Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

Preface

>> ix Preface In January 2009, then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced plans to close a $19.9 billion budget gap in California.1 His proposal to make massive cuts in social services like health care and welfare-to-work programs had all the familiar markings of the Republican Party’s brand of fiscal conservatism —with one radical exception. Schwarzenegger took direct aim at prison expansion and overcrowding, promising a constitutional amendment that would prevent the state from spending more than 7% of its annual budget on corrections and plans to reduce the size of the state’s prison population by forty thousand persons over a period of two years. Schwarzenegger’s proposal was certainly a logical one given that much of California’s budget troubles are directly linked to the state’s commitment to “getting tough” on crime by incarcerating more people, even those convicted of minor drug offenses, for long periods of time. What made it radical was that in the course of the last three decades few politicians, certainly none of Schwarzenegger’s prominence , were willing to risk their political careers by offering anything less than enthusiastic support for the law and order campaign to “lock ’em up and throw away the key.” While Democrats and Republicans alike have sought to reduce government spending by gutting social welfare services, they have simultaneously (and unironically) continued to spend staggering amounts of money on prisons. California’s budget crisis is the tip of the iceberg. Across the country, states are now scrambling to find solutions to myriad problems associated with costly and overcrowded prisons. For the first time in nearly thirty years, Americans are rethinking what it means to punish and to incarcerate. Much of the debate has focused on nonviolent drug offenders, since they represent a significant proportion of the increase in the size of the nation’s prison population. Proposals include sentence reductions for drug crimes, expanded use of drug treatment programs in prisons and community-based correctional settings, and granting the private prison industry an even greater role in the management and control of prisoners. As a sociologist who studies prisons, I am encouraged by efforts x > xi criminal activity and drug use upon their release. As it turns out, I was wrong. The program survived and prospered even though state-sponsored studies showed that its coercive treatment practices had no effect on prisoner recidivism and relapse rates. Today the program remains an essential component of correctional programming in the women’s prison. Perhaps not coincidentally, the state now has one of the highest incarceration rates of women in the country. This program and others like it continue to gain in popularity in women’s prisons and in community-based, alternative-to-incarceration programs across the country . Ultimately, I decided to write the book in order to explore the appeal of a treatment model that aims not to rehabilitate women drug offenders but to “break them down.” I argue that coercive therapy is not an alternative to “get tough” policies but a gendered extension of them. It is a failure only if we believe that its purpose is to curb crime and reduce drug use. I aim to show that there are other agendas, beyond crime control, that are at play. This program was born in the same historical moment that poor, African American women were vilified by politicians and media outlets as “crack whores” and “welfare queens.” In 1995, for example, former secretary of education William Bennett proclaimed that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could . . . abort every black baby.”2 Racist stereotypes that took aim at Black women’s parenting skills, sexual practices, relationships, and labor market participation obscured how increases in urban poverty, and Black poverty in particular, were a product of shifts in the broader political economy. In essence, such stereotypes turned poverty into a moral problem rather than a political one. This, in turn, undermined whatever sympathy poor families might have garnered from the public and made it possible for politicians to simultaneously dismantle welfare while beefing up the prison system. This paved the way for the prison system to become the primary institutional site for managing and controlling racial minorities and the poor. Treatment programs like the one I studied capitalized on these stereotypes and, by claiming that women offenders were “diseased,” added to them. Such claims, in fact, opened up new markets for the private prison industry. I offer this book, then, as a cautionary tale. My intent is not...