How the Rockefeller Drug Laws Harm Society ...
Women in Prison and its Effect on Families

[An overview summary January 2004]

In response to an alarming increase in the incarceration of women, the Women in Prison Project was created in 1991 with the goals of reducing New York State's use of incarceration as a response to the social and economic problems facing women; expanding gender-specific community-based alternatives to incarceration and drug treatment programs; ameliorating the conditions of confinement for women prisoners; increasing rehabilitation and treatment programs in women's correctional facilities; expanding the scope and number of programs that assist women returning to their communities; and strengthening family and community ties both during women's incarceration and upon their release.

The number of women incarcerated has more than tripled in the last fifteen years. The New York State criminal justice system as a whole supervises over 42,000 women on probation, parole, or confined in prison.

The majority of women prisoners are survivors of domestic violence and/or childhood physical and sexual abuse. Many are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or suffer from serious health problems or depression. Although women prisoners typically have greater needs than male prisoners, they remain the most neglected and overlooked population in our prison system.

New York State Data (March 2002)
3,133 women were incarcerated in New York State prisons as of January 1, 2002- 4.6%
of New York State's total prison population.
New York State has the fourth largest female prison population in the nation, exceeded
only by Texas, California and Florida.
80% of women who entered New York State prisons in 2000 were convicted of non-
violent drug or property offenses.
As of January 1, 2001, 53% of women confined in New York State prisons were African
American, 27% were Latina, and 19% were white.
As of January 1, 2002, 89% of women under custody for a drug offense were women of
color: 54% were African-American and 35% percent were Latina.
In 2000, 76% of New York State women prisoners reported that they are mothers of over
6,000 children. 70% of incarcerated mothers lived with and cared for their children prior
to their imprisonment.

The Rate of Increase in Female Incarceration Is Amplified In New York State Between 1977 and 2001

The population of imprisoned women in New York State grew by 511% compared to 253% for men.

Before the female incarceration rate began to decline in 1996, to levels closer to those of the early 1990s, the population of women in NYS prisons had increased by 628%. The rate of growth for women was two times higher than the rate for men.

In 1977 there were 37 men for every woman in New York prisons, compared to a rate of 20 to 1 in 2001.

Discussion

More than $54 billion is spent annually on prisons in the United States, much of directed toward incarcerating people for non-violent drug offenses with little or no hope of access to rehabilitation services. Many would argue that the nation's dependence on mass incarceration reflects an approach to imprisonment that actually sacrifices public safety. They contend that the appropriate strategy to address this situation is to reallocate funding throughout the U.S. criminal-justice system toward education, housing, health care, and jobs-all priority areas that can directly influence crime rates.

The growth of the female prison population corresponds directly to the mandatory minimum sentencing laws in effect since the early 1970s. Since more women are convicted for non-violent, drug - related crimes than for any other, these sentencing policies have had a particularly profound effect on women.

New York State's Rockefeller Drug Laws are among the harshest of these sentencing schemes and have contributed to a 277% increase in incarceration for drug felons.

The majority of women in prisons are mothers. Because women typically are the primary caretakers of children, the increase in female incarceration has significant consequences for children, families and neighborhoods. Once incarcerated, a woman is at increased risk of losing her children to the foster care system, and possibly even of having her parental rights terminated.

However, this usually does not translate into greater stability and well-being for the children. Children of prisoners are at great risk of instability, trauma and interrupted development. Furthermore, in communities with a large percentage of incarcerated men, women are often the central providers of financial, social, and emotional resources.

When women are incarcerated, support networks in already disadvantaged neighborhoods are further compromised. The dramatic increase in female incarceration means that the demands on the corrections system have far outpaced its ability to provide necessary supportive services for women.

For example, women require different health care services than have been traditionally administered in prison. Many women enter prison pregnant and/ or in need of treatment for reproductive health problems. Current gynecological services are inadequate to meet this need.

Psychological counseling services also are in short supply, yet a substantial number of women in prison have suffered physical and/or sexual abuse Finally, since a significant number of women in prison report having regularly used drugs before their arrest, treatment services are needed so that they are better able to reenter society without returning to substance abuse.

Solving the Problem

Incarceration does not solve the problems associated with drug use and trafficking in poor communities. Instead, treatment, social service provision and increased economic opportunity are needed in areas ravaged by the loss of an economic base, service cuts, and social and political disenfranchisement.

Preventive education and treatment are far more cost effective than arrest and imprisonment. In Arizona taxpayers saved 2.6 million dollars in the first year after legislation passed mandating drug treatment instead of prison for non-violent drug offenders.

New York would benefit from such an initiative. Currently, each year we spend $32,000 per prisoner in our upstate prisons, and about $68,000 per bed in the New York City jail system. This represents a total of $860 million a year to operate its jail system. Sensible sentencing reform, a greater investment in Alternatives to Incarceration, and a reevaluation of how we punish female offenders would begin to stem the tide of women into prisons and jails.

