Criminal justice expert Katheryn Russell told a crowd of about 50 people in 105 Dartmouth Hall that females in America's prison population are misrepresented in a speech last night.
Russell, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, told the mostly female audience that the misrepresentation of incarcerated women mainly results from the small overall proportion of women in criminal activity and the lack of attention-grabbing violence in their crimes.
"Those two rationales combine to render women invisible in the criminal justice system," she said.
This is especially disturbing considering the fact that there has been a steady increase over the past five years of female involvement in criminal activity, she said.
Russell also said society holds a false stereotype for female criminals and said most people see women as victims in the criminal justice system or conjure up the image of a black, poor and mentally unstable "welfare mother with pinstripes."
Discrimination against black females in the justice system is evident in a statute allowing prosecution of pregnant mothers who endanger their fetuses by using crack cocaine, she said. Russell added that if pregnant women were also incarcerated for smoking, more white women would be arrested as well.
Racial discrimination is also blatant in another statute concerning crack cocaine, she said. Federal guidelines distinguish crack cocaine use from powder cocaine use and penalize the former more harshly. While blacks are not the majority of crack users, the law is applied overwhelmingly to them, Russell said.
Russell has worked extensively on issues of race and crime and is the author of several books including "The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Macroagressions."
Russell's speech was sponsored by the Women's Resource Center, the East Wheelock Cluster, Rockefeller Center, the sociology department and Paleopitus.
