence and physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse. A study of juvenile offenders in Georgia Youth Detention Centers, for example, revealed that nearly 60 percent of girls met criteria for an anxiety disorder (in contrast to 32 percent among boys); 59 percent of girls had a mood disorder (versus 22 percent among boys). Girls are three times more likely than boys to have experienced sexual abuse, which is often an underlying factor in high-risk behaviors that lead to delinquency. Other risk factors include un-grieved deaths (murder, suicide, drug overdose, etc.), family distress and fragmentation, substance abuse, physical or mental health issues, teen parenting, academic failure, unhealthy relationships and "triple threat."1

"Triple Threat"
Poor girls of color in the JJ system face a "triple threat" of marginalization, alienation and prejudice based on race, class and gender. In regards to racism, three of every 10 cases involving black girls are dismissed, compared to seven of every 10 cases dismissed for white girls. Furthermore, immigrant girls face a number of challenges around culture, race, class, gender and language in their new community. In addition to discrimination that they may or may not have experienced in their home country, they face a new set of expectations in their schooling, allegiance to two cultures and increased responsibilities to family and community.2

Gender Stereotypes
Gender stereotypes about girl gangs and residual stereotypes about girls and sexuality from the early '90s continue to dictate the way the juvenile justice system treats girls:

• In 2000, 430,000 young women under age 18 were arrested—28 percent of the 1,560,000 juvenile arrests that year.3
• Nationally, approximately two-thirds of the girls and women in the juvenile and adult justice systems are minorities, primarily African American and Latina.
• African American girls comprise nearly half of all those in secure detention, and Latinas comprise 13 percent.
• Comparatively, 65 percent of the population is Caucasian/white, while only 34 percent of girls in detention nationally are Caucasian/white.4
• Nationally, there are fewer community-based services for girls, and girls are twice as likely to be detained, with detention lasting five times longer for girls than boys.5

Current Trends and Characteristics of Female Offenders
Girls' involvement in the juvenile justice system continues to increase steadily, even as juvenile male involvement in JJ system declines. "Girls on the Edge" reported that public policy and community sentiment have been shifting from intervention, support and rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents to the criminalization of youth behavior. Additionally, a lack of services to address victimization, paired with a lack of support systems for girls in particular, means girls are actually becoming more violent, aggressive, and delinquent.6

Next Steps
Several researchers point to the following key criteria for helping girls resist delinquency: provide physical and emotional security, positive female role models and a sense of belonging and competency through gender-specific programming. To learn more or volunteer, visit the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Girls Incorporated, Girls Justice Initiative and Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

1. Castro, Gena and Julie Posadas. "Girls on the Edge: A Report on Girls in the Juvenile Justice System." United Way of the Bay Area and San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department (February 2003) [back]
2. Ibid. [back]
3. "Fact Sheet on Girls and Juvenile Justice." Girls Incorporated (August 2002) [back]
4. Castro and Posadas, "Girls on the Edge." [back]
5. Budnick, Kimberly J. and Ellen Shields-Fletcher. "What About Girls?" OJJDP Fact Sheet #84. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (September 1998) [back]
6. Castro and Posadas, "Girls on the Edge." [back]

Purple Power, Down by the Riverside

By the Rev. Heidi Neumark
(Excerpted from an address at the 2005 Social Justice Biennial Conference, January 14, 2005, in Tucson, Arizona. Read full text of her keynote address.)

A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, 'If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.' And she prevailed upon us. (Acts 16:14-15, NRSV)

She was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. Thyatira was known for its dyed cloth, particularly its dyed wool. Ancient documents from the city show that it had a well-organized guild system, communities of workers in different jobs: bakers, weavers, potters, leather workers and others, including dyers who worked in different colors. All of the dyes from that time were made from plants, except for one purple dye that came from a kind of sea snail. That was evidently the most intense purple and the most highly prized. In the New Testament there are various kinds of purple and they are not all associated with wealth. However it turns out that in Thyatira, the purple dye that was used came from something called madder root that grew near grazing sheep, so that the same fields yielded the wool and the dye. To this day, in the area of Thyatira, people continue to use madder root as a source of purple dye. Cicero noted in his writings distinguishing between purple from animal-based dye, and purple from vegetable-based that the second was inferior, not as deep and rich and valuable. Well that was Cicero's opinion about purple power, but it all depends on what you mean by "deep," what you mean by "rich," and what you mean by "valuable."

... While those who worked with their hands were not on the level of beggars, they were never able to reach the upper classes, they were never social insiders. There was no middle class, no middle ground. While purple fabric may have been desired, the work of creating it was a sordidum job done by sordidum people. Be my decorator but don't come to be blessed in my church. Your orientation makes you sordid. Or as many Mexican and other immigrants find—wash my dishes, care for my children, cook my food, but your sordidum children cannot get papers so they cannot qualify for financial aid. Sew my clothes and build my gadgets at maquilas across the border, but don't expect me to stop the machines just because hundreds of your sordidum coworkers are brutally raped and murdered. A broken grip. Beloved children torn away. Hands meant to be together, pulled apart. This is pax? peace?

And speaking of orientation and documentation, Lydia came from the orient, an immigrant from the East. It was likely that the group she worked with were also foreigners who came to Philippi as she had. The purpurari were usually freed people, who settled in other cities to do their work in small groups with women in the majority, but not usually in guilds of women only, organized women, as was true of Lydia and her sisters who were doing a new thing.

It's not hard to imagine that Lydia's group of purpurarius had joined together to earn a living and to shape their social and spiritual lives in common. That they were living in an environment of threat as immigrants and as God-fearers, an expression for non-Jews drawn to Judaism. As outsiders in a Roman colony, it was a matter of life and death for them to stick together and draw strength from their shared faith. They must have had to struggle hard to get to where they were, to forge an identity with dignity outside what was accepted in the Pax Romana, to organize in resistance to a system that offered pax without justice.

How did Lydia come to perceive this possibility? Where did she get her organizing skills? What network did her training come from? A network with a long history, going back at least as far as the network of resistance that came together at another river millenniums earlier. Remember Moses' mother and sister, the midwives Shiprah and Puah and Pharaoh's daughter. Acting together against the Egyptian empire, resisting from within and from without, saving life, preparing a way through the desert, down by the Nile riverside. Lydia's network goes back to Isaiah who knew at the end of exile that all organizing was reorganizing and had his eyes opened to perceive a new thing. And so Lydia offers this witness, a fearer of God, but not afraid of the Roman empire, worshiping God but with her own organized community, on her own ground, where others have marginalized her, outside the city gate, where she finds a place to create community, sustain community and pray in community, down by the riverside, by the waters where we are named and claimed as children of God in a grip of love that no power can break.

The Rev. Heidi Neumark currently serves Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan (ELCA). For nineteen years prior, she was pastor of Transfiguration Lutheran Church, where her experiences as a pastor and community organizer led to a highly-acclaimed book, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx.

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The PC(USA) Worship Guide on Trade and Globalization

The Global Week of Action on Trade, April 10-16, 2005, will be observed in congregations around the world. Women often bear the brunt of unjust trade policies. This worship guide has everything you need to raise critical issues and encourage Christian discipleship in a globalized world.

Order the colorful 16-page Worship Guide by clicking on the order button below or call (800) 524-2612, PDS #7436505360, $2.

Download printable versions.

Interfaith Worker Justice National Conference
May 22-24, 2005
Chicago, Illinois
Interfaith Worker Justice will convene activists, organizers, clergy and seminarians in Chicago to become more effective in organizing to improve wages, working conditions and benefits for workers in our society.