12 An Unjust System

Charleena Lyles was pregnant. A mother of four, she called the police in June 2017 to report a robbery. Charleena needed support and help. Instead, she was killed by police in front of her young children.

There’s no question that the Seattle Police Department could have and should have used de-escalation tactics instead of shooting first and asking questions later. Unfortunately, unacceptable tragedies have become almost routine in our country.

Pause, step back from the political rhetoric, close your eyes for a moment to clear your head of the clutter of grocery lists and the chaos of your own life, and then try to imagine what this situation means in your heart. Can you imagine for a moment just being in this situation? Calling the police, terrified that a robbery might be happening while your children are home, and then the police arrive and make your children orphans? Can you imagine being pulled over for a broken taillight and that being the last time you saw your loved ones? It’s unimaginable for some. But racial profiling and police brutality is a reality for too many women in our communities. We absolutely need to address the crisis of our entire criminal justice system, in which racial profiling and police brutality are happening at the same time as women are now one of the fastest growing incarcerated populations.

This is a women’s rights issue, and it must be front and center in our priorities. So while we touched on this topic in prior chapters, we’re going to dive deeper now. Across the country, Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed when they encounter police. And Black women are especially vulnerable—studies show that Black women are falsely viewed as more threatening and “masculine” by police than white women.¹ That means that not only are the police more likely to use deadly force against Black women, like they did to Charleena, but also that police are more likely to unjustly arrest and charge Black women.

Here are just a few cases that demonstrate this troubling truth: A Black woman was made to put her infant child on the sidewalk so police could search the stroller for drugs (nothing was found).² When Miriam Carey was killed in a hail of bullets, her one-year-old daughter was in the backseat.³ And a New York police officer put a woman who was seven months pregnant in a chokehold after a dispute over illegal grilling.⁴ Illegal. Grilling. As in illegally cooking food. Are you kidding me?! Sadly, this is not a joke. It’s all too real.

The names of Black women lost to police violence can’t be swept under the rug. Rekia Boyd, Miriam Carey, Tanisha Anderson, Charleena Lyles, and too many others must be remembered and honored. The list grows tragically longer every day.

Racial discrimination and gender bias are part of the entire criminal justice system and fabric of our nation.⁵ For instance, people of color are disproportionately represented in the roughly 2 million people who are in prison or jails nationwide despite the fact that in some areas, like drug use, white people are more likely to offend.⁶ Here are some specifics: Even though people of color represented roughly 38 percent of the overall American population in 2016, at least 59 percent of the people in state prisons at that time were people of color. In fact, Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people in state prisons.⁷ “Nationwide, the criminal justice system is failing communities, hurting the economy and destroying families—and putting women and mothers disproportionately behind bars for drug and property crimes,” wrote Monifa Bandele, vice president of MomsRising, in an article for the ACLU.⁸

Bringing actual justice to our criminal justice system is a core part of the modern women’s rights movement. It’s on us to raise the alarm and fight for fixes. That includes advocating for police reform and accountability; reforms in sentencing, bail, and prosecution; ending mandatory minimums and the death penalty; as well as largely divesting from the prison industrial complex, including for-profit prisons, prison labor beneficiaries, and satellite industries—all of which profit from incarceration.

Enough Is Enough

Enough is enough. Women’s lives are at stake. Black lives matter. It’s time for each of us to stand up and demand an end to what we’re all seeing and reading in the news and on social media.

This is a women’s rights issue. This is a national issue. This needs to stop.

The truth of the matter is that structural racism permeates our society, including within the criminal justice system. From the moment police are called or an officer decides to investigate a car on the road or a person walking down the street, an unjust system is activated. This system disproportionately punishes communities of color, leading to arrests, incarceration, and lifelong stigma for those caught in its grasp. And women of color face the compounded impact of violence both in the criminal justice system and everyday life. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with women among the fastest growing incarcerated populations.⁹

How did we get here? The path starts early, before a person commits a crime or is incarcerated. The cradle-to-prison pipeline begins in preschool, when Black kids are suspended at higher rates than white kids for the same actions.¹⁰ In preschool! As mentioned, the pipeline extends to schools, where there are now more police than counselors in the largest public school districts.¹¹ And it goes on in the daily racial profiling that happens on our streets, in stores, and in our communities, where who gets pulled over—and who gets shot—too often hinges primarily on skin color. Studies prove these points over and over again.¹² The pipeline affects who gets arrested, why certain charges are chosen, how bail levels are set, who is sitting in jail. Structural racism is woven into our entire system, not just the criminal justice system, from the moment a child is born. Sexism is often added to the toxic mix, and the impact is too often brutal.

