A world in which Barack Obama never made criminal justice reform a part of his second-term agenda, creating the largest clemency project in recent US history.
It would be a world in which bipartisan consensus never coalesced around the idea that America puts too many people behind bars; a world in which celebrities like Jay-Z and John Legend never took on mass incarceration as a cause célèbre; a world in which liberal and conservative think tanks never got together to push for a less punitive criminal justice system.
According to a recent report by the Prison Policy Initiative, many women in the US live in that world now. The report concluded that while incarceration rates have been falling since a peak in 2007, men and women have benefitted at vastly different rates.
According to the report, the total number of men incarcerated in state prisons nationwide fell more than 5% between 2009 and 2015. The number of women in state prisons fell by less than 0.33%.
“In 35 states,” the report said, “women’s population numbers have fared worse than men’s, and in a few extraordinary states, women’s prison populations have even grown enough to counteract reductions in the men’s population.
“Too often, states undermine their commitment to criminal justice reform by ignoring women’s incarceration.”
Oklahoma leads the US in the incarceration of women by a dramatic margin. Out of every 100,000 women in the state, 150 are serving time in a state prison – more than twice the national average. Between 2011 and 2015 that incarceration rate, already the highest in the nation, climbed by 25%.
“Oklahoma is more likely to incarcerate people for offenses that other states would put them on probation for, and incarcerate them for a longer time,” said Susan Sharp, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma’s Women Prisoners.
Sharp estimates that as many as half the women in state prison in Oklahoma would not be there in any other state.
Specifically, she said, the state tends to pursue extremely punitive sentences around low-level drug and property offenses, which “happen to be the crimes that women are most likely to commit”.
Oklahoma prosecutors, Sharp said, will consider “charging women for trafficking because someone used their telephone to make a deal” and pursue other cases that serve very little purpose in terms of public safety.
“The other one that they do a lot of is the ‘failure to protect’ laws,” Sharp said, “where a woman who is quite likely being abused herself gets a harsher sentence than the male who actually abused her child.”
Sharp raised the case of Tondalo Hall, who in 2006 was sentenced to 30 years for failing to protect her daughter from her abusive boyfriend. The boyfriend, who broke the three-year-old girl’s femur and ribs, was sentenced to just two years. He has since been released. Hall remains incarcerated after her latest plea for clemency was denied.
The PPI study’s findings are in line with prior research on gender and incarceration, such as a 2016 report from the MacArthur Foundation and Vera Institute that found that women in local jails were the fastest-growing population of incarcerated people in the US.
Local jails are where defendants are held before trial. They also house convicted criminals serving very short sentences for lesser crimes. Longer sentences for more serious crimes are typically served in state prison facilities.
A unique law around the jail/prison distinction may have something to do with Oklahoma’s swollen prison numbers, Sharp said, noting that the state allows convicts on very short sentences to be held in prisons.
“Any prosecutor is going to try to keep the expense off of their own county,” she said.
According to Sharp’s research, about 25% of women in Oklahoma prisons would likely be in jails in other states. But even if those 25% were removed from the total number of women in prisons, Oklahoma would still lead the nation in incarcerating women.
The effects are profound. Women tend to enter prison in more vulnerable situations than men: they are more likely to be using drugs, to be receiving public assistance or to be unemployed. More than half are parents of minor children.
Prison tends to deepen the grip of addiction, make women less employable and add strain to strain family relationships, increasing the risk of recidivism.
Sharp said the situation in Oklahoma was not however hopeless, noting that in 2016 voters in the very conservative state approved a series of ballot measures that would reduce a number of drug crimes to misdemeanors and channel the money saved on incarceration into drug treatment programming.
“There’s been a lot of pushback by legislators,” Sharp said, “but it is moving forward and that should greatly reduce the incarceration of women in the state of Oklahoma.”
