Locking up Hope:
Immigration, Gender, and the Prison System

Article notes by the authors.¹²

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 system⁴—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.

1. This article served as the basis for a discussion during The Scholar and Feminist Conference XXXI: Engendering Justice: Prisons, Activism and Change, Barnard College, April, 2006. [↩]
2. Both authors contributed equally to the writing of this article. [↩]
3. Irwin, Tim, “Anti-terrorism legislation delays entry of refugees to United States,” UNHCR, September 6, 2006. [↩]
4. We use the terms criminal legal and criminal justice systems interchangeably. The reason for focusing on the criminal legal system is that, too often, this is a system of injustice, not justice, to poor, minorities, women, and immigrants (see Andrea Smith, “Looking to the Future: Domestic Violence, Women of Color, the State, and Social Change,” Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings in Race, Class, Gender & Culture, N. Sokoloff with C. Pratt, Eds., Rutgers University, 2005, 416-434). [↩]
5. According to the Associated Press, more than 1,000 “illegal” immigrants are located in Oregon’s prisons, making up 7 percent of Oregon’s state prison population. See The Associated Press, “News of the Week: More than 1,000 Illegal Immigrants in Oregon Prisons,” August 26, 2007. Thus, 1,000 of Oregon’s 13,3000 inmates are being detained and will be deported after serving their sentences. [↩]
6. Rubén G. Rumbaut, et al., “Immigration and Incarceration: Patterns and Predictors of Imprisonment among First- and Second-Generation Young Adults,” in Ramiro Martinez Jr. and Abel Valenzuela Jr., ed., Immigration and Crime (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 65. [↩]
7. “Immigrant Assimilation and Crime: Generational Differences in Youth Violence in Chicago,” in Ramiro Martinez Jr. and Abel Valenzuela Jr., ed., Immigration and Crime (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 37. [↩]
8. Rubén G. Rumbaut and Walter A. Ewing, “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation: Incarceration Rates among Native- and Foreign-Born Men” (PDF) (Washington DC: Immigration Policy Center), Spring 2007, 6. [↩]
9. For a summary of the data on women’s experiences with prison between 1970 and 2004, see Natalie J. Sokoloff, “Women Prisoners at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” Women & Criminal Justice, 16(1/2): 127-135. (2005). Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2005” (PDF), Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, November 2006, 4-5. [↩]
10. Kelly Jeffereys, “U.S. Legal Permanent Residents: 2006,” Annual Flow Report March 2007. Washington, DC: DHS Office of Immigration Statistics. [↩]