Over the years, as O’Dwyer weaved in and out of prison, psychiatrists variously described her as a “paranoid schizophrenic” and “a psychopath.” She felt they were completely missing the effect of imprisonment itself on the behavior of women. “They always asked me about my early life but not about what had happened to me in those institutions since the age of fourteen.” Prison, for women, can be a transforming experience; in this milieu, it is undeniably culture that dictates how violence bursts forth.
Nevertheless, scholars have generally failed to delve into female inmate aggression, according to criminologist Clemens Bartollas. “Most researchers have focused on the pseudo-family relationships” that women form, their nurturant roles. Apropos of his observation, the one scholar to do a thorough study of Chowchilla’s population, the feminist criminologist Barbara Owen, told a criminology conference in 1994 that “women’s prison is completely different than men’s. The women are all really supportive, really nurturing of each other.” Yet one of the few academic studies to focus on hierarchy building in women’s prisons confirmed O’Dwyer’s experience, in that women who “had established reputations for being able to fight and otherwise physically defend themselves” achieved high status, getting first choice of drugs, for instance, as well as their sexual pick of the new girls. Also high in the hierarchy are white women, who can manipulate preferential guard treatment and get guards to run interference. Men tend to settle disputes among themselves, valuing inmate solidarity above all else. But women will appeal to staff for mediation, or as a means of setting one another up. “You constantly have to watch your back,” notes Toni Cato about her own life at the Scott Correctional Facility in Michigan, “because you never know who may wake up wrong or think you’re out to take their woman away from them and try and set you up, by putting a razor or stolen food from the kitchen in your room.” A study of inmate strategies at Frontera in California found that up to 90 percent of the inmates had acted as snitches. “Women watch each other,” says Wong, “who’s twisted around whose finger, who’s seeing who. Allegations can bury you whether they’re valid or not.”
Dorothea Puente has solid rank at CCWF, partly because of her crimes, which make her deadly, and partly because she spent a lot of time while out of prison sending care packages of Levi’s jeans and other prized possessions to the right people in prison, so that they’d owe her if she had to go back. Marti Salas-Tarin possessed a similar instinct, which was to grease the wheels: to head her potential combatants off at the pass by offering something they wanted. “You follow the flow there,” she explains. “If you think you’re better, they’ll beat you up. If you don’t want to be tough, you become tough, if you’re not a lesbian … most of the young girls get caught up in that, because they want to be popular. I wasn’t a lesbian in there, but I was respected. I hung with all the heroin addicts, and they knew that I worked in the infirmary. I had access to all the needles. So I was their connection.”
One of Marti’s cellmates was a rich Filipina who’d been caught embezzling. Terrified of prison, she threw money at the problem, buying her safety from Salas-Tarin. “Drugs, food, whatever I wanted— for protection. ’Cause she was in the click, man! And she was scared. So she paid me to look out for her.” Another cellmate was a fortyish blonde from Los Angeles whom everyone called Blondie. For her sense of safety, Blondie opted for the most successful tactic in the outside world, but the most disastrous one in prison: the maiden-in-distress motif. “One of the guards was fucking her for nothing. She saw it as, like, a romance!” says Marti, her astonishment vivid on her face. “I said, ‘Blondie, you gotta get something out of it, girl!’ ” Sure enough, the guard was shortly transferred to another prison and didn’t so much as bid Blondie good-bye.
White women seem more prone to throwing themselves at the mercy of their jailers, whether through sex, romantic manipulation, or by seeking out protection through medical attention. White inmates are reportedly more likely than any other women to receive mental health care in prison and to use prescription drugs. Black women believe this is because whites are more shocked by prison. “Your average drug user knows there’s a possibility they’ll go to prison,” says one African-American inmate, “but a lot of white women are in denial. Prison is something they didn’t envision in their future, they’re more traumatized by it, more afraid of their surroundings. You see a lot more of them in the line-ups for meds.” White girls, according to this same inmate, “Jane,” are also more likely to seek out and receive protective custody. “Coming in, you have to spend time in reception. They will put white women in a priority cell because they are worried about their safety. Maybe they think they’re weaker, or they care more.”
Indeed, it is white heterosexual women, with their more traditional guise of femininity and “weakness,” whose power plays succeed with prison officials, judges, parole boards, the media. They are the ones who get interviewed by journalists, who get the best jobs working in administration, who get released and go on to lecture others on the conditions of female imprisonment, playing to the script of feminine virtue. “White women get to come out of ninety-day mandatory work schemes quicker,” says Jane, “they get into programs quicker, this is commonplace. In the last six weeks, all the white women who came in are now in better jobs with better status— law library clerk, tutor, administration. White women see themselves as more entitled. Many of them come in with their Jean Harris attitude. They’ve owned their home, they have strong family ties. Do they see themselves as better? Yes. And I have to say they’re better equipped to negotiate the system.”
