War on the Family

Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind

Renny Golden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135939694
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this timely book, renowned criminologist and activist Renny Golden sheds light on the women behind bars and the 350,000 children they leave behind. In exposing the fastest growing prison population-a direct result of Reagan's War on Drugs-Golden sets up new framework for thinking about how to address the situation of mothers in prison, the risks and needs of their children and the implications of current judicial policies.

1

COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

When we define criminal bodies, we also define ourselves…. Criminalized bodies are inevitably politicized bodies, surfaces on which theorists project hopes and fears, ideologies and ideals.

Nicole Hahn Rafter¹

Families suffer the collateral damage in America's drug wars. Since the war on drugs began almost twenty years ago, imprisonment has exploded. The U.S. incarceration rate rose almost 300 percent between 1980 and 1998, eclipsing both South Africa and Russia's all-time international imprisonment record.² We can't build prisons fast enough to hold this war's cargo of dark-skinned prisoners. Like ghostly slave ships, prisons float in prairies and valleys, tree-ringed rural settings hours from the urban catchment areas.

Hidden within the war on drugs is another war whose captives are mothers. Almost 70 percent of all incarcerated women are mothers.³ Their children, already part of the socially excluded, have been left with little protection or hope. Entire families of children are cast away from the one anchor that might have kept them afloat in the sea of social devastation in which their lives are cast.

President Reagan's Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, aimed not at big dealers but at street-level users, cast a net that daily fills the holding tanks of America's jails with the small fish of the drug trade. The harsh sentencing laws of Reagan's crime bill and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (especially mandatory minimum sentences) ensured a dramatic increase in imprisonment. Christian Parenti reports: “In 1985 roughly 500,000 people were locked away in state or federal prisons; by 1990 that number had doubled; by 1998 that number had reached 1.7 million.”⁴ The trend continues with President George W. Bush's drug czar.

Children are destructively stigmatized by this war. Twelve-year-old Damon told me, “It was hard because I couldn't see my mama…. Sometimes when kids said stuff about my mama I ignored them but I didn't beat them up because I'm not a violent person.” A street-smart youngster, Damon knew his mother was addicted and needed help when he was only seven, but from his point of view, nothing justified his mother's absence, his years of humiliation at school, and the loneliness and constant worry about his mother. Damon had no one to whom he could turn. Families such as Damon's remain invisible to mainstream society, and if they are mentioned, it is to vilify their “unworthy” mothers.

Michel Foucault described how the modern criminal justice system, seeking humane distance from its punitive role, hides the prison enterprise from public scrutiny. “Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness.”⁵ People like Damon and his mother Teena are abstractions cast into scapegoat racial stereotypes that politicians use to whip up moral outrage or fear about the scourge of drugs and crime. Their political or moral claim on a society that upholds “family values” is severed—it is as if they are disposable.

The complexity of the social effects of drug war policies on families is rarely examined. A mother's incarceration is not simply a sadness or a tragic disruption for her young children—it is a trauma as serious and as unique to each child's personality as the posttraumatic stress reactions of Vietnam war vets. Rev. Bill Webber, former president of the New York Theological School, who directed a theological studies program for Sing Sing prisoners, says that “for every mother that is incarcerated, another ten people (children, caretakers, grandparents, siblings, fathers) are directly impacted.” A father's imprisonment has considerably less impact because mothers care for 90 percent of the children of incarcerated men. Only 28 percent of fathers serve as their children's caretakers when the mothers are imprisoned.⁶

For imprisoned mothers, the effects of America's gulag extends beyond their confinement within its walls. The violence inscribed on the bodies and spirits of poor mothers is reinscribed upon their children.

RACIALIZED DRUG WARS AND UNFIT MOTHERS

The percentage of women entering U.S. prisons in the last twenty years has increased almost 400 percent, while male incarceration rates increased at less than half that rate.⁷ The captured are poor women of color, mostly African Americans, the majority of whom are mothers. The incarceration of African-American women in state prisons rose 828 percent between 1986 and 1991, and it continues to climb.⁸

Families targeted for disruptive and traumatic state intervention are rarely white or middle class. African-American children are nine times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison, and Latino children are three times as likely.⁹ Two-thirds of incarcerated mothers have children under the age of eighteen.¹⁰ The majority (58 percent) of the children of imprisoned parents are under the age of ten.¹¹ This is an increase of one-half million children since 1991.¹²

Poor families living in deindustrialized urban spaces, devoid of their traditional communities of sustenance and healing, are more and more the victims of violent stigmas that predestine their incarceration. In addition, mothers endure insinuating myths of pathological drug addiction and responsibility for the reproduction of violent subcultures. The legacy of slavery and reverberations of its image of black females as unfeminine, oversexed amazons, also help rationalize punitive social responses.

The stigmas that inscribe poor mothers are not new. Compliant poor mothers, considered the worthy poor, though patronized, categorized, and kept barely functional through social welfare, have not endured the assaults served upon the unworthy poor mother. Either too sassy, hostile, ungrateful, disassembling, or despairing, the unworthy (unfit) poor mother was punished by labels of neglect, and her children were taken by the state to be protected. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the unfit poor mother has been cut off from state welfare, criminalized, and her children cut adrift into the unruly sea of state protection or the care of relatives, themselves barely able to stay afloat. Ignored are the conditions of social exclusion, abuse, lack of decent schools, health care, and jobs that surround the lives of most incarcerated women.

