On the morning of May 26, 1998, Betsy Ramos woke to two police officers at her door. They had come to serve a warrant on her boyfriend, Joseph Serrano, for missing a court date for drug possession. Fearing arrest, Serrano instructed Ramos to tell police that he was not present, then hid in the closet.

Fearing Serrano’s wrath, Ramos did just that. The officers searched the apartment twice before finding Serrano. He resisted arrest, managing to grab hold of one officer’s gun. He and the other officer, Anthony Mosomillo, shot and killed each other. Ramos was arrested and charged with Mosomillo’s death. At trial, she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years to life.

The circumstances of Ramos’s arrest and imprisonment are not the typical story of women in prison. But the pathway from trauma to substance use to violence to criminalization is a familiarly-trod one for many women who end up entangled in the criminal justice system, particularly for domestic violence survivors.

No one knows how many domestic violence survivors are incarcerated for acts related to their abuse. What is known is that, in the United States, one in three women (roughly 33 percent) experience physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner. For incarcerated women, that rate rises to 77 percent. In other words, while Ramos’s particular conviction may be unusual, she is not the only domestic violence survivor imprisoned because of her partner’s actions.

Ramos’s ordeals began long before that morning. As a teenager in Brooklyn, Ramos was abandoned by first her mother, then her father. She began using heroin, leading to multiple arrests and convictions.

We criminalize the experience of trauma, especially for women

Amanda Bashi is the supervising professor at the Women’s Decarceration Practicum at Cornell Law School, in which law students assist incarcerated women, including Ramos. She points out that adolescent or young adult trauma is linked to addiction. But, she adds, “because we criminalize addiction, we criminalize the experience of trauma, especially for women.” For instance, a study prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice found that rates of PTSD among incarcerated women are more than three times the rates of PTSD reported in women in the outside world. It also found that 78 to 85 percent of incarcerated women have experienced at least one traumatic event.

But criminalization only serves to lock people away, not treat the underlying issues that caused the trauma or continue to fuel the addiction. For Ramos, those arrests and stints behind bars did not address her sense of worthlessness caused by her parents’ abandonment.

In 1993, she was nearly arrested again for selling heroin. A long-time customer convinced her to bring in drugs from Colombia. Ramos agreed, was arrested at the airport and, after pleading guilty, sentenced to three years in federal prison followed by ten years of probation.

In 1996, Ramos was released from prison to a halfway house. She also learned that she had contracted HIV. “It felt like I received a death sentence. I thought, ‘No one is ever going to love me like this,’” she explained through her attorneys. “I felt ashamed, and wondered how people would treat me. I felt so alone.”

At the halfway house, she met Serrano, who had recently been released from state prison and had his own history of arrests for drugs.

When she told Serrano about her HIV status, he told her that he would accept her. Later, however, he used her diagnosis—and stigma around HIV—to maintain control and prevent her from ending their relationship, telling her repeatedly that no one else would love her. That control soon extended to every aspect of her life—Serrano controlled what she wore, forbidding her to wear open-toed shoes or white tops in public. He taped black curtains to all of the windows to keep her isolated from the outside world. He controlled her body, beating her with his fists and, at one point, holding her down and forcibly sodomizing her.

In July 1996, shortly moving into her apartment, Serrano beat her badly enough to send her to the hospital. Ramos required stitches in her head and three days in the hospital. When she came home and found him still in the apartment, she called the police. According to the police report, she told police that Serrano “constantly pushes her around and threatens her life.” She also told police that, when she told him to leave, he began choking her.

“He got craftier with his abuse. He would hit me where he wouldn’t leave marks.”

She also called Serrano’s parole officer who had Serrano arrested for a parole violation one week later. Serrano spent three months at Rikers Island, New York’s island-jail complex, where he continually called Ramos and begged for another chance. She finally relented and he returned to her apartment. But the abuse did not stop. Instead, she said through her attorneys, “he got craftier with his abuse. He would hit me where he wouldn’t leave marks.” He also continued with his drug use and refused her efforts to enroll him in rehab at the hospital. Instead, the abuse grew worse. To cope, Ramos, who had stopped her drug use after prison, began “dipping and dabbing.” Her response is not unusual; studies show that drug use is a common coping mechanism among women who have experienced violence and trauma. The United Nations found that women with substance use disorders have high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.  

