Some of the most neglected, misunderstood and unseen women in our society are those in our jails, prisons and community correctional facilities. While women's rate of incarceration has increased dramatically, tripling in the last decade, prisons have not kept pace with the growth of the number of women in prison; nor has the criminal justice system been redesigned to meet women's needs, which are often quite different from the needs of men.
There are many reasons for the growing numbers of women in the criminal justice system, but the primary one is the increase in drug-related convictions and the advent of mandatory sentences for these offenses. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, over 60% of the women in their custody are serving
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It states that when trying to treat women offenders for substance abuse problems, it can become very complex due to a number of barriers that the facility faces just to get the services for in prison and post-prison compared to male prisons. The rate in which offenders reoffended upon release from prison was different between each state and each treatment group. For example, in New York the offender-based substance abuse program showed that women in the treatment group had substantial decreases in reoffending in comparison with women who had partaken in other kinds of prison programs. A detailed study of women inmates were entered into a reviewing clinical study of substance abuse treatment for one year. Every one of the women who participated in this program had experienced either some type of abuse whether it was sexual, physical, or observing violence to traumatic events happening in their lives such as disasters or accidents. All of these reasons being the cause for effect as to why they suffer from substance abuse. Information was collected from the women being questioned about their past experiences with different forms of abuse and obtained through an Initial Trauma Review. after the time of the study over 70 % of the women had been victims again of sexual abuse, some …show more content…
Rehabilitation needs a positive atmosphere and subjects who want help to work. Nothing is 100% but this study showed that prisoners who took it serious and had the correct methods, took full advantage of the rehab. All of the inmates that participated in the substance abuse programs reported that they had found some aspects of the programs to be beneficial and most of them said that they had made a significant progress in addressing their substance abuse problems. A lot of the time inmates will enter a rehabilitation program just so that they can get some time reduced off from their sentence. If the rehabilitation program is relevant to the crime in which the inmate committed then the rehabilitation program will more than likely be successful. Previously, substance abuse treatment, research and recovery has been primarily based on the male prison population, more times than not ignoring the needs of women. While this neglect has a serious impact on women and treatment programs in the free world, the problem is magnified for women in the criminal justice population. Most female prisoners are poor, undereducated, unskilled, single mothers, and a disproportionate number of them are women of
For the past centuries, women have been fighting for their rights, from their right to vote to equal rights in the workplace. Women resistance is the act of opposing those in power, so women can have a voice in the world. Women in prison are often overlooked. In the 1970s, the women prisoners’ rights movement began, and it is still going on today. The number of incarcerated females is rapidly growing compared to men. According to Victoria Law, a prison rights activist, she stated that the percentage of female prisoners increased 108%. This struggle is significant because women in prison are being silenced; they are the most vulnerable people in our country (Siegal, 1998). Women prisoners have the highest rate of suicide because they are
Women are twice as likely as men to avoid incarceration if convicted of a crime. Whether or not this is fair, though, is highly debated. Some politicians argue that women’s prisons be abolished all together, while Men’s Rights Activists push for equal sentencing for comparable crimes. It has been proven that judges tend to give women less time in prison, or no incarceration at all, and the reasons for this support the imbalance in sentencing. Though many view women’s tendency to receive lighter punishments as unfair, it is justified that women receive this treatment because of legal rules that surround the subject, the statistics that show women commit less serious and violent crimes, and how women being incarcerated impacts those around them.
The United States criminal justice system, an outwardly fair organization of integrity and justice, is a perfect example of a seemingly equal situation, which turns out to be anything but for women. The policies imposed in the criminal justice system affect men and women in extremely dissimilar manners. I plan to examine how gender intersects with the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. Gender plays a significant role in understanding who commits what types of crimes, why they do so, who is most often victimized, and how the criminal justice system responds to these victims and offenders. In order to understand the current state of women and the way in which gender relates to crime and criminal justice, it is first
With women being arrested at a higher rate than men, we have to look at how women are being treated in jails. “My research in local correctional facilities showed that women are often put into facilities where both males and females are held, but where females are isolated in one particular part of the jails”
Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) suggests that the needs of incarcerated women have traditionally been ignored due to the tremendous percentages of incarcerated persons being men. While this may be true, women and men have issues that differ from one another and should be treated as separate issues. The physical and mental health needs, as Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) puts it, may be inferior than those of incarcerated men or women in the overall population. It is almost as if the problems of incarcerated women are undetectable or are seen as less important in the criminal justice
Since the mid 80’s, the number of women incarcerated has tripled.The majority of women incarcerated are unskilled, impoverished and disproportionately women of color. As a result, African American children are nine times more likely to have a parent in prison than a White child.
