How the Criminal Justice System Works Against Women of Colour
February 16, 2025โข884 words
"The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws." ~ Ben Whishaw
"I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten." ~ Henry Louis Gates
"Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African American kids are unemployed. It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system." ~ Bernie Sanders
"Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right for the people they have harmed. [...] Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night." ~ Piper Kerman
You are being watched. Not only by people, but by a whole system that is set up to monitor your every action. If you are a woman of colour, your mere existence is not neutral, but is perceived as a threat, a problem to be managed. You don't need to have done anything wrong to be treated as though you are a criminal. The system was constructed for you, not as a benefit, but as a target.
Power is not random. It is built systematically, regulated by policy, and implemented by force. One of its most effective mechanisms is the criminal justice system. It doesn't just punish crime; it creates it too. It dictates the boundaries of criminality and makes sure that some individuals, individuals like you, conform.
If you're a Black or Indigenous woman in Canada, the system is stacked against you. One in 20 of you will be imprisoned if imprisonment rates stay constant. You are twice as likely to be imprisoned as white women. If you are Latina, your chances are only somewhat better, one in 45 of you will be imprisoned. The same apparatus that polices Black and Brown men to uphold a racial hierarchy spares no women, but operates more insidiously instead, its hold equally suffocating.
If you are an Indigenous woman, you represent 42% of women in prison but a minority (3%) of the public in general. You are the fastest-growing group of prisoners, your population rising 60% in a decade by itself. If you are a Black female, your incarceration is triple your representation in Canadian society. The system does not need to state its targets in language. The numbers of these women of colour exposes the criminal justice system.
You were never supposed to succeed in this system. You're born into your body, and already you're in a world where the police regard you as a suspect before you've drawn your first breath. You are policed in your communities more, stopped more, arrested more forcefully. Black women in North America are stopped 17 times as often as white women. In the juvenile justice system, Black and Native teenage girls are incarcerated at nonsensical rates, 3.5 and 4 times the rates of white girls. Yet, power operates not through sense, but only through control.
The laws are not applied equally. Drug offenses? Your white counterparts use at the same rates, yet they get to remain free while you are sent to prison. Poverty? Your trauma is criminalized, your survival mechanisms, whether street work, self-defense, or simply being present in over-policed neighborhoods, are used against you. The system does not consider your trauma, it profits from it. The criminal justice system in North America is the largest in the western democratic nations!
They'll say justice is blind. That courts decide on evidence objectively. That prisons are for rehabilitation. But what if the scales are tipped from the beginning? The law isn't neutral, it bends depending on who's holding it. Judges, prosecutors, police officers, these aren't people but tools of a greater machine that's meant to keep order, and you're not part of the order they're trying to keep.
Women of colour who fight back against violent partners are historically more likely to be arrested than protected. The law that should recognize them as victims recognizes them as aggressors. Self-defense, when used by Black and Indigenous women, is transformed into aggression. By the numbers it seems, the system desires that you endure violence, not escape it.
And once you are in prison, you aren't rehabilitated, you're erased. You become a negative statistic, cautionary tales, evidence of the system's success at silencing those it considers undeserving of freedom.
To be aware of power is to be liberated from it. The system feeds on your obedience, on your conviction that its decrees are free from injury. But every structure has its vulnerabilities. All nations that construct their authority on the basis of dominationโespecially people of colour, are eventually faced with resistance.
You cannot be naรฏve. You must understand how power operates, how it deceives, how it conceals itself in the language of law and order. Only then can you navigate around it, outwit it, dismantle it piece by piece.