Queer Incarceration Nation, by Andrea Trevino

Queer Injustice outlines many forms about how we have been given a conditioned sense of laws, politics, and prison systems. These systems affect groups of individuals in an unjust sense. The presentation of these ideas and how our criminal justice system falls short of being ‘equitable’ to everyone is outlined in the introduction of the text. The authors give background to the root of the problem being how we perceive crime stating, “the prison industrial complex is a system that promotes prisons as ‘solutions’ to social, political, and economic problems while reaping political and economic benefits from incarceration” (xiii). Crime is a social construct in which most powerful agencies choose to say who is being kept safe. Are they protecting privilege? That is privilege of being able to freely express and be oneself if it fits the heteronormative box. Homosexuality was associated with danger, deception, contagion, and subversion, all evoking emotional responses.  Social norms have dictated what we know as deviance or the ‘unnatural’. Laws are socially and politically determined and may be skewed because of how “crime has become a national obsession in America” (xi).

Queer folks are more likely to be criminalized in the sense that their actions and choices start to reflect how they are as a person; one begins to generalize. A theme that challenges this notion is how the U.S prison system is actually queer. As I stated earlier, if crime is deviance, far from the norm, aren’t all inmates queer? They stray from the normal, no? Page 95 explains how prisons and jails were initially constructed as houses for prostitutes. Their purpose was to rehabilitate criminals and deter crime by sentencing those convicted of offenses to isolation from unwholesome influences and inoculation with appropriate moral and spiritual values. In addition, gender segregation is enforced which turns heterosexuality into situational homosexuality. This type of housing leads to the main argument of how LGBTQ people are disproportionately victimized in prisons.

The Huff Post article by Mollie Reilly states that “LGBT people are discriminated against once in jail. They are more likely than other inmates to face inhumane treatment, be placed in solitary confinement and have insufficient access to legal resources. It’s also more common that they’ll find themselves in a courtroom with biased judges or juries.” As I reflect on the values we say to hold true as a nation, everything that makes America the best country in the world, I think of the freedom of speech, celebration of diversity but yet, there are atrocities that are swept under the rug. Injustices in which I was blind to because of the constant enforcement of gender binaries and rejection of nonconformity. Power of the state and police rest as the motivating factor and excuse to he enforcement of gender conformity through ‘prison regulations’. The authorities confront the ‘superhuman’ power of the other which leads to violent control of individuals. This radicalization of queer criminality linked to the idea of a super predator derives from toxic masculinity. An example of this toxic masculinity is seen through how sex exerts power over someone. LGBTQ inmates disproportionately experience sexual violence in prisons because they must ‘like it’. Dangerously, the hyper-sexuality of an LGBTQ body tells officials it is okay to violate them because they deserve it. Well how could we make change to this injustice if the “criminal legal system as a whole refuses to recognize transgender prisoners’ chosen names and gender identities” (110)? The prison system automatically strips the individual of their dignity by not even acknowledging their true gender identity and expression. Queer advocacy is crucial at this time with this group of individuals because only “18.5% of homosexual inmates report sexual assault” (99). This percentage does not include the probable greater percentage of inmates who report any and all types of abuse. LGBT victims of violence are subjected to further abuse at the hands of law enforcement that are charged with protecting them. We have the power to give importance and urgency to these silent voices and hold those in power accountable for their actions just like any other citizen.

It is obvious that laws disproportionately impact vulnerable people. Lorde and the film Two Spirits bravely depict personal stories of injustice within the criminal system. As Two Spirit depicts the result of a hate crime, Audre Lorde also provides a deeper argument into the injustices faced as an LGBTQ individual but even more so, as we have seen in our current political climate, inflated injustices facing LGBTQ youth of color. Not only is it the fact that “more than 60% of prisoners, and two-thirds of people serving life sentences, are people of color” (xii) but also that “mass incarceration is deeply rooted in the history and maintenance of racial power relations with racially disproportionate impacts” (xii). Lordes’ embrace of the power of the erotic and an intersectional black lesbian feminism helps framing the injustice behind the hyper sexualization of queer youth of color. Hyper sexualization seen through the example of enlarged clitorises of inmates emasculating women because of the gender codes and laws put on masculine women. Adding a different shade and pigment of the skin heightens this hyper sexuality. As stated in an Audre Lorde project article, “We know that in order to rise up against police brutality, we must be in solidarity with all economic, racial, and gender justice movements.”

As the end of chapter 6 in Queer Injustice states, we are to develop bolder justice systems and new frameworks for naming, analyzing, and confronting the myriad forms of individual and systemic violence that not only hurts individuals, but also destabilizes entire communities. It is time to not only care for the whole person but the whole community.