“As outsiders, we can observe cycles that involve addiction, abuse and feelings of worthlessness,” stated Bashi, noting that trauma creates pathways in the brain that can be difficult to change. “Each time Joseph beat her or reminded her that she was unlovable because of her diagnosis, it dug that pathway a little deeper and made it harder to change her life.”

Similarly, she points out that current drug policy can inhibit people’s ability to seek help. “We know that people have died of overdose because the people around them were afraid to call 911 because of their own drug use. We also know that, in domestic violence cases alone [without drug involvement], women are often reluctant to call police on their loved ones.” In other words, the combination of the two make a person far less likely to call 911.

“They’d ask me, ‘Is there a problem?’ But he’d be standing right there and I’d be scared to say anything.

But Ramos did. She called 911 two other times. Each time, she recounted, she was only able to dial the numbers before Serrano grabbed the phone. But because they had been called, police arrived. “They’d ask me, ‘Is there a problem?’ But he’d be standing right there and I’d be scared to say anything. If they wouldn’t take him, he’d give me another ass whupping,” she recounted. “Every time I opened the door, something happened—and I’d still be stuck with him.” She also tried finding shelter through Safe Horizon, but they had no availability for a single woman without children.

By that fateful May morning, Ramos had suffered over 600 days of Serrano’s abuse. She was afraid to not obey his demand, but she also remembers feeling relieved. “Now he knows the cops are coming here. After they leave, he’ll leave and be scared to come back because he knows the cops are going to keep coming here,” she said. “I never imagined that he would take it to the extent that he did. I never imagined that he would hurt anybody because he only hurt me [before].” Ironically, the officers were from the same precinct where she had filed her initial complaint.

Because Serrano had died in the shootout, Ramos was the focus of the victim’s family’s anguish—and the wrath of the court. “Betsy became the last living person who could be held responsible [for the officer’s death],” Bashi noted. The ensuing publicity highlighted Ramos’s past drug convictions, labeling her an “ex-con” and “a convicted drug dealer and smuggler.”

“Our criminal justice system loves labels”

“Our criminal justice system loves labels,” Bashi stated. “When we can make a proper noun out of one act that was committed, it creates an assumption and a narrative.” In Ramos’s case, her past drug convictions made her an unsympathetic defendant rather than someone who had been victimized herself.   

At trial, the prosecutor argued that Ramos had helped Serrano grab the officer’s gun, a charge that Ramos and her attorney dispute. The jury acquitted Ramos of both murder and the gun charges. Instead, they convicted her of second-degree manslaughter. Then-prosecutor Charles Hynes used Ramos’s past arrest to press for a life sentence, the maximum penalty allowed for manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to 15 years to life.

Betsy (right) and her sister-in-law Davina.

Ramos does not downplay the impact of her decisions that day. While in jail, despondent that her actions had led to another person’s death, she attempted suicide twice. In 1999, she told the probation officer who interviewed her, “If I had known that my boyfriend was going to react the way he did, I would not have denied that he was in the apartment. If I could trade my life for the dead officer’s life, I would do it. I am very sorry for the pain I have caused the officer’s family.”

Since her incarceration, Ramos appeared before the parole board three times; each time, she was denied parole. In January 2018, she was diagnosed with cancer; she began chemotherapy and radiation as well as surgery. The prison’s own risk assessment tool (COMPAS) shows that, given her age, gender and illness, Ramos has a low risk of violence, rearrest or absconding.   

Ramos appears before the parole board again on January 8th. But even if parole commissioners grant her parole, she will not be a free (or even paroled) woman. Instead, she will be handcuffed by U.S. marshals and brought to a federal jail where she faces prosecution for violating probation from that 1993 heroin smuggling conviction. 

Ramos’s experience illustrates the ways in which drug policy, domestic violence and criminalization form a tangled web for many incarcerated women. And, notes Bashi, “there are more women like Betsy whose criminalization results from trauma.” Now, unlike Ramos during her earlier years, some of these women have more resources as they attempt to navigate the court system.

