While there are still a lot fewer women than men in jails and prisons, the number of number of incarcerated women is nearly 14 times higher than what it was in the 1970s.
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Yet, surprisingly little research exists on who these women are or why they are increasingly ending up behind bars.
“Once a rarity, women are now held in jails in nearly every county – a stark contrast to 1970, when almost three-quarters of counties held not a single woman in jail”, said a report by the Vera Institute of Justice and the Safety and Justice Challenge detailing the drastic rise.
“The same factors that result in many men being in jail are certainly the case for women, but they’re at even greater risk because of a number of factors that come into play”, Garduque said.
Amid a fierce national debate on mass incarceration in the United States, a new report has found that one population has been severely overlooked: women.
Highlighting the outsized role that local jails play in sustaining mass incarceration has been a major priority of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice challenge program. Unlike prison, where those convicted of crimes are sent to serve sentences, most people in jail are awaiting trial and are legally presumed innocent. But women’s pathways to incarceration are different than their male counterparts, she explained, and deserve to be investigated closely.
Local jurisdictions have let jails become “stopgap providers” of social and community services for women, who were unable to reach resources they needed outside of the criminal justice system, the report said. “But that makes it very hard on women”. Although a recent Washington Post analysis of DOJ data found that black incarceration rates have declined over the past decade, racial disparity levels remain extremely high, although less so among women than men.
According to the study, 82 percent of women are in jail for nonviolent offenses, and almost 80 percent are mothers (most of them single).
Swavola said women coming to jail with a history of trauma may find standard procedures such as shackling or strip searches deeply distressing, and may trigger painful memories. Women tend to be arrested for minor transgressions as opposed to violent crimes-between 1960 and 2009, the proportion of women arrested grew from 11% to 26% of total arrests in the US.
Similarly to the male jail population, 30 percent of female inmates are black, while black women only make up 13 percent of the US female population, and 16 percent of female inmates are Hispanic, while Hispanic women only account for 11 percent of American women. Meanwhile, the number of men in jail-not to mention the overall crime rate-has been declining.
Already, the report’s numbers are being treated with some caution by some criminal justice experts, who say the report could even be an underestimation of the full impact on women in jails.
While there are still fewer women in U.S. jails than there are men, they are disproportionately affected by some of the main problems plaguing the criminal justice system: harsh punishments for those addicted to substance abuse, warehousing the mentally ill in jails as opposed to treating them, disadvantaging the poor who can not afford bail or various fees.
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“They are coming with a whole host of disadvantages, and many of those disadvantages lead to their criminal justice involvement, and then are deepened by the criminal justice system itself”, she said.
