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We need criminal justice reform now. It’s no secret that the incarceration rate in America has skyrocketed since the 1970’s. But did you know the number of women behind bars has grown nearly twice the rate of men in recent years?
Why are we locking up so many women? The War on Drugs has a lot to do with it. In the eighties, crack was the culprit. Thousands of African-American women were caught up in the system.
Many because the so-called “girlfriend” problem -where a women will take the brunt of the charges when she unknowingly
assisted a boy friend or relative committing a drug crime.
But even as prison sentences for crack became less harsh, the number of women prisoners kept rising between 1980 and 2010.
Why? The War on Drugs has a new found battlefield. Crackdowns on methamphetamines are ensnaring predominately white, rural women in much the same way.
Oklahoma, which has more meth labs than any other state also has the highest female incarceration rate, per capita, in the world.
Between 2000 and 2008, 34 percent of women prisoners were locked up for meth related offenses. Eighty percent are in for nonviolent offenses.
Prison terms can be destructive to anyone, but when you lock women up, it is especially harmful on families. One in ten women are pregnant while in prison, and these women get inadequate prenatal care.
More than 70% of incarcerated women in state prisons are also the primary caretakers of at least two minors, displacing millions of children into foster care or other unstable situations.
This helps perpetuate the cycle of crime, as children of incarcerated parents are 5 times more likely than their peers to commit crimes.
We have alternatives to incarceration. We can change our drug laws, and we can take into account the needs of children during sentencing.
We have options. We don’t have to put more women behind bars than any other country on Earth.
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
The post Why Are So Many Women in Prison? [Video] appeared first on The Good Men Project.
