According to the text, more than one million women in the United States “are under some form of criminal justice supervision” (1). Females behind prison walls have outweighed men over the years since 1985. In regards to gender difference, 73% of women have returned to prisons on technical violations versus men. Additionally, capital punishment towards women is an example of how women are viewed in the justice system has changed over time. For example, “a total 167 death sentences have been imposed upon females offenders from 1973 through late-2010.” Women differ from men in that they tend to commit crimes that are non-violent such as property crimes and drug possession. Female inmates in modern prisons receive harsh treatment at times being
Wally Lamb's book "Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters," is a compilation of writings written by female convicts at York Correctional Institution. Lamb thought that by giving detained women a platform to express their stories and experiences, the book would raise awareness of the issues that they face. The book is significant, because it gives a voice to a group of individuals who are frequently excluded and overlooked. In this essay, I'll briefly summarize the book's objectives and analyze three topics that were presented in the text and discussed in class regarding women as criminals and victims. The book's objective is to provide female prisoners with a forum to discuss the events that led to their conviction.
Their bonds were set at amounts that were 54 percent lower than what men were required to pay. • Women were 58 percent less likely to be sentenced to prison. • For defendants who were sentenced to prison, there generally was no gender disparity in the length of the sentence. There were disparities in sentencing for some individual types of crime, however. For example, female defendants convicted of theft received longer prison sentences than male defendants convicted of theft.
It would be impossible to understand women’s imprisonment without looking back to its history. During the sixteenth century English jails were in awful conditions, there was no segregation of inmates. Men, women, children, the mentally ill, physically sick, the serious offenders and the petty offenders were all housed in the same place (Moynahan and Stuart, Pg. 4). Slavery and the Colonial Penal System were a period when America was being colonized; an era when not only the rules of religious and secular beliefs rule, but also of the rules of slavery. Blacks were being sold to slavery.
She acknowledges that living in prison is not an easy life and it can sometimes be brutal. She experiences women inmates be sexually abuse, be humiliated, and treated poorly by guards. The author
In this article Nagel discusses an era of “the new Jim Crow” where racism ad sexism is appernt in the United States jail system. Nagel uses statistics to show how the prison population is growing to be black women and more gilrs than there are men. Nagel disccuses ways inpoliticans look at racial discrepancy ehrn sentencing. Her end argument is that it is time to transform our jail and justice system so that a black and female life can be considered a human life in the United States. This academic journal article will help support my argument that most of the politicians use the fact that these immigrants or people of color are dangerous and need to be kept off the streets as a political campaign to keep the white minority “safe”.
My Year in A Women's Prison, a true story written by Piper Kerman, further verifies the true nature of incarceration and the nervousness that surrounds re-entry. As of 1980, the United States' state and federal prison population has propelled itself from 300,000 to 1.6 million (CITE 7). How could
Feminist criminology has been around since the late 1960's and started out centered on speculations brought upon traditional theories of crime. Most traditional theories didn't necessarily ignore women in the criminal justice system yet they generalized crime and what causes a person to turn to crime so that women who commit crimes are overlooked by the generalization. Not only are the numbers skewed when you look at gender in criminal justice offenders but there is also a certain bias in the criminal justice systems workers. In the movie Vera Drake there is a clear example of this when the investigator and the officer come into the movie. While watching you can easily assume that the female officer is treated and thought of much differently
Did you know that there are roughly 165,824,620 women currently alive in the United States as of this year, women make up about 50.6% of the population? But did you also know that there are 219,000 women locked up in our current Criminal Justice System? Where nationally, we lock up 8 times the amount of woman than we do men. That’s a lot of mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts locked up. Many of these woman that are currently incarcerated have at some point in their lives experienced some sort of mental, physical, and sexual abuse.
Women of color in prison are treated more unfairly than white women. Women in prison don’t have it easy obviously, but especially women of color. With many coming out with their stories of the racial discrimination treatment from prison staff vs white female prison inmate. Recently in the years the female population goes up as the increase of women of color. It may seem that it just so happen that women of color are treated more unfairly them white women in prison.
Patricia O 'Brien 's article on We should stop putting women in jail. For anything is not practical. The article title was misleading and the article focused on women should not be incarcerated for nonviolent crimes and getting rid of women 's prisons. The examination of women in U.S. prisons reveals that majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experiences and abuse from childhood to adulthood. She said the United States is a prison nation and have more than 1.5 million people incarcerated.
Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.
Women get treated differently in a prison system, but they also experience their sentences differently too. For woman the facilities are smaller and further away from their love ones. This is in hope that the women will rehabilitated so they are not away anymore. In most cases woman are serving shorter sentences than men are for the same type of crime. This again is in hopes that the woman will change her ways so that she can go home to her children.
(Moulds, 1978) This leads to women getting less harsh punishments than their male counterparts. So, one could argue that this need to protect women is actually hurting them, and society in general. When they are given lighter sentences, women learn that they can get away with more, because of the leniency they are given in the system. However, taking a step back and looking at the way media treats women vs men tells a very different story.
Angela Davis in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, argues for the overall abolishment of prisons. Amongst the significant claims that support Davis’ argument for abolition, the inadequacy of prison reforms stands out as the most compelling. Reform movements truthfully only seek to slightly improve prison conditions, however, reform protocols are eventually placed unevenly between women and men. Additionally, while some feminist women considered the crusade to implement separate prisons for women and men as progressive, this reform movement proved faulty as female convicts increasingly became sexually assaulted. Following the theme of ineffectiveness, the reform movement that advocated for a female approach to punishment only succeeded in strengthening
Consequently, there is evidence from studies that draw conclusions that there is gender bias in sentencing for both women and men. On the surface there appears to be a degree of preferential treatment or leniency in the criminal justice system. However, there are other factors that enshroud the whole aspect of biases that include class, race and the offence in question among others. There is need for the justice system to understand female offenders in order to be able to address it effectively and avoid the perpetual claims of bias which only signifies the