3) In Throwaway Moms: Maternal Incarceration and the Criminalization of Female Poverty, authors Suzanne Allen, Chris Flaherty, and Gretchen Ely specifically focus on mothers incarcerated for drug offenses. Furthermore, they discuss the negative effects incarceration has had on the relationships between mothers and their children. The article involves the interviews of 26 mothers incarcerated in a Kentucky prison in 2007. According to the authors, maternal incarceration is surrounded by a large number of issues and policies. This includes poverty, addiction, federal legislation, the War on Drugs, child welfare, and other financial issues that mothers in particular face (Allen, S., Flaherty, C., & Ely, G. 2010). The article explains that the majority of women involved in the prison system are poor single mothers. The same majority of poor single mothers are all serving sentences for nonviolent drug-offenses. This article as well as many others, place a significant amount of blame for the increasing prison population on the War on Drugs. The authors explain the correlation between poverty and the implication of mandatory drug sentencing laws. According to the article, it is clear how a domino-effect has developed following the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has had a dramatically negative …show more content…
The act was passed in response to the increasing number of children lingering in foster care. Unfortunately, the act mandates that parental rights be terminated if a child has been in out-of-home care for 15 of the prior 22 months (Allen, S., Flaherty, C., & Ely, G. 2010). According to the Women’s Prison Association, the average prison sentence of a woman is 18 months. The article clearly explains how the mandatory drug sentencing laws are quickly leading to the termination of incarcerated mother’s parental
This article describes the similarities and parallelism of the foster system to the prison systems and how they perpetuate and are influenced by each other. It describes how these systems commodify and dehumanize these human beings, especially women who receive long, severe sentences for minor offenses and are thus denied ability to parent their child from behind bars. This, thus, affects the child in the short and long term because these children are taken from their mothers by the state, often put into foster care, in which the state then refuses to take care of these motherless children. This then leads to social workers developing more aggressive and hostile tactics when dealing with these types of cases, because often the children must scavenge the streets in order to survive and become troubled by the social realities they face. The author then begins to discuss how the welfare system becomes heavily involved with these families, along with the stigmatizations government assistance is attached with. . It is unfortunate that this article only very briefly discusses pregnant, black incarcerated women, and the lack of prenatal care they are provided with during
Nowadays, females serve more time for drug offenses even though they are less likely to be involved in the drug trade (Van Wormer, Bartollas). The percent of women convicted and charged in state prisons were more likely than men to have been convicted of a drug crime was (59% vs. 40%) (Van Wormer, Bartollas). The amount ...
Kreager, Derek A., Ross L. Matsueda, and Elena A. Erosheva. 2010. “Motherhood and Criminal Desistance in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods.” Criminology 48:221-58.
Drug policies stemming from the War on Drugs are to blame, more specifically, the mandatory minimum sentencing mandates on petty drug charges that have imprisoned millions of non-violent offenders in the last three decades. Since this declaration of war, the percentage of drug arrests that result in prison sentences (rather than probation, dismissal, or community service) has quadrupled, resulting in an unprecedented prison-building boom (Wyler, 2014). There are three main reasons mandatory minimum sentencing laws must be reformed: (1) They impose unduly harsh punishments on relatively low level offenders, leading to the mass incarceration epidemic. (2) They have proven to be cost ineffective fiscally and in crime and drug use reduction. (3) They perpetuate a racially segregated criminal justice system that destroys communities and discourages trust
Although the actual number of pregnant women incarcerated in the United States is somewhat unclear, it is estimated that six to ten percent of the females sentenced to prison are pregnant when incarcerated. (Guerino et.al., 2011) The majority of female inmates that are sentenced to prison after felony convictions are s...
Kreager, Derek A., Ross L. Matsueda, and Elena A. Erosheva. 2010. “Motherhood and Criminal Desistance in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods.” Criminology 48:221–58.
In Breaking Women, Jill McCorkel reveals a systematic disempowerment of women that takes place within the penal system in the form of privately run drug treatment programs. McCorkel shares her findings by
In 2007 there were approximately 77,200 fathers and 65,600 mothers incarcerated in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). As our society continues to grow, our jail and prison population are growing as well. When a parent or guardian is taken into custody the juvenile (child) is taken and released to a relative or child protective services. The children are either given to a close family member or a surrogate parent, meaning a foster home. This may have an emotional impact on the juvenile involved, which may lead them to committing delinquent acts. The children sometimes feel they are left to fend for themselves emotionally and the stress of these emotions are left upon the guardian at the time. These intense sufferings sometimes leave the juveniles in a harmful mental state resembling depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and feelings of abandonment from their parents/guardians. Children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely than their peers to commit crimes (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2008).
