Record Numbers of Incarcerated Mothers Bad News For Women, Children, Communities

It is well known that the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized country. And while it is true that the prison population is predominantly male, the number of female prisoners has risen more than 800 percent in the last three decades, outpacing the approximate 400 percent increase in the male prison population during the same time period. And according to the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice report "Hard Hit: The Growth in the Imprisonment of Women, 1977-2004," in 1977, the United States imprisoned ten out of every 100,000 women, while in 2004 that number had increased to 64 out of 100,000. And because women tend to be caretakers, particularly of children, the effect their incarceration often has on families can be disastrous.

The Roots of Mass Incarceration

"The rise of what we now know as mass incarceration happened on the heels of the civil rights movement and the various liberation movements in the U.S.," says Vikki Law, author of "Resistance Behind Bars: the Struggles of Incarcerated Women." Lower-income communities began to be policed more heavily as a way to prevent people from getting organized, says Law. The war on drugs had kicked into gear by 1982, which "wasn't focused across the board on everybody," says Law. "There were specific images, like the black mother on crack and crack babies."

Because women tend to be nonviolent offenders, a large factor in the increase has been the popularity of mandatory minimum drug laws, which were seen as a tough-on-crime measure during the war on drugs.

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