Introduction
Gisela Fosado
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.
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