The case of Josette Bickle has galvanised Malta. The story ticks all the right shock-horror boxes. A woman goes to prison for dealing in heroin and while there continues her business, quite obviously with the collusion of those who are in charge because otherwise it would have been impossible.
She uses the power and money she gets through heroin, and I suspect uses also the influence she has outside the prison through her heroin network, to control the guards and bosses inside the prison. And because she controls the guards and bosses, she has full control over her fellow prisoners, who are all women because prisoners are segregated, and who therefore succumb much more easily to her essentially alpha male psyche.
Before the LGBT lobby jumps down my throat, I am not saying here that homosexual women are the equivalent of men – they know I know better than that, and that heterosexual women can and do have an alpha male personality. Had she been a man operating in the men’s prison, Josette Bickle would not have found the road clear, because she would have been challenged at various points over the years by other pairs of antlers.
Other aspects of her male persona helped her dominate the women in the ways we associate with men, and take advantage of them in the same way as well: sex. This is where her sexuality becomes highly relevant, because heterosexual women, no matter how domineering and sociopathic they might be, do not want other women near their private parts unless those other women are paid to provide a clinical service on an obstetrician’s couch, in a maternity ward or at the beautician’s.
And that ticked other boxes for the reading and listening public, which is never averse to a spot of titillation. Bickle forced her fellow prisoners to shave her private parts and soap her in the shower, not because she couldn’t do these things for herself, but because they are exercises in humiliation and dominance, which create a master-slave relationship and perpetuate it, and she wasn’t averse to using these stratagems because she derived sexual pleasure from them. A heterosexual woman with the same personality would have used physical violence for control, not sex: hitting, pinching, pulling out clumps of hair and threats with boiling water – the way some women treat their maids in undemocratic societies where they are themselves constrained and restricted.
Josette Bickle’s case brings up an important issue that is well overdue for review. We have accepted the segregation of prisoners by gender without ever examining the original reason for it or considering whether it should be revisited. Women are separated from men in prisons precisely to avoid situations of sexual predation or harassment, or communion for that matter, and the tension and loss of dignity and privacy that these situations cause. There is no other reason.
It is the same reason that men and women have separate public lavatories, are searched by police officers and guards of the same gender and so on. To have a woman strip-searched by a prison guard (or for that matter, an airport security guard) who is quite obviously homosexual defeats the underlying purpose. She will feel as uncomfortable and deprived of her dignity as she would if strip-searched by a man. This has nothing to do with homophobia. Women who object to being strip-searched by men are not man-haters or lesbians. They’d just like to keep their dignity.
Back in the days when the rules were laid out the world over, nobody thought in terms of homosexuality. Lesbians were a fiction and gay men who ended up in prison were thought to be getting all they deserved in the shower and maybe that they actually enjoyed it or even posed a threat to the other prisoners who, so the thinking went, also deserved it. Now we are supposed to be more enlightened.
We are supposed to know that putting a homosexual woman with an alpha male personality (this is the crucial detail, not the homosexuality itself, as it is this ‘alpha male’ trait that makes for predation) into a prison full of women is like putting a rooster among the chickens. Josette Bickle is the textbook example of what happens: life becomes hell for the chickens. I do not use the farmyard metaphor to insult or denigrate prisoners but because it is highly illustrative (hence Animal Farm), a prison being much the same context as a coop.
The prison authorities put Josette Bickle into the women’s section because of her gender, and this despite the fact that she posed all the risk to the other women that segregation from men is intended to avoid. From what we read about Bickle, it is clear that she should have been placed with the men. The other women would have been saved from her predations and she would have been safe from those of the men, because there are no flies on this one and no one was going to risk trying it on. I rather suspect, though, that in the men’s section this woman would have seen that as another business opportunity over and above the heroin, and would not have been averse to using sex from which she derived no pleasure for control and money, besides the drugs. The crucial difference there is that the men would have been willing participants.
Perhaps there is no real solution to the problem of where to place somebody like Josette Bickle. Solitary confinement is fraught with human rights issues and is, strictly speaking, reserved only for the murderously insane. Wherever she is placed, and she’s back inside again now, there is one solution that cannot be avoided: people working on back-to-back shifts have to be detailed to watch her every move and report back. This is not because she is a risk to herself, but because it is now public knowledge just what a great risk she poses to others, and there can be no more excuses.
The only way to control a person like that is to shift the balance of power against her. Her fellow prisoners have to be empowered so that they do not become her victims, and this from the first days of her return to prison, so that she has no time to assert her dominance. They have to be briefed to pull together against her, and they must be shown that they have the full backing of the prison guards and authority, without which they cannot hold this woman off. She will divide and rule through all-round intimidation.
Prison is enough of a punishment without having to deal with somebody like Josette Bickle adding to the already overwhelming stress of being deprived of your freedom.
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