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Incarceration Of Women In Prison Essay

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For decades, there have been numerous conversations around the issue of the mass incarceration of men of color in the United States. These conversations and others revolving around prisons around the world do not take into consideration the stories of women. This essay will deviate from the current narratives on men and instead focus on the experiences of women in the prison systems and what the role of the intersectionality of their race, class and gender is. Furthermore, this essay will provide a comparative analysis of the United States and South African women’s prisons. The United States has the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Although this is not the case for South Africa, it has had a racial history similar to that of the …show more content…

The United States and South Africa have many similarities and differences in their constructions of race. Both are countries founded on the idea of White supremacy as the essential ideological anchor. In order to explain the constructions of race in each society, we must first understand what race is. Race is known as a large group of people bound together by a historically contingent and socially significant element. The two main theories of racial formation often used revolve around the ideas of social constructivism which states that race results from assigning culturally-specific sets of symbols and norms and that categorization results from the way humans interact with each other and other institutions and essentialism, which states that a naturally occurring trait or set of traits that can be biological or genetic defines a particular group of people. Essentialism is based on science and research. Both the United States and South Africa have used essentialist views on race to support slavery and different forms of colonialism and

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Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought.

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In the memoir Born a Crime Trevor Noah explains how race classifications worked in South Africa during apartheid. He describes the legal definition of a white person during apartheid as “completely arbitrary” (119). People were placed into racial categories on the basis that they may appear to be of a certain racial identity. He further explains the way the South African government determined the social hierarchy in writing, “If two white parents had a child and the government decided that child was too dark... the child could be classified as colored” (119). The simple complexion of a child could determine the entire trajectory of their life, as well as the lives of the parents, creating difficult and unethical family dynamics.

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Michelle alexander states in her book that “1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men” (61). The idea of incarceration, in this situation, mass incarceration is

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“there were in 2005 some 9 million prisoners in the world, more than two were being held in the United States.” More prisoners are in the United States, some have committed big crimes and some were locked for committing violent. The author describes that more black man are on prisons, some are high school dropouts and some are just working men. The author considers this issue as more than technical issue. The author connects the Nation of Jailers as his personal issue.

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Mr. Benham-Baker English 1 28 April 2023 Born a Crime/Synthesis Essay Introduction Starting in 1948 and ending in 1994, Apartheid was a policy of complete racial segregation in South Africa, allowing political and economic discrimination against non-white people (Burns). The government ruled by the white minority, or the Afrikaans, installed Apartheid to build an excellent standard of living within South Africa for the white minority, while the non-white majority struggled (“South Africa: Revolution”). From the first colonization of South Africa by Dutch Settlers in 1650 to the British capturing the colony for their empire in 1910, Apartheid was inspired by the white supremacist ideologies that first placed South Africa into white control (Noah

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Ultimately, the disparities of dehumanization among African Americans has allowed for inmates to experience increased violence. In the article Women, Girls, and Mass Incarceration, Michele

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Women get treated differently in a prison system, but they also experience their sentences differently too. For woman the facilities are smaller and further away from their love ones. This is in hope that the women will rehabilitated so they are not away anymore. In most cases woman are serving shorter sentences than men are for the same type of crime. This again is in hopes that the woman will change her ways so that she can go home to her children.

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• United States and South Africa have diverged so sharply, at least in their official commitments regarding racial equality, one can imagine a variety of ideological motives behind any comparison of the history of white supremacy in the two countries. • The contrast between the United

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Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

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The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with about 2.3 million people in prison. According to Vitanna.org’s statistics, an estimated one million of these prisoners are African American. 12.3 percent of the population is black, yet over 43 percent of America’s prisoners are black. This disparity is certainly unnatural, seeing as how African Americans are no more likely to be criminals than whites. Black men are overrepresented in prisons because of the unfortunately common stereotype that they are all remorseless criminals.

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Introduction According to Dowden & Andrews (1999), since 2010, there has been a growing concern over the increasing rate of incarceration for women: an alarming rate of 3.4 percent annually. Some experts like Kruttschnitt (2010) explain that the growth of incarcerated women population is due mainly to two major factors; one contributor to this phenomenon is the war on drugs. As politicians are passing more aggressive anti-drug policies and as police are cracking down on drug offenders, increasing amounts of women are being caught with illegal substances. The second reason is the the switch from indeterminate sentencing to determinate sentencing which is forcing women to stay in prison for longer than is necessary.

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1. Compare the increase in the females versus males in terms of the number under correctional supervision. a. According to the reading the number of female prisoners increased a significant 23 percent while the number of male prisoners increased 15 percent. Meaning that the population of male prisoners went from “1,246,234 to 1,438,602” and the females prisoners went from “85,044 to 104,604.”

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Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.

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This essay is an effort to discuss why matters or race and racism are more than just the attitudes and behaviours of individuals. I will be discussing what racism is and the different forms of racism and I will explain how racism is socially constructed, furthermore, I will give a brief discussion on the history of racism and also discuss some of the key concepts and perspectives to offer a sociological analysis of the complexities of politics of difference and identity, furthermore, I will show how this applies to schools in the South African context. Race is one of the traits that accompanies a person’s social identity, it contributes to the definition and formation of a person’s social identity. Race can be defined as a person’s physical characteristics such as skin, hair or eye colour, it is one of the factors used to differentiate and categorise people where people can be categorised as black,

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Critical Race Theory (CRT) in principle summarizes the fact that despite being widely criticized, racism is still a part of present day and modern society and may be important in the functioning of institutions and social practices. The CRT pursues to inspect, from a legal viewpoint, the conducts in which main origins of race (and to some extent, culture and identity) preserve relations of authority, oppression and injustice. In South Africa, the need of such a critical engagement with race and law is justified by a long history of institutionalised white supremacy and white racial privilege which today coexists with ongoing forms of anti-black racism and racial exclusion, because of our past of colonialism and apartheid. The CRT, however, argues that indeed there are many international

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