The class and race chasm that separates the families of unfit mothers from mainstream culture is deep. Inundated by the media's obsession with individual sensationalist urban crime reports, the public is kept ignorant of the social inequities that confront residents of core urban areas. In a culture that lacks public consciousness of class structure, racial exclusion, and the gender burdens of poor women, these mothers and their children are both ignored and stigmatized. Their sufferings are invisible, but their failure to meet class, race, and gender standards are villainized and publicized. Implicit in the stigmatizing of incarcerated women is the supposed need to contain their violence, but the majority of incarcerated women commit nonviolent economic crimes, and their rate of violent crimes has remained virtually stable. For example, the female state and federal prison population increased 275 percent between 1980 and 1992, while violent offenses increased only 1.3 percent.¹³ Of those who have committed violent offenses, three out of four committed simple assault.¹⁴

THE BENEFITS OF FOCUSING ATTENTION DOWNWARD

Since the war on drugs began, results have been conclusive but publicly unknown: prison construction has flourished, crime has decreased, and drugs flood into the country daily. There are some who benefit economically from these contradictory trends. An approximation of all funds spent annually on the drug war (not including incarceration costs) is $100 billion. Two–thirds of that amount is used for law enforcement.¹⁵

Focusing on the “dangerous classes” as the source of violence diverts public attention from crimes of the powerful. For example, the cost of corporate crime in 1997 was $338 billion, which is “10,000 times the total amount stolen in all bank robberies in the United States in 1997 and more than 20 times the total amount stolen in all thefts reported in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports for that year.”¹⁶ Even as U.S. corporate officers are caught stealing billions but receive minimal criminal sanctions, and as church officials negotiate away culpability by protecting serial pedophilic clerics, the cultural gaze is still focused downward on the stigmatized, who lack the legal and social power to counteract their objectification and criminalization.

PUBLIC POLICY: DISCIPLINING MOTHERS

Liberal policy makers, intending to counter the racialized stereotypes of incarcerated mothers, focus on helping women who fail their social and familial responsibilities by emphasizing the need for more social services. Conservatives want to punish unfit mothers, and well-meaning liberals seek to rehabilitate them, but either policy response diverts attention from the social inequities at the heart of the problem. Thus, the social gaze remains obsessively fixed on unfit mothers, successfully diverting notice from the lack of social opportunity that narrows life choices. These women struggle not only to survive but also to make desperate choices to protect their children. And they make these choices when, according to the human odds, they should have given up in despair.

The policy studies that obscure social inequities are informed by a social consensus about mothering that has shaped both child welfare and social welfare policy throughout U.S. history. Women are held solely responsible for children. If her crime is neglect of her children because of drug use, she enters the realm of the monstrous. The image of the failed mother is both racialized and class specific. Women are portrayed as hopeless addicts, and willing prostitutes who live in filthy conditions, wantonly choosing to abandon their children. In summary, they are viewed as women who have lost their maternal instinct.

Middle-class white women who fail their maternal responsibilities through illegal activities avoid incarceration because they can both afford legal protection and present to legal authorities assurances that they can and will seek psychological help so as to resume family responsibilities. If whites are imprisoned, they are granted the first shots at drug treatment, which often ensures parole and helps people avoid returning to prison: “A California study showed that two-thirds of drug treatment slots went to whites despite the fact that 70 percent of inmates sentenced for drug sentences were African American.”¹⁷

WHO ARE INCARCERATED MOTHERS?

In the month prior to their arrest, 50 percent of the mothers in a California study were unemployed, and 70 percent lacked a high school diploma.¹⁸ Steve Donzinger reports that “two–thirds of the women in prison are minorities, about half ran away from home as youths, a quarter had attempted suicide, and a sizable number had serious drug problems. Over half had been victimized by physical abuse and a third reported sexual abuse. Most had never earned more than $6.50 an hour.”¹⁹

These are women who almost never caught a break, women who lacked the economic or social power to overcome their circumstances, women who experienced trauma as youths and then gave up or gave in. Almost 20 percent were homeless the year before their incarceration, and 23 percent of the mothers reported mental illness.²⁰

The majority of these mothers came from a single-parent home in which at least one family member had been incarcerated. One in five grew up as a ward of the state. One in three had made suicide attempts.²¹ Six out of ten women in state prisons have experienced sexual or physical abuse at some time in their past.²²

The effects of violence on the lives of incarcerated women cannot be overemphasized. Two recent studies indicate that posttraumatic stress disorder can increase cravings for drugs. In children, repeated sexual abuse, like repeated drug abuse, changes in a particular area of the brain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Collateral Damage in the War on Drugs
• Chapter 2 Joanetta's World
• Chapter 3 Lost Childhood: A Family Narrative
• Chapter 4 Family Narratives of Survival and Sorrow: Bell, Melvanie, Nadia, and Louella
• Chapter 5 Expendable Bodies, Racialized Policies
• Chapter 6 Incarceration: Theater of Terror
• Chapter 7 Teen Mothers and the Infants Who Saved Them
• Chapter 8 Children in the Other America
• Chapter 9 Gonna Rise: Pam's Story
• Chapter 10 Eye on the Prize: Theorizing Change
• Chapter 11 What is to be Done in the Meantime?
• Chapter 12 Beating the Odds
• Addendum
• Notes
• Index