But mentors are no substitute for mothers. The war on drugs has had a particularly devastating impact on women, who have become the fastest growing, though least violent, segment of the prison population. The number of female inmates has tripled since mandatory sentencing laws were enacted in the 1980s, and the increase shows no signs of abating. Before mandatory sentencing, judges could take children's needs into account when they decided where and how a drug-offending mother paid for her crimes. Incarceration, of course, is not the only thing that takes parents from their children.
Drugs can do it, too.
Some states and private organizations have recognized this in creating programs that work to get women off drugs and keep, or reunite, them with their children at the same time. Seventeen states now have community facilities where mothers can do all or part of their time along with their young children, instead of in prisons hundreds of miles away from them. When we incarcerate a drug offender, we do so, at least in theory, not because she is a menace from whom society must be protected at any cost, but because we believe she is caught in a destructive cycle that must be interrupted. But rather than being interrupted, that cycle is being perpetuated into the next generation. About half of all juvenile hall inmates have a parent who has been incarcerated.