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
Women caught in a cycle of addiction are among the most neglected citizens of the state. With a severely under funded and inadequate treatment system nationwide, the lack of programs suitable for women - particularly women with children -- presents an immense obstacle in the long road to recovery and reassembling one's life. To further impede a woman's attempts to improve her quality of life and stability for her family, not only does drug addiction carry a strong stigma in society, but access to public benefits has become increasingly limited for individuals with a history of drug use. Work, welfare benefits, public housing, and access to funding for higher education can all be jeopardized with a drug conviction or a positive drug test. Without these treatment or these auxiliary resources available to women, their chances for success - at overcoming an addiction, recovering children from the state, supporting themselves and their families, and becoming an independent productive individual - are tragically diminished. Without this success, a woman's chances of HIV or Hepatitis-C infection, homelessness, overdose, and a forced breakup of a family structure all increase.

Families Left Behind
In communities with a staggering percentage of the young male population behind bars, women and children are left to fill the role of financial provider and caretaker, and struggle to rebuild a family structure. In the town of Tulia, Texas, sixteen percent of the Black community was arrested in one undercover operation10 and one in three Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is under state control or supervision.(11) The destruction of the family unit by the policies of the drug war has far reaching consequences that deeply mar both the individuals sent to prison and the families that they can no longer support emotionally or financially. In 1999, 2.1% of children in the U.S. had a parent in State or Federal prison. Black children were nearly 9 times more likely to have a parent in prison than White children. Latino children were 3 times as likely as White children to have an inmate parent.(12)

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.

Notes:

1. Source: Amnesty International, "Not Part of My Sentence," Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody (Washington, DC: Amnesty International, March 1999), p. 26.
2. U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics. Criminal Offenders Statistics. (revised on June 24, 2001).
3. Gran Angular, Magazine on Development in the Cochabamba Tropics, No. 35, March 1998. Via the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.
4. Source: Tracy Huling, 'Women Drug Couriers: Sentencing Reform Needed for Prisoners of War.' Criminal Justice (Winter 1995), pp. 15-19, 58-62.
5. US Sentencing Commission. (1995, February). Special Report to Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, Table, 18. Washington, DC: U.S. Sentencing Commission, pg. 170.
6. In New York, a report from the central registry suggests that fatalities in foster care due to abuse and neglect may appear at two to three times the frequency of the general population (New York State Department of Social Services, 1980). Andrew Kendrick. Fostering Assessment in the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: A Literature Review (July 1994).
7. Regina McKnight was convicted of homicide and sentenced to twelve years in prison for suffering a stillbirth. See McKnight v. South Carolina (South Carolina Superior Court in Horry County, 2000).
   The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published an article reviewing the studies conducted on cocaine use and pregnancy that concluded that the crack baby scare was a myth and that there is no scientific evidence to support the contention that cocaine is more detrimental to a pregnancy than cigarettes, alcohol, and other known risks. Deborah Frank et al., Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review, 285 JAMA 1613 (2001).
8. Ferguson vs. the City of Charleston, SC, 121 S.Ct. 1281 (2001)
   Friends of Justice. War on People. (visited July 9, 2001)
   Mauer, M. & Huling, T., Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later (Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 1995).
9. Mumola, Christopher J., US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, Incarcerated Parents and Their Children (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, August 2000), p. 2.