The devastating reality of having loved ones in prison

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with independent journalist Victoria Valenzuela, who reports for a wide range of news outlets on incarceration in California and Louisiana. Victoria’s recent articles shed light on the inhumane conditions at California City Detention Center—specifically its no-contact visitation policy, making it the only detention center in California to enact such a rule. CCDC is operated by the for-profit corporation CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), an organization with a history marred by systemic violence that is currently capitalizing on Trump’s mass deportation policies to expand its detention contracts.

In the second half of the conversation, Mansa and Victoria discuss the circumstances of incarcerated women domestic violence survivors in California and the potential for prison abolition. They note that the state’s incarcerated women population has decreased from roughly 11,000 to 3,700 over two decades.

Related link:

• Families Are Fighting Draconian No-Contact-Visit Policy at California ICE Jail

  via Truthout

• Victoria Valenzuela’s

  Substack

Credits:

• Production/Post-production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today I’m speaking with reporter Victoria Valenzuela about a recent reporting on incarceration in California. Thank you for joining me, Victoria. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Victoria Valenzuela:

Hi, I’m Victoria. Thank you so much for having me. I’m an independent journalist. I’ve been reporting on families and individuals impacted by incarceration for five years. I’ve been published in a variety of news outlets, about 30 now, and that includes The Guardian, Truth Out, Prism, The Real News Network, Buzzfeed News, USA Today, documented a bunch of different places. And I also have a substack with my heart, Victoria Valenzuela, where I cover individuals and families impacted by incarceration.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. So recently you wrote an article about non-contact visits in a particular California detention center. Explain to our audience why this particular issue is problematic in and of itself, because most people think that if you locked up, you don’t have a right to contact visit, you don’t have a right to conjugal visit. You have that with the invention of technology and tablets that you’d be lucky if you get a visit on a tablet. Explain why it’s important that people understand this particular issue and unpack the background of it.

Victoria Valenzuela:

Sure. So in California, most immigrant detention centers give contact visits, but there’s one in particular, California City Detention Center in Southern California that is not giving contact visits. And that has been a problem since they opened a few years ago. And basically since they’re not allowing contact visits, families cannot hug their loved ones, which is really terrible, especially that a lot of the people inside, they don’t have a criminal record. They’re just picked up off the street. There’s no reason why they should be policed and they’re not able to hug their families. A lot of families, they live all across California. They even live out of state sometimes, and so they travel to the facility. It’s spent a lot of money on gas and they still can’t even hug their loved ones. And so the alternative to through the glass visits, which they’re allowed, is phone calls overpriced, video calls that they’re able to do like FaceTimes, but that costs by the minute the costs add up and they’re still not able to hug their loved ones.

So those are two really bad alternatives to being able to hug their loved ones. And so this policy has been going on since the facility opened up. And then the issue of no contact visits is much bigger than immigrant detention centers. It’s also happening in jails across the country and in some juvenile detention centers, it’s left up to the probation department. So it’s really a problem of the people in charge just trying to repress the incarcerated population by not allowing them to hug their families.

Mansa Musa:

Is this based on location in this particular part of California or is this the state of California saying we regulating certain detention centers, regulating them this way and some way regulating them that way?

Victoria Valenzuela:

Yeah, from my understanding, it would be CoreCivic who owns California City Detention Center’s decision to implement this. And maybe if California were to pass a law, then they’d have to comply. They did send the California Department of Justice a policy recommendation that included a plan to have in-person visits, contact visits, I’m sorry, and they are not doing that. So technically they’re violating their own policy that we promised to the California Department of Justice.

Mansa Musa:

CoreCivic being a private industry, what’s your read on their relationship with the state? So how are they responsible for regulating or creating policies about how visits should be done or they come in, they being under contract, they’re saying that we are going to have these kind of visits, we’re going to have this kind of treatment. Is that the case?

Victoria Valenzuela:

So what I understand is that CoreCivic is operating as its own unit, and I’m not sure whether they’re compliant or under the state, but what I do know is there was also talk that CoreCivic was not in compliance. They did not have the permits to open in the first place. And so they were kind of rushing opening a couple years ago, and I kind of see that as they just wanted to cash in on the mass immigration enforcement that’s happening under Trump. So they didn’t really care about the conditions. They give the reason in the California Department of Justice report that they’re not having contact visits because of a lack of staffing. Seems like they didn’t have the care to implement that in the first place. They just wanted to open and operate at the lowest price possible because they are for-profit. And so if they invest into more visits, into more staff, then that’s money that they lose because they’re for-profit.

They’re making money off this.

