Once Again, the Female Criminal Justice Sentencing Discount

The feminist (man bad, woman good) model drives government larger – bigger enforcement agencies (police), larger court system, growing correction facility, and, huge prison network (the world’s largest).

Support industries ought to see job growth lawyers, government experts, professors in academic, social workers, psychologist, psych testing, and family & children services, among others.

Feminism Inc. fits well into America’s new service economy.

Through divorce man is re-imaged as violent. Definitions of legal terms re-defined to convict men, for example, change “violence” and “abuse” feeling a threat vs. bodily contact. Then add a few new terms like “harassing” and “stalking”.

It is now easy to begin to fill a system build to protect woman and children from men. Brilliant.

Less often appreciated is the gender bias of capital punishment in the United States, though it is a much stronger predictor than race or social class. According to the Justice Center Website of the University of Alaska – Anchorage, “Of the 19,000 confirmed executions since 1608 in what is now the United States, only 515, less than three percent, were executions of women. Until this year [1998], Velma Barfield, executed in North Carolina on 2 November 1984, was the only woman executed in the U.S. since executions resumed in 1976.” Two more women have since been executed, for a total of 3 out of 596 (0.5%) between 1976 and December 1999. (See Paul Duggan, “Rising Number of Executions Welcomed, Decried,” The Washington Post, December 13 1999.)

The Death Penalty Information Centre notes that “Women are more likely to be dropped out of the system the further the capital punishment system progresses. … Women account for about 1 in 8 (13%) murder arrests; … 1 in 52 (1.9%) death sentences imposed at the trial level; … 1 in 77 (1.3%) persons presently on death row; and … only 3 in 540 (0.6%) persons actually executed since [1976].” (DPIC, “Women and the Death Penalty: Brief Facts and Figures.”) Using the updated figures cited in the previous paragraph, the statistic can be framed another way: 99.5% of those executed in the United States since 1976 have been male.

The bias against men carries over to juveniles and the mentally handicapped. Here, in fact, it is exclusively underage and handicapped males who are killed by the state: “There are presently 58 inmates, all male, on death row for crimes committed while juveniles. … As of year-end 1997, 31 mentally retarded men had been executed in the U.S. since 1976.” (Source: Justice Center Website.)

Capital punishment increasingly seems a weapon of choice in the U.S. Ninety-nine prisoners — all male — were executed in 1999, “a significant increase in government-sanctioned killing over last year, and far more than any annual total since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.” (Duggan, “Rising Number of Executions …”) (Update: On February 24, 2000, Betty Lou Beets became the fourth U.S. woman executed since 1976. See Michael Graczyk, “Woman Executed after Bush Rejects Plea for Clemency”, The New York Times, February 25 2000. On May 2, 2000, Christina Marie Riggs was executed by lethal injection in Arkansas for suffocating her two children; she was the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years.)

Numerous other abuses and atrocities can also be cited within the U.S. prison system, which has long been notorious for its high rates of violence, torture, and rape (see the extraordinary efforts and resources of Stop Prisoner Rape in the United States). Recent indictments by human-rights groups have cited the use of prisoners as borderline slave labour: the prison population mysteriously continues to rise as crime rates fall nationwide. Billions of dollars of corporate investments now depend on prisoners working for miserable wages (see “The Prison Industry: Capitalist Punishment,” Corporate Watch, October 28 1999). As Rage Against the Machine put it in their 1999 song “New Millennium Homes”: (Cf The United States)

http://www.gendercide.org/case_imprisonment.html

Also almost nine out of every ten inmates are men.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/jailag.htm