Racism and Sexism Questions

Punishment of Black Mothers

and Children AFAM & WMNST 103

Racism and Sexism

Week 6

Dorothy Roberts,

“Prisons, Foster Care,

and Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers

State Appropriation of Black Women’s Bodies

• Systematic Punishment • The Maintenance of unjust hierarchies, systems, and

institutions • Producing normative citizenry

Terms and Concepts

• System Intersectionality • Neoliberalism • Prisons and policing maintain racial inequalities,

racial hierarchies, and racial & gender inequalities

Robert’s Lecture on Colonizing Black Women’s Bodies

• Gendered racial stereotype (e.g. the jezebel, the mammy, the welfare queen) are circulated through culture and in response institutions of power (the state, the prison, the welfare system) assert various social mechanisms (surveillance, policing, institutional exploitation) to regulate control

• These social mechanisms in addition to existing practices of racist policing echo long-standing implementations of racial targeting that emerge from slavery.

• In particular, black mothers are in a fragile position where they cannot take care of their children because of the enforcement of two systems, the prison and the foster care system

Addressing misconceptions of mothers in prison and the foster care system

• The dominant framing of reform that discusses the risks of children with incarcerated parents to end up in foster care miss several points: • The systemic deprivation of their children’s experience • Or will ignore mothers altogether

• “Foster care is more than a precursor to prison (for children), and prison is more than a precursor to foster for children (of the incarcerated).”

• ”The simultaneous buildup and operation of the prison and foster care systems rely on the punishment of black mothers who suffer from the system’s intersection.”

• 1/ 3 of women in prison are black and most are the primary care-takers of their children • 1/3 of children in foster care are black and most have been removed from black mothers

DEBUNKING THE RACIAL STEREOTYPE THAT BLACK WOMEN ARE UNFIT MOTHERS

• Roberts explains that the overlap evidence that she finds shows that the pervasive form of governance known as neoliberalism facilitates the racial targeting of black women.

• Neoliberalism, a form of punitive governance, according to Roberts: • Perpetuates social inequality; • Transfers services from the welfare state to the private realm of the family and market (white

promoting market conditions conducive to capital accumulation); • Dismantles a social safety net which many impoverished minority families rely on; • While targeting poor communities of color à containment of nation’s most disenfranchised

group (while shrinking government responsibility).

• So, the two systems, the prison and foster care together, perpetuate social inequities in the following…

MASS INCARCERATION HARMS THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY: • Damages social networks; • Distorts social norms/ reproduces racial stereotypes (criminalization of blackness); • Destroys social citizenship

• Following Loïc Wacquant and Michelle Alexander, Robert explains that mass incarceration with its historical lineage in slavery, the Jim Crow South, and the “urban ghetto” in the North have produced together the expanding carceral system which inherently targets African Americans.

• “People suffer not only because the government has abandoned them but also because punitive policies make their lives more difficult. These two trends– private remedies for systemic inequality and punitive state regulation of the most disadvantaged communities– are mutually reinforcing.”

• Preserving a “racial caste system” that civil rights reforms were supposed to abolish.

The Incarceration of Women

ROBERTS EXPLAINS: • Women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, with an

828 percent increase in the number of black women behind bars for drug offenses between 1986 and 1991. • For most of these women, prison constitutes a culminating victimization that

results from multiple forms of vulnerability and violation, including domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction and other health problems, and homelessness. • U.S. law enforcement treats the health problem of drug addiction as a

criminal offense, and black women who lack adequate access to drug treatment are most vulnerable to the punitive approach.

Women who depend on public assistance to care for their children are increasingly treated as criminals: Accusations of welfare fraud are brought as felony charges punished with prison sentences rather than administrative violations garnering civil penalties.

Thousands of black women in prison today—mostly for nonviolent offenses— need treatment for a substance abuse problem, support for their children, or safety from an abusive relationship instead of criminal punishment.

The Incarceration of Women

Most incarcerated women are mothers. Mass incarceration strains the extended networks of kin and friends that have traditionally sustained poor African American families in difficult times, thereby weakening communities’ abilities to withstand economic and social hardship. This injury to social networks counterbalances the claim that removing criminal mothers benefits their children and extended family by relieving them of problems caused by the offenders’ antisocial behavior.

Repercussions on Family Life • 1/15 black children had a parent in prison, making them nearly 8 times more likely to have an incarcerated

parent than white children; • Over the course of childhood, the risk of parent imprisonment is even greater than this point-in-time

estimate. • Mass incarceration deprives thousands of children of important economic and social support from their

parents, placing extra economic and emotional burdens on remaining family members; • Separation from imprisoned parents has serious psychological consequences for children, including

depression, anxiety, feelings of rejection, shame, anger, guilt, and problems in school. • Incarcerating mothers tend to upset family ties more than incarcerating fathers because inmate mothers are

usually the primary caretakers of their children before entering prison. • While judges used to show mothers leniency, they are now more often compelled by mandatory sentencing

laws to give mothers long prison terms (yet another example how the ”person” and humanity are taken out of the picture of imprisonment).

“Incarceration’s impacts on black mothers is an important element of how mass incarceration acts as a means of political subordination. One of the most pernicious features of prison expansion is that it devastates community-based resources for contesting prison policy and other systemic forms of disenfranchisement.”

MOTHERS WITH CHILDREN IN FOSTER CARE

PRISONS AND FOSTER CARE WORK TOGETHER IN A CARCERAL CYCLE OF SEPARATION AND CONTAINMENT (ONE THAT PARALLELS THE SEPARATION OF BLACK FAMILIES DURING SLAVERY

• Before the Civil Rights Movement, black children were disproportionately excluded from openly segregated child welfare services that catered mainly to white families;

• Black children are still grossly overrepresented in the U.S. child welfare system: Even though they represent only 15% of the nation’s children population, black children currently compose about 30% of the nation’s foster care population.

