Prisoners of war: black female incarceration at the end of the 1980s.

Rolison, Garry L. ; Bates, Kristin A. ; Poole, Mary Jo 等

IN THE WORDS OF THE U.S. BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, THE PAST TWO DECADES have witnessed an "incredible increase in incarceration rates..." (Chaiken, 2000: 5). As Chaiken notes, the incarceration rate has "more than quadrupled" since 1975. Even more striking is that this rate is distributed disproportionately so that the black population, Which is approximately 12% of the general population in the United States, represents 50 to 60% of those incarcerated individuals. This trend results from multiple factors, including the War on Drugs, differential sentencing for types of cocaine, harsher laws like three-strikes and mandatory sentencing, an increased number of law enforcement agents, and inequitable access to legal representation due to economic disparities. Accompanying these changes has been a shift to a highly racialized public discourse that has attempted to justify the above changes in incarceration. As del Olmo (1991: 12) noted, the "various discourses erected around drugs have allowed the creation of stereotypes--the best expression of informal social control--so necessary to legitimating formal social...control." Similarly, Bhavnani and Davis (1997:7) contend that the symbiotic discourses of the welfare mother, the immigrant, and the "criminal" create a "retrograde racial politics" and present a danger to democratic possibilities for the future.

Following del Olmo and Bhavnani and Davis, we argue that race is central to any attempt to understand the increased rates of incarceration in the United States that started in the 1980s. To do this, we offer a statistical analysis of black and white women who were incarcerated at yearend 1991. We are mindful that embedded in the statistics we analyze and present is a broad socio-historical context in which the influence of politics and the media is not directly accessible through statistical analysis.

Whence the New Prisoners?

A cursory examination of speeches by U.S. politicians and a glance at the U.S. media since the 1980s would lead us to believe that there has been an increase in criminal behavior over the past two decades. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that violent crimes and property crimes have decreased during this time (Chaiken, 2000). Indeed, only incarceration for drug-related crimes has increased. Thus, the crime "explosion" is best understood as the collective clink of prison cell doors due to a mythical drug war initiated in the Reagan era.

Using the term "Second Reconstruction," Marable (1991) compares the post-Civil War Reconstruction period to the Reagan years. Like the First Reconstruction, this Second Reconstruction failed to achieve racial equality and thus failed blacks. This' was due in part to "the loss of northern white support" and the "reemergence of the South's traditions of inequality and racial prejudice as the dominant theme of U.S. public policies vis-a-vis blacks" (Ibid.: 4). The loss of northern white support is reflected in government and corporate policies and decisions made during this period. In particular, federal taxation policies benefited corporations, big business, and the wealthy, leaving a large part of the tax burden on the working class and poor (Ibid.: 207). This heightened the disparity in the distribution of wealth. As multinational corporations sought lower-wage labor markets lacking U.S. regulatory constrictions, urban industries that paid a decent living wage began to close. Wacquant and Wilson (1989) descr ibe a shift to low-paying service-sector jobs, which aggravated preexisting racial segregation in employment. As unemployment increased and the urban tax base eroded, people of color were effectively disenfranchised economically.

In this context, crack cocaine first appeared in the inner cities. Though its origin is uncertain, the impact of its appearance in communities of color differed from the impact powder cocaine had on the white community. Concurrently, the discourse on drug use shifted from the "medical-juridical model" of the 1960s (which defined drug consumers as ill and dealers as criminal) to a 1980s model that redefined the user as a "client and consumer of illegal substances" (del Olmo, 1991: 18,28). This discursive shift built public support for punishing drug offenses, as did media stories, culminating in the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 just before Election Day. It was a foundational justification for the rapid expansion of an increasingly punitive criminal justice system (Belenko. 1993:14).

