The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
“Communism is not the loving daydream of a better world, then, but something cultivated first from rage at what the world is not. We do not glimpse it. We feel it in moments of fever—of cities burning, of order breaking down, of loved ones dying slow and unremarkable deaths…because a better world is not built backwards from the future, but from where we stand now, at the peak of the mountain of bones that constitutes the pre-history of the human species.”
—Phil Neel
I met C* about three days into my federal prison sentence. A fifty-year old, half-Mexican and half-white anarchist, C kept her dark hair in long braids, made curious vegetarian concoctions with commissary ingredients, and spoke fondly of her dominatrix and stripper days in the 80s. She was also one of the few people in the prison who made me feel safe speaking openly about my political values and issues I care about.
When I told her my mom cut off contact with me after I had been convicted for destroying police cars and Confederate monuments during the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings, she told me that if I were her daughter, she would brag to all her friends about me.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’d be like, ‘my daughter is a freaking badass!'”
I don’t know if she knows how much that meant to me.
Since I started doing my time, I met numerous women with lengthy sentences for drug charges. Many have worked in the sex trade in some capacity. Meeting these women and coming face-to-face with the carceral system only further convinced me that any movement for liberation must advocate for the complete decriminalization of drugs and sex work. However, I’ve come to believe that we must achieve those goals while actively working toward a world where neither drugs or sex are commodified for profit, and where no one has to labor in degrading conditions under threat of starvation, homelessness, and imprisonment.
When I say I am an abolitionist, I mean that I am an abolitionist all the way, from the seed to the flower—as in, there is no prison and police abolition, without also abolishing U.S militarism and imperialism, and none of this is possible without abolishing capitalism.
I walked through the gates at Aliceville Prison Camp confident in these beliefs. But now, I will walk out of here understanding these things in a much more visceral and personal way than I did before. When you live with 100 other women—your roommates, friends, and coworkers—who have had their whole lives twisted and turned by these systems, you end up *feeling* the injustice in your bones.
“My time in jail was intense immersion education. It was painful but ultimately mind-expanding and heart-opening and there is no other place I could have learned the lessons taught there.” —Rebecca Rubin
My best friend in here is as young as I am—a Mexican lesbian who just turned 26. She’s serving an 11-year prison sentence. The crime? She happened to be in the car with her brother while he was trafficking drugs. Neither of them knew exactly what he was transporting.
Versions of this same story repeat itself everywhere here. My former bunkie, a Black woman in her sixties, also a first-time offender, was in a relationship with a man who was trafficking drugs. She’ll probably do about six years—just for knowing what he was doing, and counting his money a couple times.
I mention these stories to demonstrate just how egregiously the federal justice system overreaches, and also make a point about how common it is for women to catch charges for the men in their lives. Women’s prisons are full of ride-or-dies and accomplices. But don’t misunderstand me: it is always wrong to cage human beings. It’s a disgrace to the world that a massive and lucrative industry exists around imprisoning and punishing humans. This is no less true for the women in here who don’t have codefendants, who had leadership roles, who knowingly committed federal crimes, no matter how severe the offense.
It wasn’t until I started getting to know my fellow prisoners that I realized just how misinformed the general public is on convicted felons and the nature of our crimes. For example, liberal prison reform rhetoric often focuses on the most palatable felons—pointedly excluding sex offenders, people with multiple convictions, and so-called “violent” offenders. You often hear things like: “it’s not fair that drug dealers get more time than murderers and rapists!” and “it’s wrong for first-time offenders to get such long sentences!” I even hear this from other incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people themselves. I think much of this attitude stems from a gross misunderstanding of how the American criminal justice system works, and it is our responsibility as abolitionists to debunk these assumptions.
A few months ago, I encountered a fellow prisoner—a trans guy I’ll call “J”—arguing with his girlfriend M about “chomos” (the prison term for sex offenders whose crimes involved sexually exploiting, harming or assaulting children). He turned to my friend D:
“D, isn’t it true—chomos can’t use the phone or email, right?” J said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Seeeee, M, didn’t I tell you?”
“I /know/, J, What I’m saying is, I thought it wasn’t /just/ chomos–” M said.
“She’s right,” D interjected. “My homegirl at the FCI is a prostitute—and I knew for sure because I saw her paperwork and everything. But yeah, she couldn’t use the phone or computer either. It’s not just chomos man, it’s all “sex offenders”—anyone who committed a sex crime.”
D herself is a “violent” offender. At age 22, she started robbing gas stations, mostly under the influence of Xanax. Though she never intended to physically hurt anyone, D was armed during her crimes.