Mansa Musa:

Right. So now it become more clear if one, I’m coming in under private contract, I’m bidding, I’m saying I’m going to provide the least amount of services for the least amount of money in a bid narrative. Somebody’s saying 50 million. I’m saying I can give you what they give me for 50 million. I can give you that less than that for 30 million. And now I get a chance to come in with my system of no contact visits because I don’t want to provide the staff, I don’t want to provide whatever it takes to maintain an otherwise minor visiting situation. But how are y’all organizing against the no contact visits?

Victoria Valenzuela:

So a lot of the activism to get contact visits is being led by impacted individuals, so people who are either detained there or they have family members. Inside, they’re directly advocating and they’re working with advocates. So the people inside, there’s about seven dorms in California City Detention Center who wrote letters to the warden so the warden can know the impact that it’s having to not have these contact visits. And the families are also going to press conferences, they’re coming together and they’re trying to make known their experiences. So a lot of the people with lived experiences, they’re just trying to amplify their voices and so other people can understand and have empathy and hopefully implement these visits. And they’re also working with advocates who formed a coalition that is called Hugs Behind Bars. And so they’re also working together. They’re trying to get media attention.

They’re having press releases, press conferences, and they’re just trying to make their voices heard. They’re writing letters, they have a petition, and so they’re just trying to do what they can. And a lot of activism is led by people in immigrant detention centers. They were also just successful in boycotting to get the attention of Governor Newsom to pass a law that would cap commissary prices by 35%. And so a lot of people inside, they are doing this organizing, so sometimes they’re successful, but then sometimes they’re retaliated against and they’re transferred to different facilities or they’re put in solitary confinement or they lose their visiting privileges, phone privileges. And so sometimes their activism works, sometimes it doesn’t, but they’re really resilient and they’re really fighting for this. It really does matter to them.

Mansa Musa:

And talk about that right there. Why is contact visits important for people that are, would you just say, under certain circumstances they don’t even belong there, but why is contact visits important for a person that’s being detained?

Victoria Valenzuela:

Yeah, I have personal experience with this. My father’s incarcerated. He’s been incarcerated 10 years. He’s in San Quentin right now. I visit him every chance I get and it’s really unifying. It feels really good to be able to just hug him, to be able to be in his presence, to talk. These phone calls in California state prisons, they’re 15 minutes and they’re recorded and every five minutes or so you get the little voice reminding you that this call is monitored and recorded. And so it’s nothing compared to the in-person visits. And we get to share a meal, we get to catch up, we get to read the Bible, play games. It’s like a moment that we get to have. And I don’t want to romanticize this and say that this is the solution because visits can also be improved.

The food is really exorbitantly priced. It’s like $10 for a single Hot Pocket. It’s $13 for a single frozen cheeseburger. It’s really bad and you only get a hug saying hello, a hug saying goodbye. Anything else is considered excessive contact and the visits could be terminated. And then even just going into the facility, women get policed for what they’re wearing. You are expected to wear clothes that are not too tight, but are not too loose and anything up to the guard’s discretion, you could be turned away. The visits could be terminated. And so it’s really harsh, but at the same time, it does matter getting to hug your family, getting to… I sit in this visiting room and I see the dignity and the humanity of everybody. Everybody’s just so soft-hearted just sitting next to their loved ones and it gives them hope and motivation of what they have to come home to.

And that’s true for state prisons where I have my experience, but also in immigrant detention centers. For some people, it could be the last hug before they get deported and you don’t know or when you’re going to see them again. Could be you get a hug your newborn. In the family that I wrote about in the article, the wife, Samantha, she was seven months pregnant, seven and a half months pregnant. I wrote this a month ago, so she could either have had the baby by now or be even further along. Her husband, Alan, isn’t going to have his deportation hearing until December. So all that time is going to be time that he doesn’t get a hug his newborn baby. He never got to feel his baby kick. And so little moments like that matter to people. Every day people take that for granted because people in immigrant detention centers and state prisons, sometimes jails, they don’t get those moments.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And I don’t think no penologist would take a position that human contact with family members is a security threat. I was in Kansas and they had the guys that organized a family day in the prison. So in this particular prison, this was the first time they ever had an activity where the family members could come into the prison without being harassed, children, and for two hours, they had shifts till they had over 1,500 prisoners participate, not counting their families. So on any given session, you had somewhere between 200 to 300 family members in the yard with their loved ones. And one of the things the guy said, “This might be the last time I get to hug my mother or my father because they was elders and they never had that happen before. But what it did for that population, that population, and the population up until that point had a lot of problems.

