The View From Inside

More Female Guards Needed

by Patricia Lickfeldt

Although most courts agree that a prisoner has no basic right to privacy, nowhere has anyone considered the female prisoner's basic right to dignity, modesty, and some sense of personal worth. The presence of male guards in all Housing Units of Michigan's three women's prisons absolutely negates any attempts to create humane living conditions for female prisoners.

At Florence Crane Women's Facility - Main and Annex, there are only about five women in permanent Resident Unit Officer (RUO) positions out of the 32 positions available on first and second shifts. In the main facility, where the bulk of the population is housed, only one position out of sixteen available is filled with a woman on a permanent basis. No matter what the reasons are for this gross overrepresentation of male RUO's, or how valid these reasons may seem, women prisoners are faced with a situation which breeds hostility, degradation, and sexual abuses.

Although all male officers do not commit blatant abuses against female residents, the women themselves often have past histories of having suffered sexual abuse - mental and physical - at the hands of men. It should be patently obvious that women who have spent lifetimes as victims are probably going to be unable to relate to any man in a healthy manner, much less an absolute authority figure who is allowed excessive freedom to dominate and intimidate those for whom he is responsible.

Women cannot build self-esteem when men are allowed to view them naked or feel their bodies intimately as part of their regular duties. Women cannot leam healthy male-female interaction when men in authority over them are allowed to make sexually suggestive and derogatory remarks. Women cannot develop any level of personal independence when they are kept under the thumb of some male guard and forced to accept total male dominance.

Wake up citizens of the FREE world! Women in prison will some day be returned to society, and when they are you have every right to expect fully functioning, potentially productive community members. If you want well-adjusted women released from our penal system, then that system must be changed to support and encourage personal pride and emotional growth.