Women have been fighting for equal rights for decades. And, as of a result of this, have gained many equal rights. But are those rights just supposed to disappear when a woman gets incarcerated, and at what price does it cost that woman, to get her rights back, or does she ever get them back? The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and with each year the percentage of women that make up that rate, are growing. According to Statistics on Women Offenders- 2015. (1997), “Since 2010, the female jail population has been the fastest growing correctional population, increasing by an average annual rate of 3.4 percent”. It also states that, in 2013, women made up 17% of the jail population, and 25% of probation population in the U.S. Not only have these numbers been steadily rising, but of those incarcerated, approximately 77% are likely to reoffend (p.1). This has risen quite a concern in society today. Why is there such a high chance that incarcerated women will likely reoffend? At a micro level, is it the fault of the woman? Or, a larger issue at the macro level, with society, laws, policies, and loss of the most basic rights that every citizen should be entitled to? According to Pinto, Rahman, & Williams. (2014), incarcerated women need help meeting individual needs when they are released, such as, reducing drug or alcohol use, finding a job, health issues, as well as help in dealing with the impact of
Prison or jail life can be difficult for people of all ages, genders and races. It is a place where offenders go to serve hard time because of the crimes they have committed. While prisons and jails have come a long ways in regards to treatment and facilities, certain types of offenders have different needs. Incarcerated women are offenders that need certain types of attention and programs that men simply have no need for. For example, a woman does not stop being a mother when she becomes incarcerated. Not all prisoners are the same and they should not be treated as such. It is not just having “programs” for certain aspects of incarceration. There needs to be specialized specifications that women’s detention centers need to take into account. Without proper a proper format to combat women recidivism, prison is just a time out and the offenders will just return to their previously way of life. This being said female detention centers are completely different than other institutions in the United States for a variety of reasons.
As of 2010, more than 1 million women are under the supervision of the Criminal Justice System, 112,793 of them being in prison (Beac, A, & Karberg,J,C). It is known that the United States has the highest incarceration of women. Numerous studies have shown that due to the “war on drugs”, the government policy changed on drug sentencing. Women are more likely to be in prison or jail for non-violent and low level drug related crimes compared to men. Especially poor women of color, bear a significant burden of this war.
According to Yamatiani and Spieldnes (2011) the biggest issues faced by women exiting incarceration were stable housing and long-term, legal employment. It was also noted that women suffer from issues such as sexual trauma and problems connecting with their children more often than their male counterparts (Bloom, Owen,
Assessing the consequences of our country’s soaring imprison rates has less to do with the question of guilt versus innocence than it does with the question of who among us truly deserves to go to prison and face the restrictive and sometimes brutally repressive conditions found there. We are adding more than one thousand prisoners to our prison and jail systems every single week. The number of women in prisons and jails has reached a sad new milestone. As women become entangled with the war on drugs, the number in prison has increased if not double the rate of incarceration for men. The impact of their incarceration devastates thousands of children, who lose their primary caregiver when Mom goes to prison.
Today’s incarceration population shows that a lot of inmates are minority or female. The female incarceration rate has slowly increased over the years. According to Schmalleger and Smykia (2015), some characteristics that are found in these inmates are: young, poor, low education, abuse, mental disorder (p. 222). Being young definitely has effects on a person especially when it comes to mentality. Younger people tend to make some bad decisions growing up, but that’s how we learn sometimes is from our mistakes. Being poor is rough especially if you have a family. When you are poor you will hit times where you will think about or do anything you can to provide for yourself and family. According to Alfred and Chlup (2009), drug use and selling
The number of women incarcerated is growing at a rapid pace. This calls for a reevaluation of our correction institutions to deal with women’s involvement in crime. Increasing numbers of arrests for property crime and public order offenses are outpacing that of men. The “War on Drugs” has a big influence on why our prisons have become overcrowded in the last 25 years. Women are impacted more than ever because they are being convicted equally for drug and other offenses. Female criminal behavior has always been identified as minor compared to Male’s criminal behavior. Over the years women have made up only small part of the offender populations. There is still only a small
Statistics show that the number of female offenders in the legal system has been increasing steadily. The number of female offenders entering the American justice system is growing at a rate faster than males. Statistics from the United States in 2010 show the female offender population to be increasing by 2.7% each year, compared to the male population at a rate of 1.8% each year, with similar statistics being seen in other Western countries (West & Sabol, 2010). The continued increase has made understanding female offenders and their catalysts for committing crime more imperative.
The pathway to crime is intricate, and for females it is no different. Females are likely to have patterns in common with males. Girls and women suffer rates of victimization and abuse at much higher rates than boys and men. The most recent survey of national correctional populations for example, established that half of the female jail inmates had been physically or sexually abused compared with fewer than1 in 5 of the male inmates (Kaeble, Glaze, tsoutis, & Minton, 2014).Female abuse occurs at excessive rates both before and after they reach adulthood. Females are most likely to suffer serious abuse as both girls and women. Women in the criminal justice system have