And once they put this concept out there, family day, you can go in the yard, be with your children, nobody going to be harassing you. It changed the attitude of the people that wanted to participate because you had to have a certain behavior to go out, see the kids running around with their socks off, with their shoes off, running to a different moonbound, and the men and the family member. So a visit might not be to that extent, but a visit had that kind of impact on people, like you say, coming from a distance to see a loved one and to put a smile on a loved one’s face and had a loved one through the same kind. What do you think the reasons is behind the state doing this or more important, CoreCivic?

Victoria Valenzuela:

CoreCivic never gave a reasoning behind this, but a lot of the advocates I spoke to think that it’s really intentional and that they’re trying to get these people who are detained to sign deportation orders. They’re trying to make conditions so deplorable by not being able to hug their loved ones. And these are among other things. This is among mold in the buildings and in food, medical neglect, solitary confinement, extremely high commissary prices. And so being able to hug a loved one would make such a big difference and they don’t get that. So now they’re dealing with all these conditions. And so they think that ICE and CoreCivic, they’re doing this so that people can sign their deportation orders and just cycle through the system and give up, lose hope. But some people, they’re not doing that. They’re looking to fight this instead.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what? In that regard, that makes sense because we have been doing story after story on immigration and the principles that they say supposed to exist is until you violated the law and that’s after having a hearing and being heard on what they say you valid, then they implement deportation. But what they’re doing, they’re forcing people to, because of the horrendous conditions they find themselves in, they’re forcing them to voluntarily sign papers saying they want to be deported as opposed to staying under those conditions. This is criminal in and of itself, do you think?

Victoria Valenzuela:

Yeah, definitely. I think it should be illegal. I think that people should have the choice. People should be able to… They shouldn’t be in conditions where they feel like the only option is to sign deportation orders to get out of there or to continue living in these deplorable conditions. That shouldn’t be a situation that people should find themselves in.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, and I appreciate your work on it. Let’s switch gears. You wrote a report about incarcerated women in California. Talk about the criminalization of women, survivors in California and the goals of survive and punish the organization you highlighted.

Victoria Valenzuela:

Right. So in California and across the country, it’s not uncommon that women who survive domestic violence and either have to defend their lives or they’re coerced to do something by an abusive partner get incarcerated, get arrested, and sometimes even face a mandatory minimum sentence or a life sentence because of this. So if a woman is being threatened with a gun, if she’s being hit and she fears for her life and she physically defends herself, takes the gun that was going to be used on her or some situation like that, then she’ll be charged and treated like a criminal instead of being given resources and help. And similarly, if a woman… Or I’m sorry, I’m saying woman, but it could be anybody. It’s most commonly women.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right, right,

Victoria Valenzuela:

Right. But if somebody is coerced to commit a crime by an abusive partner, they never wanted to commit it in the first place, but the abuser’s threatening them, they’re saying that the alternative is to be hit or abused, then they commit the crime, they’re charged as an accomplice or they’re charged as the person who commits the crime. And so it’s very common that incarcerated women face some kind of trauma. It’s up to 91% or more. It’s about 91% or more. Some research have found that incarcerated women face trauma before their incarceration. And so it’s a really common thing and it’s just terrible because these women, they’re just trying to survive and they should be met with resources, they should be met with care and somebody to talk to, a therapist, and instead they’re just being incarcerated. And then the cycle of trauma perpetuates because now they’re losing agency, they’re losing control over their activities, they’re constantly being threatened to comply with the system or else be punished further.

And so instead of getting that help they need, they’re locked up. And a lot of the times their stories, they’re not even able to tell their stories because there’s this movement for affirmative defense right now. A lot of women or people, survivors of domestic violence, they’re given to court and then they’re not able to tell their story, so they’re just solely looked at for their crime. So if their crime is committing murder to survive, they’re not looked at as it’s surviving was to defend their lives. It was like the alternative was to die. That’s not looked at. It’s just the murder and then that’s all that’s looked at and then they’re just sentenced to prison based off that.

Mansa Musa:

So what is the Justice for Survival law?

Victoria Valenzuela:

There’s been a lot of Justice for Survivors Act in different states, like Oklahoma passed one, New York passed one. In California, we’ve been trying to pass one too in the last consecutive years. It’s been introduced and so basically the one in California, because I’m unfamiliar with the one in Oklahoma and New York, but in California, there’s been a movement for this bill would offer two things. It would offer affirmative defense and it would offer vaccine relief. So affirmative defense would be just what I said. A lot of women aren’t able to share their stories when they’re in court, so this would give them the chance to share their stories. And so they would be able to have a holistic sentencing, so they would be able to even get off. They’d be able to share their stories so that would be taken account during court. So it wouldn’t be they’re just looking at them for a murder like, no, this was a murder to survive.