Too Many Women Are Trapped in a For-Profit Prison System

To make matters worse, there’s a monetary incentive to continue this crisis in our nation: Private correctional facilities were a $4.8 billion industry in 2015, with profits of $629 million.¹³ The numbers are horrifying. We are allowing an entrenched for-profit prison industrial complex—where companies run jails for profit—to run amok. That’s part of the reason why the incarcerated population in the United States grew sevenfold over the past forty years, even as crime is going down.¹⁴ Between 1980 and 2014, the number of women in prison in the United States increased by more than 700 percent. Currently 54 percent of all inmates are parents with children under the age of eighteen.¹⁵ And right now over 60 percent of incarcerated women have at least one child under the age of eighteen.¹⁶

This is horrible. It hurts families and our children, and the cost of incarceration is sky high for taxpayers. The Federal Register estimates that the average cost is $31,977.65 per year per incarcerated person,¹⁷ and in some states, like California, where the cost is $75,560 per person per year,¹⁸ the cost is much higher. Imagine if those funds were largely spent on education instead.

All of this adds up. It adds up to a lot. A regularly cited statistic puts the cost at $80 billion per year, and a new study from Washington University in St. Louis found the true cost, one that takes in the community and family impact, to be much higher: more than $1 trillion per year.¹⁹ That’s trillion with a t.

The costs aren’t limited to dollars. With over 1 million women under the supervision of the criminal justice system in the United States,²⁰ it’s easy to see that the economics of incarceration is costing our economy. But that’s not all. Mass incarceration is costing women’s families. “Imagine you’re a seven-year-old girl, you come home from school, and your mom’s not there,” well-known advocate and attorney Amanda DuBois said. “The mom has been arrested for something, but the little girl has no way of knowing where her mother is or what’s going on. The child doesn’t get to say goodbye. Her mom doesn’t have any time to make arrangements because if somebody gets arrested, they just get thrown in jail.”

There are tens of thousands of women who haven’t been convicted of any crime at all, but who are sitting in jail simply because they can’t afford bail. This means that little girls or boys are without their moms due to minor crimes like having a suspended driver’s license. Women, including moms, can be thrown in the county jail without the ability to make bail for weeks or months even though they haven’t been convicted of a crime. When we have for-profit companies operating our prisons, these companies are more likely to push for laws and procedures that send people to jail and to prison for longer periods of time. We shouldn’t live in a society where companies have an incentive to tear up families in order to improve their bottom line. As Amanda concludes, “We’re traumatizing families over and over.” This shouldn’t be happening. As women and mothers, we must look out for these details, like the need for bail reform that are in emergency need of fixing, and look out for each other.

Mass Incarceration Harms Children

Carol is an elementary school teacher who has taught many students whose parents either are or were incarcerated. She’s seen firsthand that incarceration has traumatic effects on families, particularly for children who grow up without a parent in the home. Carol notes, “Many people who are incarcerated have not committed violent crimes, or are not actually guilty of their crimes, and are disproportionately people of color. Our society requires radical justice and sentencing reform to humanize families and children who are victims of criminal injustice.”

Carol’s right. When it comes to children and trauma, psychologists have created a list of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to determine if a child needs support and intervention. Not surprisingly, having a parent in prison is an ACE. To figure out a child’s overall ACE score, each type of trauma counts as one point. The points are added to tally a total score.²¹

Some ACEs relate to the child’s own experience: physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Others relate to the family environment: a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death, or abandonment.

While the ACE study measured only ten types of childhood trauma, Jane Stevens, founder and publisher of the ACEs Connection Network, also notes that recent ACE surveys are adding other evaluation experiences, including racism, bullying, witnessing violence outside the home, gender discrimination, witnessing a sibling being abused, experiencing war, involvement with the foster care system, involvement with the juvenile justice system, witnessing a father being abused, and poverty.²²

We know that ACEs can have damaging effects on a child’s development, and we also know that early learning is an important time to intervene and build resiliency in kids to stave off these damaging impacts. A lot of new research is showing that particular ACEs can have long-lasting negative impacts on children, but if early intervention and support are provided, then that negative impact can be diminished.²³

“There is a huge ripple effect from the mass incarceration of women through families,” notes Amanda DuBois. “Here’s an example: You have trauma in your childhood. Then you got in a domestic violence situation as an adult. You became a drug addict. You ended up in prison. And the next thing you know your children are being taken away from you. So, instead of treating people who have addiction problems as a medical problem, which is what it is, they throw them in prison, and then they take away their children. And that carries the trauma on.”

