Women’s Mass Incarceration:
The Whole Pie 2026
By Wendy Sawyer and Brian Nam-Sonenstein
October 14, 2026
Press release
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experiences with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? Why are they there? How are their experiences different from men’s? These are important questions, but finding the answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal legal systems,1 but also unearthing the frustratingly limited data that’s broken down by gender.2
This report provides a detailed view of the 198,800 women and girls incarcerated in the United States and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. We pull together data from a number of government agencies and break down the number of women and girls held by each correctional system, by specific offense, in 446 state prisons, 27 federal prisons, 2,765 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 65 Indian country jails, and 148 immigration detention facilities, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.3 We also go beyond the numbers, including rare self-reported data from a national survey of people in prison4 to offer new insights about incarcerated women’s backgrounds, families, health, and experiences in prison. This report answers the questions of why and where women are locked up — and much more:
Women’s incarceration has risen by almost 60% globally since 2000. For several decades in the U.S., it grew at twice the pace of men’s incarceration, yet it still receives relatively little attention, obscured by the much larger scale of men’s incarceration. Making up just 1 in 10 people behind bars, women continue to experience confinement in systems designed for men — that is, systems that ignore important gender differences, even in the data they collect and report. Frustratingly, even as this report is updated using many of the same data sources from year to year, it is not a direct tool for tracking changes in women’s incarceration over time; we are forced to rely on the limited sources available, which are neither updated regularly nor always compatible across years. Still, 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.5
How women’s incarceration has changed in recent years
We caution against comparisons to past editions of this report because of the inconsistencies of gender-specific data reporting and our own methodological changes. But people engaged in policymaking, analysis, and advocacy around these issues understandably look for shifts in each successive report for clues about where to focus their attention. To that end, we examined differences in the various segments of this “whole pie” from the last one in 2024, and identified a few noteworthy changes…
With every update to this report, we caution against comparisons to past editions, especially given the inconsistencies of gender-specific data reporting and our own methodological changes. Only some of the changes presented in this report are the result of recent policy decisions, while others may reflect improvements to our methodology. This year, for example, we provide our first-ever estimate of the number of women with underlying criminal charges or convictions who are involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals. That doesn’t mean this is a new phenomenon; rather, it’s the first time we were able to offer a reasonable estimate of its magnitude.
Despite these cautions, people engaged in policymaking, analysis, and advocacy related to the criminal legal system understandably look for shifts in each successive Women’s Mass Incarceration report for clues about where to focus their attention. To that end, we examined differences in the various segments of this “whole pie” from the last one, and identified a few noteworthy changes:
- Overall, we report a 4% increase in women’s confinement since our last report (about 8,200 more women). The addition of a new “slice” — roughly 2,900 women involuntarily committed — only accounts for a portion of that increase. Most of the growth is driven by a 5% expansion of women’s state prison populations (almost 3,900 more women) and a nearly 3% increase in their local jail populations (about 2,400 more women than in our last report).
- The number of girls held by the juvenile legal system grew in 2023 compared to 2021 (with 22%, or nearly 800, more girls in confinement). However, this is the first post-pandemic update on that population; it remains to be seen whether that trend will continue.
- Surprisingly, about 760 fewer women and girls are detained for immigration-related reasons compared to our last report, but this total difference obscures important differences between the two systems that make up this piece of the “pie.” ICE is holding far more women (up by 1,800 or 31%), while the number of unaccompanied girls held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is a fraction of what it was when we last looked (570 versus 3,100 in 2024).6
- The federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service are holding about 1,000 (or 6%) fewer women than they were at our last count. We know of no obvious reason for this drop, but better odds of early release may play a role: women are overrepresented among First Step Act releases relative to their share of the federal prison population.7
Broader trends in women’s incarceration over time and since the pandemic
For a long time, the trend was clear: women’s incarcerated populations were growing at twice the pace of men’s. That growth persisted even after many states began to reduce their overall use of incarceration, and it was only just a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic that the number of incarcerated women began to decline. In 2019, the women’s prison incarceration rate was still slightly higher than it was in 2000, while the men’s rate had already dropped 12% below its 2000 level. In the first year of the pandemic, incarceration rates dropped dramatically across the board, with the rate among men landing at more than 25% lower than it was in 2000. That’s a relative drop that the women’s population has never attained.
Since 2021, prison incarceration rates have begun to climb back up, with the growth in women’s rates again outpacing men’s (at about 3-4% per year versus less than 1.5%). As of December 2023 (the most recent available data), the men’s prison population had recovered about 15% of its pandemic-related drop, while women had recovered almost twice that portion (28%).
A similar story has unfolded in the nation’s local jails. After dramatic reductions in jail populations in 2020, men’s jail rates have gone up by 14% as of 2024, while women’s rates have increased by 31%, erasing more than half of their pandemic-related drop. Of course, it is too soon to tell how much of the recent growth in confined populations is an indication of what is to come or whether it’s simply the system still “catching up” from COVID-related delays.
