Incarceration should be a last resort, yet this broken and brutal system punishes marginalised women, most of whom are inside for non-violent crimes
When you imprison a woman, you imprison a family,” a young woman in Sierra Leone told me, cradling her small baby in a damp cell. My mind flashed back to being a teenager, hearing my mother sob after receiving a phone call to say that my father had been arrested in Zambia for political reasons.
I understand how children are collateral damage of imprisonment, and over 20 years as a lawyer, I know that is even more true when women – primary caregivers – are arrested.
I have witnessed the devastating impact of incarceration on hundreds of women and their children but also how their voices are ignored, even in women’s rights spaces.
“Bad girls” is how society labels women in prison. But what if that label is a lie? The majority of women are imprisoned for non-violent offences, and my research, conducted by Women Beyond Walls and Penal Reform International over the past two years, shows that in most cases women are criminalised due to poverty, mental illness, abuse or discrimination.
Half of all women in prison, as opposed to less than a third of men, have a drug dependence in the year before imprisonment.
The small proportion of women who commit violent crimes are usually survivors of violence
In Pollsmoor prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was once detained, a woman told me how she had been arrested for shoplifting, as she tried to feed her family. In Sierra Leone, I documented countless women who were arrested for owing money. In Kenya, I heard stories of women being arrested for “hawking” – selling food without a licence – to survive.
Women from Mexico explained how the US-led “war on drugs” is fuelling a rise in the number of women behind bars, especially in Latin America and Asia. Many women sell drugs due to poverty and coercion; though not major players in the drug trade, they are easier to apprehend by police trying to meet quotas.
