Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology

The Intersections

Dragan Milovanovic, Martin D. Schwartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317298595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

These essays, first published in 1996, focus on class, race, and gender as organising and analytical concepts in criminology. For many years, their importance in studying how the world relates to crime and its control was minimized or ignored. It is clear, however, that these concepts are of critical importance in understanding societal issues, especially crime and societal responses to it. This title will be of interest to students of criminology.

Section II
Applications

Chapter 7
Sentencing Women to Prison: Equality Without Justice¹

Meda Chesney-Lind

As the number of people imprisoned in the U.S. continues to climb, we have achieved the dubious honor of having the second highest incarceration rate in the world—ing the newly formed Russian nation (Mauer, 1994). Along the way, America's love affair with prisons claimed some hidden victims—econo— marginalized women of color and their children.

During the nineteen eighties, the number of women imprisoned in the U.S. tripled. Now, on any given day, well over 90,000² women are locked up in American jails and prisons. Increases in the number of women incarcerated surpassed male rates of increase for every year except one during the last decade, and the first few years of this decade saw the numbers of women in prison continue to climb (though their rates of increase now roughly parallel those seen in the male populations). Between 1990 and 1992, for example, the number of women in prison increased by 14.6% and the number of women in jail jumped by 9.3 %. The starkest increases were seen at the federal level, where the number of women in prison jumped by 28 % in just two years (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 193a:2; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993b:4).

Building More Women’s Prisons

As a result of this surge in women's imprisonment, our country has gone on a building binge where women's prisons are concerned. Prison historian Nicole Hahn Rafter observes that between 1930 and 1950 roughly two or three prisons were built or created for women each decade. In the nineteen sixties, the pace of prison construction picked up slightly with seven units opening, largely in southern and western states. During the nineteen seventies, seventeen prisons opened, including units in states such as Rhode Island and Vermont which once relied on transferring women prisoners out of state. In the nineteen eighties, thirty-four women's units or prisons were established; this figure is ten times larger the figures for earlier decades (Rafter, 1990:181-2).

Trends in Women’s Crime

Was this the only response possible? Are we confronting a women's crime wave so serious that building new women's prisons is our only alternative? A look at the pattern of women's arrests provides little evidence of this. In 1983, there were 17,429 women in our nation's prisons. By 1992, that number had grown to 50,409, an increase of 189 percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1991b: 1). By contrast, total arrests of women (which might be seen as a measure of women's criminal activity) increased by only 41 percent during the period. Indeed, during the last two years of that period (1990 and 1992), years that saw women's jail and prison populations soar to new heights, the number of adult women arrested showed little change: the number of women arrested declined between 1990-1991 and increased by less than one percent between 1991-1992 (Federal Bureau of Investigation 1992: 222; Federal Bureau of Investigation 1993: 226).

Turning specifically to trends in the arrests of women for Part One offenses (including murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson)—these increased by 34 percent during the years between 1983 and 1992 (Federal Bureau of Investigation 1993: 224). Looking at these offenses differently, however, reveals a picture of stability rather than change over the past decade. Women's share of these arrests (as a proportion of all those arrested for this offense) rose from 21 percent to 22 percent between 1983 and 1992 —hardly anything to get excited about. Women's share of arrests for serious violent offenses moved from 10.8% to 12.3% during the same period displaying, if anything, the non-violence of women's offending (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993: 222). Clearly, dramatic increases in women's imprisonment cannot be laid at the door of radical changes in the volume and character of women's crime.

In fact, most of the increase in women's arrests is accounted for by more arrests of women for non-violent property offenses such as shoplifting, check forgery, welfare fraud, as well as for substance abuse offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol and, as we shall see later, drug offenses.

Characteristics of Women in Prison

The characteristics of women in U.S. prisons also suggest that changes in policy rather than women's crime explain what has happened. The American Correctional Association (ACA) recently conducted a national survey of imprisoned women in the U.S. and found that overwhelmingly they were young, economically marginalized, women of color (57 percent), and mothers of children (75 percent), although only a third were married at the time of the survey (American Correction Association 1990; see also Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994). About half of them ran away from home as youths, about a quarter of them had attempted suicide, and a sizable number had serious drug problems.

Over half of the women surveyed were victims of physical abuse and 36 percent had been sexually abused, and about one-third of the women in the ACA study never completed high school and a similar number quit because they were pregnant. Twenty-two percent had been unemployed in the three years before they went to prison. Just 29 percent had only one employer in that period.

Most of these women were first imprisoned for larceny-theft or drug offenses. At the time of the survey, they were serving time for drug offenses, murder, larceny-theft, and robbery. While some of these offenses sound serious they, like all behavior, are heavily gendered. Research indicates, for example, that of women convicted of murder or manslaughter, many had killed husbands or boyfriends who repeatedly and violently abused them. In New York, for example, of the women committed to the state's prisons for homicide in 1986, 49 percent had been the victims of abuse at some point in their lives and 59 percent of the women who killed someone close to them were being abused at the time of the offense. For half of the women committed for homicide, it was their first and only offense (Huling, 1991).

Women, Violent Crimes, and the War on Drugs

Another indication of that fact that women are not more serious offenders comes from statistics on the proportion of women in state prisons for violent offenses declined from 48.9 percent in 1979 to 32.2 percent in 1991 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994). In states like California, which have seen large increases in women's imprisonment, the decline is even sharper. In 1992, only 16 percent of the women admitted to California prison were being incarcerated for violent crimes, compared to 37.2 percent in 1982 (Bloom, Chesney-Lind, and Owen, 1994).

