How the Criminal Justice System Treats Women

One of the specific issues the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) addresses is how incarceration affects mothers, and how the criminal justice system can better address the needs of pregnant women, mothers, and children. One report published by the WPA summarizes a 2008 data set compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The document, “Incarcerated Mothers and Their Children: Highlights from the New Federal Report” reveals three main facts. The first is that more mothers than ever before are being imprisoned in the United States, invariably impacting greater numbers of children than ever before. Second, the majority (77%) of mothers provide all or almost all of their children’s daily care needs and/or live in a single-parenting household. Third, children with incarcerated mothers live with their grandparents or a foster family many times more often than children of incarcerated fathers. The results show that incarceration has a net deleterious effect on society by impacting the security and wellbeing of children. The report calls attention to the need for alternative sentencing programs for mothers.
The issue of incarceration, and how it impacts children, is an important issue because it shows how the criminal justice system is unnecessarily punitive to the point where it is causing more harm than it is resolving, directly hurting children who are already disadvantaged by life circumstances. Moreover, the WPA report substantiates the literature showing that the children of incarcerated mothers are at a much higher risk for developmental, emotional, social, and psychological maladaptation (Zeman, Dallaire & Borowski, 2015). When incarceration harms children directly, criminal justice policy analysts need to propose evidence-based alternatives and offer solutions for addressing the needs of criminalized mothers. Solutions include alternative sentencing, such as probation, victim restitution, and community service, as well as robust mental health counseling for female offenders. Incarceration is not the only option for female offenders, and is certainly not the best option, particularly for women who are, or who are about to become, mothers.
References
Women’s Prison Association (n.d.). Incarcerated mothers and their children. http://www.wpaonline.org/wpaassets/IncarceratedMothers_Final_rebrand.pdf
Zeman, J., Dallaire, D. & Borowski, S. (2015). Socialization in the context of risk and psychopathology. Social Development 25(1): 66-81.