Gender gap: New report contends that U.S. drug laws have damaging impact on women

NEW YORK -- America's war on drugs is inflicting deep and disproportionate harm on women -- most of them mothers -- who are filling prisons in ever-rising numbers despite their typically minor roles in drug rings, the American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups contend in a major new report.

The report, "Caught in the Net," is being released today as the focus of a two-day national conference in New York, bringing together criminal justice officials, sentence-reform activists and other experts to consider its package of proposed legislative and policy changes. The report recommends expansion of treatment programs geared toward women, says incarceration should be a last resort, and urges more vigorous efforts to maintain ties between imprisoned mothers and their children.

"Many of the drug conspiracy and accomplice laws were created to go after the kingpins," said the ACLU women's rights project director, Lenora Lapidus, a lead author of the report. "But women who may simply be a girlfriend or wife are getting caught in the web as well, and sent to prison for very long times when all they may have done is answer the telephone."

Lapidus acknowledged that legislation addressing the situation would probably need to be gender-neutral. But she and her fellow authors -- from New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice and the advocacy group Break the Chains -- make a detailed case that existing drug laws "have had specific, devastating and disparate effects on women."

Among their contentions:

* Many women are ensnared in drug investigations despite peripheral involvement, sometimes solely because they failed to turn in their partners to police. Sentencing laws fail to consider factors such as physical abuse or economic dependence that may draw women into drug abuse or deter them from notifying authorities of a partner's drug activity.

* Treatment programs, to the extent they exist, often are tailored for men and prove relatively ineffective for women.

* Black and Hispanic women are imprisoned for drug offenses at higher rates than white women even though their rates of illegal drug use are comparable. Factors include prosecutors' decisions, policing tactics and selective testing of pregnant minority women for drug use.

* Most imprisoned women, and relatively few imprisoned men, leave behind children for whom they were the sole primary caretaker. The separation can be shattering for mothers, who may lose parental rights, and for children, thousands of whom are placed in foster care at state expense.

The report makes an economic case for change, contending that the combined annual cost of imprisoning a mother and placing a child in foster care is seven times the cost of an intensive one-year drug treatment program.

Several mothers jailed for drug offenses are attending the conference, including Dorothy Gaines, whose 19-year prison sentence for cocaine conspiracy was commuted by President Clinton in 2000 after she served six years. Gaines says her son, Phillip, now 20, was devastated by the separation.

"He was an honor roll student, but when I went to prison, he just lost it," Gaines said in a telephone interview from Alabama. "Even when I finally came home, he tried to kill himself. He's still bearing the scars."

The issues raised in the report are difficult ones for criminal justice officials as their states debate building new prisons or diverting more nonviolent drug offenders into treatment.

"When there's a woman defendant with children, we generally try everything we can to put her into rehab rather than prison," said Michael Arcuri, district attorney in New York's Oneida County and former president of the state DA's association.

"On the other hand, we're supposed to treat everyone the same," he said. "You see more women in prison because you see more women selling drugs. Some of them feel that, because we were softer on women in the past, they'll get some sort of easier treatment."

Bruce Bullington, a Florida State University criminologist, said drug-offending mothers may win sympathy from some activists but often are viewed harshly by lawmakers.

"It's not just an issue of drugs, but of embedded moral values," he said. "We demonize these women, and it comes back to haunt us in a variety of ways."

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