The growing impoverishment of the black community was buried beneath the "cover story" of the "crack crisis" during the 1980s:

Cover stories cover or mask what they make invisible with an alternative presence; a presence that redirects our attention, that covers or makes absent what has to remain unseen if the seen is to function as the scene for a different drama.--Lubiano (1992: 324)

All three major television networks presented documentaries on crack. CBS's documentary, "48 Hours on Crack Street," was watched by 15 million viewers, "making it the most watched documentary in television history." Time magazine made crack an important cover story, describing the war on drugs as "America's Crusade" (Thomas et al., 1986; Rosenblatt, 1986). This informational "blitz" (Belenko, 1993:24) highlighted the horrors of this drug and intimately associated it with urban youth and gangs, particularly African-Americans and Latino males (Ibid.). Presented as a highly and rapidly addictive drug, the media warned that "drugs, especially crack, were destroying virtually every institution in American life--jobs, schools, families, national sovereignty, community, law enforcement, and business" (Reinarman and Levine, 1989: 118).

What About Women?

It has not gone unnoticed that the rise in the number of women imprisoned has actually been more rapid than that of men. Although the percentage of violent offenses committed by women has steadily decreased, there has been a significant increase in women prisoners (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999:7). In particular, between 1986 and 1991 the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) shows an unprecedented 75% increase in the number of women in state prisons (Ibid.). Between 1985 and 1997, the white female imprisonment rate (in jails and prisons) increased from 27 per 100,000 to 76 per 100,000, while the black female imprisonment rate increased from 183 per 100,000 to 491 per 100,000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). A more recent BJS "Special Report on Women Offenders" shows that in 1985, one of every 4,762 adult women was in jail and one of every 4,167 adult women was in prison (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999: 6). In 1999, these statistics showed a radical change: one of every 1,628 adult women was in jail and one of ever y 1,230 adult women was in prison. Overall, there has been a 48% increase in women per capita involved in the corrections system since 1990.

In 1986, 12% of women in state prisons were convicted of some type of drug offense, compared to an almost threefold increase in 1991 of 32.8% (Snell and Morton, 1994: 3). Current statistics indicate that 37% of women convicted of a felony in state courts in 1996 had been charged with a drug offense (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999: 6). Between 1990 and 1996, there was a 34% increase in drug trafficking convictions and a 41% increase in drug possession convictions. Owen and Bloom (1995) argue that this increase is an outcome of mandatory sentencing for low-level drug offenders. For women prisoners, they state, "substance abuse acts as a 'multiplier' for other problem areas (e.g., family problems, lack of self-sufficiency, physical abuse)." Therefore, "the criminality of women has not increased; instead, the legal response to drug-related behavior has become increasingly punitive, resulting in a flood of less serious offenders into the state and federal prison systems" (Ibid.).

The vast majority of incarcerated women are low income, with 37% of women in state prisons reporting incomes of less than $600 per month and 30% receiving welfare (Greenfeld and Snell, 1999: 8). Women of color are disproportionately incarcerated; recent statistics estimate that two-thirds of incarcerated women are women of color, while two-thirds of women under parole and probation supervision are white (Ibid.: 7). Over 50% of women involved in the correctional system have a high school education, and 30 to 40% have had some college education. Only four out of 10 women were employed full-time before their arrest. Greenfeld and Snell (1999) indicate that 44% of women under correctional authority suffered physical and/or sexual abuse before incarceration, with 69% reporting assaults before age 18. Indeed, regardless of race, the significant pains that are inflicted through the gendered experiences of the female body, such as objectification, domestic violence and sexual abuse, and impoverishment need to be tak en very seriously and should be given priority in social policy.

The Black Woman

However, we can hypothesize that as women's prisons become increasingly black institutions, conditions will, as in the past, come more and more to resemble the punitive conditions of men's prisons. This is an especially timely consideration now that black women are incarcerated eight times more frequently than white women (Kurshan, 2001).

The importance of race in determining which groups of women go to jail is apparent in the fact that the number of black non-Hispanic women incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses increased by 828% between 1986 and 1991 (Mauer and Huling, 1995). This is the highest increase for any population.

Read the newspapers, watch television, or simply listen to people talk: among other things, welfare queens are held responsible for the crack trade and crack babies. And they combine that with moral degeneracy within their families--for example, they trade sex for crack in front 'of their children. (Within the economy of this narrative the crack dealer is also demonized, but he is the creation of his pathological "nurturer" because it is she who reproduces the culture.) ...She is the agent of destruction, the creator of the pathological, black urban, poor family from which all ills flow; a monster creating crack dealers, addicts, muggers, and rapists--men who become those things because of being immersed in her culture of poverty (Lubiano, 1992: 339).