What most women inmates have in common, regardless of race or class, is a desire to be romantically linked to another inmate as the basis for their personal security. If men join gangs in prison to secure their sense of safety, women join “families.” They become, to a remarkably high degree, homosexual for the duration of their stay behind bars. Lesbianism in prison has little to do with lesbianism as a sexual preference on the outside. California inmates and correction officers estimate that actual lesbians make up about 20 percent of the yard population. Beyond that particular group, perhaps another 60 percent of inmates “turn” in their yards, forming relationships with other women and going back to their husbands and boyfriends as soon as they’re released.
That women, crime, and aggression should come together in many people’s minds as an image of Big Betty, the antifeminine butch dyke who couldn’t get a man, means, of course, that lesbian stereotypes flourish in popular depictions of prison life. A rash of prison chick flicks in the 1970s, which for some reason always starred Linda Blair of The Exorcist, invariably counterposed nice girls with large, leering “lesies” wielding weapons. The iconography angered some feminist cultural critics so much that they vigorously countered the images by arguing that there weren’t any lesbians in prison, and if there were, they looked and acted just like other women.
“Common messages gleaned from female prison films, none of which are supported by observations of actual women in institutions,” Karlene Faith wrote recently, “include … [the messages that] women locked up are masculine, and do routine physical damage to one another” and that a “disproportionate number of women in prison are lesbians,” caricatured as “macho heterosexual men.” Well, in fact, although the B movies are salacious and cartoonish, and split their characters into a dichotomy of virtuous feminine and amoral unfeminine, the truth is that there are inmates in each North American women’s prison who transform themselves into the equivalent of macho heterosexual men. In California, they’re known as the stud broads.
There are only two stud broads in B Yard this noontime, one is African American, tall and broad-shouldered, with gnarled rasta hair and a distinctive mustache. She lopes, moving from her shoulders rather than her hips, projecting an air of supreme self-assurance. The other stud is white, with a brush cut and a goatee. She is shorter, but wiry and muscled, like a marine. There is no point in saying she. These are not women im
itating men. They don’t look campy, like the woman in the muumuu. They have achieved an almost pure masculinity. Their transformation takes your breath away.
“The girls loved the studs to death, man. ’Cause they looked like men!” says Marti, explaining what she saw as a pretty obvious equation. “That’s your mentality when you’re in prison for a while.” Women don’t want to date women, they want to date men. Moreover, women don’t feel secure in an environment as volatile as prison by partnering up with another woman. They feel secure by seeking out the tough, strengthening shelter of a man. “Usually the girls who turn are young,” says Marti. “When they walk in, there’s like a hundred stud broads standing there fishing. They’re like, ‘Oh, man, look at that one, I want that one.’ And pretty soon they know what room the new girls are in, and they’re sending them candy, they’re sending them cigarettes, a pair of 501s.… And the [young girls] are naive, you know. So they hang onto the stud broads for this stuff, for protection. The cute girls get turned out right away.” The relationships may or may not be sexual, depending upon the women. They are rather more marriages of convenience, like political or economic alliances, ceremonially consolidated. “They get married in there, too, you have a ceremony. Another stud that’s been there a while will marry you, she’s like a priest. They’ll just invite certain people.”
Which way the cute girls turn—toward the feminine or the masculine—is one of the most fascinating aspects of women’s prison culture. “There was this girl named Blanca at Chowchilla,” Marti remembers, “she looked exactly like a boy, she was bea-u-tiful. Real cute face. Blond. Every girl in Chowchilla wanted to be with her, that’s why they’d go to the chapel, just to see her.” Blanca had a boyfriend on the outside, and whenever he came to visit, she kicked off her droopy, slim-hipped men’s jeans, pulled off her muscle T-shirt, and slapped on some makeup. She was living two lives, the allure of the feminine, the command of the masculine. “Blanca used to tell me, ‘Marti, pray for me. I want to be a man.’ “
At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, stud broads are known as aggressors. One winter afternoon, in the prison’s bright, tidy administrative offices, an aggressor named Mohammad strolled in and sat down warily for an interview. Mohammad, whose first name is actually Arlene, is a handsome woman in her forties with crimped hair, cut close to her head, graying at the temples. She sports a tasteful burgundy sweater and an elegant pair of men’s tasseled loafers, and plants her feet firmly on the floor when she sits, her hands held loosely in her lap in a posture of relaxed self-possession. Mohammad isn’t as flamboyantly masculinized as the California studs. She has no visible facial hair, for one thing. Her sexual preference is more internalized, less connected to the power structure of prison itself. “I’d never heard the word aggressor before I came here in ‘eighty-four,” she says. “Prior to coming to prison, I’d been called stud, dyke, bull dagger, it changes with the years. I don’t change. I’ve been gay since I was fourteen.” Mohammad’s experience of being gay on the outside, where homosexuality is not the norm or an arrangement of expedience, makes her particularly sensitive to the negative stereotypes. So, one of the first things she wants known is that aggressors are not the ones who corrupt straight women. “A lot of people think that when a young woman comes in here, she’s not given a chance, she’s hit on by a bunch of women dressed like men. It’s the total opposite. There’s so few aggressors (five to eight to a unit) that we’re like the woman going alone to a singles bar, who gets hit on. If you happen to be gay before you get in, you’re even more popular. People say, ‘Hey, she’s the real thing.’ “
If you’re not gay when you go in, then, like Blanca, you find yourself with a choice that no one ever offered you before. “Feminine women are making little aggressors out of the [new girls],” says Mohammad, “and [because] they haven’t been in the world long enough to know their own sexuality,” they’re responsive. How they dress themselves and what posture they adopt depends to a large degree on the fashion of the times. “The same way you see fads on the street, certain lifestyles, that’s carried over to prison.” says Mohammad. “You’ll find that the younger aggressors have their pants hanging off their butts.”
