For many people, Mother’s Day brings memories of making misshapen pieces of pottery in an elementary school art room or gluing colorful bits of ribbon to handmade cards. Mother’s Day is an economic boom for florists and restaurants capturing the “Moms refuse to cook on their special day” crowd.
As we grow older, the second Sunday in May evokes grief over the loss of grandmothers and other mother figures who have made their transition. Yet for 2 million children in the United States, this Mother’s Day reveals the human costs of our addiction to incarceration.
On any given day, there are more than 2.3 million Americans behind bars with more than 7 million under some form of criminal supervision. The racial disparities embedded within the American criminal justice system have gained the attention of scholars, policymakers and activists working to reform the cluster of institutions that systematically devalue Black Lives.
However, it’s necessary to address the intersections of race, gender and hyperincarceration. Although White women’s incarceration rate has dramatically increased over the last 10 years, Black women, particularly poorer and working-class Black women, are arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated at a rate that far exceeds their share of the population. Black women comprise 13 percent of U.S. women but are twice as likely to be incarcerated as a White defendant charged with the same offense.
Policy choices rather than crime rates undergird these trends. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions vehemently opposed efforts to reduce the amount of time served for nonviolent drug offenses. During the 2016 election cycle, six states and the District of Columbia legalized recreational marijuana while 28 states and DC legalized medical marijuana. Seventeen states, including Connecticut and Vermont, have moved to decriminalize small amounts of non-medical marijuana, opting for substance-abuse treatment over expensive incarceration.
Though national polls indicate that the majority of Americans support full legalization of marijuana, Sessions, now attorney general, maintains his belief that the most commonly used illicit drug represents a significant threat to Americans’ health and safety.
This shift from promoting decriminalization to harsh punishment may have deleterious effects for mothers of color. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “Drug use and drug selling occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic groups, yet Black and Latina women are far more likely to be criminalized for drug law violations than White women.”
