Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T03:56:46.451Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Creating Criminals: Race, Stereotypes, and Collateral Damage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2020

Michele Goodwin
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Get access

Summary

The questions and concerns addressed in this book cannot be evaluated in isolation from race and class, especially because the state finds many ways of making criminals out of its citizens. Racial disparities dominate all forms of policing in the United States, regardless of sex and income. However, the shocking toll of male incarceration crowds out research and more nuanced understandings of women’s engagement with the penal system. Sadly, researchers and policymakers tend to view incarceration through a male lens. However, they are missing a very grave, rapidly emerging social problem. Marginalized women are funnelled in and out of the American justice system at alarming rates. They are invisible. Their experiences with mass incarceration, police brutality, sexual violence, shackling while pregnant (if in the penal system), birthing behind bars, medical neglect, restrictions on housing access after release, and other pernicious encroachments on their daily lives are rarely rendered visible. Consequently, male accounts about mass incarceration, while troubling and certainly not inaccurate, fail to problematize and offer a detailed reading of prisons and penal systems. More importantly, these depictions fall short of informing the American public about women and children as the casualties of the nation’s overpriced and unsuccessful drug war.

Type
Chapter
Information
Policing the Womb
Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood
, pp. 114 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×