Column: Bimbos, ‘bottom girls’ and the ugly reality of misogyny in our justice system
In the United States, we have a long tradition of giving women and minority groups access to women’s health services, but in states where access is limited, there is no denying that these efforts are vital.
While no one is claiming that there is complete access to health care or that health care providers are racist or misogynistic, I think that it is important to take a deeper look at how the state has treated women and other marginalized groups.
And, in the case of women, it is important that states and cities like San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland can tell their own stories of the state’s failures to treat women fairly.
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Last year, I shared the “All Girls in Prison” series on social media. The series is based on a series that my friend and activist, Lottie, did in 2014.
The short version of the story is that there are many more women incarcerated in California than men.
Lottie looked at data from the Department of Corrections and released an updated version of the All Girls in Prison series and it was shared on the Facebook page of the ACLU of Northern California. The series included statistics showing that women are incarcerated at rates that far exceed their representation in the state’s police department and other government agency.
In the updated all girls in prison data, the numbers for the various racial and ethnic groups are all over the place. White women have the highest incarceration rate at 34.9 percent, and Black women are the lowest at 4 percent. Among Latina women, the rates are at the very highest at 16.6 percent, while Asian women have the lowest at 1.2 percent.
Men, on the other hand, have incarceration rates that fall below 20 percent.
That’s just for California.
The trend is the