Even when we aren’t contending with long-term disruptions like a pandemic, this report is not designed for year-to-year comparisons in order to identify broader trends. That is simply impossible without consistently updated data sources that include breakdowns by sex or gender identity. Each update to this report also improves on the methodology of the last as we find new data. For example, this update not only includes our first estimate of women involuntarily committed, but we have also been able to obtain more precise and up-to-date information about women held for the U.S. Marshals Service than in the past. Ultimately, each Women’s Mass Incarceration report stands alone as the most up-to-date and comprehensive view of women’s confinement possible with the data available. See the methodology for more details.
The policing and incarceration of so many women is at least partially explained by the United States’ bipartisan commitment to so-called “tough on crime” policies. Rather than cracking down on the “worst of the worst” as politicians often promise, this approach has instead made local, state, and federal governments reliant on the criminal legal system as the primary (if not only) tool for addressing a wide array of societal issues like drug use, poverty, and homelessness. As a result, governments have ensnared hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people — including nearly 200,000 women and girls — in a system that fails to resolve those issues but nonetheless returns people behind bars over and over again, destroying their lives, families, and communities in the process. The rapid expansion of a surveillant, punishing system of community supervision; the aggressive policing of “quality of life” issues stemming from disinvestment in healthcare and housing; and the commitment to long mandatory sentences under the war on drugs are just some examples of policy choices that have forced so many women behind bars.
It’s particularly notable that — in stark contrast to the total incarcerated population, where state and federal prison systems hold twice as many people as jails — more incarcerated women are held in jails than in prisons. As we explain, the outsized role of jails has serious consequences for incarcerated women and their families.
Get our latest data & analysis in your inbox!
Jails loom large in women’s incarceration
Women make up about 25% of all individuals booked into jail each year. Compared to men or the total jail population, a greater share of women in jails are serving sentences, but even so, most women being held for local authorities (61%) have not been convicted of a crime and are trapped there awaiting trial.
Aside from women under local authority (or jurisdiction), state and federal agencies also pay local jails to house nearly 7,600 additional women. For example, ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service, which have fewer dedicated facilities for the people they detain, contract with local jails to hold roughly 2,900 women on a typical day. That means the number of women physically held in jails is even higher:
Women disproportionately stuck in jails: Causes and effects
Avoiding pretrial detention is particularly challenging for women. The number of unconvicted women stuck in jail is surely not because courts are considering women to be a flight risk,8 particularly when they are generally the primary caregivers of children. The far more likely answer is that incarcerated women, who have lower incomes than incarcerated men, have an even harder time affording money bail. When the typical bail amounts to a full year’s income for women,9 it’s no wonder that women are stuck in jail awaiting trial.
After conviction, the system continues to funnel women into local jails: About one-quarter (26%) of convicted incarcerated women are held in jails, compared to about 8% of all people incarcerated with a conviction.10 This reflects the different distribution of offense types and criminal histories between convicted men and women. Women are proportionally more likely to be serving a sentence of incarceration for a property or drug offense and less likely to be incarcerated for a violent offense as compared to men. These differences mean that women are more likely to be sentenced to a term in jail, where people typically serve shorter sentences of up to one year.11
So, what does it mean that large numbers of women are held in jail — for them, and for their families? First, while stays in jail are generally shorter than stays in prison,12 jails can be especially deadly for women.13 Women have a higher mortality rate than men in jails,14 dying of drug and alcohol intoxication at twice the rate of men. And the number of deaths by suicide among women in jails increased by almost 65% between the periods of 2000-2004 and 2015-2019. Women are more likely than men to enter jail with a medical problem or a serious mental illness, and while incarcerated, they are more likely to suffer from mental health problems and experience serious psychological distress.15 Being locked up doesn’t help: research shows that incarceration can cause lasting damage to mental health.
Compounding the problem is the fact that jails are particularly poorly positioned to provide proper health care. 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 that’s available to men in the same jail. (However, this is certainly not to say that prisons are always better at meeting women’s needs, as we will discuss further.)
Jails also make it even harder to stay in touch with family than prisons do. Jail phone calls are often at least three times as expensive as calls from prison, and other forms of communication are more restricted — some jails don’t even allow real letters, limiting mail to postcards. 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. These barriers to authentic communication are especially troubling given that 80% of women in jails are mothers, and most of them are primary caretakers of their children. Children are therefore particularly susceptible to the domino effect of burdens placed on incarcerated women.16
Ending mass incarceration requires looking at all offenses — and all women
Too often, the conversation about criminal legal reform begins and ends with the question of “non-violent” drug and property offenses. While drug and property offenses make up more than half of the offenses for which women are incarcerated, the pie chart reveals that all offenses — including the violent offenses that account for nearly one-third17 of all incarcerated women — must be considered in the effort to reduce the number of incarcerated women in this country. This fact underscores the need for policy discussions to focus not just on the easier choices but on the changes that will have the most impact. Particularly in light of the fact that many survivors of domestic and sexual abuse have been incarcerated for violent crimes that occurred in response to gendered violence and abuse, excluding entire offense categories from consideration for reform makes even less sense.
