The War On Drugs Has Become A Largely Unannounced War on Women of Color

Feeling Rebloggy

       
       Source: Andrea Ritchie

     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.”
Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women make up a grossly disproportionate share of women incarcerated for drug offenses, even though 

• whites are nearly 5 times as likely as Blacks to use marijuana and 
• 3 times as likely as Blacks to have used crack. 

According to sociologist Luana Ross, although 

     Native Americans make up 6 percent of the total population of Montana,
they are approximately 25 percent of the female prison population. These disparities are partially explained by incarceration for drug offenses.
     These statistics are not just products of targeting Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; they are consequences of focusing on women of color in particular.

     From 2010 to 2014, women’s drug arrests increased by 9 percent while men’s decreased by 7.5 percent. These disparities were even starker at the height of the drug war. Between 1986 and 1995, arrests of adult women for drug abuse violations increased by 91.1 percent compared to 53.8 percent for men.
     However, there continues to be very little information about the everyday police encounters that lead to drug arrests and produce racial disparities in women’s prisons... 

     One notable exception to the lack of information with respect to women’s experiences of drug law policing was a General Accounting Office investigation, which found that Black women were more likely to be subject to searches of their bodies and personal effects by US Customs and Border Protection agents than any other group.

In fact, Black women were  

• 9 times as likely as white women to be X-rayed after being frisked or patted down, and
• 2 to 3 times as likely to be strip-searched, even though they were less than 1/2 as likely as white women to be found to be carrying contraband.
• Black women were also searched at a rate 1 1/2 times that of Black men and Latinx people,
• and were less likely to be found with contraband than any other group.

The report also found that Asian and Latinx women were strip-searched 3 times as often as men of the same race, and were 20 percent less likely than white women to be caught with contraband.

     Amanda Buritica, a fifty-two-year-old school-crossing guard born in Colombia, landed in San Francisco in 1994 on her way back from Hong Kong. She was strip-searched, forced to drink laxatives, repeatedly kicked by a US Customs officer, and held more than twenty-four hours before she was returned to the airport, sick and dehydrated from her ordeal 

      Across the country, shortly after landing in Fort Lauderdale following a trip to Jamaica, Janneral Denson found herself handcuffed to a bed at Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital by US Customs inspectors; she was forced to drink laxatives, her bowel movements were monitored, and she was held without contact with the outside world for two days, all because she allegedly fit the profile of a drug courier. She was seven months pregnant and experienced severe diarrhea and vaginal bleeding upon release. One week later, she delivered by C-section a three-and-a-half-pound baby who required prenatal intensive care for a month. 

    These stories are just a few of the many behind the statistics that reflect pervasive stereotyping of Black and Latinx women as drug couriers...

http://andreajritchie.com/2017/08/21/war-on-women-of-color/