Priscilla Ocen: “Mass Incarceration and the Incapacitation of Motherhood: Reproductive Justice and Prison Abolition as Ways Forward”

 

Abstract: Incapacitation, or the idea of removing dangerous people from society, is one of the most significant contemporary penal rationales in the US. People in women’s prisons have been uniquely devastated by the deployment of this rationale. The US is home to the largest and fastest growing women’s prison population in the world, nearly seventy percent of whom are the primary caretakers of small children at the time of their arrest and approximately eighty percent of whom are of reproductive age. Ocen highlighted the racialized and gendered ways that incapacitation has been used to regulate the bodies and reproductive capacities of marginalized women. Specifically, through the “incapacitation of motherhood,” people in women’s prisons are alienated from their children, denied reproductive care, humiliated during pregnancy and postpartum recovery, and in some cases, sterilized. This talk explored ways to contest these practices through both law and social movements, including prison abolition, informed by the principles of reproductive justice.

Priscilla Ocen is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, where she teaches criminal procedure, reproductive justice, and a seminar on race, gender and the law. Her work explores the ways in which the intersection of race, gender and class make women of color vulnerable to various forms of violence and criminalization. Ocen’s writing has been published extensively in academic law journals as well as in popular media outlets. She is co-author (along with Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jyoti Nanda) of the influential policy report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected (2015). She received the inaugural PEN America Writing for Justice Literary Fellowship (2018–19) for her research exploring the struggles of women on parole. Professor Ocen also served as a 2019–20 Fulbright Fellow, based out of Makerere University School of Law in Kampala, Uganda, where she studied the relationship between gender-based violence and women’s incarceration. In 2021, Professor Ocen was appointed to the California Penal Code Revision Committee by Governor Gavin Newsome. Professor Ocen received a J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and a B.A. from San Diego State University.

Nessette Falu, Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, responded. Dr. Falu is a Black queer feminist and cultural anthropologist. Dr. Falu’s research lies at the intersections of race/anti-Blackness/racism, gender expressions/nonconforming gender, sexuality/queer/lesbian identity, individual and collective wellbeing, affect, subjective formations, African Diasporic religiosities, gynecological health, and medicine ideology. Through these intersections, they interrogate systems of power and violence within medical infrastructures, history of medicine, language and culture, human sociality within the medical sphere, and interaction dynamics. They study these areas to honor Black/Brown lives and identify social solutions for and toward a different present and future.

This event was co-sponsored by the Pipeline Beyond Program at Texas Law.