A central concern of this analysis is this racialized discourse and how it has been manifested during the War on Drugs. We argue that this prevailing discourse of women who are incarcerated operates as a "sociological cover story" that hides the significance of race. In the following analysis, we offer a new understanding of the War on Drugs by uncovering the cover story and recasting the War on Drugs as a War on Black Women.

Method

For the data in this article, we use a 1991 National Institute of Justice study, which is a stratified probability sample of all prisoners in state and federal prisons.

We use the data sub-samples of 6,393 incarcerated non-Hispanic African-Americans and 4,969 incarcerated non-Hispanic whites. From these sub-samples, we select only data on black and white women prisoners. Below we present descriptive statistics for the proportion of each group incarcerated for drug violations and violent crimes, and then the results of logistic regressions that compare characteristics of white and black women incarcerated for drug violations and their counterparts incarcerated for violent crimes.

Theoretical Framework and Variables

We employ three theoretical frameworks to examine why black and white women are incarcerated for drug and violent crimes. In particular, we make use of differential association (Sutherland, 1949), social control (Hirschi, 1969), and feminist theory (Chesney-Lind, 1997) to examine the nexus of race, gender, and imprisonment. These theories are used descriptively: we assume that each perspective partially explains individual involvement in criminality. Therefore, the variables derived from these theoretical positions are proxies for criminal involvement In short, those theoretically derived variables are used as a control for criminality.

Numerous studies of criminal involvement employ differential association and social control theories as the guiding framework (e.g., Jensen, 1972; Matsueda, 1982, 1989; Matsueda and Heimer, 1987). Although male criminality has been the primary focus of these theories, following Gora (1982) we believe they may also be useful for explaining female incarceration. Differential association theory, initially developed by Edwin Sutherland (1949), suggests that individuals develop a likelihood for deviant activity because of an excess of definitions favorable to deviance. In other words, individuals are more likely to deviate if they associate with deviant others or those who hold deviant beliefs than if they were to associate with individuals holding conventional beliefs. Thus, criminality is learned by association with criminals and the criminally inclined in intimate social groups such as friendships or the family. Our models offer a limited test of the differential association perspective using a variable that as ks whether "anyone in their immediate family has ever served time in prison." Following the tenets of differential association theory, we suspect that a significant proportion of individuals in our study will report that they have had an incarcerated family member in their immediate family. We expect that this will be more likely for women incarcerated for violent offenses rather than for drug offenses.

In contrast, social control theory addresses why individuals fail to pursue criminal activity (Hirschi, 1969). The theory posits that individuals with a strong social bond are less likely to engage in deviant behavior. Social control theorists suggest that the social bond consists of four conceptually distinct, yet closely associated elements--attachment to conventional others, commitment to a conventional lifestyle, involvement in conventional activities, and belief in conventional norms. To test hypotheses associated with social control theory, variables in our models include the highest grade attended before arrest, marital status, and employment status before arrest. Each of these is a proxy variable that represents the attachment of individuals to the social bond in conventional society. In line with social control theory, we would expect a large proportion of those incarcerated for violent offenses in our study to have low educational attainment, to be unmarried, and to be unemployed at the time of thei r incarceration.

Beyond these more traditional theories of crime and deviance, we employ a feminist perspective to uniquely explain female incarceration. Many feminist theorists in criminology who focus on women and incarceration argue that social control and differential association theories are male-centered and consequently fail to acknowledge that the path women take to becoming incarcerated differs from that taken by men. They point out that, in contrast to men, a majority of women in prison has been physically or sexually abused (Owen and Bloom, 1995; Chesney-Lind, 1997; Henriques and Manatu-Rupert, 2001). Moreover, they assert the focus of patriarchy in the criminal justice system is the social control of women who choose not to, or cannot, adopt the hegemonic feminine ideal in society as a whole (Rolison, 1993). (Such women are viewed by the dominant society as somehow personally deficient or victimized in ways that prevent them from being "good" wives and mothers.) We test this perspective by positing that a higher p roportion of women incarcerated for violent offenses, as opposed to drug offenses, will be drug and alcohol dependent, as well as sexually or physically abused. Finally, we suggest that women incarcerated for drug offenses will be more likely to receive indeterminate sentences than are women incarcerated for violent offenses, due to the perception that their sentences are "treatment" rather than "punishment" (Armstrong, 1977).

