Women Behind Bars | Fault Lines
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2013
- Women are the fastest growing population in the criminal justice system. Low level drugs offences and crimes associated with poverty have swept in hundreds of thousands of women across the US.
Many have spent years behind bars for non-violent offences.
In California, after promises of prison reform, women continue to face some of the highest levels of overcrowding.
And while the state boasts of significantly reducing the female prison population, county jails have disproportionately filled up with women who are still being swept in for the lowest-level crimes.
Allen Hooper, from the American Civil Liberties Union, explains: "The prison construction, sort of filled a void and a vacuum, both in terms of keeping the economy going just with the construction and the jobs and then also people who were unemployed because of the economy who get caught up in crimes of poverty ... You scoop them up you figure out excuses to put them in those cages."
Fault Lines travels to California to look inside the criminal justice system and asks why so many women are behind bars.
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These women are spending more time on drug charges than mothers killing their own children! Ridiculous 🤦🏻♀️
If you stop committing crimes, you will stop going to jail.
The system is designed to keep the prison population at maximum capacity. Not to rehabilitate the prisoner.
Prison is a business.
When anybody commits a crime, they deserve to be punished. The problem is these harsh sentences for minor, non-violent crimes.
I love how when the cameras were on the yard and the women started yelling out the truth they made them go inside immediately before too much was exposed. Just sad, yes people did wrong, yes they need to have consequences but really life for less than a gram of heroin? Sentences for violent offenses is passed down to non violet petty criminals.
She went to prison for life for 1gram of coke,ridicoulous law!!!Three strikes and your out is a joke for sure!!!
I am not sure how you fix this, but jails and prisons aren't doing the job they were intended to do. Instead of rehabilitating someone so that they can survive real life without risking recidivism they are squeezing every nickel out for the stockholder. The worst part is that they will never ever have to admit the system's broken or do anything about it because they have a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholder. And you will continue to have asshats who say things like, "if you can't do the time, then don't do the crime", to boot.
we should be helping drug addicts not puting them in prison
The black woman wearing purple is so vibrant and obviously not a criminally-minded person, her description really drives home how ludicrious the penal system has become.
sick system
Maybe if they weren't sentencing people for every single little thing they do then maybe the prison not just in California but the whole United States they wouldn't be overpopulated. And, I'm not talking about violent charges.
The woman who said that she took a pacifier from Walmart and they locked her up and took her child...there must be something she's leaving out. I would be curious about her criminal history. I feel bad for these women, but what should be done? If you commit a crime you will go to jail. Most of these women have been in trouble with the law many times before. This seems like one sided reporting. Painting these women like they had nothing to do with their own circumstances. Were they thinking about their families when they tried drugs for the first time? The old " I stole in order to feed my children," is highly unlikely, unless it's because they sold all their food stamps in order to get high. That's what probably happened. We live in the kind of country where you can manage to feed feed your children for free. All I'm saying is take some responsibility for your own mistakes and stop blaming everything and body including the rain for your circumstances.
Realignment
Watching this documentary infuriates me. To perform eugenics on the women in the prison system just lets you know how evil and wicked these people are. This is,beyond sick and sad.
In Canada we have two laws, one for the rich and the other for the poor. Minority people are the highest serving inmates and the female population is growing fast. Drugs, gangs and guns appear to be the most contributing factors. Intoxication, domestic abuse are also high. The most disturbing of all crimes are murders of Aboriginal women and young girls in today’s society. History of racism and products of Residential Schools and Scoping of children in the adoption process have been a generation that affected the families. Government had a significant role in attempting to assimilate people by taking the children from their families and putting children in Residential Schools. The language, culture and spirituality was taken and punishable, when practiced by students. Some people call this mistreatment and genocide of minority people.
1. Justice only works when punishment is proportional to the crime. Where this is not the case, from the point of view of the subject of the justice, there is little point in minimising crime, and this leads to a black and white moral purity idea which is damaging.
I have a horrible thought; what if they are deliberately overcrowding in order to collect more money per inmate from the government? and if so many people say there is overcrowding, how can there not be some truth to it, especially when the prison only allows areas it allows to be taped and photographed?
People are human. We all make mistakes. There is lack of rehabilitation in the systems. Get to the source of the problem and you wont have such a prison over population! These women need help!
our justice system and the departments of corrections make me ashamed to be an american