Editor’s note: Vanguard Incarcerated Press Director Joan Parkin talks with Angie Gordon following her experience in ADSEG.
Joan: You ended up in administrative segregation. What happened?
Angie: Sure, so being sent to the hole, in this instance especially, is rather embarrassing, but it prompts discussion on an important topic, and regardless of the stigma and presumptuous judgments which are too often attached to any sort of alleged PREA situation, I don’t mind putting my situation under the microscope because talking about these issues serves a purpose far and beyond the whims of my vanity.
I was placed in the hole over a wildly exaggerated, and suspiciously investigated Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). It passed in 2003 allegation. For whatever reason, my former cellmate elected to file a complaint against me, slanderously misrepresenting mutual horseplay as abusive sexual contact. In spite of the actual circumstances, the decision was made to substantiate the fraudulent claim, and as a result, I was left to ponder my fate for two months on disciplinary status, no phone or messaging, cut off from my family and friends, and at the end of which I had a Confidential Enemy and was precluded from returning to complete the Bachelor’s program through Sac state.
The claim was that I grabbed his butt, and on a prior occasion, I poked his breast, licked his face, and laid my entire body on him. Now, for those who know me, and know the degree to which I speak out about sexual and gendered violence, the idea that I would be victimizing someone in this manner is laughable; however, for those who know my accuser, the idea of me liking any part of him, much less his face, is beyond absurd. This is a man who has been caught on numerous occasions laying on the floor of a prison shower, back arched in a masturbatory escapade; this is the balding, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing, dead-eyes staring, 34-year-old bridge troll trying to pass as a man; this is the sorry sack whose personal hygiene leaves so much to be desired. That, on a lark, his friends switched out his toothpaste for a tube filled with humus, and it took him 12 days to notice—true story. So, no, I wasn’t licking, coming on to, or paying any sexual mind towards my accuser, but I did slap him on the ass, and that I will admit.
Context is important in these cases, and believe me, if I am interested in someone, I have a little more romantic subtilty than having to resort to flagrant groping. Nonetheless, and as a mildly attractive enough trans woman, I certainly have been groped against my will a time or two. The truth is, it happens so frequently that if I were to file a PREA complaint every time, I would perpetually be wrapped up in an investigation. We hear the term “locker room environment” so much, especially post #METOO, but I literally live in a “locker room,” and as a woman, I have had to learn how to navigate that space. Custody will use PREA against you, so easily turning your protection into a punishment; but also, it’s not a cute look to be telling on people in here, so if a bitch wants to survive, she better learn how to manage these boys, cause the cops simply are not going to in any reliable or equitable way.
Now, my typical response when someone cops a feel is to verify, clearly and without question, if that is REALLY how they want to play—because contrary to popular belief, I am big on consent. Once they confirm, or continue “playing,” then it’s game on, and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. You would be surprised how effective a very public ass slap can be at dissuading a grabby guy from his plotted course of harassment. Now, I’ve learned that perhaps this isn’t the best way to handle these situations, but on the higher security yards that I came from, actions speak louder than words, and what works works. This is the type of situation I found with my cellmate, but level two just isn’t the setting for this form of problem-solving.
Joan: How did things escalate so quickly?
Angie: Now, when I stop to consider just how all of this came to such a drastic head there are two fields of influence. On the one hand, there are the nightmarish soul-sucking parasites who, for the sake of their animus towards me, participated in a concerted effort to have me removed from the yard—not to absolve myself from responsibility, I certainly should not have been playing with my celly in that manner. On the other hand, there was the prison staff who responded to, and managed, the whole affair. Like the same investigator, Ms. E. Clark, was simultaneously investigating the PREA situation and my submission of an academic article to Critical Criminology. The whole thing feels kind of sketchy, but I can only speak on what I know.
Joan: What was the connection between your academic article and being thrown into ad seg?
Angie: So in the fall of 2022 I conducted a research study, as part of my senior seminar in Intercultural Communication. In the spring of 2023, I wrote the study up and submitted it to the American Society of Criminology, and then, with Dr. Emily Lenning from Fayetteville State University as my coauthor, prepared a scaled-down version of my conference paper for academic publication. Both Dr. Lenning and I made several attempts to communicate with the prison about the paper, not to get approval though—as we didn’t legally require it. Rather, we wanted to touch base with them and offer administrators an opportunity to provide input, and if their concerns were reasonable, make certain concessions, but again, only as a courtesy, and in service of a larger goal, which was to build a professional working relationship with them in hope that actual evidence-based reform could someday be discussed. In spite of our efforts, none of my requests for an interview were even responded to, and Dr. Lenning was sent on a merry-go-round of phone extensions who didn’t answer and people who had no bearing or direct influence on anything even remotely related to the study.
