WOMEN IN PRISON
Prisons serve the same purpose for women as they do for men; they are instruments for social control. However, the imprisonment of women as well as all their live takes place against a backdrop of patriarchal relationships. Patriarchy implies that men hold power in all the important “institutions” of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. Therefore the incarceration of women in the United States has always been a different phenomenon than that for men. The proportion of women in prison has always differed from that of men; women have traditionally been sent to prison for different reasons and once in prison they endure different conditions of incarceration. Women’s crimes have often had a sexual definition and been rooted in the patriarchal double-standard. As long as there has been crime and punishment patriarchal and gender-based realities and assumptions have been central determinants of the response of society to women offenders. In the late Middle Ages reports reveal different types of treatment for men and women. ... On the other hand women were burned at the stake for committing adultery or murdering their spouse. ... In the South after 1870 prison camps emerged as penal servitude and were essentially substituted for slavery. The overwhelming majority of women in prison camps were African American; and the few white women that were there had been imprisoned for much more serious offenses but because of the fact that they were white they experienced better conditions than the black women did. For instance at Bowden Farm State Prison in Texas the majority of the women were black and they were forced to work in the fields. The few white women who were there were there for homicide and served as domestics. While the system of slavery was applied to the penal system some states forced women to work on state owned penal plantations but they also leased women to local farms, mines, and railroads. ... Like the prison camps custodial women’s prisons were majority black regardless of their regionality. Even though black women have always been imprisoned in smaller numbers than black men. Euro-American men have often constituted larger percentages within female prisons than black men did in a men’s prison. For example between 1797 and 1801 forty-four percent of the women sent to New York state prisons were black, where as only sixty percent of the men were black. The women incarcerated in the custodial prisons tended to be twenty-one years old or older. Forty percent of the women were unmarried and many of them had worked in the past. Women in custodial prisons were often convicted of felony charges; most commonly for property crimes. ... The rate for both property and violent crimes were much higher than the fates for the women at the reformatories.