On Wednesday, Jan. 21, Dr. Jill McCorkel gave a lecture titled, “From Good Girls to ‘Real’ Criminals: Dissecting the Market Logic and Racial Politics of Incarcerati” in Gibble Auditorium in the MLK Celebration Week lecture series. She is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Villanova University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, her lecture topic was how mass incarceration has impacted women’s lives, how prison privatization has changed the political landscape and what the implications are of our current rate of incarceration.
The U.S. is five percent of the population, but holds 25 percent of the world’s prisons. The U.S. has the most prisoners in the world and is incarcerating its population at the highest rate. China and Russia are ranked at a distant second and third. Our incarceration rate is 500 per 100,000 of the national population. It is a rate historically and globally unprecedented. It is which is a higher rate than during the Apartheid in South Africa and the Great Purge during Soviet Russia.
Mass incarceration started with drug war of the 1980s. States were under pressure from the federal government to comply with harsher punishment for drug crimes. If they failed to comply, their federal funding would have been taken away. However, the crimes were focused on the weight of the drugs, not their involvement in the drug process. This meant that there was a broadening of those implicated in drug crimes. People who could’ve unknowingly taken the drug money could face harsh legal proceedings. If there is a connection to the drugs or the money, the person can be punished.
McCorkel told a story of a women she met when she researched women’s prisons. She gives the story of a grandmother, an active church-going woman raising her grandchildren. Her grandson was busted for selling weed, but since he lived in his grandmother’s house and paid her rent with drug money, they convicted the grandmother of drug trafficking. However, she had no idea her grandson was selling drugs.
There is also a problem with the way law enforcement bolster their forces because it is predominantly in Hispanic and black impoverished neighborhoods. However, caucasians use drugs at a much higher rate in all categories of drugs, but it is not reflected in our incarceration statistics.
Before mass incarceration in the mid-1980s, there were 300,000 citizens in state and federal facilities, which was considered a high population. By 2012, the statistic rose to 1.57 million. In addition to the number in federal and state prison and under parole, the number is 7 million. In the mid-1980s, there were 13,000 women in prison, and now there are 113,000. There hasn’t been a significant increase in crime, despite the higher numbers. The rate at which we incarcerate is higher, and the punishments for drug-related offenses have become harsher. The drug war tripled the amount of arrests.
In addition to the higher population in prison, one of the elements of mass incarceration which is the rate at which we incarcerate, which is the highest rate in the world. During the mid-1980s, there was one prison being built a week. It has increased despite African-American crime going down. The third element is the type of incarcerations, which have are harsher prison sentences. The fourth element is the kind of punishment within the American prison system. There has been a disappearance of rehabilitation programs and a greater use of 23 hour lockdown. This means that the incarcerated are being reintroduced to society with no rehabilitation, no education and no job training, which mostly means that they will end up back in jail.
The status of women’s prison population has been mostly stable. Women in American prisons make up five percent of the total prison population. The ideology of women’s prison was based on a different foundation. The early 1900s viewed the women only as minor criminals. They were seen as wayward, and they needed to be rehabilitated through care.
However, the trend of women’s crime has changed. Punishment has gotten harsher. The most typical story of the women in jail is like the one woman McCorkel met who was in her early 20s. She had a history of sexual abuse and domestic violence. The men in her life convinced her to prostitute herself as a source of income. She started to sell drugs to her clients so she could raise enough money to leave the sex trade. Before the mass incarceration of the 1980s, she would’ve been rehabilitated and had to do community service.
McCorkel explained the works of the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim, who noticed that crime has been in all cultures and in all time periods. Crime is everywhere, so it must perform a social function, which is not to stop criminal behavior but to create social solidarity. The existence of crime makes society feel bounded together by out casting criminals.
However, in a society of race and class, it gets more pernicious. In women’s prisons, instead of the rhetoric of “getting tough,” there is resistance by the facility which is devoted to rehabilitation. The government is asking the prisons to get tough and buy tasers for the guards and have razor wire fences, but the prison facility doesn’t believe that it should operate like a men’s prison.
By virtue of the reaction crime gets, it gets punished. The ideal function of punishment is to stop people from participating in criminal activities, but that can’t be how it works in practice because the rate of crime continues to go up even when punishment is severe. There is, however, no relationship that shows a correlation between the rate of crime and punishment. Due to stricter sentencing laws, there is over-crowding in women’s prisons.
A private prison company found a way to profit from rehabilitation. Their ideology was that the incarcerated women are inherently damaged addicts whose addictions can only be managed, not cured. They are not victims of their circumstances; they are criminals that are fundamentally flawed. They must be built from the ground up and given a new identity. The private prison company repackaged rehabilitation as profitable because the prison system must manage criminals throughout their whole life.
The race issue made it easier to digest the harsher punishments in women. Introducing harsher treatments that mimic the trauma they’ve suffered throughout their lives was more palatable when the influx of women prisoners were black.
McCorkel gives an example of a woman who is considered the ideal inmate because she exemplified the progress of the private company’s methodology. She met up with the woman one year after her release and found life was still very difficult for her.
The woman worked three jobs and had to hire a nanny to take care of her child due to her busy schedule. Despite all of her hard work, she did not make enough money to support herself.
The woman recalls that when she hustled drugs, she had time for her child and could pay the bills. She thinks back to the treatment and thinks that maybe because she is fundamentally flawed. She thinks of herself as an addict despite the fact that she used to be a drug dealer, not a user. She also entertains the thought that maybe she should just give up and go back to her life in the drug hustle.
