Incarceration of women
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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This article discusses the incarceration of women in correctional facilities.
History
In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s. The first American female correctional facility with dedicated buildings and staff was the Mount Pleasant Female Prison in Ossining, New York; the facility had some operational dependence on nearby Sing Sing, a men's prison.
In most of the Western world, female prison guards exclusively guard female prisoners. Until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, this was true in the United States. Men usually worked in perimeter posts, such as gate posts, rather than having direct contact with female prisoners. Male employees previously had restricted positions. Both acts integrated the workforce, and after the acts passed male employees gained increasingly direct contact with female prisoners. As of 2007, about 40% of prison guards in American women's prisons are men. In some facilities, most of the prison guards are men: Silja Talvi, author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, argued that in theory gender equality makes sense in all occupations, but in practice having male guards watch over female prisoners is problematic.
At the end of 2001, in the United States 93,031 women were incarcerated in federal and state prisons, making up 6.6% of the total incarcerated population. Within the US, the rate of female incarceration increased fivefold in a two decade span ending in 2001; the increase occurred because of increased prosecutions and convictions of offenses related to recreational drugs, increases in the severity of offenses, and a lack of community sanctions and treatment for women who violate drug laws. Tough-on-crime legislation and legislation associated with the war on drugs have been connected to the increasing rate of the incarceration of women of color from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This rapid boom of female prisoners is something the primarily male-dominated prison system was not structurally prepared for and, as a result, female prisons often lack the resources to accommodate the specific social, mental, healthcare needs of these women.
