Content area
Full Text
Abstract
As welfare and prison reform shape public discourse about incarcerated women, there needs to be deeper conversations about sociohistorical, political, and economic causes of increased incarceration of Black women. In this paper, we present the characteristics of women offenders and explore the impacts of neoliberalism, poverty, and illiteracy on the increase of Black women's incarceration. Using critical race theory as a guiding framework, we present the argument that neoliberal welfare reform policies and crime control policies exacerbate illiteracy and poverty, thus contributing to women's criminal activities. We emphasize gender-responsive strategies when planning and implementing programs for low-income, low-literate, and incarcerated women.
"The huge expansion of the criminal justice system in the United States over the past thirty years has replaced social welfare programs with mass incarceration"
(Sturr, 2006).
According to Angela Davis (1998), imprisonment has been the response to the social problems confronting individuals caught in the cycle of poverty. As Davis further contends,
These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human being contending with them are relegated to cages (1998, para 1).
As of June 30, 2008, state and federal correctional systems had legal authority over 1,610,584 prisoners and 785,556 inmates were being held in local jails (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009). These figures represent an increase of 0.8% during the first six months in 2008 compared to 1.6% increase during the same period in 2007. Similarly, there was an increase of 0.7% in the local jail population during the same period in 2008 "accounting for the slowest growth in 27 years" (Bureau of Justice Statistics, p. 1). Since sixteen states actually reported a decline in the number of prisoners, the Bureau of Justice Statistics declared that the "growth in prison and jail populations is slowing" (2009, p. 1).
In a display of differing interpretations, during the same month the Bureau released its figures, an article entitled "U.S. Prison Population Explodes" (Hales, 2009) was published in Workers World. Hales' interpretation of the numbers was based on a Pew Center report that...