Convicted: A Prison Diary

Carrie Roach is seated in a bare room, her head in her hands, the soft, coaxing voice of a police officer reading her her rights and encouraging her to tell him what happened. In the same kind voice, he adds that once they get into the interview, if she then decides she wants a lawyer . . . but she cuts in, her voice cracking with pain and despair, and repeats, "I trust you, I trust you, I trust you." Ms. Roach's image fades and recedes as an aerial view of the Robert Scott Correctional Facility for Women surrounds and then seems to swallow her, a fitting visual metaphor for the dehumanizing experience she will face inside Scott, the prison in southeast Michigan where she is serving a life sentence for murder. Like most of the other women with whom filmmaker, artist, and prisoners' rights advocate Carol Jacobsen has worked over the years, Carrie Roach is in jail for killing her abuser.

The footage of Roach's interrogation, like all the other interior shots used in Jacobsen's short film Convicted: A Prison Diary, was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A social documentary artist, Jacobsen is coordinator of the Michigan Battered Women's Clemency Project and associate professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. The Clemency Project, which was founded in 1991, works for the release of women who have been wrongly convicted because of systematic bias in the criminal justice system against victims of domestic abuse. It also advocates for the health and human rights of all women prisoners. Jacobsen and her colleagues from the Clemency Project recently published a study of homicide conviction rates and sentencing patterns in Oakland County, Michigan, and, consistent with other research, found overwhelming evidence of bias against abused women who seek to defend themselves. "Victims of domestic violence in Oakland County during the three-year period under study (1986-1988) received higher conviction rates and longer sentences than all others charged with homicide, including those with previous violent criminal records."[1] Bias against victims of abuse compounds a more general tendency toward more convictions and harsher sentences for women (in the present study, for example, women were convicted at a rate of 71 percent, compared to 63 percent for men) and is in turn heavily compounded by racism (80 percent of black women defendants in the study were convicted, compared with 62 percent of all others).[2] Their study corroborates national data showing that more than three-quarters of battered women charged with killing their abusers plead guilty or are convicted.[3]

Convicted conveys the daily deprivations, irrationality, and brutality of life inside Scott, a prison that Amnesty International has identified as one of the worst in the nation. In her larger body of work, Jacobsen uses photography, video, and first-person stories of women inmates to assemble a compelling account of the structural violence that lands abused women in jail and punishes them further once they are incarcerated. Convicted focuses mostly on the latter. Jacobsen conveys the disorientation and isolation of imprisonment with simple, often slow-motion shots of the prison's exterior, such as the wobbly, rotating aerial shot in the first scene, and the repetitive pans of row after row of high fences and razor wire. The external shots are cut and overlaid with footage of mostly faceless, often brutal interactions between guards and the women prisoners, culled via FOIA from the prison's own surveillance.

Jacobsen skillfully navigates the tension between illuminating structural violence (her visual focus on literal structures elegantly makes this point) and honoring the subjectivity and humanity of the women whose lives she documents. In Convicted, she effectively collaborates with Carrie Roach by narrating the film with excerpts from Roach's letters; Jacobsen's harsh, monotonous images echo the litany of abuses that Roach has witnessed and endured inside Scott. The letters display Roach's intelligence and acute sense of justice, as well as her intense empathy for her sister inmates: She narrates the violations they endure with righteous outrage and sadness. Jacobsen's selections from the letters also allow the viewer to observe Roach's growing analysis of her own situation. Underfed, Roach thinks she might be seriously ill until one day she gets money to buy extra food and realizes her symptoms were from extreme hunger. She repeatedly awakes shivering in the cold Michigan night, unable to sleep because she has no blanket and no coat to cover her. "Being here is very much like being in an abusive relationship," she writes. "After a while you can't tell any more that you're being abused."

