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

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.