Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law Volume 23 | Issue 2 Article 1 2018 “Lock Her Up!” How Women Have Become the Fastest-Growing Population in the American Carceral State Spencer K. Beall Georgetown University Law Center,
[email protected] Recommended Citation Spencer K. Beall, “Lock Her Up!” How Women Have Become the Fastest-Growing Population in the American Carceral State, 23 Berkeley J. Crim. L. (2018). Link to publisher version (DOI) https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38X34MS09 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals and Related Materials at Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law by an authorized administrator of Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Beall: Lock Her Up! ISSUE 23:2 SPRING 2018 “Lock Her Up!” How Women Have Become the Fastest-Growing Population in the American Carceral State Spencer K. Beall* The majority of discourse on American mass incarceration attempts to explain the outsize populations in jails and prisons as the result of a political war against a specific group of people (e.g. against a certain race, against the poor), rather than against crime itself. Less attention has been paid to women, even though they are the fastest- growing population in the carceral state. Since the 1970s, law enforcement has imprisoned women at twice the rate of men, despite relatively static female criminality patterns. Rampant sexual abuse, inadequate female healthcare, and pitiless shackling during labor and childbirth are among the consequences of rapidly locking women into a corrections system established for—and designed by—men.