We use these theoretical perspectives as sensitizing concepts to explain any propensity to criminality in white versus black women. Our derived models seek to compare black and white women along two lines: those incarcerated for drug violations versus violent offenses, and those incarcerated for criminality rather than for reasons of race and gender. We assume that each perspective has merit in predicting the incarceration of individuals who have some propensity toward criminality. However, the propensity is greater for those incarcerated for violent crimes than for drug offenses, which are the result of political pressures rather than an individual proclivity toward criminality. If the War on Drugs has had a significant and varied impact on the incarceration of women, we would expect the differential association, social control, and feminist perspectives to better explain the incarceration of violent offenders than the incarceration of drug offenders. Moreover, the variables stemming from these perspectives should distinguish between women incarcerated for violent offenses and those incarcerated for drug offenses. Beyond our theoretically derived variables, we also attempt to control for the level of involvement in the criminal justice system. If there has been a shift from a medical model to a criminal justice model for substance abusers, these variables should partially capture this. In particular, they should not significantly differ between violent offenders and drug offenders. The variables we look at are whether the offender was on parole or probation before their current incarceration, had previously been incarcerated, as well as their age at first arrest and the date they were arrested for their current incarceration. Finally, we control for whether the prisoner resided in the Southern United States, given the history of racism and incarceration in that region (McKelvey, 1997).

Descriptive Statistics

In 1991, 26% of blacks incarcerated in prison were there for a drug offense. This compared to 13.5% of whites. Thus, blacks were about twice as likely as whites to be in prison for drug offenses at the beginning of the 1990s. This is significant, since blacks and whites were equally likely to have been incarcerated for violent crimes (44.5% versus 46.1%), and whites were more likely than were blacks to have been incarcerated for property offenses (28.7% versus 21.5%). Many observers have noted this trend of high African-American incarceration for drug offenses in the 1980s and have suggested that the War on Drugs is really a war on black males. We present data to critically assess U.S. drug policy and its impact on black women.

The pattern of incarceration for black and white women across the categories of drug violations and violent crime is detailed below. In particular, 35.1% of black women were incarcerated for drug offenses, compared to 23.5% of white women. In 1991,31.2% of black women and 35.9% of white women were incarcerated for a violent crime. (See Table 1 at the end of the article.)

Multivariate Analysis

Racial differences among women with respect to offense violation and incarceration are apparent in the data. In particular, black women were more likely to be incarcerated for drug violations than white women were. Our logistic multivariate models seek to differentiate between characteristics associated with being incarcerated for a drug offense relative to a violent crime. Are the characteristics of drug offenders the same as those whom the public wishes to see incarcerated?' If not, this raises serious questions about the continued incarceration of drug violators. Each model is estimated separately for black and white women. That is, we do not expect the coefficients to be the same for each group of women given that their rates of incarceration for drug offenses differ, for the most part, as do their patterns of incarceration for violent crime.

The multivariate results for drug offenses for white and black women distinguish them from white and black women incarcerated for violent offenses. To distinguish group membership, we performed logistic regression rather than the more common discriminant analysis. The logistic model does not require assumed multivariate normality of the predictor variables and equal variance-covariance matrices among groups (Norusis, 1990: 45). These assumptions are not met in our sub-samples. Additionally, the logistic model allows us to interpret the logistic coefficients relative to each other. In a manner analogous to the use of dummy variables in a regression equation, significant logistic coefficients indicate whether a statistically significant difference exists among groups.

Multivariate Data: Results

Black women imprisoned for drug offenses differ from black women imprisoned for violent crime in that they are less likely to report that they had been sexually or physically abused in the past, or to have been on probation or parole when they were arrested for their current offense. They also report being incarcerated for a shorter time, are more likely to see themselves as crack cocaine dependent before their current arrest, and are more highly educated. The two groups do not differ with respect to age, reported alcohol or heroin dependency, previous incarceration, whether anyone in their immediate family was in jail, whether they were married or employed at the time of their arrest, had a set date for release, or resided in the South.

