Another War on Women: Mass Incarceration, Gender, and Color
A Research Summary
Sandra Enos, Professor of Sociology and Global Studies
Key facts about the U.S. criminal justice are almost universally known among an informed citizenry. With 2.2 million people behind bars, the United States is the world’s jailer. With 5% of the world’s population, we are responsible for incarcerating 25% of the world’s prisoners. Compared to other nations, our correctional system is characterized by long sentences, a high representation of inmates serving sentences with no chance of parole, and a high failure rate with many inmates returning to prison after release from confinement. In our War on Drugs, we have taken our prisoners from communities that are overwhelmingly poor, minority and undereducated despite the fact that many other communities use drugs at a level which is equal or in excess of these communities. We are seeing the impact of aggressive policing, severe sentencing and the piling on of collateral punishments—bans on voting, on living in public housing, in receiving food stamps, in employment—in the creation of populations that will be disadvantaged for generations to come. As Michelle Alexander explains, this is the New Jim Crow.
My interest in the criminal justice system stems from my work in the state’s prison system in the 1970s and 1980s. My dissertation examined the impact of the incarceration boom on mothers and their children inside and outside the prison system. I examined the role of race, ethnicity and social class in determining where children lived while their mothers were serving sentences. My research on the prison system has also always featured the impact of criminal justice policies on women, especially women of color. An article published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought titled “Mass Incarceration: Triple Jeopardy for Women in a 'Color-Blind' and Gender-Neutral Justice System” I investigated how women of color are triply disadvantaged and targeted by the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. My most recent paper titled “Another War on Women: Mass Incarceration, Gender and Color” to be published in the Winter edition of the International Review of Modern Sociology examines these issues on a global basis. Here, I would like to share a few highlights from that research.
Although the United States makes up 5% of the world’s population, we incarcerate 30% of all the women behind bars across the globe. That rate is higher than it is for men.
If all the states in the United States were nations and we sorted them by incarceration rates for women, the states in the United States would occupy the first 25 places. Even our lowest incarceration states, like Rhode Island and Vermont incarcerate twice as many women as nations like Portugal and China.
World wide, we have seen increases in the number of people behind bars on every continent since 2000. The rate of increase for men has been 18% and the rate for women 50% with growth rates of more than 50% for Asia and for the Americas.
The population of women behind bars across the globe is decidedly women of color or those that are marginalized.
What are we to make of this increase? More research is needed. However, scholars like Sudbury suggest that globalization and neo-liberal economic policies, the fraying of the welfare state, and the adoption of U.S. inspired wars on drugs have propelled this increase.
Some reforms are moving ahead but it must be admitted that small changes in criminal justice policy will not achieve the large-scale refiguring and re-thinking of the system that is so necessary to re-engineer systems that punish and don’t rehabilitate and that create life-long generation spanning disadvantages.
My interest in the criminal justice system stems from my work in the state’s prison system in the 1970s and 1980s. My dissertation examined the impact of the incarceration boom on mothers and their children inside and outside the prison system. I examined the role of race, ethnicity and social class in determining where children lived while their mothers were serving sentences. My research on the prison system has also always featured the impact of criminal justice policies on women, especially women of color. An article published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought titled “Mass Incarceration: Triple Jeopardy for Women in a 'Color-Blind' and Gender-Neutral Justice System” I investigated how women of color are triply disadvantaged and targeted by the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. My most recent paper titled “Another War on Women: Mass Incarceration, Gender and Color” to be published in the Winter edition of the International Review of Modern Sociology examines these issues on a global basis. Here, I would like to share a few highlights from that research.
Although the United States makes up 5% of the world’s population, we incarcerate 30% of all the women behind bars across the globe. That rate is higher than it is for men.
If all the states in the United States were nations and we sorted them by incarceration rates for women, the states in the United States would occupy the first 25 places. Even our lowest incarceration states, like Rhode Island and Vermont incarcerate twice as many women as nations like Portugal and China.
World wide, we have seen increases in the number of people behind bars on every continent since 2000. The rate of increase for men has been 18% and the rate for women 50% with growth rates of more than 50% for Asia and for the Americas.
The population of women behind bars across the globe is decidedly women of color or those that are marginalized.
What are we to make of this increase? More research is needed. However, scholars like Sudbury suggest that globalization and neo-liberal economic policies, the fraying of the welfare state, and the adoption of U.S. inspired wars on drugs have propelled this increase.
Some reforms are moving ahead but it must be admitted that small changes in criminal justice policy will not achieve the large-scale refiguring and re-thinking of the system that is so necessary to re-engineer systems that punish and don’t rehabilitate and that create life-long generation spanning disadvantages.