User:CSRoberson/Matrix of domination

Criminality

In Nancy A. Heitzeg's article " 'Whiteness', criminality, and double standards of deviance/social control" Heitzeg focuses on the construct of white racial framing and the impact that has on constructing Blackness with criminality. In doing so Heitzeg speaks on the methods of social control, placed on those who are deviant from the norm of society. Mechanisms of social control find themselves helping to categorize those who are not cis-gendered and white as the "Other". Heitzeg, using Patricia Hill Collin's "matrix of domination" explores how shapes access to social control as well as opportunity. Deviating from the social control base that finds itself at the intersections of race, gender, and class among other differences helps to solidify who is categorized as the "Other".

Markers associated with race, class, gender, etc., argues Heitzeg allows for stereotypes that allows for mitigation of a "redeemable" white middle class and criminalization for poor Black people and other people of color. White racial framing creates a space for constructing storylines of white deviance, simultaneously creating storylines of Black criminality. This extends itself to the "medicalization" of whiteness, allowing for racial framing around whiteness to allow for associations of purity and redeem-ability. The opposite is imposed upon Black people. The identifiers associated with whiteness and Blackness allow for a framework in which subjects Blackness to something that is accepted as criminal.

In the context of criminality, the Matrix of Domination, may best present itself in the statistics:

Currently the number of women imprisoned in the United States is more than one million, making them the fastest growing population in the prison industrial complex. The number of women in prison has massively increased from statistics found in the 1980s, more than eight times as many women have been reported to be either in prison, or are at the control of the criminal justice system.

Within these numbers, Black and brown women are an overrepresented population. Black women represented roughly thirty percent of the prison population while only representing thirteen percent of the female population in the United States. In addition, Hispanic women currently make up roughly sixteen percent of the prison population, while only making up eleven percent of the female population in the United States.

The facts surrounding the cases for Black and brown women who are incarcerated show a pattern of these women being from urban areas, with an emphasis on their alleged crimes being ones of involvement or association, as opposed to being the sole perpetrator. Scholars have attributed these numbers to the over-policing of these neighborhoods in which house an almost exclusively minority population. Other attributes come from the variations in arrest and sentencing policies and practices, prison expansions, especially with for profit prisons being on the rise.