Prisoners of war: black female incarceration at the end of the 1980s.

• Date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Rolison, Garry L.,Bates, Kristin A.,Poole, Mary Jo,Jacob, Michelle
• Published date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Rolison, Garry L.

IN THE WORDS OF THE U.S. BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, THE PAST TWO DECADES have witnessed an "incredible increase in incarceration rates..." (Chaiken, 2000: 5). As Chaiken notes, the incarceration rate has "more than quadrupled" since 1975. Even more striking is that this rate is distributed disproportionately so that the black population, Which is approximately 12% of the general population in the United States, represents 50 to 60% of those incarcerated individuals. This trend results from multiple factors, including the War on Drugs, differential sentencing for types of cocaine, harsher laws like three-strikes and mandatory sentencing, an increased number of law enforcement agents, and inequitable access to legal representation due to economic disparities. Accompanying these changes has been a shift to a highly racialized public discourse that has attempted to justify the above changes in incarceration. As del Olmo (1991: 12) noted, the "various discourses erected around drugs have allowed the creation of stereotypes--the best expression of informal social control--so necessary to legitimating formal social...control." Similarly, Bhavnani and Davis (1997:7) contend that the symbiotic discourses of the welfare mother, the immigrant, and the "criminal" create a "retrograde racial politics" and present a danger to democratic possibilities for the future.

Following del Olmo and Bhavnani and Davis, we argue that race is central to any attempt to understand the increased rates of incarceration in the United States that started in the 1980s. To do this, we offer a statistical analysis of black and white women who were incarcerated at yearend 1991. We are mindful that embedded in the statistics we analyze and present is a broad socio-historical context in which the influence of politics and the media is not directly accessible through statistical analysis.

Whence the New Prisoners?

A cursory examination of speeches by U.S. politicians and a glance at the U.S. media since the 1980s would lead us to believe that there has been an increase in criminal behavior over the past two decades. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that violent crimes and property crimes have decreased during this time (Chaiken, 2000). Indeed, only incarceration for drug-related crimes has increased. Thus, the crime "explosion" is best understood as the collective clink of prison cell doors due to a mythical drug war initiated in the Reagan era.

Using the term "Second Reconstruction," Marable (1991) compares the post-Civil War Reconstruction period to the Reagan years. Like the First Reconstruction, this Second Reconstruction failed to achieve racial equality and thus failed blacks. This' was due in part to "the loss of northern white support" and the "reemergence of the South's traditions of inequality and racial prejudice as the dominant theme of U.S. public policies vis-a-vis blacks" (Ibid.: 4). The loss of northern white support is reflected in government and corporate policies and decisions made during this period. In particular, federal taxation policies benefited corporations, big business, and the wealthy, leaving a large part of the tax burden on the working class and poor (Ibid.: 207). This heightened the disparity in the distribution of wealth. As multinational corporations sought lower-wage labor markets lacking U.S. regulatory constrictions, urban industries that paid a decent living wage began to close. Wacquant and Wilson (1989) descr ibe a shift to low-paying service-sector jobs, which aggravated preexisting racial segregation in employment. As unemployment increased and the urban tax base eroded, people of color were effectively disenfranchised economically.

In this context, crack cocaine first appeared in the inner cities. Though its origin is uncertain, the impact of its appearance in communities of color differed from the impact powder cocaine had on the white community. Concurrently, the discourse on drug use shifted from the "medical-juridical model" of the 1960s (which defined drug consumers as ill and dealers as criminal) to a 1980s model that redefined the user as a "client and consumer of illegal substances" (del Olmo, 1991: 18,28). This discursive shift built public support for punishing drug offenses, as did media stories, culminating in the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 just before Election Day. It was a foundational justification for the rapid expansion of an increasingly punitive criminal justice system (Belenko. 1993:14).

The growing impoverishment of the black community was buried beneath the "cover story" of the "crack crisis" during the 1980s:

Cover stories cover or mask what they make invisible with an alternative presence; a presence that redirects our attention, that covers or makes absent what has to remain unseen if the seen is to function as the scene for a different drama.--Lubiano (1992: 324)

All three major television networks presented documentaries on crack. CBS's documentary, "48 Hours on Crack Street," was watched by 15 million viewers, "making it the most watched documentary in television history." Time magazine made crack an important cover story, describing the war on drugs as "America's Crusade" (Thomas et al., 1986; Rosenblatt, 1986). This informational "blitz" (Belenko, 1993:24) highlighted the horrors of this drug and intimately associated it with urban youth and gangs, particularly African-Americans and Latino males (Ibid.). Presented as a highly and rapidly addictive drug, the media warned that "drugs, especially crack, were destroying virtually every institution in American life--jobs, schools, families, national sovereignty, community, law enforcement, and business" (Reinarman and Levine, 1989: 118).

What About Women?

It has not gone unnoticed that the rise in the number of women imprisoned has actually been more rapid than that of men. Although the percentage of violent offenses committed by women has steadily decreased, there has been a significant increase in women prisoners (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999:7). In particular, between 1986 and 1991 the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) shows an unprecedented 75% increase in the number of women in state prisons (Ibid.). Between 1985 and 1997, the white female imprisonment rate (in jails and prisons) increased from 27 per 100,000 to 76 per 100,000, while the black female imprisonment rate increased from 183 per 100,000 to 491 per 100,000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). A more recent BJS "Special Report on Women Offenders" shows that in 1985, one of every 4,762 adult women was in jail and one of every 4,167 adult women was in prison (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999: 6). In 1999, these statistics showed a radical change: one of every 1,628 adult women was in jail and one of ever y 1,230 adult women was in prison. Overall, there has been a 48% increase in women per capita involved in the corrections system since 1990.

In 1986, 12% of women in state prisons were convicted of some type of drug offense, compared to an almost threefold increase in 1991 of 32.8% (Snell and Morton, 1994: 3). Current statistics indicate that 37% of women convicted of a felony in state courts in 1996 had been charged with a drug offense (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999: 6). Between 1990 and 1996, there was a 34% increase in drug trafficking convictions and a 41% increase in drug possession convictions. Owen and Bloom (1995) argue that this increase is an outcome of mandatory sentencing for low-level drug offenders. For women prisoners, they state, "substance abuse acts as a...