I first saw the film in the context of the multimedia group show "Disturbing the Peace" that Jacobsen curated in the spring of 2006 at Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York City. Co-sponsored by Amnesty International USA, the show coincided with Amnesty's campaign against human rights abuses in U.S. women's prisons. Works by Deborah Bright, Martha Rosler, Susan Meiselas, Holly Hughes, Connie Samaras, Pat Ward Williams, Joanne Leonard, Donna Ferrato, and Clarissa Sligh were featured, as well as Jacobsen's own show-within-a-show, Conviction, which included her documentary about Carrie Roach. Jacobsen's sly title highlighted the dangers so many women face for having the conviction to stand outside of oppressive norms, including a feminine ideal that dictates that "real" women should endure abuse rather than fight back.

I later watched the film on its own. In some ways the film is even more powerful without the rest of the Jacobsen's installation around it, because the viewer can focus more closely. It almost pulses, both visually and aurally, with the matter-of-fact humiliations Roach faces inside. In the exhibit the film was played on a loop. Played over and over again, the film seemed to underscore the relentless days stretching out in front of Roach. Without the looping, the ending feels abrupt: a melancholy, Christmas-day entry in Roach's diary, read over a sweeping view of the prison that continues, finally, beyond the walls, through and past the parking lot, and into the surrounding countryside. With this parting shot, and the letter in which Roach describes her own Christmas day and imagines Jacobsen's, Jacobsen makes the point that she, the filmmaker, and we, the viewers, are not inside the Scott Correctional Facility, and simultaneously underscores that Scott is not a world unto itself, but part of the world outside. As she and her colleagues write:

No batterer acts alone. Violence against women is facilitated by gender- and race-based inequalities in our social and political systems, structures that perpetuate the denial of abuse, blaming women for batterers' acts, and socio-economic barriers to women's independence. These interlocking structures connect domestic violence to imprisonment through unequal treatment by the law and gendered modes of punishment.[4]

In the conventional narrative, a prison is a place apart, and the women inside are there by virtue of their own misdeeds, or perhaps individually tragic circumstances. Feminist critic Wendy Kozol has noted how Jacobsen's work challenges this "exceptionalist" account of crime and punishment. I would add that this challenge extends even beyond the more familiar critique of criminal in/justice made by the important but limited focus on the exoneration of "innocent" people, mostly through the re-analysis of physical evidence with technologically improved DNA analysis. To be clear, the Innocence Project and other efforts to free wrongly convicted people are critical interventions in the systematic racism and classism of the in/justice system, as well as the procedural problems that exacerbate these biases. But rather than holding out the simpler possibility that the system has "gotten the wrong person," Jacobsen's art, and the activist project that it advances, requires a rethinking of such crucial concepts as "guilt," "self-defense," and the "reasonable" person whose actions are judged to be criminal or not. An analysis of gender is indispensable to this rethinking. For example, the recent Clemency Project report includes case studies that suggest that one explanation for men's lighter conviction and sentencing burdens could be traced to a willingness to view men who kill to protect women as "heroes," while women who protect themselves are judged as having failed to exhaust all the possibilities for retreat. Recall, too, the trust with which Carrie Roach entered the system. It seems likely that gender norms present arrested women with an impossible dilemma: feminine cooperation, which the statistics indicate is rewarded with heavy incarceration rates and long sentences, or resistance, which feminists have shown to be judged as more hostile and deviant in women than in men.

For more information about the Clemency Project, or to receive a short film about the project, which is free to activists, visit the website, or write to the Michigan Battered Women's Clemency Project, 1019 Maiden Lane, Ann Arbor, MI 48105. To order Convicted: A Prison Diary, contact Carol Jacobsen at jacobsen@umich.edu.

Endnotes

1. Carol Jacobsen, Kammy Mizga and Lynn D'Orio (2007). Battered Women, Homicide Convictions, and Sentencing: The Case for Clemency. Hastings Women's Law Journal 18: 31-65; p. 53. [Return to text]

2. Ibid, p. 52. [Return to text]

3. Ibid, p. 55. [Return to text]

4. Ibid, p. 6. [Return to text]