Authored by Lizzie Hurst

As of 2013, “more than 2.2 million adults are incarcerated in federal and state prisons and county jails in the United States. With an incarceration rate of 743 adults per 100,000, the United States is the world leader in locking up its own citizens” (McCorkel, 6-7). Now in 2017, the number is close to 2.3 million (Wagner and Rabuy).

Figure 1. Breakdown of imprisoned individuals by jail type and crime.

The replacement of the penal welfarism with a ‘get tough’ mentality on crimes in the mid 1990s resulted in a criminal justice system revolving around race and gender. The new framework disregarded attempts of criminal rehabilitation and instilled a ‘three strikes’ legislation while cracking down on drug crime and expanding the use of the death penalty (McCorkel, 6). Maximum-security prisons with high surveillance became directed at controlling those deemed the ‘super predators’ of society (McCorkel, 7). As such, certain groups of society became targeted as the most crime pone, creating a system largely targeting certain racial and gender classes. Although more men are incarcerated than women, the rates of women incarceration has increased 587 from 1980 to 2011, which is around 1.5 times that of men in the same years (Caputi, 1131). People of color disproportionally are incarcerated, resulting in a system not only gendered but also inherently racist. As such, prisons became gendered and so did measures enacted towards male and female offenders. Male offenders were framed “as rational actors who committed crimes intentionally” while female offenders were seen as vulnerable to harmful men and making “bad” choices in relationships or actions (McCorkel, 10). Thus prisons needed to focus on changing the self for women (McCorkel, 10). Private companies that started to supply goods and services to government owned prisons exploited the increasing incarceration rates, leading to the creation of the term the “prison-industrial complex” (O’Sullivan, 403). The ‘get tough’ crime mentality created a system largely directly at African Americans or Latinos, and targeted African American women for drug crimes roughly three times as much as white women (O’Sullivan, 402).

Jail admissions and daily jail population per year from 2007-2014

Citations:

Caputi, Jane. “The Color Orange? Social Justice Issues in the First Season of Orange Is the New Black.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.6 (2015): 1130-1150. Print.

McCorkel, Jill A. Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Print.

O’Sullivan, Shannon. “Who is Always Already Criminalized? An Intersectional Analysis of Criminality on Orange Is the New Black.” Journal of American Culture 39.4 (2016): 401-412. Print.

Image Citation:

Wagner, Peter, and Bernadette Rabuy. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016.” Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016 | Prison Policy Initiative. Prison Policy Initiative, 14 Mar. 2017. Web. 30 Apr. 2017. <https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html>.