Other recent figures suggest that without any fanfare, the "war on drugs" has become a war on women, and it has clearly contributed to the explosion in women's prison populations. One out of three women in U.S. prisons in 1991 were doing time for drug offenses (up from one in 10 in 1979) (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988: 3; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1991; U.S. Department of Justice, 1994: 3). While the intent of get tough policies was to rid society of drug dealers and so-called king-pins, over a third (35.9 %) percent of the women serving time for drug offenses in the nation's prisons are serving time solely for "possession"(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988:3).³ The war on drugs, coupled with the development of new technologies for determining drug use (e.g. urinalysis), plays another less obvious role in increasing women's imprisonment. Many women parolees are being returning to prison for technical parole violations, because they fail to pass random drug tests; of the six thousand women incarcerated in California in 1993, approximately one-third (32%) were imprisoned due to parole violations. In Hawaii, 55 percent of the new admissions to the Women's Prison during a two-month period in 1991 were being returned to prison for parole violations (largely drug violations).⁴

Nowhere has the drug war taken a larger toll than on women sentenced in federal courts. In the federal system, the passage of harsh mandatory minimums for federal crimes coupled with new sentencing guidelines intended to "reduce race, class and other unwarranted disparities in sentencing males" (Raeder, 1993) have operated in ways that distinctly disadvantage women.⁵ They have also dramatically increased the number of women sentenced to federal institutions. In 1989, 44.5% of the women incarcerated in federal institutions were being held for drug offenses, only two years later, this was up to 68%.⁶ Twenty years ago, nearly two-thirds of the women convicted of federal felonies were granted probation, but in 1991 only 28% of women were given straight probation (Raeder, 1993: 31-32). Mean time to be served by drug offenders increased from 27 months in July 1984 to a startling 67 months in June 1990 (Raeder, 1993: 34). Taken together, these data explain why the number of women in federal institutions has skyrocketed since the late 1980s. In 1988, before fall implementation of sentencing guidelines, women comprised 6.5% of those in federal institutions in 1988; by 1992, this figure had jumped to 8 %. The number of women in federal institutions climbed by 97.4 % in the space of three years (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1989: 4; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993b: 4).

What about property offenses? Nearly 30 percent of the women in state prisons are doing time for these offenses. California, again, gives us a closer look: over a third (34.1%) of women in California state prisons were incarcerated for property offenses of which "petty theft with a prior offense" is the most common offense. This generally includes shoplifting and other minor theft. One woman in ten in California prisons is doing time for petty theft. Taken together, this means that one woman in four is incarcerated in California for either simple drug possession and petty theft with a prior.

Getting Tough on Women’s Crime

Data on the characteristics of women in prison as well as an examination of trends in women's arrests suggest that factors other than a shift in the nature of women's crime are involved in the dramatic increases in women's imprisonment. Simply put, it appears that the criminal justice system now seems more willing to incarcerate women.

What exactly has happened in the last decade? While explanations are necessarily speculative, some reasonable suggestions can be advanced. First, it appears that mandatory sentencing for particular offenses at both state and federal levels has affected women's incarceration, particularly in the area of drug offenses. Sentencing "reform," especially the development of sentencing guidelines, also has been a problem for women As noted earlier, in California this has resulted in increasing the number of prison sentences for women (Blumstein et al., 1983). Sentencing reform has created problems in part because these reforms address issues that have developed in the handling of male offenders and are now being applied to women offenders.⁷ Daly's (1991) review of this problem notes, for example, that federal sentencing guidelines ordinarily do not permit a defendant's employment or family ties/familial responsibilities to be used as a factor in sentencing. She notes that these guidelines probably were intended to reduce class and race disparities in sentencing, but their impact on women's sentencing was not considered.

Finally, the criminal justice system has simply become tougher at every level of decision-making. Langan notes that the chances of a prison sentence following arrest have risen for all types of offenses (not simply those typically targeted by mandatory sentencing programs) (Langan, 1991: 1569). Such a pattern is specifically relevant to women, since mandatory sentencing laws (with the exception of those regarding prostitution and drug offenses), typically have targeted predominantly male offenses such as sexual assault, murder, and weapons offenses. In essence, Langan's research confirms that the whole system is now "tougher" on all offenses, including those that women traditionally have committed.

A careful review of the evidence on the current surge in women's incarceration suggests that this explosion may have little to do with a major change in women's behavior. This stands in stark contrast to the earlier growth in women's imprisonment, particularly to the other great growth of women's incarceration at the turn of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the best way to place the current wave of women's imprisonment in perspective is to recall earlier approaches to women's incarceration. Historically, women prisoners were few in number and were, seemingly, an afterthought in a system devoted to the imprisonment of men. In fact, early women's facilities were often an outgrowth of men's prisons. In those early days, women inmates were seen as "more depraved" than their male counterparts because they are acting in contradiction to their whole "moral organization" (Rafter, 1990: 13).

The first large-scale and organized imprisonment of women occurred in the U.S. when many women's reformatories were established between 1870 and 1900. Women's imprisonment then was justified not because the women posed a public safety risk, but rather because women were seen to be in need of moral revision and protection. It is important to note, however, that the reformatory movement that resulted in the incarceration of large numbers of white working-class girls and women for largely non-criminal or deportment offenses did not extend to women of color. Instead, as Rafter has carefully documented, African American women, particularly in the southern states, continued to be incarcerated in prisons where they were treated much like the male inmates. They not infrequently ended up on chain gangs and were not shielded from beatings if they did not keep up with the work (Rafter, 1990: 150-1). This racist legacy, the exclusion of black women from the "chivalry" accorded white women, should be kept in mind when the current explosion of women's prison populations is considered.

Indeed, the current trend in adult women's imprisonment seems to signal a return to the older approaches to women offenders: women are once again an afterthought in a correctional process that is punitive rather than corrective. Women also are no longer being accorded the benefits, however dubious, of the chivalry that characterized ea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Theoretical Perspectives
• II Applications
• Index