Currently there are 80,000 drug offenders in federal prison, making up a little over 60 percent of the prisons’ population (Stewart 113-114). 94 percent of the drug offenders were sentenced under one of the four mandatory minimum statutes passed by Congress between 1984 and 1990 in an attempt to reduce drug use in the United States. Even further, it was in 1998 that “57 percent of drug defendants entering federal prison were first offenders, and 88 percent of them had no weapons.” On average, these 80,000 prisoners are sentenced to approximately 6 and ½ years in prison (Stewart 113-114). And it is due to the prohibition of mitigating circumstances that leads to these situations. The United States’ prisons are overcrowded. New York Times reported that despite the United States only is home to less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the country provides approximately one quarter of the world’s prisoners (Liptak). Yet some will insist that Todd must have been guilty in someway or another, or maybe he was simply an innocent who fell through the inevitable cracks in the system. On the contrary, that is the exact problem with mandatory sentencing, it’s setup allows people to not only slip through cracks, but to land face first and watch their life
When I was introduced to this dichotomy between the two sections, the readings for that week included Donziger’s “Women in the Criminal Justice System.” This article shed more light on why the women in the jail might be hostile toward my classmates by suggesting that a high portion of the women might be incarcerated because of non-violent offenses, and odds are that the majority of them are mothers who have been separated from their children. Donziger states that “78 percent of the women in prison have children”...
“The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, written by Amanda Coyne depicts the struggles of parents and family members with the emotional trauma children go through due to the absence of their loved one. The story tugs the heart strings of readers with its descriptive account of Mother’s Day in a minimum security federal prison. Coyne describes the human emotions and truly gives an accurate account of what being in a visitation room is like. “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison” makes the reader question the criminal justice system and convinces him or her to adjust their way of thinking towards the definition of criminalization through the logos, pathos, and ethos demonstrated throughout the text.
In her research Richie found that this kind of activity leaves these women ‘vulnerable to the long arm of the criminal justice system’ (Daly and Tonry, 1997) and this is reflected in the growing population of those who are incarcerated in the U.S. Richie finds that substance abuse tends to be misclassified as a crime problem when it could, in fact, be better understood as a matter of social injustice (Richie, 2011). This over-representation is also reflected by other marginalised groups, who similar to those women in Richie’s study are ‘under surveillance and control of the criminal legal system in this country’ (Mauer 1999; Spohn and Spears 2003) (Richie, 2011). The concept of social justice within criminology and criminal justice can be represented through certain groups and individuals. An example of this are individuals with a socially excluded background, so those within the lower and working class of society. The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) lists a number of problems amongst the causes of crime such as unemployment, debt, education etc. (Social Exclusion Unit,
The war on drugs has been going on for some time. The war on drugs refers to the government’s attempts to stop the circulation of drugs. This includes the production, selling, and transport of illegal drugs, in order to reduce drug abuse. This war has been going on since the 1900’s. The bureau of justice reported that fifty five percent of federal prisoners and twenty one percent of state level prisoners are incarcerated on the basis of drug related offenses( ). That amounts to about half a million people for scale that’s more people than live in Wyoming. The war on drugs has been going on for thirty years now. The war has made a significant impact on society, the economy and has made a lot of history gaining spotlight time along the
One in fifteen African American children have at least one parent in prison, resulting in higher high school dropout rates, higher poverty rates, and a greater likelihood that they will end up going to prison themselves. Incarcerating those suspected of having committed drug related crimes is financially incentivized by the government, with localities receiving upwards of 80% of the possessions of those who are imprisoned. It is also estimated that if the state decided to reduce the incarceration rates to pre-crime crusade levels that over a million jobs would be lost. On a whole, the issue of mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses feeds into the greater issue of wealth inequality within the African American
The challenges of children who grow up with parents whom were incarcerated at some point in their childhood can have a major effect on their life. The incarceration of parents can at times begin to affect the child even at birth. Now with prison nurseries the impregnated mother can keep her baby during her time in jail. With the loss of their parent the child can begin to develop behavioral problems with being obedient, temper tantrums, and the loss of simple social skills. Never learning to live in a society they are deprived of a normal social life. “The enormous increase incarceration led to a parallel, but far less documented, increase in the proportion of children who grew up with a parent incarcerated during their childhood” (Johnson 2007). This means the consequences of the children of the incarcerated parents receive no attention from the media, or academic research. The academic research done in this paper is to strengthen the research already worked by many other people. The impact of the parent’s incarceration on these children can at times be both positive and negative. The incarceration of a parent can be the upshot to the change of child’s everyday life, behavioral problems, and depriving them a normal social life.