In fact, anyone who possesses a firearm during a federal crime—whether the crime itself involved violence or not, like transporting drugs with a gun in your car, for example—can potentially be charged as a “violent” offender. My codefendants and I faced this risk, as well—my attorney was worried because ATF considered a Molotov cocktail a “destructive device.” So-called “violent” offenders do not benefit from the First Step Act—a law passed in 2018 that drastically reduced most federal prison sentences. D will be in her 30s when she gets out of prison.
My coworker, A, is serving her fourth prison sentence. Her last two sentences were on probation violations. What many don’t understand about parole, probation, and pre-trial supervision, is that the very subjective judgments of your supervising officer has an incredible amount of power over whether or not you return to prison. A “strict” PO can request the judge re-incarcerate you for something as miniscule as forgetting to make a restitution payment, arriving late for a drug test, forgetting to report an interaction with law enforcement, and missing a court-ordered therapy appointment, among many others. Another PO may completely dismiss these mistakes altogether. POs have access to your entire case file and criminal history—there is nothing preventing them from tormenting you if they take personal issue with you, like if you’re a sex offender, for example, or if they disagree with your political activities.
When we assume that all sex offenders, “violent” offenders, and “career criminals” are dangerous to society and deserve to be locked up, we are committing the grave error of lending credence to carceral logic. The reality is that this logic is flawed by design. Portraying convicted felons as scary and dangerous benefits the prison-industrial complex. So is creating obstacles for formerly-incarcerated people to stay out of prison—recidivism is a feature of the PIC, not a flaw.
So how does this problem relate specifically to sex workers?
There is a sex-positive, liberal feminist depiction of sex work that is currently trending in media and pop culture. This set of perspectives depicts sex work as inherently empowering, modern and feminist. Think TikToks of strippers flashing stacks and high-earning OnlyFans girls going viral on Instagram. This approach overwhelmingly highlights the voices of the world’s most privileged individuals in the sex trade—western cisgender women with financial security and a lot of autonomy—and assumes that these perspectives represent all sex workers.
Much of the global sex trade looks very different than what you see on the internet. Many women in the Global South (sometimes referred to as the “Third World” or the colonized world) enter the trade because they have few options to earn money in their home countries that have been ravaged by U.S military occupation or U.S military-backed coups. Many poor and working-class women here in the U.S. enter exploitative relationships with pimps, or are groomed into the trade from a young age, sometimes by family members. These less glamorous experiences are often glossed over, or spark defensive responses from liberal feminists—i.e, “That’s stereotyping—sex workers are not just victims to be saved!”
And that’s no lie. Most of us are incredibly regular people. Like most Americans, the majority of us don’t own much capital of our own. And many of us are also workers like you, with day jobs serving food, cleaning, pencil-pushing, and delivering. Some of us make decent money, some of us make very little. Some of us suffer less than others, some of us suffer more. But all of us are under the boot of capitalism. Like most everyone else, we are doing what we can, to survive, or have a decent quality of life—not necessarily what we *want,* not necessarily what is good for us, nor what is good for our communities, our societies, our Earth and our environment. That’s what must change, and it must change from the root up.
Other, self-described “radical” feminists react with the extreme opposite view, taking a hardline stance that all sex work is nonconsensual and exploitative, that pornography is inherently misogynistic, all while offering carceral “solutions” to the harms and dangers of the sex trade. The most popular of these solutions is criminalizing buying sex—the logic is that we lock up tricks for objectifying and exploiting women, and treat the sex workers like their victims.
But locking up tricks won’t end the sex trade, just like locking up drug dealers doesn’t end the drug trade. All it does is make the trade more dangerous, ruin more lives, and puts sex workers in closer proximity to law enforcement.
No more band-aids; we are looking for cures, and the only cure is abolition—abolition of capitalism and the conditions it creates, conditions that create not only the sex trade, but also the drug trade and the slave trade and all illegal business that necessitates violence and suffering to regulate itself.
Both the liberal and radical feminist approaches are failing us. When I say us, I mean all of us—all exploited, oppressed, colonized, and caged people. We cannot rely on the same pigs and politicians that cage people for decades on prostitution and drug charges to give any of us justice. And we cannot claim to care about sex workers if we only care about the loudest and proudest and richest of us.
“See this?” C showed me her leg. There was a long, pale stippled patch of skin on the side—an old, deep scar. “This was from when a cop broke my leg. I was in the hospital getting clean. He called me a ‘fuckin crack whore’ and stomped on it. All the nurses just stood there and watched.”
C signed my “fedbook” (composition notebooks bought from commissary, decorated with pictures, collages, and messages from our friends, to take with us when we’re released) the day before she went free.
“Keep stickin’ it to the man!” she wrote.
*All names have been abbreviated to protect identities.
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.