Today, there’s a greater understanding and awareness of the role that domestic violence plays in criminalization and imprisonment. While that awareness and understanding has not penetrated every courtroom, it has increased the amount of support available to survivors—organizations like Survived and Punished, and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls now work with women facing and currently in prison, many of whom are in similarly tangled webs. And there’s Bashi and her team at the Women’s Decarceration Practicum at Cornell Law School, who are fighting for Ramos to get parole—you can help by sending letters and messages of support to ab2756@cornell.edu.

“I believe that the world would be better with me outside of prison,” Ramos says in a video put together by her legal team. “I have changed and atoned and because of that […] I would like to help others [who are facing] the vicious cycle that was once my life.”

Photo of Betsy and her dog, Guinness, who she fostered through the Puppies Behind Bars program. Courtesy of Betsy Ramos’ legal team

The post Betsy Ramos’ Abusive Boyfriend Killed a Cop. She Has Been Locked Up for 21 Years appeared first on Filter.

The past 17 years have seen an increase in prison abolition groups and organizing. In stark contrast to prison reform advocates, who push to improve prison conditions but posit that prisons are ultimately necessary for societal safety, prison abolitionists charge that prisons themselves are sites of violence and can never be adequately reformed. Instead, prisons must be eliminated; so too must the conditions that send people to prison, including racism, poverty and root causes of violence.

Conspicuous by its absence in many of the conversations about prison abolition, however, is how to address gender-based violence and harm without relying on police and prisons.

At the same time, many of the most prominent organizations and movements fighting domestic and sexual violence continue to rely on policing and prisons. In the aftermath of the six-month prison sentence imposed upon Brock Turner, the white Stanford student convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, feminist groups and activists expressed outrage at the shortness of the sentence and called for the ouster of his sentencing judge.

Harsher punishments and lengthier sentences have always fallen hardest upon—and devastated—people and communities of color, while providing little safety or prevention from gender violence.

Similarly, as accusations against celebrities like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby mounted, calls for justice centered arrest and prison. The most vocal calls for “justice” failed to recognize that harsher punishments and lengthier sentences have always fallen hardest upon—and devastated—people and communities of color, while providing little safety or prevention from gender violence.

This reliance on criminalization reinforces state violence, which is not only perpetrated against overwhelmingly black and brown and poor men, but also upholds a system punishing women (cisgender and trans), trans men, gender non-conforming and intersex people, even when they themselves are victimized by violence. We’ve seen this in the case of Marissa Alexander, the Florida mother initially sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot to stop her abusive husband’s assault. We’ve seen this in the case of Ky Peterson, a black trans man currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after fatally shooting the man who raped him.

How did we get to this divide?

In 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which pushed police to respond to complaints of domestic violence, sexual assault and other gender-based violence. The act was the result of years of lawsuits and organizing by many feminists to force law enforcement to respond to gender-based violence rather than dismissing it as an interpersonal issue. In many jurisdictions, VAWA resulted in mandatory arrest laws and more punitive prison sentences. It also led to policies such as dual arrests, in which police arrested both people. Some jurisdictions jail victims as material witnesses or impose fines and threaten a survivor with arrest if they do not cooperate with prosecution. (The city of Columbus, Georgia, changed its policy of non-cooperation fines and arrests after a lawsuit by abuse survivor Cleopatra Harrison and the Southern Center for Human Rights.)

By and large, carceral feminism views solutions to gender-based violence through a white middle-class lens.

Carceral feminism is the term often used to describe this reliance on increased policing, prosecution and imprisonment as the primary solution to gender-based violence. By and large, carceral feminism views solutions to gender-based violence through a white middle-class lens, one which ignores the ways in which intersecting identities, such as race, class, gender identity and immigration status, leave certain women more vulnerable to violence, including state violence.

At the same time, women’s incarceration has skyrocketed. In 1980, the nation’s jails and prisons held 25,450 women; 10 years later, that number had nearly tripled to 77,762. By 2000, that number had doubled again to 156,044 and continues to grow. As of 2017, jails and prisons incarcerate 209,000 women. (These numbers do not include women in immigrant detention or youth jails or trans women in men’s jails or prisons.) At least half of incarcerated women reported surviving violence even before being arrest.

