Melanie Klein,Drug Crimes,and Women

Due to changes made to drug laws in the 1970s and 1980s the population of women serving time in prison has skyrocketed. This article uses material verbatim from court cases and public discourse about reform of drug laws in New York State to examine the psychodynamic processes that seem to be undergirding our discussion about and projections onto women arrested for drug crimes. Primarily drawing on Melanie Klein's theories concerning the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, it explores society's deep ambivalence about the lives and fate of these women.