Women and Conspiracy

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Prosecutors have long used conspiracy law to cast a wide net over criminal activity.  More and more often, the peripheral characters caught in this net are girlfriends, wives, and mothers.  What are we to make of this use of conspiracy law, not to mention other complicity tools such as aiding and abetting, in this context, and the drastic increase in the number of incarcerated women?  Is this a case of over-enforcement, or a sign of gender parity? How are these prosecutions informed by the war on drugs? To what extent do these prosecutions implicate issues of race and class?  Is the problem with complicity law in general?  In short, is it time to reconsider complicity and women?