BJS Argumentative Analysis

The number of incarcerated women has grown significantly, increasing at a rate double to the rate of male incarceration since 1980 (Covington & Bloom, 2006). Braithwaite, Treadwell & Arriola note that incarcerated women have historically been a forgotten population, and despite the rapid growth of the population, their needs have continued to be ignored (2005). In addition to the stigma that comes with being or having been incarcerated, Braithwaite,

Women are twice as likely as men to avoid incarceration if convicted of a crime. Whether or not this is fair, though, is highly debated. Some politicians argue that women’s prisons be abolished all together, while Men’s Rights Activists push for equal sentencing for comparable crimes. It has been proven that judges tend to give women less time in prison, or no incarceration at all, and the reasons for this support the imbalance in sentencing. Though many view women’s tendency to receive lighter punishments as unfair, it is justified that women receive this treatment because of legal rules that surround the subject, the statistics that show women commit less serious and violent crimes, and how women being incarcerated impacts those around them.

The United States criminal justice system, an outwardly fair organization of integrity and justice, is a perfect example of a seemingly equal situation, which turns out to be anything but for women. The policies imposed in the criminal justice system affect men and women in extremely dissimilar manners. I plan to examine how gender intersects with the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. Gender plays a significant role in understanding who commits what types of crimes, why they do so, who is most often victimized, and how the criminal justice system responds to these victims and offenders. In order to understand the current state of women and the way in which gender relates to crime and criminal justice, it is first

On average, women make up about 7 percent of the total federal and state incarcerated population in the United States. This has increased since the 1980s due to stricter and more severe laws that focus on recreational drug use, a lack of community programs, and fewer treatment centers available for outpatients (Zaitow and Thomas, eds., 2003). According to the National Women's Law Centers, women prisoners report a higher than statistically normal history of domestic violence in their immediate past, and the fastest growing prison population with a disproportionate number of non-Whites forming over 60 percent of the population. In fact, over 30 percent of women in prison are serving sentences for murder involving a spouse or partner. The incarceration of women presents far different cultural and sociological issues than those of men issues with children, family, sexual politics and more (NWLC, 2012).

Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) suggests that the needs of incarcerated women have traditionally been ignored due to the tremendous percentages of incarcerated persons being men. While this may be true, women and men have issues that differ from one another and should be treated as separate issues. The physical and mental health needs, as Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) puts it, may be inferior than those of incarcerated men or women in the overall population. It is almost as if the problems of incarcerated women are undetectable or are seen as less important in the criminal justice

Since the mid 80’s, the number of women incarcerated has tripled.The majority of women incarcerated are unskilled, impoverished and disproportionately women of color. As a result, African American children are nine times more likely to have a parent in prison than a White child.

Throughout the years, the question of whether those who commit the same crime should receive the same sentence or not has created controversy because of the mandatory sentencing laws, though, in reality, no two crimes are exactly alike and neither are the circumstances of the people involved. For women, in particular, the issue of mandatory sentencing has increased the population of women in prison. In the March 3, 2017 issue of the Congressional Quarterly Researcher titled “Women in Prison: Should they be treated differently than men?” the author, Sarah Glazer, had an anecdote given by Ramona Brant that discussed the involvement of women in a crime where they were not selling drugs, is usually due to a relationship, which they received the

Today, “the number of girls and women doing time is utterly unprecedented in U.S. history. In 1977, there were just slightly more than 11,000 women in state or federal prison. By 2004, the number of women in prisons had increased by a breathtaking 757 percent. At the end of 2006, there were 203,100 women in jails, state and federal prisons, plus another 1,094,000 women on probation or parole, for a total of 1.3 million females under some form of correctional supervision. Another 15,000-20,000 girls are being held in juvenile detention.”(CDC 2016). While Euro-American women still outnumber any other demographic group in jails and prisons, African American women are four times more likely to be locked up than their Euro-American

Chapter 17 discusses female offenders, the major crimes they commit, and the issues that come with females in the prison population. Statistics show that the number of women incarcerated has grown rapidly and has only recently started to level off. Most of the women who end up incarcerated share common characteristics; usually unemployed, failure to complete high school, may be addicted to drugs (female inmates are more likely than males to be drug offenders), already have children and receive no help from the father, etc…

Assessing the consequences of our country’s soaring imprison rates has less to do with the question of guilt versus innocence than it does with the question of who among us truly deserves to go to prison and face the restrictive and sometimes brutally repressive conditions found there. We are adding more than one thousand prisoners to our prison and jail systems every single week. The number of women in prisons and jails has reached a sad new milestone. As women become entangled with the war on drugs, the number in prison has increased if not double the rate of incarceration for men. The impact of their incarceration devastates thousands of children, who lose their primary caregiver when Mom goes to prison.

The population rate in prisons have increased substantially over the past few decades but the most surprising aspect of this statistic is that there are more women that are incarcerated than ever before. Crimes that were mostly committed by the male gender have taken a surprising turn on it. It seems that rate of females prisoners have risen significantly over just the past decade.

It is shocking to see the increase of women that have been imprisoned. Looking at the table titled “number of female prisoners under the jurisdiction of State or Federal correction. In 2003 the percentage was 6.6%this is when the increase of women in Federal and State prison. In 2006 to 2008 the rate was at all-time high of 6.9%. (120) However by 2009 the rate decreased to 6.8%. According to the author Mexican and African American women experience a high incarceration. The “get tough” policies were to dissolve the illegal activities of drug dealers and big kingpins. This policy didn’t work 35.9% of women are serving time for drugs passion offenses in the prison system many women of color. I believe some of the women that are incarcerated for passion is because to a boyfriend manipulate the girl into doing illegal activity , also females enjoy material things and coming from a low income area females believe they have something to prove to others in their low income neighbor. Many of these females are from dysfunctional homes where there is a lot of physical abuse, drug abuse, sexual abuse and mental abuse. The author states there have been new technologies for determine drug use, such as a urine analysis, which can determine if the female parolee is in violation of her parole. According to the author this is the reason women are returning to prison for parole violation. The author also states one out of five women returned to prison on parole violation. According to the

The number of women incarcerated is growing at a rapid pace. This calls for a reevaluation of our correction institutions to deal with women’s involvement in crime. Increasing numbers of arrests for property crime and public order offenses are outpacing that of men. The “War on Drugs” has a big influence on why our prisons have become overcrowded in the last 25 years. Women are impacted more than ever because they are being convicted equally for drug and other offenses. Female criminal behavior has always been identified as minor compared to Male’s criminal behavior. Over the years women have made up only small part of the offender populations. There is still only a small

Statistics show that the number of female offenders in the legal system has been increasing steadily. The number of female offenders entering the American justice system is growing at a rate faster than males. Statistics from the United States in 2010 show the female offender population to be increasing by 2.7% each year, compared to the male population at a rate of 1.8% each year, with similar statistics being seen in other Western countries (West & Sabol, 2010). The continued increase has made understanding female offenders and their catalysts for committing crime more imperative.

The war on drugs has led to the increase of mass incarceration of people of color and minorities, which is a problem in the United States. The United States is known for holding more children and adults in jails, and