by VICTORIA LAW
IN 1974, WOMEN IMPRISONED at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Prisoner organizer Carol Crooks had filed a lawsuit challenging the prison’s practice of placing women in segregation without a hearing or 24-hour notice of charges. In July, a court had ruled in her favor. In August, guards retaliated by brutally beating Crooks and placing her in segregation without a hearing. The women protested, fighting off guards, taking over several sections of the prison, and holding seven staff members hostage for two and a half hours.
Male state troopers and (male) guards from men’s prisons were brought in to suppress the uprising, resulting in twenty-five women being injured. In the aftermath, twenty-four women were transferred to the Matteawan Complex for the Criminally Insane.
Three years earlier, male prisoners in Attica, New York, captured headlines nationwide when they took over the prison for four days demanding better living and working conditions. The governor ordered the National Guard to retake the prison; 54 people (prisoners and guards) were killed. The rebellion catapulted prison issues into public awareness, becoming the symbol of prisoner organizing. In contrast, the August Rebellion is virtually forgotten today, leading to the widespread belief that women prisoners do not organize or resist.
Women prisoners have always resisted. When imprisoned in male penitentiaries and work camps, they refused to obey the rules. When states began housing them in separate facilities, they protested substandard conditions, sometimes violently. In 1835, New York State opened its first prison for women. The environment was so terrible that the women rioted, attacking and tearing the clothes off the prison matron and physically chasing away other officials with wooden food tubs.[1]
A century later, women continued to protest horrifying prison conditions: In 1975, women imprisoned in North Carolina held a sit-down demonstration demanding better medical care, improved counseling services, and the closing of the prison laundry. When prison guards attempted to end the protest by herding them into the gymnasium and beating them, the women fought back. Using volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete, and hoe handles, they drove the guards out of the prison. Their rebellion was quashed only after the state called in over one hundred guards from other prisons.[2]
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