We always knew Hillary Clinton was going to make her campaign about her gender. It seems now she can’t even talk about a bipartisan issue like criminal justice reform without making it about gender — and what she says is so tone deaf and unaware that I almost just wrote “I can’t even.”
Clinton couldn’t just write about the need for criminal justice reform, she had to make it an appeal to women specifically, by trying to make it seem like the criminal justice system hurts women especially, even when those women are criminals.
In an op-ed, she tells the (very) abbreviated versions of two women’s road to prison. The first woman spends 12 years in prison for a robbery we’re told she didn’t commit. We’re not told any additional details, like maybe she was the getaway driver and helped dispose of evidence or lied to police or anything like that.
The second woman is portrayed as a victim of domestic violence who simply “ran afoul of the law” and because of those mean, nasty laws, she missed her children’s birthdays. We’re not told what crimes this woman committed, but we’re supposed to — what? — think she shouldn’t have gone to jail for whatever she did because she had children?
“But women aren’t the only ones affected when they are sent to prison. The high number of women in prison — and the long lengths of their sentences – destabilizes families and communities, especially their children,” Clinton writes. “Since 1991, the number of children with a mother in prison has more than doubled. Mothers in prison are five times more likely than fathers in prison to have to put their children in foster care while they serve their sentences.”
Maybe those women should have thought about their children before they committed crimes. Having children shouldn’t be an excuse for women to get away with breaking the law.
The other thing Clinton misses here when she talks about all of these statistics is that each one is even worse for men. Clinton notes in her op-ed that there are 215,000 women in prison. There are 2,224,400 adults in America’s prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, that would mean there are more than 2 million men in prison, meaning men are more than 9 times as likely to be imprisoned as women.
And if we’re talking about the lengths of sentences, women are far more likely to get lighter sentences than men for the same crimes, eve if they come from similar backgrounds. A study from University of Michigan professor Sonja Starr found that “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are … twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.” This occurs even with reprehensible crimes like child sexual abuse.
Clinton continues her op-ed by suggesting “we need to be deliberate about understanding the different paths that can land women in prison, be more attentive to women’s unique needs while they are incarcerated, and do more to support women and their families once they are released.”
Do men not deserve to be supported, even if they are criminals? Apparently not to Clinton, as she has in the past supported the “believe the accuser” mentality when it comes to campus sexual assault, which treats men as rapists based merely on an accusation, denies them due process and brands them as criminals for life without evidence or the ability to defend themselves.
Clinton notes that “formerly incarcerated people face limited job opportunities” and that “an entire family is effectively punished by a woman’s time in prison.”
Yes, formerly incarcerated people face limited job opportunities, and so do people branded as criminals, which is exactly why we need to ensure that accused students receive due process.
Back to the actual, legitimate criminal justice system. The absence of a father can also be crushing for a family, and we need to stop acting like fathers don’t matter. The lack of a male role model can lead to negative outcomes in children, including future criminal activity. Perhaps, however, the lack of a negative role model is a good thing for children. In the same vein, perhaps the lack of a negative female is better for children. Is a mother jailed for murder or theft or selling drugs always better for her children than the relatives who are out of prison or even a foster home? (It depends on the circumstances of the foster home and relatives, obviously.)
Clinton also ignores the advantages women receive in the court systems, aside from shorter sentences for abhorrent crimes. In divorce court, women are far more likely to receive full custody of children, cutting loving and capable fathers out of their children’s lives thanks to a bitter ex. But such a gender disparity is ignored because it negatively affects men, and many feminists like Hillary Clinton seem to care only about gender disparities that affect women, even if those disparities have to be exaggerated.
Criminal justice reform is a bipartisan issue. By turning it into a gender issue, Clinton ignores some of the very real problems that need to be addressed and the huge gender discrepancies that negatively affect men in the system.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