It wasn’t until we were three weeks out from our submission deadline that I was able to give Dr. Lenning’s email to the Warden. So with no uncertain irony, it was only because of having been put in the hole on the PREA issue that I was able to communicate straight to the top and afforded the opportunity from my mandatory review by the Institutional Classification Committee when being retained in segregation. Emily got an email from Clark the next day.
Now, initially, Clark was very interested in what we were doing, she asked a lot of questions, as she was totally unaware of how academic publishing even worked. And initially, she told Dr. Lenning that the PREA investigation was close to being done and that I would be back to the committee by June 22, or the 29th at the latest. She gave me the indication that the whole thing would be unsubstantiated and that I didn’t fit the typical profile. I mean, most of these claims involve someone making unwanted sexual advances, not inappropriate horseplay. Anyway, things seemed to change when Clark got into the meat of the article, and that was when the whole situation got confusing.
In total, the prison responded to my study in a fairly aggressive and punitive manner, like internal affairs came in and turned my cell upside down on two different occasions, searching me and some of my bunky’s stuff like I was dealing drugs or a gang leader. Then, as part of her investigation, Clark repeatedly sought out who actually participated in the study, attempting to access my files and work product regardless of the confidentiality rights I owed to my participants. She asked me to alter the finding in the article and insisted that I not use the name of incarcerated college program as my affiliation, using simply Sacramento State University instead. Specifically, Clark was concerned about the prison coming under investigation from an outside agency for some of the disturbing responses that officers gave in the study.
She wanted anonymity for the prison, wanted it above and beyond what was expected from the university’s institutional review board. We made this concession for them, and really it is the college program that lost its due recognition for enabling a student to accomplish such an unprecedented and impressive task. I don’t believe that there has ever been a university-approved empirical study done by a researcher who was incarcerated at the time of the study. Maybe there is, but I have never come across it, and I’ve looked.
Anyway, we told Clark clearly that we were submitting on the 23rd of June, and asked her to pull together all her concerns before then. Well, on the 24th she contacted Dr. Lenning and raised some concerns of the study participants, or vaguely stated that some of them had concerns; this obviously meant that she had been successful at discovering who some of the participants were. As wildly unethical as that action was on her part, it didn’t matter, we had already submitted the article for peer review. Now, from everything Clark had said, the PREA investigation should have been done by then, but lo and behold, I would soon find out that she completed it on the 26th, two days after her late attempt to challenge the article was dismissed. Unsurprisingly, the charges against me were substantiated and I was issued a disciplinary citation. The irregularities and procedural errors of the write-up are another matter, but for now, I can say that they are highly suspect.
Joan: It’s interesting that rather than ad seg dragging you down you seem to have come out of the hole more resilient than ever. You mentioned resistance writing in an earlier conversation. Can you explain a little about this form of writing?
Angie: Sure, so I have been kicking around this idea for the last six months, mentioned it within a few select circles, and I’ll admit, my thinking on this topic is still in an early phase. Nonetheless, I think it’s an idea ready enough to begin putting words to it, giving working names to what I think are its core principles. I think we could call it “resistance writing,” or perhaps “incarcerated resistance journalism,” but resistance is the important notation here. I believe that incarcerated writers are in a position where they can exploit a hidden vulnerability within the carceral state, and do so in a rather revolutionary way. Now this vulnerability was ironically given to us by way of the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, and it’s sort of a game-changing approach to pursuing an abolitionist agenda from the inside.
So, typically, when we think about the administrative grievance system (for me CDCRs, though every department of corrections has them) we think of using them to make primarily legal arguments; we think of those arguments being reviewed by biased ideologues who interpret policy and the law from a seemingly alternate reality than the one in which we live, and we sort of accept that the end game for 99% of claims is in the court, using the grievance system as a foregone rejection and an arbitrary exercise in exhausted remedies. It’s sort of like those companies who adopt a customer service model where callers are intentionally left on hold for a really long time, essentially making the process so lengthy and annoying that people are more likely to give up than stay on the line and receive service. The long and short of it is that correctional grievance systems are a total joke.