“It is often forgotten that state agents forcibly remove most of these children and that the mothers are then intensely supervised by child welfare authorities as they comply with the agency requirements to be reunified with their children. This state intrusion is typically viewed as necessary to protect maltreated children from parental harm. But the need for this intervention is usually linked to poverty, racial injustice, and the state’s approach to caregiving, which addresses family economic deprivation with child removal rather than services and financial resources.”

Little attention is paid to the political function of this massive removal of children from black mothers. How does U.S. child

welfare policy, both historically and today, reflect and reinforce the disadvantaged political status of African

American families? • Racial disparities in the child welfare system reflect a political choice to investigate and black

mothers for the cause of starting rates of child poverty.

• Enforcing a system of welfare safety with punitive measures: while children receiving welfare services declined significantly in the 1970’s, foster care population had skyrocketed.

• Rather than providing services for families and children, black mothers were targeted. • Poor and low-income black mothers tend to receive child welfare support (not when they are in a

desperate situation (e.g. Housing 4 Mothers), but charged with child maltreatment).

Racial Geographies • The impact of state’s disruption and supervision of families is intensified when it is concentrated in

inner-city neighborhoods. • In many urban areas, most children protection cases occur in poor and low-income African American

neighborhoods; • Black children are at risk of growing up in a neighborhood where child protective services are heavily

involved and black mothers are at risk of losing their children to the system; • The spatial concentration of child welfare supervision creates an environment in which state custody

of children is a realistic expectation, if not the norm. • Like the prison system, placing large numbers of children in state custody interferes with the

ability of community members to form healthy connections and to engage in collection action.

System Intersectionality • An intersectional perspective reveals that black women suffer the combined effects of

racism and sexism and therefore have experiences that are different from those of both white women and black men (an example of what Davis described as the “deformed equality of equal oppression.”)

• This perspective enables us to analyze how structures of privilege and disadvantage, such as gender, race, and class, interact in the lives of all people, depending on their particular identities and social positions.

• Intersectionality analyzes the ways in which these structures of power connect with and shape each other to create a system of interlocking oppressions.

• What sociologist and black feminist, Patricia Hill Collins, terms a “matrix of domination.”

“The analysis of the roles black mothers play in both the prison and foster care systems reveals that these systems intersect with each other jointly to perpetuate unjust hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Prisons and foster care function together to discipline and control poor and low-income black women by keeping them under the intense state supervision and blaming them for the hardships their families face as a result of societal inequities… [shuffling] family members into the punitive machinery of law enforcement and child protection.”

System Intersectionality (cont.) • System intersectionality is evident when child welfare and prison policies

make it extremely difficult for incarcerated black women to retain legal custody of their children. • 11% of mothers incarcerated in state prison reported that their children were

in the care of a foster home, agency, or institution, which 5X the rate reported by fathers. • Most of the mothers studied were incarcerated after their children were

placed in foster care, perhaps because losing custody of their children led to increased substance abuse or loss of needed assistance.

Gendered racial stereotypes

• Stereotypes about black female criminality and irresponsibility and negligence legitimate the massive disruptions that both systems inflict on black families and communities. • Stereotypes do not simply percolate in some disembodied white psyche. They are

reinforced and recreated by institutions such as the foster care system and prisons. • Angela Davis on the prison industrial complex: the prison “relies on racialized

assumptions of criminality—such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns.”

Conclusion: Policing and Punishing Black Mothers in Neoliberalism Black mothers are useful to the neoliberal agenda because state regulation of their bodies, already devalued by a long history of reproductive regulation and derogatory stereotypes of maternal irresponsibility, makes excessive policing by foster care and prison seem necessary to protect children and the public from harm. In turn, this analysis suggests the need for cross-movement strategies that can address multiple forms of systemic injustice to contest the overpolicing of women of color and expose how it props up an unjust social order.

Shackling Laws in Prisons

The First Step Act in December 2018, a federal law that prohibits some of the most punitive measures against prisoners, including shackling of pregnant women.

But the recently enacted federal legislation fails to protect women in state prisons and county jails – a population that accounts for 85% of incarcerated women in America,

according to a 2018 report by the Prison Policy Initiative.

This means thousands of pregnant inmates remain at the mercy of guards who can choose exactly how to control their every movement – as well as the movement of

their unborn children.

Currently, 23 states, says Lauren Kuhlik, Equal Justice Works fellow at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, do not have laws against shackling of

incarcerated pregnant women, despite a 2010 United Nations rule that “instruments of restraint shall never be used … during labor, during birth and

immediately after birth”.

Meanwhile, many prison employees lack understanding of an inmate’s legal rights. Not-for-profits try to fill the gap by distributing pamphlets to inmates

and in support groups, explaining anti-shackling laws.

Colonizing Black Women’s Bodies • The shackling of pregnant mothers in prison indicate how the punitive practices of

slavery still exist today; • Even when mothers are giving birth, they are perceived as criminals and need to be

chained to the prison hospital beds; • The severity of physical harm from shackling women while pregnant is not only

injurious to the woman giving birth, but also to the baby and can cause serious complication during the birth process; • After giving birth in prison, women are cannot have custody of their child even if

their sentence does not allow them to be with the child. The time away between mother and child (due to the prison sentence) is considered as “negligence” by welfare services while also reinforcing the stereotype of black women as “unfit mothers.” Children are then put into the foster care system.

Videos from today: • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laL0AyssYY8

• https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/22/belly_of_the_beast_d ocumentary