{"id":8097,"date":"2018-11-13T09:08:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T14:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=8097"},"modified":"2018-11-15T12:44:32","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T17:44:32","slug":"mass-incarceration-women-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/13\/mass-incarceration-women-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"New report, Women&#8217;s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018, reveals how many women are locked up in the U.S., where, and why"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Women in the U.S. experience a starkly different criminal justice system than men do, but data on their experiences is difficult to find and put into context. In a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\">new report<\/a> produced in collaboration with the ACLU&#8217;s Campaign for Smart Justice, the Prison Policy Initiative fills this gap in the data with a rich visual snapshot of how many women are locked up in the U.S., where, and why.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\"><i>Women&#8217;s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2018<\/I><\/a> (a detailed update to the inaugural 2017 version), Legal Director Aleks Kajstura pieces together data from the country&#8217;s fragmented systems of confinement, producing a detailed &#8220;big picture&#8221; visualization as well as a separate close-up view of women in local jails.<\/p>\n<p class=\"featureimage caption\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/womenpie_pressimage_cropped.png\" alt=\"Preview of pie chart showing how many women are locked up on a given day in the U.S. by facility and offense type.\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kajstura&#8217;s analysis reveals that:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"list\">\n<li><b>56% of women in prisons or jails are there for drug or property offenses<\/b>, compared with approximately 40% of the general incarcerated population (which is almost entirely male).<\/li>\n<li><b>7,000 immigrant women are in confinement every day<\/b> awaiting deportation or an immigration hearing.<\/li>\n<li><b>54,000 women are behind bars every day without a conviction<\/b>, typically because they <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/incomejails.html\">cannot afford money bail.<\/a><\/li>\n<li>While 219,000 women are behind bars every day, <b>over 1 million are on probation<\/b>, suggesting that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/50statepie.html\">probation reform<\/a> is also a women&#8217;s issue.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;With this big-picture view, it&#8217;s easier to see why many state-level reforms <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/women_overtime.html\">unintentionally leave women behind<\/a>,&#8221; Kajstura said. Her analysis particularly underscores <b>the need for local reforms to county jails<\/b>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"popoutright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/pie2018_women_jail_detail.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/pie2018_women_jail_detail.png\" alt=\"preview of infographic about women in jails\" width=\"341\" height=\"256\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul class=\"list\">\n<li><b>Incarcerated women are far more likely than men to be held in local jails<\/b>, both before trial and while serving their sentences.<\/li>\n<li>Of all immigrant women held for ICE, <b>4,700 are not in detention centers, but &#8220;rented&#8221; beds in local jails<\/b>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/13\/mothers-day-2018\/\">80% of women in jail are mothers<\/a>, and most are the primary caretakers of their children.<\/li>\n<li>Mental health care is notoriously bad in jails, where <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/22\/bjs_jail_suicide_2016\/\">suicide rates are literally off the charts<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While states vary widely in how many women they put behind bars, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/global\/women\/2018.html\">every single U.S. state outranks most independent countries<\/a> on women&#8217;s incarceration, as we found in June 2018 &#8211; making reform a moral necessity in every state. Kajstura calls her analysis &#8220;the foundation for reforming the policies that lead to incarcerating women in the first place.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>See the full data visualization and report: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\">https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The report includes a new, data-rich visualization of women in jails, highlighting a critical area for criminal justice reform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"coauthors":[46],"class_list":["post-8097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-release"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8097"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8154,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8097\/revisions\/8154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8097"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}