Women and mass incarceration: A critique of capitalism

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“There are no criminals here at Rikers Island Correction Institution for Women (New York), only victims. Most of the women (over 95 percent) are [B]lack and Puerto Rican. Many were abused children. Most have been abused by men and all have been abused by ‘the system.’ … There are no big time gangsters here, no premeditated mass murderers, no god mothers. There are no big time dope dealers, no kidnappers, no Watergate women. There are virtually no women here charged with white collar crimes like embezzling and fraud. Most of the women have drug-related cases. Many are charged as accessories to crimes committed by men. The major crimes that women here are charged with are prostitution, pickpocketing, shop lifting, robbery and drugs. Women who have prostitution cases or who are doing “fine” time make up a substantial part of the short-term population. The women see stealing or hustling as necessary for the survival of themselves or their children because jobs are scarce and welfare is impossible to live on.”
— Assata Shakur

This country currently cages 2.3 million people, far more than anywhere else in the world or in history. Although the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population, it imprisons 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Almost 5 million additional people are under “correctional control” on probation or parole.

The imprisonment of women has historically been tied to the position of women in society. From convents to witch trials to reformatories to prisons, patriarchal relationships have dictated the social control of women. Today, women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population. In the last 40 years, the number of incarcerated women has increased at twice the rate of incarcerated men.

Statistics reveal the profile of a typical woman behind bars in the United States. She is young, often a single mother, unemployed, without the resources of a formal education or a skilled trade, with a history of trauma or substance abuse, and serving time or awaiting sentencing for a property or drug-related offense. A key reason women are filling jails and prisons at twice the rate of men is because they are the hardest hit in their communities by the decades long assault on working people’s rights, the destruction of social welfare programs and deepening poverty.

A huge number of incarcerated women — 1 in 4 — are not even convicted of a crime. In local jails, 60 percent of women have not been convicted of a crime and are still awaiting trial. Women typically have lower incomes and a harder time affording bail, so they end up stuck in detention. A typical bail amounts to an average full year’s income. Like the majority of people imprisoned, most women should not be incarcerated at all.

Despite levels of violent crime decreasing over the past decades, harsher sentencing on nonviolent offenses has contributed to a rise in women being incarcerated. Additionally, the racist foundation of the punishment system is clearly reflected in the incarceration of women of color, especially Black, Latina and Native women, as compared to their percentage of the population. White women, however, are currently a fast-growing segment of the incarcerated population, which is likely due to the opioid epidemic and its destruction of poor rural communities.

Modern mass incarceration

Under capitalism, the prison system serves the same purpose for men and women alike, as an instrument of social control and order. Mass incarceration has a dual function for the system — to remove and cage the surplus population that the economy deems as disposable and repressing the segments of the population most likely to fight back. Policing is utilized to funnel poor and working people into penal institutions in pursuit of profits from the exploitation of prison labor and the privatizations of jails themselves.

The prison boom of the last 40 years has served the needs of the system as a control mechanism for a significant portion of the population for whom there are little-to-no employment opportunities, condemned to the margins and criminalized for it.


The deliberate policies of deindustrialization and globalization ushered in vast unemployment, low-wage service sector work and deepening poverty.

Accompanying this economic shift was an ideological shift in the orientation of ruling class elites to the problems of the poor and working classes. Rather than admit to flaws in the system and promote social programs like during the New Deal and Great Society, the emphasis turned towards blaming poor people and their “pathological” traits as an excuse to cut social programs.

A centerpiece of this ideological campaign was an assault on Black women on welfare, one of the hardest hit sectors of communities ravaged by the economic policies of their accusers.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan introduced “welfare queens” into the public conversation around poverty to delegitimize and gut social welfare programs. Reagan’s attacks sought to re-center the conversation, blaming Black women on welfare for the multiplying challenges in Black working class communities. In fact, it was the plundering, free market, global outsourcing for the cheapest labor policies loved by Reagan and his friends, which were the obvious cause of the problems in these neighborhoods. Funneling people from poor and oppressed communities into jails and prisons began as marijuana and cocaine became major new markets, and the “war on drugs” emerged as a vehicle for the capitalist class’ “law and order” response to social devastation from the economic restructuring. Mass incarceration’s impact on women is deeply rooted in both this general history of attacks on the working class, particularly brutal in oppressed communities, and the specific ways in which gender is criminalized.

