Prison abolitionist, speaker, and educator Lauren Chief Elk is the mind behind the Twitter trend #GiveYourMoneytoWomen, advocating that women be paid for emotional labor. She also teaches an ongoing online course, Industrial Complex, about interconnected systems of oppression (prison, police, military, and more). Chief Elk talked with The Progressive about the demands of #PrisonStrike2018, and how they do not go far enough.
Lauren Chief Elk
Q: The prison-industrial complex is an overwhelmingly male space. But prior to your work on prisons, you advocated for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, who are mostly women. Can you talk about how those intersect?
The women’s prison population is our fastest-growing. There’s really not a lot in this prison strike that covers gender-specific issues in regards to demands. Whether that is the criminalization of domestic violence and sexual assault victims, reproductive issues like pregnancy in prison, issues of sexual abuse in jail. Things like that aren’t really being centered in the way that they should. On top of these things, women are being exploited for labor as well.
Q: Given this country’s astronomical incarceration rate, I’m sure there’s a significant portion of women negatively impacted because their partners are locked up.
Especially because most women of color’s partners aren’t in jail for gender-based violence. The majority of people in jail across the board aren’t in for violent crimes. Who gets criminalized the most for gender-based violence is women of color. Whether it’s self-defending, whether it’s the legal system punishing women who don’t want to testify against their partners, whether they’ve been deemed to be lying. . . .
Q: In the conversation about mass shooters having histories of violence against women, you’ve spoken about how legally categorizing these shootings as “terrorism” could end up further harming those women.
We’ve already seen what has seen what has happened within the war on terror. And we already know how women are already criminalized for violence against them. So trying to add this extra layer . . . it’s gonna blame women for terrorism. That happened with the Orlando shooting and Omar Mateen. [His widow] Noor Salman went to trial. Thankfully she got acquitted. But she got federal terrorism charges hurled against her. Despite being a victim of domestic violence. Somehow she was expected to stop him when she couldn’t even stop violence against herself.
It would behoove all women and the feminist movement to really divest from militarism and incarceration.
Q: What can activists do to reverse the criminalization of women’s lives?
It would behoove all women and the feminist movement to really divest from militarism and incarceration. Who’s funding our movements and dictating how these conversations go and what we’re allowed to do? Figuring out different ways to fund our movements and just the general organizing to get money to women. And disrupting policing, disrupting the tech industry, needs to be a top priority.
Q: Let’s say we abolish the prison system. What then?
I like to remind people that the prison system and policing are fairly new inventions. People have been living on the North American continent with justice systems and governing systems that didn’t include prisons or policing but were still able to administer accountability, administer punishment, administer healing.
We’re capable of figuring shit out without all of this.