A consensus is growing that drug treatment for female offenders must incorporate gender sensitive approaches. It is rooted in a progressive acceptance of the view that women often have distinctive paths of social and moral development. We also have a greater knowledge about the violence and trauma that characterizes women offenders' lives.

Consequently, gender specific programs for women promote a holistic view that treats addiction as a "complex disorder imbedded in both the individual and society". Most importantly, these programs are sensitive to the high prevalence of sexual abuse and violence in women's lives; address women's elevated risks for HIV/AIDs; and attend to the complex ways in which children and parental responsibilities influence treatment success.

Treatment approaches that stress confrontation and shaming, for example, are especially problematic for individuals when shame and trauma play an integral role in drug use; indeed, they may even cause more harm.

Women drug addicts in the criminal justice system, have experienced uncommon levels of personal violence, both physical and sexual, in most cases originating in childhood and continuing into their adult years. By the time they reached incarceration and treatment, drugging had become part of their daily lives, serving variously as a means to respond to the pain of poverty and violence, as a means of economic support, and as an integral part of their relationships with partners and peers.

Programs that provide an opportunity for women to retrace and understand their history, through methods that emphasize empowerment and peer support, can and do allow women with long drug and criminal histories to change their lives. The notion that confrontational program models that focus on "breaking down the addict" are not likely to be useful for lives that have been sorely broken. Instead, a method of treatment that focuses on healing, mending, and rebuilding has much to offer women battling drug addiction and the chronic trauma, neglect, and shame that so often coincides.

The Case for Ending Minimum Mandatory Sentences
Justice Anthony Kennedy Aug. 9, 2003
(Excerpts from an address to the American Bar Association)

Even those of us who have specific professional responsibilities for the criminal justice system can be neglectful when it comes to the subject of corrections. The focus of the legal profession, perhaps even the obsessive focus, has been on the process for determining guilt or innocence. When the prisoner is taken way, our attention turns to the next case. When the door is locked against the prisoner, we do not think about what is behind it.

We have a greater responsibility. As a profession, and as a people, we should know what happens after the prisoner is taken away. To be sure the prisoner has violated the social contract; to be sure he must be punished to vindicate the law, to acknowledge the suffering of the victim, and to deter future crimes. Still, the prisoner is a person; still, he or she is part of the family of humankind.

Were we to enter the hidden world of punishment, we should be startled by what we see. Consider its remarkable scale. The nationwide inmate population today is about 2.1 million people. In California, (where this address took place) this State alone keeps over 160,000 persons behind bars. In countries such as England, Italy, France and Germany, the incarceration rate is about 1 in 1,000 persons. In the United States it is about 1 in 143.

We must confront another reality. Nationwide, more than 40% of the prison population consists of African-American inmates. About 10% of African-American men in their mid-to-late 20s are behind bars. In some cities more than 50% of young African-American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system.

While economic costs, defined in simple dollar terms, are secondary to human costs, they do illustrate the scale of the criminal justice system. The cost of housing, feeding and caring for the inmate population in the United States is over 40 billion dollars per year. In the State of California alone, the cost of maintaining each inmate in the correctional system is about $26,000 per year. And despite the high expenditures in prison, there remain urgent, unmet needs in the prison system.

Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.

I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences. In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise and unjust.

Professor James Whitman considers some of these matters in his recent book Harsh Justice concludes that the goal of the American corrections system is to degrade and demean the prisoner. That is a grave and serious charge. A purpose to degrade or demean individuals is not acceptable in a society founded on respect for the inalienable rights of the people. No public official should echo the sentiments of the Arizona sheriff who once said with great pride that he "runs a very bad jail."

It is no defense if our current prison system is more the product of neglect than of purpose. Out of sight, out of mind is an unacceptable excuse for a prison system that incarcerates over two million human beings in the United States.

A decent and free society, founded in respect for the individual, ought not to run a system with a sign at the entrance for inmates saying, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

References:
1. The Center for Community Alternatives (CCA)
"Arriving, Connecting, Feeling: Themes from a Women's Treatment Program for Felony Offenders", Kathryn A. Sowards, Ph.D., Marsha Weissman, M.P.A. Justice Strategies Working Paper, August 2003
2. The Women in Prison Project of the Correctional Association of New York
3. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
4. Speech at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting, August 2003
5. Women's Prison Association & Home, Inc.(WPA)
6. Ideas for an Open Society: Justice Reinvestment - To Invest in Public Safety by Reallocating Justice Dollars to Refinance Education, Housing, Healthcare, and Jobs, November 2003

 

Back to Top

Return to Position Papers