It’s still also true that nearly 90 percent of incarcerated people are men (or classified as men). But not every feminist and anti-violence activist espouses a carceral solution. For years, anti-violence activists and organizations, such as Beth Richie and  INCITE! , have argued that increased criminalization replaces abuse by an individual with abuse by law enforcement, courts and prisons while doing nothing to address the root causes of violence against women. We’ve seen this with Marisa Alexander, Ky Peterson and countless other women and trans people.

No one knows how many thousands of survivors are sitting behind bars after law enforcement failed to guarantee their safety. That’s because no agency tracks this data. The most recent statistics are nearly 20 years old, from a 1999 Department of Justice report stating that nearly half of women in local jails and state prisons had been abused prior to their arrest. But, because women make up approximately 10 percent of the nation’s prison population, many of the conversations about mass incarceration and prison abolition continue to center men, a focus that leads to a false binary in which men are incarcerated and women are victims. It’s a divide that excludes people (of any and all genders) impacted by both interpersonal and state violence, and thus fails to meet their needs.

I’ve interviewed numerous adult survivors of domestic violence imprisoned for defending themselves. Again and again, they tell me that they turned to the police and legal system, both of which failed to protect them. Perhaps the police took their abuser away for a few days, but that didn’t stop the violence. Perhaps the courts issued an order of protection, a piece of paper that their abuser flagrantly ignored. Perhaps the police did nothing. Perhaps their abuser was the police. This same legal system that failed to protect them then punished them for their survival. In prison, many are subject to violence—at the hands of other incarcerated people, staff members or the day-to-day practices.

At the same time, much prison abolition organizing continues to reflect larger society’s failure to consider the societal and cultural shifts needed to end gender-based violence or to develop concrete ways to prevent and address domestic and sexual violence in daily life.

“The two are not really talked about together,” says Hyejin Shim. Shim works at the intersections of gender and state violence, as both a staff member at the Asian Women’s Shelter and an organizer with Survived and Punished, a grassroots group supporting criminalized and incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence. Though efforts to end gender-based violence and prison abolition are often positioned as incompatible, Shim notes that “both are focused on ending violence,” whether that violence is from an individual, the state or both.

Transformative Justice

One way to address interpersonal violence without relying on state violence is through transformative justice. Transformative justice refers to a community process that addresses not only the needs of the person who was harmed, but also the conditions that enabled this harm. In other words, instead of looking at the act(s) of violence in a vacuum, transformative justice processes ask, “What else needs to change so that this never happens again? What needs to happen so that the survivor can heal?” There’s no right or wrong set of footprints to follow in transformative justice; instead, each process depends on the people and circumstances.

Shim notes that people frequently engage in transformative justice processes, even if they don’t use that term. They come together to support people in their circles who have been harmed—helping them identify what they need and how to access those needs. At the same time, Shim points out that these kinds of skills are often undervalued in organizing circles. “In movement spaces, you might have a direct action training or a facilitator training, but not one for skills to work through conflict or support survivors,” she noted. In this #MeToo moment when more people are coming forward with their own experiences of sexual and domestic violence, “the support needed is not really there or been developed.”

Anti-violence organizers have developed resources to help fill those gaps. Creative Interventions, an organization dedicated to providing “resources for everyday people to end violence,” has developed a 608-page on-line guide of strategies to stop interpersonal violence. Organizers and abuse survivors Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani and Leah Lakshmi Piepnza-Samarasinha compiled a 111-page zine entitled “The Revolution Starts at Home” (which later became a book), documenting ways that social justice organizers have held abusers accountable.

Creative Interventions’ guide, for example, recounts the way a Korean cultural community center in Oakland, California handled an incident of sexual assault, made even more complicated by cross-cultural factors.

In the summer of 2006, the Oakland center invited a drumming teacher from South Korea to teach at a week-long drumming workshop. One night, he sexually assaulted one of the students. The Oakland center handled the process through a series of actions, beginning with an immediate telephone call to the head of the drumming center in Korea. Even though it “was culturally difficult for the Korean American group to make demands of their elders in Korea, everyone decided this was what needed to be done.”

