A POX ON the house of the next pundit who calls Harriet Miers "Souter in a skirt," or the next Bushie who claims that opposing W's nominee is sexism. The gender potshots are cheap, intellectually lazy and, perhaps worst of all, utterly irrelevant to the discussion of whether a ragingly unqualified lawyer deserves elevation to the nation's highest court.
When we talk gender in this country, we talk in symbols. We saddle women at the top with the responsibility of representing all of womankind, and when all falls down around the Carly Fiorinas, the Martha Stewarts or the Harriet Mierses, we make broad claims about women in business, media or the judiciary that would be patently absurd were gender roles reversed.
And while we busy ourselves with grand conclusions based on experimental samples of one, we turn a blind eye to what it means to be a woman in the places where being a woman really makes a difference. If the chattering classes are so eager to talk about femininity in the context of law, they'd be well served to focus their attention downward to the bottom of the justice system, where gender matters in a major way.
This past weekend, for the eleventh time, associations of corrections officers, advocates and others within the criminal justice community gathered for a biannual Conference on Adult and Juvenile Female Offenders in Minnesota to address the shameful underbelly of the changing nature of the American correctional system: the skyrocketing number of women in prisons. In the past decade alone, the numbers of women in state and federal prisons has more than doubled (by contrast, the number of men has grown by around 32 percent), and, unlike women serving on the Supreme Court, the gender differences that separate women prisoners from their male counterparts are enormous.
To understand this difference, forget everything you know about the average prisoner. If anything, violent crime among women is on the decline -- murders committed by females, for example, has been dropping since the 1980s. Overwhelmingly, the 148,200 women in state and federal prisons are victims themselves of an unjustly executed "war on drugs."
The Department of Justice corroborated this evidence back in the late 90s, finding that women were grossly over represented among low-level drug offenders who "were non-violent, had minimal or no prior criminal history, and were not principal figures in criminal organizations or activities, but nevertheless received sentences similar to 'high level' drug offenders under the mandatory sentencing policies." The history of incarcerated women follows the trajectory of the drug war almost exactly; in 1986, 12 percent of women in prison were drug offenders -- just five years later the numbers stood at a third.
Regardless of why they find themselves in prison, the stories of these women have a familiar theme of abuse. According to the federal government, close to 60 percent of all women in state prisons nationwide suffered abusive histories, and an estimated half or more suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of sexual or physical abuse. Despite this, a correctional facility with any sort of psychiatric treatment capabilities is a rarity.
What is far more common, at least according to the findings of an Amnesty International Report on women in prison, are facilities that turn a blind eye to sexual assaults within their boundaries, with records showing "male correctional officials subjecting female inmates to rape, other sexual assault, sexual extortion, and groping during body searches, and watching women undressing, in the shower or the toilet." Seven of 10 guards in these facilities are men, and the culture of silence surrounding such issues is paralyzing for women, especially the anywhere from 66 to 90 percent of inmates (depending on the instution) of whom have children. Guards can threaten to take away visitation rights, or issue rules-infraction tickets to prolong sentences, putting women in the unthinkable situation of choosing between seeing her children and protecting her own body.
Let's talk, then, about what it means to be a woman in America, but let's talk about it in a context where it matters. Focusing on the skirt that distinguishes Miers from a male judicial nominee is an inexcusable abdication of our responsibilities to the women our judicial system has failed in a real and significant way. Like so much else in this country, gender irrelevancy governs life in high places but doesn't seem to quite trickle down to the bottom. So if we want to talk about what it means to a woman in America, the bottom would be a pretty good place to start.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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