Women and the prison industrial complex
by Val Codd
Off Our Backs, Feb 2001
The U.S. war on drugs has become a war on women, specifically women of
color. According to a Department of Justice Report, since federal drug laws
ushered in mandatory sentencing in 1986, the incarceration rate for women
has increased 400 percent, and the figure for black women is 800 percent.
While the current rate of imprisonment for black women is more than eight
times that for white women, the rate for Latina women is four times that
for white women, according to Amnesty International.
The disempowerment of women bred by physical, sexual, and psychological
abuse, including impoverishment, is highly correlated with women's criminal
activity, including drug use, and subsequent imprisonment. Women are charged
most often with the types of "petty" crimes that mark efforts for daily survival.
In addition, women charged with drug crimes are often not the major players
in the drug trade. Such male "kingpins" enjoy a lot more slack in the criminal
justice system, due to their ability to trade information for reduced sentences.
Very little drug treatment is available for women in prison, and the programs
that are offered are often modeled around a male user, including a lack
of childcare provision.
A study conducted by the Drug Policy Research Center of the California-based
RAND corporation found that if $1 million spent on delivering long, mandatory
sentences was used to treat drug addicts, cocaine sue could be cut by over
100 kilos. This finding reveals the actual usefulness of imprisoning those
accused of drug-related crimes.
More than two-thirds of women are in prison for non-violent crimes, and
the same percentage are mothers, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Pregnant women in prison receive little or inadequate prenatal care, and
Amnesty International has reported that women have been forced to give birth
in chains.
Although white women are more likely to use drugs during pregnancy, black
women who use drugs during pregnancy are more likely to be criminalized
by medical practitioners, and subsequently imprisoned for the duration of
pregnancy. The disproportionate incarceration of pregnant drug users represents
the continuation of patriarchal, racist criminalization of women's bodies,
and is indicative, too, of the overemphasis placed on the fetus by anti-reproductive
rights forces. In terms of cocaine use, it is actually lack of adequate prenatal
care, as opposed to the drug, that poses more of a danger to the fetus.
HIV+women in prison face horrid conditions. According to Blind Eye to Justice:
The HIV+Women Incarcerated in California, a film produced by the Women's
Positive Legal Action Network, while 400 male prisoners in California have
died from AIDS since 1985, no one knows how many female prisoners have died.
Prisoners, however, say countless numbers of women have died, with an average
of two to three deaths per day in a single prison in California. Healthcare
in prison is virtually nonexistent, with extreme delays in already inadequate
medical treatment. As identified in Blind Eye to Justice, a lack of trained
medical practitioners is one factor. In addition, correctional officers,
who women prisoners have identified as extremely prejudiced against and abusive
towards HIV+prisoners, are the first point of contact in accessing medical
care. As HIV+women in prison have said, the state of healthcare in prison
is reminiscent of a concentration camp.
Angela Davis is an activist around what she has termed the "prison industrial
complex." The prison industrial complex refers to the boom in federal contracting
to private companies for building and running prisons. In addition, contracting
for prison labor has become a cheap and highly exploitable source of production
for such companies as Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, and Chevron. The capitalist
system and the federal government's priorities fuel one another. While the
government does not benefit financially from such privatization, the federal
cut-backs in social programs that are happening at the same time point to
a racist and classiest move by the government to "disappear social problems,"
according to Davis.
As an interviewee noted in Blind Eye to Justice, all of the above conditions
around the imprisonment of women signify patriarchal, racist, and capitalist
oppression of women, and serve only to further punish women for suffering
under patriarchy.