But how deeply do these superficial fads penetrate women’s sexual identities? There is a vigorous debate about this within women’s prisons. According to Mohammad, women who “turn” in prison will probably continue to explore their bisexuality. “I think a very high percentage will go home to a husband and have, every now and then, a liaison with a woman. They are exposed to something here they didn’t know existed before in themselves.” To what? A transmutation of sexual boundary, a leveling of the playing field where gender is concerned, an altogether different sensation of power. “When Blanca got outta there,” says Marti, “we set her up with Victory Outreach [a Christian, largely Mexican, program]. She completely changed and went back to being a girl, a lady. She goes: ‘You know what was the hardest thing for me to do when I went in this program? They told me, “You got to take off those boxers and put on a dress.” I cried and cried for about two weeks, and then finally I put the dress on.’ “
Mohammad’s friend Precious Bedell, who is working on her master’s degree while serving time for homicide, wrote a play about the transmutations women undergo in prison. One of the scenes, published in Prison Life, involves an aggressor named Moneylove discussing gender with a feminine woman named Sandy, who calls Moneylove “Mr. Career Criminal.”
MONEY: That’s me, but don’t change the gender, baby. Ms. suits me.
SANDY: Oh, so today you want to be a woman?
MONEY: Come on now, baby. I have no illusions about who or what I am. I’m just aggressive and prefer men’s attire.
Most stud broads and aggressors view themselves as women, and the physical differences between them and feminine women can be quite subtle, depending upon the individual and the institution. What generates the argument is that some appropriate masculine strategies of domination. “You can use women,” Cat points out. “They can do a lot of things that you want done. If you stupid or weak enough to get caught up in that, they’ll use you sexually, or make you their maid, or whatever, make you run dope.” Abuses of power by aggressors are the subject of heated debate for women inmates. “Lesbianism is not the issue,” wrote Washington State inmate Veronica Compton (partner of the Hillside Strangler) in a guest editorial in Prison Life:
Lesbianism is, ideally, women loving other women. What I oppose are women who … act as oppressive male figures wielding control and power over other people.… What’s especially tragic is that a woman finds her misogynist in other women inmates, not just staff.
Some Bedford Hills aggressors unquestionably replicate the behaviors of misogyny: stringing along three or four girlfriends at a time, making their girls cook and iron for them, smacking them if they step out of line. This, at least, was the observation of former inmate Jean Harris. She recalls one inmate wailing, “What did I do, Tony? I did it all just the way you told me. I can’t do any more. How can you be mad at me, Tony?” At least one scholar records that aggressors set up a system of tribute, in the manner of feudal lords.
Stud broads and aggressors may have high status within the inmate social world, but they are not the ones who benefit from guard treatment, because unlike tough heterosexual women or celebrity inmates, their prestige is narrowly confined to their yards. “The famous white girls like Amy Fisher and Pamela Smart, that type, always get into relationships with African-American women,” says Jane. “Maybe in their minds they feel safer. But any black girl who goes with them is running a big risk. You got a double whammy of white and celebrity. When a black woman and a white woman get into an argument, and the white woman [tells the guard], ‘She made me buy a pair of sneakers,’ the black girl goes to lockdown for extortion, even if the truth is exactly the opposite. White girls are believed faster.” Where most guards are concerned, African-American aggressors are nothing more or less than the B movie stereoty
pe of butch dykes. “Do we feel [homophobia] in the judicial system?” Mohammad asks. “Most definitely. Are aggressors treated differently than feminine women? Sure. Both inside and outside of prison.”
Whether women’s conflicts take the form of direct assault or indirect set-up, the emotional currents running through their prisons as a result of relational power structures contribute in large part to the volatility. According to a national survey of correctional officers in America, women inmates were overwhelmingly viewed as more “emotional, temperamental, moody, manipulative, quarrelsome and excitable.” Correctional officers in women’s institutions have far more complicated relationships with their charges than those in men’s prisons, partly because women inmates involve the guards in their politics with other inmates, and partly because the guards get sexually or romantically involved with their charges. The survey found that female officers considered women to be more difficult to manage than men, while for male officers the reverse was true, suggesting that each sex has less tolerance for and less interest in the power plays of its own gender. “Women’s view of women differs substantially from men’s,” says Lieutenant Wong. “Women know when women are lying. Men can get twisted around. Female officers will arrest and cite twice as many women as men do.”
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