Nadia knows firsthand how harmful our country’s harsh sentencing policies can be for children and families. When her father was incarcerated for a nonviolent drug charge, it was devastating to their family. Though Nadia’s father was a veteran with no prior criminal history, due to our country’s harsh sentencing laws, he was locked away instead of getting the counseling and treatment that he needed.

Nadia told me, “My father’s imprisonment was disastrous for us emotionally and economically. It forced us to move into public housing and to rely on food stamps, and led me to finance my own college education.” Nadia isn’t the only daughter or son negatively impacted by America’s failed—and failing—system of mass incarceration. One in three Americans now has a criminal record, our prisons are overcrowded, and families are being torn apart.²⁴

Solving the Crisis

Women are being impacted by incarceration in big ways. Two-thirds of the women in federal prisons are serving time for challenges related to nonviolent drug use.²⁵ Instead of increasing public safety, current sentencing laws have led to a massive sweeping of nonviolent offenders into prisons, harming women, costing at least a billion taxpayer dollars,²⁶ and fracturing families like Nadia’s.²⁷

It’s important to take a look at who is incarcerated and why in order to figure out how we can begin to solve this crisis.²⁸ To start, mandatory minimums have been used against communities of color at a staggeringly disproportionate rate. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, approximately 70 percent of mandatory minimums are imposed on Black and Latino individuals.²⁹ Compounding these numbers are so-called three strikes penalties that mandate life sentences for certain individuals if they have three convictions in certain areas of the law. Additional studies show that Black women are eight times more likely than white women to be incarcerated, and Latina women are four times more likely to be incarcerated.³⁰ This isn’t fair.

Women are among those who are hit hardest by the extreme unfairness in our criminal justice system. The trauma of the criminal justice system is all too often added on top of personal trauma in a vicious cycle that we must help break. For instance, the overwhelming majority of women in prison are survivors of domestic violence. Three-quarters have histories of severe physical abuse by an intimate partner during adulthood, and 82 percent suffered serious physical or sexual abuse as children.³¹ This means that women who experience violence in their daily lives are also astronomically more likely to experience harm by our criminal justice system.

Compounded Harm

Too often incarceration compounds harm, not heals it. One heartbreaking fact is that girls and women who are victims of sex trafficking are regularly arrested on prostitution charges and incarcerated rather than being supported as survivors of violence, whereas the men who exploit them are rarely prosecuted or punished. The subsequent time in prison compounds the trauma these girls and women have already experienced.³²

Another is the prevalence of prison rape. According to the Department of Justice, an estimated 4 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2 percent of jail inmates report experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff.³³ But we know this number is a gross underestimate, given that these are only the instances of abuse in prison that are reported.

These are just two examples of compounding harm. But make no mistake, harsh sentencing practices, without any access to counseling and treatment, regularly do more harm than good.

Further, strict penalties designed to combat the distribution of illegal drugs have done little to stem the drug trade. Instead, the result has been a massive influx of incarcerating people experiencing challenges related to drug addiction into an ever-expanding criminal justice system that fractures families and wastes resources that would be infinitely better invested in community services, schools, rehabilitation services, and health care. For instance, in-prison vocational programs—which are largely lacking in today’s for-profit system—produce a return of $12.62 for every dollar invested.³⁴

But too often, instead of investing in people, incarcerated people are taken advantage of by the prison industrial complex. One example of this happened as the 2017 wildfires raged across the West, ripping through neighborhoods and forests, and raining ash and fire on cities: Women inmates in California were paid just $1 per hour, with a bonus of $2 per day, to work on the hazardous front lines of the fires. These imprisoned women earned only a fraction of the $40,000 per year that firefighters earn, despite performing the same job. The inmates were saving lives and land on the front lines without the pay but with all the hazards, including breathing toxic air that could leave lasting negative impacts on their lungs.³⁵

Our Families

Our justice system is failing families, damaging women and children, and hurting our economy. We are living in a time when more than 2.7 million children in the United States have an incarcerated parent ³⁶ (1 in 28 children³⁷)—and around 35 million children in the United States—nearly half of U.S. children—now have at least one parent with a criminal record.³⁸,³⁹

Jessica, who grew up with an incarcerated parent, highlights the importance of reconsidering how we value family in society. “Sentencing women of low-income families for harsh drug or minor offenses keeps mothers away for years,” she suggests. She advises that instead of investing time trying to keep family apart from one another, we should try to do the best we can to keep families together.

