Stretched out on her bunk at night, arms all akimbo, Sharonda Miller likes to close her eyes and imagine freedom is a train ride home. After 19 years away from her only child, the 41-year-old mother, known for her big jokes and watchful eye, has built countless friendships inside the gates of Logan Correctional Center, Illinois’s largest women’s prison.
The lack of cameras in her temporary unit made her mind tick and creep into dark parts of her past. Miller, like nearly all women at Logan Correctional Center, is a survivor of gender violence. She was sexually assaulted as a child in the foster care system and just last year, during the pandemic, she claims a correctional officer attacked and physically assaulted her, nearly breaking her arm. A 2017-2018 survey conducted by the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration in partnership with the Women’s Justice Institute found that 99 percent of the women incarcerated at Logan Correctional Center have experienced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse at some point in their lives. More than half the respondents, 60 percent, like Miller, had experienced abuse as a child.
Lindsey Hess, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, confirmed in an e-mailed statement that the three women went on a hunger strike in early June due to plumbing issues that began on May 29. Hess says that facility staff identified plumbing issues and a leaky pipe in the basement of housing unit seven, and out of precaution women from the unit were moved for repairs.
“People hear ‘prison’ and think we deserve less than human treatment as is,” says Miller. “So it’s nearly impossible to receive any type of compassion or assistance in regards to our lives and issues.”
Supporters argue that Miller was criminalized for defending herself against rape and punished for her act to survive gender violence. Since November 2020, her clemency petition to reduce her sentence to time served has sat on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk, awaiting his judgment.
The organizing and resistance of incarcerated women is in part how they care for one another. “All these sort of big and small ways that people resist isn’t very well documented,” says Krig. “And also the way that women care for one another just generally isn’t valued very highly in society.”