Based on the above pattern of results, the predictions of the social control and feminist perspectives fit black women incarcerated for violent offenses better than they do black females incarcerated for drug violations. Our model reveals that black females incarcerated for drug offenses were less likely to have been involved in a criminal culture than were those incarcerated for violent crime. They tend to be relatively more privileged than are black women incarcerated for violent crime. Black women drug violators are also more educated, less likely to have come from an abusive past, and less likely to be on parole or probation when arrested. One striking non-finding is that with the exception of crack dependency, black women incarcerated for drug violations were no more likely than were black women incarcerated for violent crime to have been involved in substance abuse. The difference perhaps may be that black women imprisoned for drug offenses were incarcerated at a later date, the factor that most strongl y distinguishes membership in the two groups (r = .234). (See Table 2.)

White women have also been affected by the War on Drugs. Five factors distinguish drug and violent offenders among white women. In descending levels of importance, they are the year the woman was arrested, whether she was on parole or probation when arrested, whether she was alcohol dependent when arrested, whether she lives in the South, and her age. White women were incarcerated for drug violations for a shorter time; they were less likely to have been on probation or parole when arrested, or to be alcohol dependent; they did not live in the South and were older than were white women incarcerated for a violent offense. The two groups did not differ on whether they had a family member in jail, on educational levels, on whether they were married, employed, had a history of sexual or physical abuse, a determinate sentence, or, most important, on whether they were dependent on crack cocaine or heroin.

It is noteworthy that white women incarcerated for drug violations did not indicate that they were crack cocaine or heroin dependent, as was the case with black women incarcerated for drug offenses. Moreover, they reported that they were less alcohol dependent than were their counterparts arrested for violent offenses. We are not certain what to make of this pattern. White women incarcerated for drug violations appear to be less implicated in substance abuse than are white women incarcerated for violent offenses. However, the finding that the two groups do not differ with respect to the variables we used to measure the differential association, social control, and feminist perspectives indicates that the two groups may be similarly involved in criminal culture prior to incarceration and to have suffered similar levels of physical and sexual abuse. (See Table 3.)

Conclusion

With respect to the sensitizing theoretical concepts drawn from the differential association, feminist, and social control perspectives, it appears that our variables fail to distinguish between drug offenders and violent offenders among white women, but do so among black women. This suggests that among white women, incarcerated drug and violent offenders are similar in terms of criminal culture and sexual abuse. This is not the case with black women. Black women incarcerated for drug violations were substantially less involved with a criminal subculture, had more social ties, and reported less abuse than their counterparts who were incarcerated for violent crime.

One exception to the above pattern is that black women incarcerated for drug offenses were more likely than their violent offense counterparts to report a dependency on crack cocaine. The findings that black incarcerated drug violators were both less likely to evidence ties to a criminal culture and more likely to be crack dependent than were black women incarcerated for violent offenses suggest that the crackdown on crack cocaine in black communities during the 1980s criminalized a disproportionate number of black women. Rather than adopt a more progressive social policy toward drug use, treatment, the U.S. embarked upon a war against drugs that relied heavily on incarceration. This "war policy" on drugs and drug users imposed a criminal-juridical model on crack-infused black communities instead of the more socially just medical-juridical model. For black women, this appears to have been especially pernicious. Based on our study and on earlier data showing the rapid rise in the incarceration of black women, they, more than any other group, bore the brunt of this punitive policy. We can only imagine how the lives of these women would have differed if a medical-juridical model had been in place in the 1980s. The resources wasted on incarcerating an essentially noncriminal population could have treated drug-addicted women and saved countless families from the breakup and pains of incarceration imposed by a less compassionate drug policy.

