![\"women's](\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/womens_incarceration_5of50.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe mass incarceration of women has severe and far-reaching effects: 62% of women, for instance, are separated from minor children when they are put behind bars. But though this is largely an issue of state policy, \u201cfew people know what\u2019s happening in their own states,\u201d says Wendy Sawyer, author of The Gender Divide: Tracking Women\u2019s State Prison Growth<\/i>. Sawyer says states undermine their commitment to decarceration when their criminal justice reforms leave women behind.<\/p>\n
For example:<\/p>\n
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- Texas recently reduced its men\u2019s prison population by 6,000, while backfilling its prisons with 1,100 more women.<\/li>\n
- Michigan\u2019s female prison population grew 30% from 2009 to 2015, while the number of men in Michigan prisons fell by 8%. <\/li>\n
- Six other states have seen men\u2019s prison populations decline even as women\u2019s populations have climbed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The report features more than 100 state-specific graphs tracking 40 years of women\u2019s prison growth, designed to help policymakers assess the need for local reform. It also isolates the underlying causes of women\u2019s mass incarceration, including the War on Drugs, harsh sentencing for violent offenses, and the growing frequency of women serving jail time.<\/p>\n
Women in prison are uniquely burdened by mental health problems and trauma, and Sawyer notes that most prisons, having been designed for men, \u201cmake those problems worse.\u201d But she stresses that the appropriate response \u201cis not to build better prisons \u2013 it\u2019s to ensure women are included in reforms that move people away from prisons.\u201d Most women in the justice system could be better served through alternatives to incarceration. Developing those solutions should be an urgent priority in every state.<\/p>\n