Joana, at only one and a half years old, was still nursing when she was separated from her mother after they crossed the southern border into the United States, seeking safety. It was three very long months of separation until the toddler was finally reunited with her mother.⁴⁰ Joana and her mother were placed in detention centers, which is a form of incarceration. Most of these centers are for-profit, unsafe, unsanitary, and far away from where pro bono attorneys can easily come to help. This last fact is important, because studies show that the majority of women coming from the southern border would qualify for asylum if they had access to an attorney.⁴¹ It should be noted that not only is it legal to seek asylum in our nation, it’s also an international human right.⁴²

Yet human rights abuses are happening in the name of immigration enforcement, including separations like baby Joana and her mom experienced. They also aren’t happening by accident.⁴³ Shortly after taking office, Trump proposed that the Department of Homeland Security enact a policy of purposefully separating children and mothers who are seeking asylum at our southern border.⁴⁴

This is damaging on a number of levels. Evidence shows that kids who are separated from their parents after dangerous journeys north are often retraumatized, and experts agree that “prolonged separations from parents have profound disruptive influence on children’s development.”⁴⁵

Recent court cases give a glimpse into detention center conditions that are horrific.⁴⁶ Conditions in facilities show the use of hieleras, or iceboxes, to detain people, as well as forcing people to sleep on cold floors, amid trash, for days without soap, showers, hot water, or beds. Conditions like these are nothing short of human rights abuse in the name of immigration enforcement.

There’s no question: Allowing human rights abuses in the name of immigration or law enforcement is wrong. Our current approach relating to prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers is nothing short of devastating. Excessive incarceration continues to do harm. The continued growth of incarceration in America perpetuates cycles of poverty for women and entrenches structural racism.⁴⁷

Racial Profiling Must Stop

We need smart reform—yesterday—that will positively impact millions of families across the country, reduce the billions of taxpayer dollars we’re spending on the federal justice system, and improve community safety. Sentencing, bail, and police reforms, along with strengthening treatment, rehabilitation, and counseling programs, are a necessity. One way to see who is valued and who isn’t in our nation is to see who is disproportionately incarcerated in our prison system; another is to take a look at who is disproportionately harmed or killed by the police. Racial profiling and police brutality are major aspects of mass incarceration in our nation that can’t be ignored. People are dying.

Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter were driving in the car with her fiancé, Philando Castile, a much-loved longtime local school worker in St. Anthony, Minnesota, when they were pulled over by police for a broken taillight on July 6, 2016.

Within one minute of being pulled over, Castile was killed by seven bullets from a police officer while still wearing his seatbelt as Diamond and her daughter sat just inches away.⁴⁸ Dashcam footage shows that Castile did nothing wrong. Yet the police officer who killed him was acquitted of all charges.⁴⁹

Diamond livestreamed her horror, terror, and despair on Facebook in the immediate aftermath while still in the car, drawing the attention of tens of millions. Heartbreaking. Beyond tragic. Tears. Sitting in that seat next to her dying boyfriend while she and her daughter were in the firing line was a form of violence itself. Police brutality is a form of violence against women, as is racism. Diamond’s four-year-old-daughter will never be the same.

The numbers are stark and should be a wake-up call for all women—no matter our race. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites⁵⁰—and young Black men are twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than young white men.⁵¹

Twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police.

This is not okay. This is why we must chant “Black Lives Matter” in the women’s movement—and is also why the Black Lives Matter movement, co-founded by three women, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, won a global peace prize from the Sydney Peace Foundation in 2017.⁵²

No mother, father, son, daughter, friend, beloved, or family member should have to fear the loss of a loved one at the hands of police officers who are sworn to serve and protect us. But this type of violence happens all too often. Philando Castile was one of 963 people shot and killed by the police in 2016 alone.⁵³

This has to stop. Together, we can build systems of policing and law enforcement that are accountable to the people they are charged to protect. Reforms should include training police to de-escalate violence, understand mental health emergencies, render first aid on the scene, and apply a good-faith standard for the use of deadly force, and the removal of the de facto immunity that police have today. Also, we must insist upon completely independent investigations of use of deadly force when there is injury or death, and bring diverse community stakeholders to the table for the development of standards and curriculum.

