female incarceration rates by state

The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. Ney, B., Ramirez, R., & Van Dieten, M. (2012). We also aggregated the total incarcerated and total population data for the three separate nations of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Island, into the one member of NATO, the United Kingdom. But the dramatic changes we saw in the first year of the pandemic completely disrupted these trends: Pre-pandemic, we saw the incarceration rate of women in local jails increase by almost 5%, while the jail incarceration rate for men dropped by almost 14% over the same time period, between 2005 and 2019. New Jersey Overcrowded prisons can take a toll on the whole system. Incarcerated population vs resident population. However, the current rate is the lowest it has been in 20 years. For some, acting out behaviors result in infractions and greater restrictions, including solitary confinement. How are their experiences different from mens? The table below has all 50 states and the District of Columbia . All Rights Reserved. Particularly in light of the scarcity of gender-specific data, the disaggregated numbers presented here are an important step to ensuring that women are not left behind in the effort to end mass incarceration.4. 2018, 2019a, 2021). To make the comparisons more meaningful to U.S. states, weve chosen to include only independent nations with total populations of more than 500,000 people. PDF Prisoners in 2020 - Statistical Tables - Bureau of Justice Statistics In R. Gido and L. Dalley (Eds.). There is no clear cut way to determine why these rates have grown so substantially since the 20th century, but some do have their theories on why. For countries within the United Kingdom, the UNs World Population Prospects and the ICPRs World Prison Brief were incompatible, so we relied on individual country censuses for female population totals for each jurisdiction. Womens incarceration has grown at twice the pace of mens incarceration in recent decades, and has disproportionately been located in local jails. This report offers the critical estimate that a quarter of all incarcerated women are unconvicted. (The Sentencing Project) The imprisonment rate for white women is 48 per 100,000. What we find interesting is that this number is said to be significantly lower than the incarceration rate for men. In fact, local jails tend to offer fewer services and programs overall than prisons do, and because most programs are designed for the larger male population, women may not even have access to programming thats available to men in the same jail. A staggering number of women who are incarcerated are not even convicted: more than a quarter of women who are behind bars have not yet had a trial. By the end of 2021 (the most recent data available), prisons were releasing 27% fewer people annually than they did pre-pandemic. Hawaii While the number of women in jails was still 23% lower in 2021 than it was in 2019, it is likely that this upward trend will continue absent meaningful changes in policing and jailing policies and practices. Cowan, B. Idaho has the highest female incarceration rate in the country Only 4% of the worlds female population lives in the U.S., but the U.S. accounts for over 30% of the worlds incarcerated women. Currently there are 2.3 million people confined to correctional institutions with millions more on probation. Below are the womens incarceration rates from the US, calculated per 100,000 women. Incarceration rates for the four jurisdictions within the former Yugoslavia are based on an estimated womens population. Increasingly, both prisons and jails are doing away with real mail altogether and contracting with private companies that scan and then destroy postal mail, delivering shoddy scanned copies to the recipients. , Reporting from the New York Times, Probation May Sound Light, but Punishments Can Land Hard, captures the typical cascading fees and conditions while following one womans navigation of probation. National trend. The Sentencing Project. Frustratingly, even as this report is updated using the same data sources from year to year, it is not a direct tool for tracking changes in womens incarceration over time because we are forced to rely on the limited sources available, which are neither updated regularly nor always compatible across years. Journal of Urban Health, 83(5), 835-848. , Our research found that women who could not make bail had an annual median income of just $11,071 (in 2015 dollars). Incarcerated mothers often lose contact with their children due to far distances and the high expense of having family members visit them (Travis & Waul, 2003). For an introduction to this work, see our discussion of some of the findings from that project. Oregon Stigma facing female parolees has been found to be greater than that facing males. This is the same as El Salvador, which is a country that is known for jailing women for having miscarriages, and de-legalizing abortion. As we detail in a recent report, women in prison also report health problems at significantly greater rates than men in prisons and far more than the general public making them particularly vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19. Correctional facilities exacerbate the vulnerabilities of female inmates, regardless of age, without providing rehabilitation or treatment services needed. Collateral costs: Incarcerations effect on economic mobility. Frequently, they are challenging to manage and need a lot of resources to run. , The Survey of Prison Inmates, last conducted in 2016 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, provides the most recent nationally-representative, self-reported data about the people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, their backgrounds, and their experiences in prison. Currently, incarceration is the primary (and most common) form of punishment in the United States. The United States imprisons people at a higher rate than any other developed nation in the world. [5] [6] Between 2000 and 2010, the number of males in prison grew by 1.4% per annum, while the number of females grew by 1.9% per annum. Virginia Like our report, Womens Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017, this report takes a comprehensive view of confinement in the United States that goes beyond the commonly reported statistics to offer a fuller picture of this countrys different and overlapping systems of confinement. So, the number of women physically held in jails is even higher: Avoiding pretrial detention is particularly