The topic of legal justice reform on this nation is at all times a difficulty that sparks main debate. Problematically, male-only representations of the legal justice system fall in need of informing the general public concerning the injury of girls’s incarceration, together with the neglect they face whereas behind bars.
The mass incarceration of girls suffers from race and class disparities. Regardless that 1 in 111 white girls stands a chance of imprisonment in her lifetime in the US, Latinas can anticipate 1 in 45; for Black girls the numbers are a lot worse: 1 in 18.
Drug offenses account for the 800 percent increase in the rate of women incarceration over the past 30 years. Nonetheless, it’s price mentioning that ladies’s drug use has not elevated throughout that point — solely their charges of incarceration. In reality, girls’s incarceration price for drug offenses now surpasses that of males. Statistically, Black girls are overrepresented.
We are able to look again so far as 1865 when white authorities imprisoned and denied citizenship rights to previously enslaved individuals. They overpoliced and over-punished Black girls then simply as they do at the moment. Black women make up only 13 percent of women in the country however signify 30 % of the ladies’s jail inhabitants and 44 % of girls in jail. But, with the little reporting that exists, this actuality is lacking from conversations about legal justice reform and mass incarceration.
By 1928, Southern states within the United States profited from a system known as convict leasing. It allowed personal corporations to lease prisoners with felony convictions from the state for a payment. The bulk affected have been Black girls. These convicted of felonies — usually ensuing from self-defense — have been put in jail, often for all times, and compelled to work.
I can’t assist however take into consideration Tanya McDowell, the mom from Bridgeport, Connecticut, convicted in 2012 of stealing an schooling by illegally enrolling her 6-year-old son at a college within the neighboring city of Norwalk, utilizing the babysitter’s handle, and given a five-year sentence. In distinction, Hollywood actress Felicity Huffman was sentenced to 14 days (solely served 11) behind bars for her function within the faculty admissions scandal, paying $15,000 to have her daughter’s SAT solutions corrected after the very fact.
You can not inform me their punishments are equal in any manner. Who would have thought {that a} mom wanting a greater schooling for her baby can be despatched to jail for 5 years?
The case of Erica Sheppard is a heartbreaking instance of when the system fails Black girls. She is a survivor or baby abuse and home violence. On the age of 19, she left a violent marriage and went to a battered girls’s shelter for assist, however they’d not maintain her. She known as the police for assist after her companion repeatedly beat her and held a gun to her face. The police did nothing. She was coerced into taking part in a theft the place a person killed a girl within the course of. Throughout her trial, her lawyer did not current her previous traumas and the way they affected her psychological well being. She’s been on demise row for almost 30 years.
