In reading Angela Davis’ book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, I explored the notion of female criminality in relation to the gendered and sexed strategies of capital punishment within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC); specifically in relation to the control of Black and brown women in the contemporary era. In particular, I focus on how female criminality produces gendered, sexed, and racialized sexual violence in direct connection to how Black and brown women experience racialized and sexed institutionalized punishment through hypersexuality (Barrett Discussion, 19 March 2021). Consequently, as Davis makes clear, the PIC inherently operates as a gendered and sexed institution; while men have an ideological connection to redemption and salvation, …show more content…
These feminized punishment strategies — i.e. models of domesticity and the cottage system--through 19th century reformatories were created to particularly reform white women; Black and Indigenous women were further racialized and disproportionately imprisoned in male prisons. Thus, women of color were not afforded these conceptualizations of female criminality as their relationship to femininity was deemed imperceptible within colonial logics (72). In racializing feminine criminality naturally leads to the racialization of hypersexuality and its function through sexual abuse within private prisons. Black and brown, particularly Latinx, women prisoners are consistently associated with hypersexual notions of fetishization and exotification in the media that manifest themselves in patriarchal capitalism. Particularly, hypsersexuality justifies sexual abuse endured by women of color in prisons and further maintains heteropatriarchy through an institution that “has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls”