The still growing and disproportionate imprisonment of Black women

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire | Last updated: Dec 19, 2018 - 2:04:16 PM

Missy Venable (not her real name) said she has trouble sleeping at night.

It’s not the typical case of insomnia. It’s the after effects of spending more than seven years in prison—incidentally, it is where her fellow inmates began calling her “Missy,” and the name just stuck.

She made up her last name for this article, choosing to hide her identity because her children are both of school age and Ms. Venable said she doesn’t want classmates teasing them.

It’s a similar story to that shared by her friend, Tina Blackman—also a fictious name.

Ms. Blackman, who said she’s in her mid-40s, spent nearly nine years in prison. “When I went in, I left behind two teenagers and one child that was eight years old and autistic and another child that was two,” Blackman told NNPA Newswire.

While Ms. Venable was imprisoned for insurance fraud, Ms. Blackman was sentenced on drug charges. After hearing their stories, one might wonder, why so much time?

Ms. Venable said she thought she was referring people to get legitimate assistance with old, broken down vehicles and didn’t know the auto shop’s owner, who was once one of her closest friends, was committing insurance fraud.

Blackman said her ex-boyfriend always denied being a drug dealer and she could find no evidence that he was. No bankroll, no fancy car and certainly not a stack of cash, because she was often late on rent and utility payments.

“Every day, I’d take mail to his friend’s because his friend didn’t have a reliable mailbox,” Blackman explained. “They all looked just like regular mail, letters and stuff,” she said.

However, one of the envelopes contained drugs and she was charged for selling narcotics.

Ms. Blackman and Ms. Venable are part of an alarming trend: The growing and disproportionate imprisonment of Black women in America.

A recent NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet noted that between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million.

Today, the United States makes up about five percent of the world’s population and has 21 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Also, according to the Fact Sheet, one in every 37 adults in the United States, or 2.7 percent of the adult population, is under some form of correctional supervision.

Further in 2014, Black Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34 percent, of the 6.8 million correctional population total and Black people are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of Whites.

The imprisonment rate for Black women is twice that of White women.

Last year, “The Status of Black Women in the United States” report was issued by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington and the National Domestic Workers Alliance in New York.That report revealed that Black women are more prone to being jailed than White women, and that tendency starts in school.

Racial disparities in discipline exist throughout the nation’s education system, the researchers said.

Black girls between 2011 and 2012 accounted for 45 percent of all girls suspended from K-12 public schools nationally, and they represented 42 percent of all girls expelled. They were suspended and expelled at higher rates than Black boys, according to the report.

Disciplining of Black girls appears to be influenced by school administrators’ stereotypes and racial biases, researchers said.

Black girls are more likely to be seen as disruptive or loud, compared with other students. They’re more often punished for dress-code violations, talking back to teachers and “defiance” than other girls.

What’s worse, Black girls with disabilities are more prone to being suspended from school than other Black girls.

A June 2018 report from the Center for American Progress noted that infant mortality and mass incarceration are major issues affecting the Black community. But while they are often thought of and dealt with on separate tracks, structural racism firmly connects these critical issues.

Structural racism exposes Black women to distinct stressors—such as contact with the criminal justice system—that ultimately undermine their health and the health of their children, according to the center’s report.

The number of incarcerated U.S. women overall has increased dramatically in recent decades—from just 26,000 in 1980 to 219,000 in 2017. Unsurprisingly, the spike in female incarceration has disproportionately affected Black women, especially young Black women.

While Black women overall are twice as likely to be imprisoned as their White counterparts, Black women ages 18 to 19 are three times more likely to be imprisoned than their White counterparts, the Center for American Progress said.

Alarmingly, their report concluded that if current incarceration trends continue, 1 in 18 Black women will be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime. Incarceration is also associated with higher odds of low birth weight, preterm birth, and infant mortality.

Mass incarceration has exposed millions of Black women to dangerous stressors that threaten their health and the lives of their offspring, Center for American Progress officials said, calling for lawmakers to put an end to this persistent form of structural racism.

“I did time … hard time and I know it was partly because I was naïve and mostly because I was stupid,” Ms. Venable said.

The Black mother of two had barely made ends meet when an opportunity of a lifetime presented itself. Or, so she thought.

“A friend of mine was running this auto shop not far from my house and he asked that I send him some clients and he’d pay me for it,” Ms. Venable said.

Promised $250 per client, Ms. Venable said she turned a blind-eye to what really was going on in the auto shop—insurance fraud.

“The clients would be folks who wanted to get rid of their cars and my contact knew just how to get rid of them, get the clients paid and of course pocket the insurance money,” she said.

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