Among women problem drug users, 35% report major depressive episodes vs. 9% of other women. Women represent 43% of clients in methamphetamine treatment, 40% of clients in cocaine treatment, 34% of those in heroin treatment and 26% of those in marijuana treatment. Moreover, about 80% of Miracle’s women have some kind of mental illness. Nearly all of them have been victims of abuse, sexual, physical, emotional, much of it in childhood. Many women do not seek treatment for fear of losing custody of their children. Treatment is complicated by the need for child care, transportation and financial assistance.2
LaDonna Cissell’s story, noted at the beginning of this chaper, is not unlike many contemporary stories of women attempting to complete the difficult task of reentry.
Even a cursory examination of the hurdles that women typically encounter—both in prison and upon release—reveals the limitations of a penal system built to house male offenders. To the extent that policy makers have focused on prison programming or reentry planning, they have generally relegated issues faced by women to the margins. Women have entered prison with a wide range of problems and related needs but have been the beneficiaries of few meaningful interventions. At the point of release, it is not uncommon for women leaving prison suffering from disabilities to find out that their condition is often more acute due to a lack of focused attention. When we add to that common foundation a frequent lack of support to ease the transition back into their communities, it is no surprise that reentry for women has been as much a dismal failure as for their male counterparts.
A common misperception may begin to explain this phenomenon. Conventional wisdom suggests that criminal conduct of women constitutes such a small proportion of crimes that it need not garner much attention. Compared to men, women do represent a smaller percentage of individuals reentering communities from prison and jail. However, their numbers are rising at a much higher rate than those of men. This steady climb in the number of women offenders can be attributed to a host of factors. Some have suggested that women are engaging in increasingly more serious criminal conduct that more often exposes them to prison terms.3 Others counter that women have not become more criminally active; instead, they have simply been caught up in the fervor to sweep more people into the criminal justice system.4 A range of arrest policies for everything from domestic violence to drugs is one reason why more women are coming to the attention of criminal justice officials. Competing explanations aside, the number of women in U.S. prisons has “quintupled since 1980.”5
One phenomenon I have observed in the massive overincarceration of women in the last two decades is the casting of a wider law enforcement net. In my experience and observations, women have been incarcerated more often for nonviolent, drug-related or drug-involved crimes (i.e., crimes committed to obtain resources for drugs or allegedly done in concert with male offenders where the woman is marginally—if at all—involved in criminal conduct). From the law enforcement standpoint, arresting and charging these women offers prosecutors an improved chance to prove the case against other individuals charged in the case. By turning the woman into a cooperating witness, prosecutors strengthen their case against the more serious male offender. In the mind of many in law enforcement, these women deserve no special consideration. Those who have children are perceived as bad parents who should not be raising children. Consequently, there is no hesitation to plunge them into the criminal justice system.
The profile of the average woman in custody is a woman of color in her early thirties with more than one child under the age of eighteen. She is in custody on a drug or property offense and was unemployed or underemployed when she was sentenced. Of course, not all women in custody fit this profile. However, statistically, women are more often incarcerated for nonviolent property or drug crimes. Although some of these trends are beginning to shift, we need only look to some of the policy decisions made in the last two decades of the twentieth century to explore the reasons women are finding themselves in custody in unprecedented numbers.
A. The Impact on Women of More Retributive Criminal Justice Policies
It is ironic that the 1980s and the 1990s, periods of profound economic growth in this country, should also mark the most dramatic increase in imprisonment rates for women. This much-heralded economic boom principally benefited upper- and middle-class Americans with virtually no uplifting effect on economically subordinated communities. In 1993 approximately 16.9 percent of this country’s female population was living below the poverty line.6 In addition to the women below the poverty line, children did not fare well during this country’s bull market. Over eleven million children lived in poverty in the year 2000.7 The net effect of the boom was a widening gap between the wealthy and poor in this country.
The progress of women of color, in particular, in moving out of poverty lagged behind that of other population groups. The economic upsurge in America was fueled in part by a dramatic rise in high-tech and skilled work opportunities. Women of color did not typically benefit from increases in this sector of the economy. These women had not been trained for these jobs, so upward mobility was limited. The very nature of the tech boom meant a reduction in available unskilled jobs. Race and gender affect women’s ability to secure one of the limited number of unskilled jobs, resulting in unemployment and underemployment. This leads to loss of earnings, which can exacerbate feelings of insecurity when a woman cannot provide for herself and her family.
At the same time that women of color were finding less success in the job market, they were more frequently coming to the attention of the criminal justice system. During the ten-year period after the passage of mandatory drug-sentencing laws, the number of women in prison rose by 888 percent.8 Previously, women who faced incarceration had been those involved in what were described as “gendered” crimes: assaulting or killing an abusive partner, robbing a client during prostitution, engaging in violent offenses as a “lookout” or other minor player. In contrast, during the 1980s and 1990s, women—and particularly women of color—faced sentences of incarceration for a wide range of drug-related crimes.
Between 1986 and 1991, this country witnessed an exponential rise in the number of women in prisons for these offenses. The number of African American women incarcerated for drug-related crimes rose 828 percent, far exceeding the increase for White women, which was 241 percent.9 The number of Latinas in prison for drug crimes rose 328 percent.10 Two-thirds of women parolees are now women of color, with close to half having been imprisoned following drug convictions. Prison classification instruments identify the overwhelming majority of female inmates as low-risk inmates, and yet they often endure lengthy prison sentences.
The principal criminal justice policy that led to unprecedented numbers of women being locked away was the War on Drugs. The strategies used to wage this war represented a fundamental shift in law enforcement policy. The rise of potent forms of cocaine was perceived by many as contributing to increased addiction and corresponding social disorder. Later, the advent of crack cocaine and the violence that often attended the fierce competition for profits in the drug trade sent shock waves through the general public. Increasingly, the public clamored for policies that would restore order and remove the problem from sight. Police departments , armed with this mandate, deployed a wide range of forces to attack and shut down open-air drug markets located principally in inner-city neighborhoods. Massive arrests took place, sweeping large numbers of drug users and low-level drug sellers into the justice system.
Although much of this activity was confined to poorer neighborhoods in the nation’s central cities, media attention escalated the public’s fear of rampant violence around every corner. When the average White American raised questions about the causes of the rise in crime in the nation, news coverage provided a ready, if not entirely accurate, answer. The violence associated with open-air drug markets involved young Black men, and the media was able to put a face on crime for much of America. More often than not, that face was of a young man of color. The baggy pants, jewelry, and pagers became the trademarks of this younger generation. However, rather than being perceived as manifestations of teenage rebellion, these differently clad young men became the image of danger
