Women of Color
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In every social role filled by women - as mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, wives, and individuals - they feel the injustice of discriminatory policies advanced by the war on drugs. Low-income, minority women experience these injustices with a particular intensity and frequency. Whether involved in the illegal drug market of their own volition or coerced into the role of drug courier by a boyfriend or husband, women receive the same, harsh mandatory minimum prison terms; a peripheral or unsuspecting role in a drug offense makes little or no difference when the sentencing standard is based solely on the weight of the illicit substance involved. Pregnant or parenting women are penalized for the alleged, often illusory, risks to which they expose their children or fetus while suffering from drug addiction. These penalties include removal of their children from their care, the termination of parental rights, and/or imprisonment. Exacerbating all of these problems, poor minority women lack access to adequate treatment and counseling tailored to their specific needs. Drug Couriers and Mandatory Minimum Sentences Women have been severely affected by the exponential growth of the international drug trade that has accompanied the drug war and resulted in increased need for efficient and inconspicuous methods of trafficking. From 1986 to 1996, the number of women sentenced to state prison for drug crimes increased ten fold, and women of color are prosecuted at significantly higher rates.(1) The U.S. Department of Justice estimated that in 1998, 3.2 million women were arrested and that women accounted for 17% of all drug felony convictions.(2) The United States government's response to the global drug trade has been one of increased interdiction efforts and stiffer border control. This response has forced drug traffickers to be more innovative and cautious in developing means and methods of trafficking. The individuals least likely to be suspected as drug couriers are usually women, and particularly women with small children. Although many women are involved in the drug trade for the same reasons as their male counterparts, other women find themselves trapped in powerless relationships with men involved in trafficking or are denied access to legal and sustainable means to support their family. Once involved, women are subject to criminal sanctions that far exceed their role in the drug trade. Many women who are arrested for trafficking have had little experience in the criminal world: in an assessment of women entering JFK Airport in New York City between 1986 and 1990 who were given life sentences for drug trafficking, 96% of these women had no previous criminal record.(3) According to a recent study on female drug couriers, many women recounted being coerced into carrying drugs with threats of violence and death.(4) The same sentencing policies that are used to punish high-level traffickers-those policies that carry extremely harsh mandatory minimum sentences-are used disproportionately against these women. Since women, as drug couriers, are often the 'mules' of a highly elaborate and hierarchical drug trade, they rarely possess information useful to prosecutors. This precludes them from benefiting from mandatory minimum law provisions which allow for dramatic decreases in sentences in exchange for "snitching" - i.e. assisting in the prosecution of others. Consequently, low-level players are routinely penalized more harshly than the high level traffickers. The effects of these laws on the rates of incarceration for women during the years after mandatory sentencing were enacted are staggering: by 1995, 55% of all female federal drug defendants were classified as low-level offenders, such as mules or street dealers.(5) Only 11% of those federal defendants were classified as high-level dealers. Attack on Parental Rights Increasingly, states will terminate maternal rights based on a single positive drug test, with little regard for factors such as fitness as a parent and the detrimental affects to the well being of the child that unnecessary separation from the parents causes. For a woman with an addiction or even medicinal use of illicit drugs, her inability to comply with the conditions required after a child has entered the Child Protective Services system - usually clean and regular drug tests - does not reflect ability to parent, but nevertheless results in the full termination of parental rights. With the promulgation of the Child Protection Act, parents have a mere eighteen months to fully comply with the court - imposed plan before irrevocably losing their children. Among the most tragic and unintended consequences of the war on drugs are the thousands of orphaned children sent to live with guardians or in foster care, where they are more likely to be the victim of sexual or physical abuse.(6) Prosecution of Pregnant Women Under the guise of the drug war and the promotion of fetal rights, women's reproductive rights have been attacked through the criminal prosecution of pregnant women who use drugs. In the state of South Carolina, a state with an abhorrent and continuing history of racial discrimination, drug use by pregnant women has been legally construed as child abuse. Women of color are drug tested, arrested, prosecuted and jailed for drug use during pregnancy. Under this practice, a stillbirth and a positive drug test can lead to murder charges.(7) Instead of being offered drug treatment, pregnant women are reported by their doctors to law enforcement, and prosecuted under state child abuse laws, despite the scientific evidence that drug use is no more detrimental to fetal health than cigarettes or alcohol use.(8) These policies are enforced in a blatantly racist manner. For example, the public hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, which serves a predominantly Black population, selectively drug tested pregnant women who seemed likely by the hospital's criteria to have drug abuse problems, reported positive tests to the police who then arrested the women--often within minutes of giving birth--and delivered them to jail.(9) Twenty-nine of the thirty women prosecuted under this policy were Black. Addiction, Treatment, and Disease Families Left Behind The consequences and circumstances of the war on drugs are particularly pernicious for women. From the destruction of the relationship between mother and child, to excessive sentences for minor drug-related offenses that result in abominable prison conditions, to increased exposure to deadly diseases, and a treatment system that is woefully inadequate to meet the special needs of women caught in the grasp of addiction, women are vulnerable to the wide range of the injustices of current drug policies. 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