Today, women are more likely than men to be imprisoned for drug-related offenses—a particularly troubling reality given that 62 percent of women in state prisons have minor children, many of whom are forced into foster care or left with relatives who scarcely have the means to care for them. The separation of families is now widely understood as a human rights crisis at the border, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the destruction of black families in the era of mass incarceration.