After the Korean institution took responsibility and apologized, the Oakland center sent a list of demands, including that the Korean institution establish sexual assault awareness trainings for their entire membership, a commitment to send at least one woman teacher in their future exchanges to the U.S., and a request that the teacher step down from his leadership position for an initial period of six months and attend feminist therapy sessions directly addressing the assault.

The Oakland organization also took actions on their part, including providing a set of sexual assault awareness workshops for the center members and members of other local drumming groups, and dedicating their upcoming festival to the theme of healing from sexual violence. With consent from the victim, facts regarding the incident were printed in the program “as a challenge to the community to take collective responsibility for ending the conditions perpetuating violence including collusion through silence.”

“Some people asked us later why we didn’t call the police. It was not even a thought in anybody’s mind.”

The story has far from a perfect ending; the victim (as she preferred to be called, rather than “survivor”) never returned to the cultural center; the lengthy process of both institutional reflection and engagement “sapped the energy and spirit of the organization and the friendships that had held it together;” and, while the drumming teacher returned to participate in festivals in South Korea, he was viewed with resentment and suspicion by Korean American visitors. But when Liz, the center’s president, reflected later on the series of events, she said: “Some people asked us later why we didn’t call the police. It was not even a thought in anybody’s mind.”

A chapter of “The Revolution Starts at Home” (the zine) called “taking risks: implementing grassroots community accountability strategies” provides another example. The authors, a collective of women of color from Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA)—Alisa Bierria, Onion Carrillo, Eboni Colbert, Xandra Ibarra, Theryn Kigvamasud’Vashti and Shale Maulanaauthor—describe a series of actions taken by members of an alternative punk community to address sexual assaults by Lou, a man employed by a popular club.

The authors report that Lou “encouraged […] women to get drunk and then forced them to have sex against their will.” In their discussions about what to do, community members “not only reflected on the survivors’ experiences, but also how the local culture supported bad behavior.” For instance, the popular alt-weekly paper often glamorized the massive amount of drinking prevalent at Lou’s parties. With the survivors’ consent, the group designed fliers that identified the man and his behaviors, called for accountability, critiqued the local paper and suggested boycotting the club.

In response, the newspaper published an article defending the man, implying that since the survivors had not filed criminal charges, their allegations were not credible. Lou also threatened to sue them for libel. But the group persisted, working with the survivors to create a document that not only shared their experiences, but also articulated a critical analysis of sexual violence and rape culture in their community and what they meant by community accountability. They released the full statement to the press and posted it to their website, sparking discussions in the larger music community about sexual violence and accountability. Lou stopped being invited to parties and events, locals began boycotting the club and out-of-town bands avoided playing there, prompting Lou to agree to engage with the group and negotiate a face-to-face meeting. Ultimately, however, he never took accountability for his actions.

The group also began a process to learn more about sexual violence, safety and accountability, learning to facilitate their own safety and accountability workshops and supporting CARA and other anti-violence organizations. “It’s a critical shift to decide to use your resources to build the community you want [rather] than expend all of your resources by fighting the problem you want to eliminate,” CARA organizers wrote.

Reflecting recently on that scenario, Bierria, now an organizer with Survived and Punished, noted that “it was a powerful counter-response to something that’s usually not spoken about.”

At the same time, she pointed out, “community accountability is not just a process of accountability. It’s creating conditions within the community that prevent harm.” It can be frustrating, she acknowledged. “We [often] want a more direct solution. But sexual and domestic violence are more complicated than that.” Over the past two decades, she and others working at the intersections of gender violence, community accountability and prison abolition have documented their processes, creating blueprints and road maps that she and other organizers did not have 20 years ago.

These examples show that the processes of community accountability are messy and rarely follow a uniform path. They often, however, mix and match from a distinct set of alternative tools that include actions for both organizations and individuals. Counseling for the person who caused harm, removal from leadership positions, admission of guilt, public and/or private apologies, workshops and trainings, and specific behavioral changes are just some of the demands that communities can make. Regardless of what forms they take, continuing to explore alternatives to state violence in response to gender-based violence is an essential piece of the movements to end both.

[1] INCITE! has since changed its name to INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans people of Color Against Violence

Photo via Wechargegenocide.org

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