Policing Women: Gender, Surveillance, and Mass Incarceration in the Late American Century

The rise of mass incarceration in the 1990s is often framed as a crisis affecting men, particularly Black men, while women’s experiences remain underexamined. However, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, all women—but especially poor women and women of color—became increasingly entangled with the expanding carceral state. As women gained greater access to employment, social welfare, and political activism, they also became more susceptible to policing and incarceration, a development largely overlooked in dominant narratives of the prison boom. This heightened criminalization must be understood as part of the backlash against the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As civil rights, feminist, and anti-poverty activism reshaped society, state actors responded with policies that reframed women as potential economic and moral threats. Concerns over the breakdown of the family, “welfare fraud,” single motherhood, and drug use fueled surveillance, harsh sentencing laws, and the expansion of police presence in marginalized communities. By the 1990s, while men’s incarceration rates soared, women’s imprisonment increased at an even faster pace, with new forms of criminalization. Yet, the literature on mass incarceration has largely ignored the gendered dimensions of these developments. This paper argues that the criminalization of women was a structural consequence of punitive state policies and reactionary efforts to control social transformation. It calls for a reassessment of how we understand gendered state repression in the late American empire and its role in the expansion of carceral power.