The New York Times today published a shocking article about the number of women who are incarcerated and how that number has multiplied since the 1970s. It has also increased substantially for men, but not at the rate of women.
Wrap your mind around these numbers:
On Wednesday, the Vera Institute of Justice and a program called the Safety and Justice Challenge released a report that found that the number of women in local jails in the United States was almost 14 times what it was in the 1970s, a far higher growth rate than for men, although there remain far fewer women than men in jails and prisons.
The study found that the number of women held in the nation’s 3,200 municipal and county jails for misdemeanor crimes or who are awaiting trial or sentencing had increased significantly — to about 110,000 in 2014 from fewer than 8,000 in 1970.
(Over all, the nation’s jail population increased to 745,000 in 2014 from 157,000 in 1970.)
Much of the increase in the number of jailed women occurred in counties with fewer than 250,000 people, according to the study, places where just 1,700 women had been incarcerated in 1970. By 2014, however, that number had surged to 51,600, the report said.
Poverty? Hopelessness? Overzealous prosecution?
Lest we forget, many prisons have been privatized, and the one thing that correction corporations don’t like is an empty cell (more on that in a post in a day or so). How much of the increase in incarcerations has been driven by the need to lift profit margins?
Criminal justice reform is intimately related to education. Children without a mother, children without a father, are children who suffer. Surely there must be alternatives to prison that would be beneficial to the individuals involved and would not destroy families and lives.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since the 70s…that’s along time, but it’s probably market-driven, as you write.
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Private Prisons Spend Millions On Lobbying To Put More People in Jail
https://thinkprogress.org/private-prisons-spend-millions-on-lobbying-to-put-more-people-in-jail-58e048bb37dd#.jl417gr20
This is a snapshot of the corporate autocratic government that is fast taking over the republic that the U.S. Founding Fathers created with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that the autocrats are subverting.
Corporations are dictatorships with one agenda, make a profit and crush the competition and anyone that gets in the way of that profit.
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TPP would make corporate profits reign supreme in USA.
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I thought they already did.
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Reblogged this on Matthews' Blog.
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These are shocking numbers. We can hope that the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to abandon support for private prisons, announced just yesterday, will have a multiplier effect on state and local prison policy.
Some part of this increase in women’s incarceration is undoubtedly caused by “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, according to experts who follow these things. That is to say, that in some families and relationships, when drugs are found in a police search, if the male is faced with a third charge, the woman will sometimes assume the onus for the drugs, expecting a more lenient sentence in place of draconian potential sentences for the partner.
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It would be interesting to see how misdemeanor laws have changed. Also, since the 1970s, our population has increased over 100 million. Still, these numbers are insane!
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I have read that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Why?
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I read this once, too. I recall that the US incarcerates more types of non-violent criminal offenders and drug offenders than other countries.
It’s important to think about the root of these offenses though (poverty, lack of access to adequate care, unemployment, etc.), regardless of our laws requiring the imprisoning of these “lesser” offenses. As a side study, it would be interesting to compare our country’s imprisoned to other countries’ imprisoned based on type of infraction and not overalls.
The fact the we make these lists (highest incarcerated, etc.) for a rich, developed country is absurd. Something is seriously wrong, on many levels.
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-incarceration.aspx
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African Americans comprise about 13% of the population, but they make up 37.5% of the population in women’s prisons. We have more people in prison than any other nation including Iran and China.
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I wanted to see if this trend was also relevant for the UK and there has been a substantial rise, most of which seems to be down to harsher sentencing. I was interested in the breakdown in prisoner backgrounds and wondered if that was reflected in the US too. Also would like to see how many are single mothers who resort to crime to support their children in the US.. In the UK we have a welfare state and that I do believe tends to keep the numbers down to 5% of the prisoner population. Source http://www.womeninprison.org.uk/research/key-facts.php
Women prisoner backgrounds
46% of women in prison report having suffered domestic violence
(80% of the women WIP works with have reported experiencing domestic violence)
53% of women in prison report having experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse during childhood.
31% women in prison have spent time in local authority care as a child.
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Poverty plays a big factor in incarceration statistics, yet lately we see headline after headline about how we (the USA) spend up to three times the money on incarcerating our citizens than on educating them and helping with issues of poverty.
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It does look as though the privatisation of the prison system is key then.. as said an empty cell does not pay.. interesting article.