challenging for women. Maine Arch Gen Psychiatry, 61(4), 403-410. Having data on justice-involved psychiatric patients is critical when looking policies to end womens mass incarceration in particular, because incarcerated women experience mental health problems at rates significantly higher than incarcerated men. Missouri Over 60% of imprisoned women are mothers of children under age 18 (The Sentencing Project, 2018). Another study found the imprisonment rate to be over 48 per 100,000 for White women, 83 per 100,000 for Black women, and 63 per 100,000 for Latina women. As you can see, the other NATO countries have a rate between 8 and 25 times lower than the United States for the incarceration of women. Incarceration Rates by State [Updated March 2023] - World Population Review Michigan Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40(1), 71-94. African American women are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white women: 96 per 10,0000 v. 49 per 10,0000 (The Sentencing Project, 2018) Rates of Hispanic women in correctional settings are 1.4 times higher than those for whites: 67 per 100000 v. 49 per 100000 (The Sentencing Project, 2018). Due to this, female incarceration rates are commonly looked over and therefore lost among the male data. (However, this is certainly not to say that prisons are always better at meeting womens needs, as we will discuss further.). Kansas A previous Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that, of the women in state prisons who have mental health problems, three-quarters also met the criteria for substance dependence or abuse, and more than two-thirds (68%) had a history of physical or sexual abuse. But since they had more to do with unintentional court slowdowns than purposeful government action to decarcerate, there is little reason to think that these changes will be sustained in a post-pandemic world. By signing up with this form, youll receive our general newsletter.Subscribe to our other newsletters here instead. , For example, our report The Gender Divide: Tracking Womens State Prison Growth covers the effects of reform on women in prisons and the Vera Institute of Justice covers women in jails in their report, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform. This change in data brings Oklahoma back up to the top, as expected. In fact, our analysis of the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates found that one-third (33%) of women in state prisons were on probation at the time of their arrest, which underscores how this alternative to incarceration often simply delays incarceration. Montana These are the kinds of year-over-year changes needed to actually end the mass incarceration of women. In the past, the United States rates have been much lower than they are now, and they only seem to be increasing. The main target is to turn an offender into a productive member of society, so the focus of jail in those countries is rehabilitation rather than punishment. Beck, A., Cantor, D., Hartge, J., & Smith, T. (2013). We must return to our credo to do no harm. Compared with men, women currently comprise 7% of the federal prison population and likewise are a smaller percentage of total inmates in state and local facilities. Over-criminalization is often considered a pressing issue: in some states, even relatively low-level misdemeanors, such as jaywalking, could potentially lead to pre-trial incarceration. Utah Similarly, girls report higher rates of victimization during juvenile commitments than same-aged boys (Beck, Canton & Hartge, 2013.) , Even the available data that are disaggregated by sex are frustratingly limited, in that they typically only differentiate between male and female, ignoring the reality that the gender identities of confined people (and all people, for that matter) are not limited to this binary. By gender, however, the overall male rate is 890 per 100,000, 14 times the female rate of 65 per 100,000. The gender divide: Tracking womens state prison growth. Updated December 16, 2021:After decades of growth in incarceration across the United States, the number of people in jail and prison decreased in recent years. From the source report: "Figure 1. Context: Whats behind womens prison growth? In the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, restrictive probation and parole conditions can also create barriers to accessing reproductive health care. As we will explain, the outsized role of jails has serious consequences for incarcerated women and their families. In general, women in prison are serving longer sentences than those in jails, and they are often located far from their families and friends. Finney-Hairston, C.F. In 2019, the incarceration rate in federal prisons in the United States was 9.6 women for every 100,000 resident women - a sharp increase from a rate of 1.1 in 1982. Thus children are particularly susceptible to the domino effect of burdens placed on incarcerated women. These states are: Even more shocking are the statistics from more progressive states. The state with the lowest incarnation rate in the country, Massachusetts, would rank 17th globally, higher than countries like Colombia and Iran. While drug and property offenses make up more than half of the offenses for which women are incarcerated, the chart reveals that all offenses including the violent offenses that account for over a quarter of all incarcerated women must be considered in the effort to reduce the number of incarcerated women in this country. West Virginia has the highest incarceration rate in the country at 273, followed by Oklahoma at 226 and Kentucky at 220. Further, in 1999 the BJS reported the highest frequency of mental illness among white women in State prison. This process may, however, result in various parts not adding up precisely to the total. List of countries by incarceration rate - Wikipedia Wolff, N., Blitz, C.L., Shi, J., Bachman, R., & Siegel, J.A. Compounding the problem is the fact that jails are particularly poorly positioned to provide proper health care. West Virginia: 273 Oklahoma: 226 Kentucky: 220 Alabama: 211 Arizona: 211 Texas: 206 Louisiana: 198 New Mexico: 191 Idaho:189 Georgia: 186 South Dakota: 183 Alaska: 183 Wyoming: 180 Mississippi: 172 Florida: 169 Tennessee: 167 Arkansas: 166 Hawaii: 161 Nevada: 153 Bandele, M. (2017, Oct. 23). Retrieved from https://cjinvolvedwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Ten_Truths.pdf (PDF, 561KB). Girls committed to juvenile correctional settings often receive harsher punishments than males for the same or lesser offenses (The Sentencing Project, 