False Choices by Liza Featherstone

Author:Liza Featherstone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Marry the State, Jail the People: Hillary Clinton

and the Rise of Carceral Feminism

Yasmin Nair

That anything to do with what is known as the “prison industrial complex” and its spread would occupy the attention of politicians would have seemed unthinkable in the run-up to the US presidential election of 2012. But by 2015, the topic had become so widely discussed that even Republican candidates such as Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul had come out against lengthy sentences for minor infractions like marijuana possession. In fact, one televised Republican debate in 2015 sounded like a New Jim Crow book group, with several uttering the phrase “mass incarceration” as if it were a bad thing.

Sure, much of it is political posturing and none of these candidates want to abolish the prison system. It’s unlikely that either Republicans or Democrats—even a libertarian like Paul or a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders—have given up their punitive ways.1 Still, where previous election years have seen candidates focusing on how their rivals were insufficiently harsh on criminals—the first Bush infamously used the story of Willie Horton to win the presidency—this time around, there is an eagerness to demonstrate awareness that the US’s current rate of incarceration is a source of shame, not pride.

Hillary Clinton sang along eagerly with this chorus of denunciation, calling for an end to “an era of incarceration” in April 2015. But this was awkward. For one thing, some of her campaign bundlers also work, directly or indirectly, for the private prison industry.2 But more deeply at odds with Clinton’s new Angela Davis impersonation was this embarrassing set of facts: her record.

Let’s acknowledge that Clinton faces a dilemma as a prominent woman making her second bid for the presidency: she must temper her need to prove that she can be an aggressive, militaristic commander in chief with evidence that her womanly sensitivities remain unscathed. Positioning herself as a carceral feminist—one willing to get tough on criminals in order to protect girls and women—has long been central to Clinton’s navigation of gendered shoals such as these.

Clinton’s feminism occupies a central place in the public’s perception of her and in terms of how she negotiates the landscape of “women’s issues.” That landscape is vastly different even from her first campaign in 2008. Domestically, the question of campus rape and related matters of sexual assault occupy the public imagination. Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University art student, captured attention with her Carry That Weight project, in which she vowed to—and until she graduated, did—carry her mattress around as long as her accused rapist remained on campus. She was even invited to Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address. Slutwalk, a transnational protest of rape, rejecting the prevalent moralizing over victims’ manner of dress, began in 2011 and remains a prominent, if contested, annual event. Accusations against unnamed University of Virginia fraternity brothers capture headlines; even prominent entertainment figures such as Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen are not immune.

In all of this, the prison industrial complex looms large in both obvious and unseen, sometimes insidious ways.

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