prison. Around 60% of women in state and federal prisons are mothers of minor children; the effect of the War on Drugs has been not only to disproportionately impact the women themselves, but also to impact their children, the next generation. In addition, as Britton and Beckett, Nyrop, and Pfingst point out, Hispanic and African-American women are overrepresented in the population of women involved in the criminal justice system. The advent of crack cocaine, a cheaper version of cocaine that could be smoked, in American inner-city neighborhoods in the 1980s coincided with rampant deindustrialization, increasing unemployment rates, and an increasing number of female heads-of-households. The advent of crack also came at the same time as the peak of the War on Drugs and its increasingly more punitive laws and focus on defunding welfare programs. Because of this, as well as the cheaper price of crack, women's drug use rates went up. Ryder and Brisgone interview a group of mothers who grew up during this “Crack Era” in the 1990s to find out how they and their children were affected by the War on Drugs and crack. They find that the mothers’ heavy use of drugs during this era heavily influenced their children to try drugs. Additionally, many women were pressured or chose to perform sex work in order to support their “urgent need for drugs”. The authors of this study found that the mothers’ addiction further forced them to spend less time with their families, disrupting ties between mother and child, although they did love their children and wanted to spend time with them when they could. Women's participation in the drug economy Women and the informal economy The informal economy is a sector of the economy that includes “all criminal activity that is income generating”. In the United States, this means that the selling and consumption of drugs is part of the informal economy. Throughout the world, working women are more likely to work in the informal sector, partly because their traditional household and childcare responsibilities may make it preferable to work from home. Others believe that women are “forced” into the informal sector because the formal sector fails to accommodate gender-specific needs for women, such as paid maternity leave. Since the 1980s, cheaper imports have been competing for domestically manufactured goods in the United States, leading to deindustrialization, particularly in urban areas. This has caused unemployment in the