The U.S. has the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. According to a recent U.S. Justice Department report, a record 7 million people—or one in every 32 American adults—were behind bars, on probation, or on parole in 2005. Over 2 million people were in prison or jail, a staggering statistic even when compared to China, ranked second with 1.5 million prisoners, and Russia, ranked third with 870,000. The U.S. incarceration rate is 737 per 100,000 people, while most other Western industrial nations have rates around 100 per 100,000 people. Why do we imprison so many more people than other nations? What are the alternatives to imprisonment, and why do we as a nation choose to ignore them?
The news only worsens with respect to women. In less than two decades, the population of incarcerated women has increased by 400 percent. During the same period of time, the number of incarcerated women of color has grown eightfold. The majority of women in prison (53 percent) and women in jail (74 percent) were unemployed prior to incarceration and faced extreme poverty. Eighty percent of women currently in prison reported incomes of less than $2,000 per year before their arrest, and 92 percent reported incomes under $10,000. Rates of HIV infection, moreover, are much higher among prisoners than the general population. The rates of HIV infection are higher among women prisoners than men prisoners, and in some urban prisons the rate of infection is as high as one in every four female prisoners. In addition, more than half of women in state prisons are survivors of abuse.
What can we conclude from these dismal statistics? This issue hopes to answer this very question. The contributors to “Women, Prisons and Change” conclude that our society has chosen to address a series of social issues—education, HIV-AIDS, drug addiction, and poverty—through imprisonment. Year after year, our elected officials take money out of our education and health-care system to funnel more money into the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), further compounding the problem. As Michelle Fine points out, between 1988 and 1998 New York State reduced overall funding for public higher education by $615 million while increasing funding for prison and jails by $761 million. Also focusing on the money trail, Julia Sudbury argues that dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex is not in the interests of many corporations, and individual investors and employees, who profit from the expansion and growth of prisons nationally and abroad. How does this make financial sense? How can locking up the nation’s pool of laborers be more cost-effective than educating them? One simple answer is that it is lucrative for the rich and devastating for the poor, thereby increasing and cementing the class divide in our nation.
And there are other numbers that fail to add up. White-collar crime is estimated to cost between $170 billion and $230 billion dollars per year, while the economic cost of “street crimes” is estimated to be $3 billion to $4 billion per year. Yet white-collar crime remains low on the police’s priority list. Several contributors, including Chino Hardin and Andrea Ritchie, point out that the police choose how and where to interpret the law. Perhaps not surprisingly—but nonetheless disturbingly—they end up policing principally poor communities, focusing in part on gender nonconforming individuals, women of color, and others who do not have the resources to protect themselves from the surveillance and violence of the state. Given the disproportionate ways in which criminal laws are enforced, and the resulting disproportionate rates at which poor women and women of color are imprisoned, the contributors all agree that our criminal justice system is inherently racist, classist, and sexist. And the struggle to dismantle this unjust system, unfortunately, will be a long one, requiring sustained energy and broad participation.
Issues Specific to Women Prisoners
Aside from the fact that women are being incarcerated at shocking rates, Andrea Ritchie urges us to be aware of the sexist aspects of convictions and sentences. The majority of women convicted of violent crimes, for example, were convicted for defending themselves or their children from abuse. Rebecca Young, in her review of Carol Jacobsen’s documentary Convicted: A Prison Diary, addresses precisely these issues. Furthermore, the average prison term is twice as long for killing husbands as it is for killing wives. Why should violent women be punished more harshly than violent men? Why should women be punished at all for defending themselves and their dependents? The bias against women within the criminal justice system extends beyond this discrepancy and includes the following:
- Women in state prisons in 2003 were more likely than men to be incarcerated for a drug offense (29 percent versus 19 percent) or property offense (30 percent versus 20 percent). Similarly, women of color receive harsher sentences than white women. In 1997, Latinas (44 percent) and African-American women (39 percent) were more likely to be incarcerated for a drug offense than white women (23 percent).
- Women prisoners spend on average 17 hours a day in their cells, with one hour outdoors for exercise. Men prisoners, on the other hand, spend an average of 15 hours a day in their cells, with 1.5 hours outdoors.
- While medical care for all prisoners is poor, the situation is far worse for women prisoners. Because prison health-care systems were created for men, routine gynecological care, such as Pap smears, breast exams, and mammograms, is extremely rare in prisons. Six percent of women, furthermore, are pregnant when they enter prison. In almost all cases, the woman is abruptly separated from her child after giving birth.
- Incarcerated women are usually much farther away from their homes and families than the average male prisoner because there are fewer prison facilities for women. This increased distance often deprives women prisoners of regular contract with their children.
- Incarcerated women are often the main caregivers of children, who are then left without their parent. Sixty-seven percent of women incarcerated in state prisons are mothers of children under 18. Seventy percent of these women, compared to 50 percent of inmate fathers, had custody of their dependent children prior to incarceration. There are 167,000 children in the U.S. whose mothers are incarcerated. Kathryn Kent, in her review of Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, discusses the toll that some of these children pay as their families are torn apart.
- Transgender women are particularly plagued, as Tamar Goelman notes in her review of the documentary film Cruel and Unusual. Transgender women are subjected to gender violence by being placed in men’s prisons, facing sexual assault and solitary confinement. They are usually denied hormone therapy and face high rates of depression and suicide while in prison. Even before entering prison, transgender women are targets of abuse. As gender nonconforming individuals, they are marginalized from society, denied support from social programs, and often targeted by the police, making them more likely to be incarcerated.