Now, California overhauled its grievance process recently, and the CDCR did an interesting thing. Where before, various lower-level prison staff reviewed and responded to submitted grievances, now administrative heads sign off on every grievance at the first level of review. This doesn’t in any way mean that associate wardens are reviewing everyone, as they still farm them out to subordinates, but what it does mean is that they sign their name to whatever sloppy nonsense is put in front of them. Why do they sign off on such absurdities? Well, it’s because, by in large, no one ever sees those responses, given the frequency of dropped claims. And I’ll admit, it is a deflating experience when you dish someone a well-articulate and convincing argument only to receive an answer which leaves you wondering if the reviewer even knew how to read, much less understood your position. The point of all this is that, maybe we have been looking at the grievance system all wrong.
Joan: But what does the grievance system have to do with resistance writing?
Angie: An incarcerated person owns the penal documents that have been violently attached to their person and owns the disciplinary citations, the committee reviews, and the grievances. These documents belong to us, and we can write about them freely, we can cite and quote them, we can use them for autoethnography and research, but we can also use them for journalism. How often have we heard about a controversial issue occurring at a prison, seen it covered on the news, and when the reporter mentions the prison’s administrators it’s always the same canned statement: “they declined to comment.” This is always the case because, for prison administrators, there is hardly ever an upside to publicity, and the safest thing for them is to hide behind their literal and figurative walls of anonymity. Well, what’s poetically just about incarcerating folx right to due process under the law is that, in our submitted grievances, prison administrators are not permitted the luxury of declining to comment; and to guild the lily, as it were, given the practice of farming out review to idiot subordinates, it’s very likely that associate wardens could be quoted as saying some rather absurd things.
So, this whole idea got me thinking, or perhaps my recent treatment by prison administrators in connection to my academic accomplishments dumped fuel onto a revolutionary spirit I have kept fairly deprived of oxygen over the last few years, but either way, I began seriously mapping out what incarcerate resistance journalism might look like using calculated and strategically worded grievances as a means of compelling comments from prison staff. Publication is a whole different beast than litigation, especially in the hyperpolitical world of departmental appointments and professional advancement. Burying someone in court is easy, but unsaying what’s already been said, that’s another thing entirely. It is my suspicion that through this method of compelled accountability, we might be able to bring power holders in the prison to the table.
Joan: What would be the method of organization?
Angie: So, one of the first steps will be to figure out just how to write grievances that effectively straddle that gap between legal and journalistic discourse, right? They simply won’t respond if there isn’t a legal argument made, submissions likely getting screened out, but framing a strictly legal argument won’t be all that helpful for journalistic purposes, so we’ll need to develop a methodology that threads the needle, so to speak. I think the only way to do this is through trial, error, and organized discussion; a point which leads to the next task, which is figuring out what exactly this form of resistance looks like as a network of intentionally aligned incarcerated writers.
My first inclination was to simply start sending off grievances and seeing what I could eke out of them, but I’ve sort of been in transit over the last couple of months, and truthfully, I’ve needed to file on my own matters. The more I thought about it, though, I began to consider that, when you get a response, however absurd it is, they generally limit themselves to commenting on one point. Now, some articles can be written around a single comment, but if a group of writers were to file grievances on the same issue, but from different frames of inquiry, then a larger scope of citable material could be produced. I sort of envision this aspect of the work as farming for quotes, and I think if writers come together in small cells and work collaboratively to identify, frame, and attack an issue, then not only can we learn a lot from the process, but we might just get some worthy responses. The goal is to get articles containing names and official quotes into print and into wide circulation. It’s only through negative publicity that this form of resistance can hope to be effective.
So, the next step for me is to start forming cells as soon as I get back from gender-affirming surgery, sometime in the middle of October. I encourage anyone out there to take up this rough template I’ve sketched out here and give it a go, either individually or as part of an organized group. Write about your thoughts and experiences, debates had by group members and lessons learned. We can build our methodology by sharing with each other the work we’ve done and the philosophy which grounded our efforts. We can write about failures just as much as success because we can learn from each other about the common pitfalls which await us. Maybe after some time, we can actually develop a curriculum, but for now, fleshing out the whole concept is what’s on the table. My contention is that we feast like ravenous revolutionaries, that we gorge on the banquet of penal stupidities laid out before us, and that we use the very system by which our voices are so frequently silenced as a trojan horse through which to topple a seemingly indomitable foe.