TABLE 1

Descriptive Statistics for Non-Hispanic White and Non-Hispanic Black
Females

 Drug Violent
 Violations Crimes

 N 1026 1026
White Females Mean Valid .2349 .3587
 Standard deviation .4241 .4798

 N 1281 1281
Black Females Mean Valid .3505 .3123
 Standard deviation .4773 .4636
TABLE 2

Logistic Regression: Predicting Black Woman Inmate Incarceration for
Drug vs. Violent Offense

Variable b S.E. Wald

Respondent's age at first arrest .0104 .0149 .4916
Alcohol dependent -.4402 .2332 3.5631
Immediate family member was incarcerated -.1069 .1951 .3003
Crack cocaine dependent .8385 .2473 11.4916
Heroin dependent .1913 .3609 .2809
Number of years of education .1483 .0517 8.2215
Respondent married -.4226 .3110 1.8463
Respondent had job month before incarcerated -.2278 .2032 1.2568
Respondent previously incarcerated -.1777 .1956 .8250
Respondent sexually or physically abused -.9072 .2015 20.2733
Respondent lives in South -.1185 .1992 .3538
Age of arrest for most serious offense .3941 .0577 46.6879
Determinate sentencing .0975 .1985 .2414
Not on probation/parole at time of arrest -.6471 .1950 11.0117
Constant -35.1293 5.1895 45.8243

Variable Sig EXP(b)

Respondent's age at first arrest .4832 1.0105
Alcohol dependent .0591 .6439
Immediate family member was incarcerated .5837 .8986
Crack cocaine dependent .0007 2.3129
Heroin dependent .5961 1.2108
Number of years of education .0041 1.1599
Respondent married .1742 .6553
Respondent had job month before incarcerated .2623 .7963
Respondent previously incarcerated .3637 .8372
Respondent sexually or physically abused .0000 .4036
Respondent lives in South .5520 .8883
Age of arrest for most serious offense .0000 1.4831
Determinate sentencing .6232 1.1024
Not on probation/parole at time of arrest .0009 .5235
Constant .0000

-2 Log Likelihood: 653.772.
TABLE 3

Logistic Regression: Predicting White Woman Inmate Incarceration for
Drug vs. Violent Offense

Variable b S.E. Wald

Respondent's age at first arrest .0400 .0207 3.7337
Alcohol dependent -1.1997 .3208 13.9835
Immediate family member was incarcerated -.2223 .2700 .6779
Crack cocaine dependent .2437 .4139 .3466
Heroin dependent .4260 .4318 .9733
Number of years of education .1063 .0672 2.5013
Respondent married -.0807 .3419 .0558
Respondent have job month before incarcerated -.2563 .2703 .8990
Respondent previously incarcerated .1329 .2786 .2275
Respondent sexually or physically abused -.0189 .2806 .0046
Respondent lives in South -.8047 .2774 8.4143
Age of arrest for most serious offense .3751 .0745 25.3485
Determinate sentencing -.0420 .2774 .0229
Not on probation' parole at time of arrest -1.4111 .2825 24.9571
Constant -33.6399 6.7423 24.8939

Variable Sig EXP(b)

Respondent's age at first arrest .0533 1.0408
Alcohol dependent .0002 .3013
Immediate family member was incarcerated .4103 .8007
Crack cocaine dependent .5561 1.2750
Heroin dependent .3239 1.5312
Number of years of education .1138 1.1121
Respondent married .8133 .9224
Respondent have job month before incarcerated .3430 1.2921
Respondent previously incarcerated .6334 .8756
Respondent sexually or physically abused .9462 .9812
Respondent lives in South .0037 .4472
Age of arrest for most serious offense .0000 1.4552
Determinate sentencing .8797 .9589
Not on probation' parole at time of arrest .0000 .2439
Constant .0000

-2 Log Likelihood: 362,933.

NOTE

(1.) See Cloud (1999) for an example of the public discourse surrounding whom the public wishes to be incarcerated. Cloud focuses on the injustices of mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws for drug violators.

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GARRY L. ROLISON is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, California State University, San Marcos, CA 92096-0001 (e-mail: grolison@csusm.edu). KRISTIN A. BATES is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, California State University, San Marcos, CA 92096-0001 (e-mail: kbates@csusm.edu). MARY Jo POOLE and MICHELLE JACOB are also at CSU, San Marcos, in the Masters in Applied Sociological Practice (M.A.S.P.) program. The authors would like to thank Alma J. Neill for her assistance on this project.