Unit C Blog #15

Statistically women have been incarcerated at a much higher average than men in the last quarter of a century. In fact it has gone up over 700%. Women prisoners have gone been gendered for much longer than males, being forced to do things like cooking and sewing while in jail. They were also trained to be servants for middle class women and then had middle class values pushed upon them. Women were also treated as less than "women" when they were placed in jail. They were assumed to be abnormal and outside the normal realm of how women should be and behave. Eventually this ideology has changed so that women are being treated more fairly in the respect that they are not being as stereotyped hence why there has been a much larger increase in women going to jail over males. Male incarceration has been steady since the beginning of the jail system.
Arizona history is similar in the respect that it focused on males primarily. However, they caught up more quickly to placing women in jail and they have many women correction facilities. Arizona also has been more progressive in employing in women at jail facilities. The biggest problem is tent city where more men are pulled over and arrested for DUI's then women. Whether it be the lack of women actually being caught for DUI's or the lack of women actually driving drunk, men are disproportionately represented in Sheriff Joe's tent city. Another trend that Arizona follows is that mostly men are in higher positions at jails. Sheriff Joe has been the sheriff for a very long time and is extremely conservative which makes him not a high candidate for enforcing women's rights.