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I would add that the “quota-funding” game behind incarcerating and policing in America appears to be a key factor for endless abuse.
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women’s lib? equality?
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It’s both market-driven and driven by the “law & order” punishment society, the same society that executes unarmed (mostly) Black people and handcuffs elementary school children here, while bombing them and their families in all the Kill Zones now part of the U.S./NATO Global War Of Terror for Empire.
When people are nothing more than commodities, they are easily disposed of when they get in the way of, or provide (as in prisons), profits for the Ruling 1% Parasite Class. This in the inevitable result of the neoliberal capitalism now dominating most of the world.
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“Poverty? Hopelessness? Overzealous prosecution?”
A professor at Fordham University has done interesting research that suggests that aggressive prosecution may be the main driver of the high U.S. prison population, at least over the last 25 years or so. Crime rates have fallen dramatically since the early- to mid-1990s, but prison populations have not. The average time served has been flat since the early 90s, and arrests for serious crimes have been flat or declining since the early 1980s. What has been increasing since the early-to-mid 1990s is the rate at which prosecutors file felony charges per arrest.
Link to one of this professor’s papers: http://tinyurl.com/zmjabut
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Add overzealous policing. Stop and frisk, broken windows , there is a lot of overtime pay in making arrests at the right time of a shift.. Incentive from the cop on the beat to the prison industrial complex . But think of the positive side ,if we didn’t destroy the lives relatively innocent people, what would the unemployment rate be, as Michelle Alexander pointed out. How many are also employed at those prisons.
Another Prilosec please .
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Professor Pfaff’s research (I swear, it is worth a read) also suggests that aggressive policing is not a significant factor in US incarceration rates. Because arrest rates have remained stable over time, for a long time. (And remember that one of the main criticisms of stop-and-frisk policies has been that arrest rates do not remotely track stops, thus indicating that police are making stops without reasonable suspicion of circumstances that could be the basis of a charge.)
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FLERP
DO YOU THINK THAT WOMEN ARE 14 times likelier to commit crimes than in 1970?
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I don’t know what has caused the jump in local jail incarceration rates for women versus men. It deserves study.
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of relatively
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FLERP!
NYC at the height ,1 million stop and frisks was a wide enough net that arrest rates did not have to be high to have significant impact .
Once there is an arrest record it does wonders for your employment options . In the underground economy not the real one .
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See Michael Moore’s movie Where Should We invade next? It talks about the prison system vs other countries and also the education system here and in other countries. Finland has the best educational system and does not give out homework.
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The drug war and the aggressive policing that goes with it have a lot to do with our ridiculously high incarceration rates. Decriminalizing most drugs and regulating them would help lower our prison rates tremendously. Isn’t is strange that so many people are in jail for selling marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc., but people who sell alcohol, tobacco, and opioid pankillers like Oxycontin are billiionaires? Isn’t America great?
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Jonathan Sackler owns the company that produces Oxycontin, the biggest of the toxic opioids. He is a billionaire. He is also a major funder of charters across the nation and in CT.
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There is evidence that drug laws have much less of an impact on US incarceration rates than conventional wisdom holds. The paper that I linked to above, by John Pfaff of Fordham Law School (not Fordham University, as I wrote above) is worth a read.
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Anyone interested in knowing more about the school to prison pipeline as it concerns girls of color should check out the book “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools” by Monique W. Morris.
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Once imprisoned, the convicted loses all rights under the constitution and becomes basically a slave. They may be forced to work building items such as furniture for pennies which is then sold for someone else’s profit.
They also need $$$$ to buy things at the commissary which family and friends must supply into their accounts. The more funds they have available, the more comfortable the stay.
And on release they get a pat on the back and told “See you soon” as they are out back on the streets or in a halfway house which contain the same environment which got them in trouble in the first place.
And if they can’t find a job due to their record and lack of education, they end up right back where they started.
Women must find it doubly difficult, especially if they are being manipulated by a family member or boyfriend/husband.
In some states, if convicted of a felony, they totally lose their right to vote. In other states, such as New York, they get that right back after their term is served and they’ve completed their parole. In the meantime, there is a whole population who have lost their say.
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14 times the incarceration rate for women??
Only in the USA!
It figures.
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Why does it figure?
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It’s the same thing that’s happening in our schools. No tolerance policies. Detention never happened for minor things such as a first time unsigned test in which the student got an A.. Now you get detention no matter the grade on the test. Everyone is treated equally.
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