Locking up Hope:
Immigration, Gender, and the Prison System
Article notes by the authors. [1] [2]
In 2004, a woman who was formerly a teacher of an ethnic group in
Myanmar (previously Burma), entered the state of Texas and applied for
asylum under U.S. asylum statutes, alleging to have been a victim of
torture and persecution due to her religion and ethnicity. As a result,
she was placed in a detention center in El Paso, Texas. This
teacher's case has gotten caught up in a network of new anti-terrorism
laws that construed her support for a resistance organization in Myanmar
as potential grounds to deny her claim. Three additional members of this
group were also detained on the same charges.[3]
Congress eventually changed the law and she received asylum. This asylum seeker is not
alone; she joins thousands of foreign-born women who have entered the
U.S. criminal legal system[4]—whether on alleged immigration violations or
infractions of criminal laws.[5]
In this article, we argue
that research and policymaking need to interrogate the current practices
of incarcerating the foreign-born through the lens of gender—and we
offer some guidelines for doing so. Today, the intersection between
immigration and incarceration is in need of substantially more research
and activist illumination—as scholars have not, until recently,
connected these two bodies of research.[6] The intersection of immigration,
incarceration, and gender cries out for even more clarity. To date,
there is very little research on gender—and particularly on women—as
particular members of the foreign-born who are sitting in U.S. jails and
prisons. While anecdotes about this intersection abound, in addition to
some broad, general statistics, we are in need of much more in-depth
information. One barrier to this research task has to do with the dearth
of data on immigration and crime more generally, since neither the
Uniform Crime Reports nor the National Victimization Survey disaggregate
the data by nativity or country of origin.[7]
A key reason for this research need is the increasing presence of
women as immigrants and as prisoners. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the United States is witnessing a rise in its
immigrant population, its prison population, and the share of women in
both of these groups. Incarceration rates for male and female adults
across federal, state, and local facilities quadrupled between 1980 and
2005, when it reached 2.2 million.[8] From 1995 to 2005, the number of
women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate for men.[9] It has
increased eight-fold between 1980 and 2005. (Unquestionably, the
incarcerated population is still overwhelmingly male, even with these
increases. Nevertheless, the absolute increase of women, particularly
poor women of color and immigrants—especially Latinas and African origin
women—must be confronted.) Additionally, women constitute a rising
share of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States, and
are now the majority of those entering the country legally. Women are
entering through more legal means at higher rates as well, comprising
55.5% of new Legal Lawful Permanent Residents in 2006.[10] Although precise numbers
do not yet exist on the proportion of the prison population made up of
foreign-born women, a large share of the growth in the female prison
population has been among non-citizen immigrants (e.g., drug mules, see
below). This does not necessarily reflect increased criminal activity,
but a drastic change in the creation and enforcement of certain
laws.
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