Violence against women, against communities, comes in many forms. Police brutality rooted in racial profiling or otherwise is one tragic form of violence against women. To be clear, it’s not just men of color who are targeted and harmed; women of color are harmed by this violence, too—both directly and indirectly—and are all too often invisible and ignored. The statistics speak for themselves: In 2013, Black women accounted for 53 percent of all women stopped by police,⁵⁴ even though Black women only make up 13 percent of the female population in the United States,⁵⁵ and Black women account for 20 percent of unarmed people of color killed by the police between 1999 and 2014.⁵⁶

Stand Up, Speak Out

Our country was built on the concept of innocent until proven guilty, in writing at least. But the statistics show that the rampant practice of racial profiling by law enforcement is conducted in a manner that too often presumes that people of color are considered guilty until proven innocent.

The high incarceration rate isn’t the “fault” of people of color, as many have insinuated. Instead, racial profiling is alive and well, doing harm in America throughout every aspect of our criminal justice system. For example, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board found that racial profiling is all too common, and the stats are getting worse over time: “Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely in 2013 to be stopped by police, and Blacks and Hispanics were both more likely to be searched, even though the likelihood of finding contraband was higher among Whites.”⁵⁷ Further, studies show that people of color have higher drug-related arrest rates even though they aren’t more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than white people.⁵⁸ Racial profiling adds up in incredibly unfair and deadly ways.

Women Are Rising

Women are rising to make our country better. In 2016 in New York State, a group of twelve mothers who lost their children to police murders worked with an organization called the Justice Committee to design an executive order appointing a special prosecutor for instances where police killed civilians.⁵⁹

Why is this important? There’s inherent conflict of interest between prosecutors and police officers because they work together every day in their regular jobs.⁶⁰ These relationships factor in when local prosecutors have to decide whether to press charges against local police officers or not. Studies show the chances of prosecution are lower when the victim is Black or brown.⁶¹ For instance, in the last fifteen years, at least 179 people—86 percent whom were Black or brown—have been killed by on-duty NYPD officers. Only three of the tragic police killings led to an indictment, and only one of the officers has been convicted.⁶²

Due to the efforts of these twelve moms and the organizations that had their backs, the bill passed. New York State now has a special prosecutor for police killings. This victory led by women of color is a shining example of what other states and our federal government can and should do immediately.

Checking Implicit Bias

Why is this happening? Implicit bias adds up to violence. I went to high school in Maryland in the 1980s, when the murder rate in the District of Columbia and Baltimore was among the highest in the nation. I lived right between those two cities. On more than one occasion I found myself ducking and crawling beneath a car because a gun was pulled. On more than one occasion police came to break up the chaos.

Never did the police look twice at me, a blond white girl. They looked at my friends, though. I remember one moment when I was in high school like it was yesterday. The police came to break up a party where a gun had been pulled amid the dancing. A deep, unfriendly quiet had come over the darkened house. And as I stood near the side of the room and looked around, I saw that my friends who were Black, and who had done nothing wrong, were in handcuffs as I stood free from police scrutiny.

I’m a witness. The police, at least where I grew up, racially profiled in extremely unfair ways.

Unchecked implicit bias results in subconscious decisions made not just at the individual level but also at the institutional and societal levels on who to hire, fire, pay more or pay less, as well as who to suspect of criminality, and, as a result, impacts who is arrested and incarcerated and who gets killed when police respond. Study after study shows racial bias woven through our criminal justice system ⁶³—and there’s no doubt that racial bias in our criminal justice system is doing harm to families, to our safety, to our freedoms, and to our democracy. It’s on us to stop it.

The Impact of Our Generation

Our future grandchildren and great-grandchildren will likely read about our generation in history books. They will ask us what we were doing when these human rights abuses were happening, when the United States had the highest incarceration rate in the world.

People created this system, so we can fix it, too. Women are needed to fight for reforms in every aspect of our criminal justice system, from fair policing standards and better accountability to changes in sentencing, bail, and prosecution; ending mandatory minimums and the death penalty; and also largely divesting from the for-profit prison industrial complex and investing in our families and children. Part of fixing the system is also giving back the right to vote to the over 6 million people who have been stripped of that right because they’ve had a conviction.⁶⁴

Our generation is facing a crisis in the criminal justice system. There is a severe lack of equity and equality in the entire system, and it’s long past time for us all to stand up to fix it. We want to be able to say that we, as a community of women, did everything we could to lift women and children like Joana, Jessica, and Nadia, and to prevent women from experiencing tragedies like those that befell women like Rekia Boyd, Miriam Carey, Tanisha Anderson, Charleena Lyles, and Diamond Reynolds. As women we must stand together. The violence must stop.

12

An Unjust System