This was a crime that was committed to defend their lives. And so that would be looked at and taken into account in court. And then vacoteer relief would just allow them to petition the court to vacate their sentences if they’re incarcerated for a survival, something related to survival.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, because I know in Maryland back in, I think it was the early ’80s or yeah, I think it was the early ’80s, they came out with a law called the batted woman syndrome. And what that did, that opened up the door for people that had homicides to offer the defense that because of domestic violence and the batted woman syndrome spoke to the state of mind that the woman was in at the time that the crime was committed, which mitigated the intent. So as opposed to me being premeditated, I’m suffering from the batted woman syndrome, constant domestic abuse that okay, when I snap, for lack of better word, and somebody get killed, it wasn’t my intent. I woke up that morning and said, I’m going to kill because, as opposed to react to this condition and respond in kind. So that’s what took place in Maryland.

But get me, and maybe you can speak on this, is the hypocrisy of this country and because you always got these domestic violence month, the nationwide domestic violence year, whatever, and you parade all these concepts out, but then you got people that are suffering from domestic violence and locked up because they responds to it. And as a nation, you don’t even look that way like are they criminals versus, so what’s the purpose of having domestic violence month if you criminalizing people that’s been domestically violent? Can you speak to that?

Victoria Valenzuela:

Yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of people, like I said, facing mandatory minimums or life sentences because of survivorship. And so that’s unfair that a lot of women, they’re just surviving and then they face that. And this does disproportionately impact Black and trans women. And there’s talk that they don’t treat white women the same way, but every woman, every survivor should be met with resources and treated humanely, not sentenced, not in the land of the free, not incarcerated.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And talk about the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners, because in mid 2000, it was 11,000 women locked up in California prison. Now it’s around 3,700. So talk about their organizing, this particular organization’s organizing around changing the narrative where the prison population for women has been reduced and hopefully eradicated at some point.

Victoria Valenzuela:

Sure. So similarly to how we talked about earlier, a lot of people detained in immigrant detention centers and their families are advocating for contact visits. That’s just kind of universal where a lot of impacted people are fighting for their rights. And so this is very similar to what’s happening in the California Coalition of Women Prisoners. It’s a group of formerly incarcerated women and allies who are fighting to free other women who are incarcerated. And so currently they’re leading a campaign to close the prisons in California, the women’s prisons in California. And so they’re saying that if we were to give relief to all of the women who experienced domestic violence and who were there for low level crimes, non-violent crimes, women who experienced trauma, then we could have so few women incarcerated that we could close prisons. They’re saying that people should be in the community, they should be given resources, they shouldn’t be incarcerated.

And incarceration is not the solution. And so they’ve been advocating. They’ve been advocating for a lot of things like for air conditioning in women’s prisons or a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners died of a heat stroke last summer, and so they fought for more protections from the heat. That’s something that we face a lot in California. And also in Texas, they fight for domestic violence survivors. I interviewed a domestic violence survivor for the article that I wrote for Waging Nonviolence about this campaign to close the women prisons. She said that she was just further traumatized in prison. She survived domestic violence, and then she felt like she had no voice until she met the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a formerly incarcerated women who were reaching out to help her. And that’s just the kind of support that people need. They don’t need prisons.

They need support with the community. They need to be with people who understand their experiences. And so that’s just kind of the movement that’s happening in California. And then I also want to say there is this movement that I’ve noticed to close, to end the incarceration of girls. So in California and in Hawaii, there’s a movement to get young girls out of juvenile detention. And advocates see this, so getting women out of prison, getting girls out of prison as a broader movement for incarceration, to end incarceration for abolition. So they’re saying that there’s such a small population of girls and women that are incarcerated compared to men that if we could target those first, then we could target the men and we could just have abolition.

Mansa Musa:

And that’s not a bad strategy, ineffective one because as I noted, the prison population for females has been reduced. Victoria Valenzuela. You rattled the bars today, let me say that. You got the last word. What do you want to tell our audience on how they can get in touch with you or how they can support y’all movement?

Victoria Valenzuela:

Sure. So you can add me on LinkedIn, Victoria Valenzuela. You can also subscribe to my Substack. That’s where I wrote the story about domestic violence survivors being incarcerated for my Substack. Like I said, it’s with my heart, Victoria Valenzuela. And I read a lot about families and individuals impacted by incarceration there. And yeah, LinkedIn’s a good way to get in touch with me. I also, on my Substack, I’ll post other articles that I write for other places because I’m a freelance journalist, so I’ll post a snippet of what I wrote for other places with a link to where to read more, and so you could follow me that way.