Latin America’s Female Prisoner Problem: How the War on Drugs, Feminization of Poverty, and Female Liberation Contribute to Mass Incarceration of Women‡

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the number of women in prisons in Latin America has almost doubled since the 1990s. Most women in prison are incarcerated for drugrelated crimes, and although women are still a minority within the prison population, the number of women behind bars is growing disproportionately in comparison to men. Simultaneously, Latin American states are implementing harsh drug criminalization policies in accordance with the global War on Drugs. Scholars have theorized that women commit crimes due to both societal liberation and out of economic necessity. Economic need can be observed empirically by the feminization of poverty, whereby women are becoming increasingly poorer and economically marginalized relative to men. In a quantitative analysis of seventeen Latin American countries, this paper tests the hypotheses that an increase in poverty rates among women and the implementation of harsh drug criminalization laws lead to an increase in the incarceration rates of women. This paper is novel in offering a holistic analysis of how liberation, economic marginalization, and criminalization uniquely influence women and thus explain the increase in female incarceration rates in Latin America. The results of this study may be used as a tool to help inform the policy debate surrounding the War on Drugs and the problem of poverty among women in Latin America. GRETCHEN CLOUTIER is a student of International Studies and Economics. She graduates in May of 2017. School of International Service (SIS) and College of Arts & Sciences (CAS), American University Email: [email protected] Clocks & Clouds: Journal of National and Global Affairs, 2016, 7 (1): 102-122 HBP Publishing ‡ I thank Dr. Eugene Walton at American University for his statistical expertise and assistance with the quantitative analysis for this study. Cloutier, “Latin America’s Female Prisoner Problem