Patriarchy and prisons

Women have historically constituted only around 5 percent of those incarcerated. Discipline and punishment of women was reserved for the domestic sphere, passed down with the legacy of patriarchy, where women were the property of fathers or husbands. Women who existed outside of that patriarchal relationship were seen as a threat. Looking at the early period of witch trials, widows and other women independent of men, particularly if they might inherit property, were more likely to be accused of witchcraft. As women became financially independent, they posed a threat to a social order where property was only to be transitioned from one male generation to the next. A woman’s sexuality also posed a threat to social control over a woman’s role in the home.

To this day, women who are seen as refusing to conform to societally-designated gender roles continue to be criminalized. Lesbian and bisexual women are eight times more likely to be in prison. Forty two percent of women in prison and 36 percent of women in jail identify as lesbian or bisexual, and nearly one in six trans people will spend time incarcerated.


Women’s crimes have often had a sexual or moral interpretation, rooted in the double standards of patriarchy. Nearly 1 in 3 incarcerated women have been detained for sex work or activity related to it. The factors in their cases are often largely inextricable from each other, a web of unemployment, drug addiction, victimization and trauma, untreated = mental health issues and other material and economic needs. When they are released, the circumstances that led to their incarceration have not changed. A recent investigation by the Guardian revealed a multibillion-dollar domestic sex trafficking industry which preys on formerly incarcerated women. Women leave prison with no support and fall right back into the hands of pimps and sex buyers and back in to the incarceration system itself.

The use of “lethal counterforce” by women has been documented in various studies as being linked to trauma from years of male abuse. After being victims of men who have battered them, the criminal justice system holds women to absurd standards of accountability. An act of self-defense against rape or domestic violence becomes criminalized and destroys the lives of these women, making them double victims of crimes defined by patriarchal rule.

Since the widespread closure of psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s, prisons have become a repository for the mentally ill from the working class. Women in the United States struggle with mental health at twice the rate of men and 68 percent of those incarcerated have a diagnosed history of mental illness. Behind bars, they are overmedicated and undertreated. As many as half of women inmates have experienced past trauma or abuse in their lives, and are then tragically transferred into captivity where the abuse continues by the state.

Once in prison, women have to endure male dominance, the intrusion of guards and denial of reproductive rights. Women lose all privacy in prison, and records show the pervasiveness of rape and other sexual assault, sexual extortion, and groping during body searches by prison guards, of which 70 percent are men. Guards will threaten women’s children and visitation rights as a means of control and silencing.

The demographics of imprisoned women shows how the prison system reflects the social consequences of capitalism. Sixty-one percent are imprisoned for property, drug or “public order” offenses — 64 percent when you add women incarcerated in immigration detention centers. Sixty percent of women in local jails are there only because they cannot afford bail.

The prison system, courts and policing have vastly expanded over the last 40 years. Shifts in the economy, primarily from a more industrialized to a primarily service sector economy, have affected great change in the composition and character of the U.S. working class. Since the late 1970s, the U.S. ruling class has been on the offensive, increasing repression and gutting social services. These factors have contributed to the expansion of the prison system and the increasing numbers of women in U.S. prisons. The truth behind why women are incarcerated in the United States is directly related to the deepening poverty of the working class, of which women bear the brunt.

The roots of oppression that women face within the many sectors of what is known as mass incarceration — from policing to the courts to conditions in prisons themselves and then parole — are directly tied to the function of the capitalist system itself. Women’s oppression is stripped down to its most brutal character within the prison-industrial complex. The systematic trauma imposed on women and girls by the system of mass incarceration, and the racist, sexist treatment of working women that makes them vulnerable to incarceration exposes the capitalist system for what it is — inhumane and unnecessary.

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