Whereas the U.S. is house to just 4% of the world’s feminine inhabitants, it accounted for 30% of the world’s incarcerated ladies in 2017. Black ladies are grossly overrepresented in that group, making up 29% of the nation’s incarcerated ladies regardless of comprising solely 13% of the nation’s feminine inhabitants.
Over the previous 4 many years, the inhabitants of incarcerated ladies has grown by over 800%. Whereas this rise is jarring, analysis exhibits it has little to do with any change in ladies’s conduct. Slightly, it’s a results of new insurance policies which have widened the web for what actions could be prosecuted—insurance policies that are likely to disproportionately goal ladies.
For instance, over 80% of women in jail are survivors of abuse and lots of incarcerated ladies have been criminalized because of defending themselves in opposition to these abusers. Whereas once in a while, tales like that of Cyntoia Brown or Marissa Alexander break via and enter into the nationwide discourse, their experiences are much more frequent than many could understand.
Whereas ladies, ladies, and gender-nonconforming individuals could comprise a smaller portion of the general incarcerated inhabitants, their experiences of deserve sustained consideration due to the distinctive methods they expertise correctional confinement and the precise harms they’re subjected to by advantage of their gender and sexuality.
Within the present public debate over the legal authorized system and its abolition, a query that usually comes up is how violence might be addressed in its absence. What this query fails to acknowledge, nevertheless, is how prisons, jails, and methods of policing really perpetuate hurt and function websites for gendered violence.
As soon as inside, younger ladies, ladies, and gender-nonconforming persons are subjected to completely different types of violence that compromise their bodily autonomy, their sexual company, and their bodily security.
Between 2009 and 2011, ladies made up solely 13% of individuals in jails however accounted for 67% of victims of staff-on-inmate sexual abuse. A 2011-2012 federal research discovered that 40% of transgender individuals in state and federal prisons reported a sexual assault inside the earlier 12 months. Along with this sexual abuse, violence can also be waged on the our bodies of incarcerated individuals in myriad different methods, from being shackled throughout childbirth to being overmedicated on psychiatric medicine with out their consent.
This series, “Incarceration as Gendered Violence,” will discover how prisons and jails operate as websites of violence for girls, ladies, gender-nonconforming and queer people, and look at the methods police, jail and jail employees, and political decision-makers enact that violence. The collection will even carry up the organizers and thinkers who’re bringing these points to the fore and creating avenues for much-needed change.
Tamar Sarai Davis is Prism’s legal justice employees reporter. Comply with her on Twitter @TheRealTamar.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit information outlet that facilities the individuals, locations and points presently underreported by our nationwide media. By our unique reporting, evaluation, and commentary, we problem dominant, poisonous narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to construct a full and correct file of what’s occurring in our democracy. Comply with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
