Essay On Female Incarceration

As Bloom and Steinhart (1993) noted, the number of women in United States jails and prions has tripled since the 1980’s. According to a report from The Sentencing Project (2012), there was a substantial increase in the number of women incarcerate, between 1980 to 2010 the incarceration rate for women increased by 646% compared to 494% for men. In light of the rapid growth in the female prison population, many have proposed theories to explain increase in the nation’s female jail and prison population. There is a general consensus that the increase in female incarceration rates is a result of adherence to harsh sentencing guidelines, for example, the use of mandatory minimums for drug offenses (Hanlon et al., 2007).
The increase in the United States female prison

towards the mass incarceration, especially of women, can have detrimental implications for the children of incarcerated mothers. Some studies suggest that the impact of a mother’s incarceration is often more harmful and results in greater disruption in a child’s life than a father’s incarceration. The degree to which maternal incarceration affects children is largely dependent on who the primary caregiver was prior to incarceration. For the majority of children, women are often the primary caregivers of their children. According to Bloom and Steinhart’s 1993 survey of mothers in jails and prisons, sixty-seven percent of women reported that they lived with their children and provided the sole means of family support prior to their incarceration. For this reason, children under the sole care of their mothers prior to their mothers are susceptible to attachment disturbance and other trauma related stress created by mother-child separation. The abrupt removal of the mother from the home poses problems for children, such as feelings of abandonment and residential instability, as well as for those who assume responsibility for children of incarcerated mothers (Greenberg,