2018). The data needed to explain exactly what happened, when, and why do not yet exist, not least because the data on women has long been obscured by the larger scale of mens incarceration. However, these national declines mask significant differences in jail and prison trends across counties, states, and regions. Data from 2021 shows that 300.36 per 100,000 people are incarnated in the United States. About half of confined women and girls are held in state and federal prisons. Incarceration. Use the map below to explore how your county compares to others along five key incarceration metrics. Siegel, J.A., & Williams, L.M. This report updates how U.S. women fare in the worlds carceral landscape, comparing incarceration rates for women of each U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world. Among our findings, and those of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, we see that in state prisons nationwide:15, These statistics confirm much of what we know about incarcerated women from previous research: By almost any measure, women in prison are worse off than men, both leading up to and during their incarceration. Below is a list of our closest allies the founding countries of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and their incarceration rates for women. Georgia In 2022, there are two million people in prisons and jails throughout the United States. Restrictions on travel are standard conditions of supervision in many places, requiring approval from a probation or parole officer to make specific trips. Connecticut Similar racial and ethnic disparities are reflected in rates of juvenile justice confinement of girls ages 12 through 17. Prison Policy Initiative. Manage Settings And for anyone still unsure of the harms of jail, just look at the suicide rates in U.S. jails. The womens prison population was already slowly shrinking before the pandemic but again, at not nearly the rate of mens prison populations. This briefing uses the most recent data available on the number of people in various types of facilities and the most significant charge or conviction. We were able to develop a way to estimate the number of women in federal prisons from each state. For more on the limitations of gender-specific data and how the current data misclassifies trans men and women, see the section of this report The need for more data. The U.S. incarcerates women over 8 times as much as any of these NATO countries. Fair Punishment1001 SW Emkay Drive #100Bend OR 97702. For the 50 U.S. states, we calculated incarceration rates per 100,000 female population that reflect our holistic view of confinement, which include: The raw data is available in a data appendix and the individual sources were as follows: One additional category of confinement is included in the womens national incarceration rate for the United States, but not in state rates, because state-level data were not available: Immigration detention. Rhode Island New Mexico And probation violations even for these innocuous and understandable reasons can land women in jail or prison who were never sentenced to incarceration. Rules vary from state to state and laws often change; do not rely on this website if making a legal decision, seek a lawyer. By Aleks Kajstura and Wendy Sawyer March 1, 2023 Press release, With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about womens experiences with incarceration. This report was supported by a generous grant from the Public Welfare Foundation and by our individual donors, who give us the resources and the flexibility to quickly turn our insights into new movement resources. Too often, the conversation about criminal justice reform starts and stops with the question of non-violent drug and property offenses. Twenty-four states have higher incarceration rates than the national average. This would mean getting an additional 19,000 Oklahoma children covered by health insurance. Prisoners in Australia, 2022 | Australian Bureau of Statistics Arkansas As public awareness has grown about the differences between gender identity and sex assigned at birth, there has been a growing interest in the question of how transgender and nonbinary individuals experience incarceration. China In addition to the numbers referenced in the main table, [6] see info about additional detainees, and alleged detainees, at Re-education through labor, Laogai, and Xinjiang internment camps . As reflected in statistics compiled by the Department of Justice and several criminal justice advocacy organizations, women of color are overrepresented among female inmates. [1] Rates are for year-end 2018. (2019, April 17). Women's incarceration across the world Alaska America's incarceration rate falls to lowest level since 1995 Childcare duties further complicate probation requirements that often include meetings with probation officers, especially for women with no extra money to spend on childcare or reliable transportation across town. Trends in Women's Incarceration Rates in US Prisons and Jails: A Tale Retrieved from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.html. The United States isnt just beating every other country in the world with their women incarceration rates, but were also beating ourselves year after year. This report updates how U.S. women fare in the world's carceral landscape, comparing incarceration rates for women of each U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world. Thailand breaks up the list with a rate of 130, and the next 17 top jurisdictions are, again, US states. We found that white women were about half as likely as white men to be arrested during a stop, but Black women were at least as likely as white men to be arrested. This data paints a more complete picture of state criminal justice policies that impact girls and women. Even Texas, which incarcerates more women than any other state, has few educational or vocational programs open to the women in its facilities. Maryland To avoid double-counting, any woman with more than one status was included in the most restrictive category, with probation counted as the least restrictive and imprisonment as the most restrictive. Ten truths that matter when working with justice involved women. In ten states, the number of men in prison continued to fall, but the number of women remained flat or actually increased; the reverse was true in just two states. Even the American states that have the lowest incarceration rates of the country are massive compared to other countries in the world. PDF Women and Girls in Corrections - Justice Research and Statistics