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Incarceration Of Women In Prison Essay

640 Words3 Pages

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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