Furthermore, even among women, incarceration is not indiscriminate and reforms should address the disparities related to gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity as well. A 2017 study revealed that one-third of incarcerated women identify as lesbian or bisexual,18 compared to less than 10% of men who identify as gay or bisexual. The same study found that lesbian and bisexual women are likely to receive longer sentences than their heterosexual peers, and more likely to be put into solitary confinement.
And although the data do not exist to break down the “whole pie” by race or ethnicity, we know that Black and American Indian or Alaska Native women are consistently overrepresented in state and federal prisons: Women in prison are 47% white, 18% Black, 19% Hispanic, 3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.7% Asian, and 13% “other.”19 While we are a long way from having data on the intersectional impacts of sexuality and race or ethnicity on women’s likelihood of incarceration, it is clear that Black and lesbian or bisexual women and girls are disproportionately subject to incarceration.20
Prison is no answer for marginalized, traumatized women
About half of confined women and girls are held in state and federal prisons.21 In general, women in prison are serving longer sentences than those in jails, and they are often located far from their families and friends. In many geographically large states there is just one facility for women,22 making visits difficult for children and other loved ones located hundreds of miles away.23 To make matters worse, a lot of facilities that hold women are overcrowded, which can lead to heightened levels of violence, worse health outcomes, and longer terms of incarceration. In Wisconsin, for example, women’s prisons are 78% over capacity, compared to 30% over capacity for men’s facilities. But these are just a few of the many challenges facing women in prison, as we found in our 2022 analysis of a rich dataset published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates.24
The data from the survey offer a rare in-depth look at the backgrounds and experiences of people in prison, relying on responses from incarcerated people themselves, rather than the administrative data that’s easier to collect from prison systems. In our analysis, we focused on people held in state prisons, who make up a much larger piece of the “whole pie” than those in federal prisons. Among our findings and those of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, we see that in state prisons nationwide:25
- Women report childhood disadvantages at alarming rates: 12% report homelessness before they turned 18, 19% were in foster care at some point, and 43% came from families that received welfare or other public assistance. Almost half (45%) had been arrested by age 18.
- Women are more likely than men to enter prison having already received a high school diploma or equivalent credential, but still over half (53%) did not finish high school.
- More than 1 in 6 women (16%) experienced homelessness in the year before the arrest that led to their incarceration — a higher rate than among men (10%).
- Women are more likely to be jobless (53%) than to be employed in the month before their arrest.
- Women are more likely to be written up for a prison rule violation in the past year (58%), particularly for “minor” rule violations (70%).26
- Women report disabilities (50%) and physical and mental health problems at higher rates than men. Over half (58%) of women met the criteria for a substance use disorder the year before they went to prison, and over three-quarters (76%) had some indication of a past or current mental health problem — both significantly higher rates than among men. Yet just 47% had received treatment for a substance use disorder and just 43% had received professional mental health care since they went to prison.
- Women are more likely to be parents of minor children (58%), more likely to be single parents, and more likely to have been living with their children prior to their imprisonment — making it more likely that incarceration would uproot their children and lead to termination of parental rights, permanently breaking up their families.
- About 4% of women (over 3,000) were pregnant when they went to prison, and more than two-thirds (68%) of these women had no health insurance at the time. Yet only half had received any kind of prenatal care in prison apart from an obstetric exam.2728 Only 10 states and the federal government run prison nursery programs, which are residential programs where people can live with their newborns.
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. Furthermore, the underlying causes of women’s criminal behavior are distinct from men’s and show that they would be better served in treatment programs in their communities than by criminal legal system punishments far from home.29
Mass incarceration targets girls, too
Over 5,000 young women and girls are caught up in various systems of confinement, very often for minor and even non-criminal offenses. Most (85%) are held by the juvenile justice system, but about 600 are unaccompanied migrant children held in facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). While children held by ORR are not held for any criminal or delinquent offense, most are held in shelters or even juvenile placement facilities under detention-like conditions.30 And a not-insignificant number of confined girls are actually held in adult prisons and jails. Like their adult counterparts, confined girls often report identities that are marginalized in the U.S. along lines of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Many girls are locked up for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety. For nearly 1 in 4 girls (24%) confined by the juvenile justice system, the most serious charge levelled against them is a non-criminal “technical” violation of probation (17%) or a status offense (7%), such as “running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.” These are behaviors that would not warrant confinement except for these girls’ status as probationers or as minors. By comparison, boys are held for these technical violations and status offenses at half the rate of girls. The use of confinement in response to status offenses is particularly troubling because those behaviors tend to be simply responses to abuse.
Girls of color and those who identify as LBTQ+ are disproportionately confined by the juvenile justice system. Black girls account for 37% of all girls in juvenile facilities, despite making up just 16% of girls under 18 nationwide; similarly, 3% of girls in juvenile facilities are American Indian or Alaska Natives, compared to less than 2% of girls nationwide.31 And while LBTQ+ women are overrepresented in the adult correctional systems, a staggering 40% of girls in the juvenile justice system are lesbian, bisexual, or questioning and gender non-conforming. The comparable statistic for boys is just under 14%.
While society and the criminal legal systems subject all girls to stricter codes of conduct than is expected of their male peers, Black girls in particular shoulder an added burden of adultification — being perceived as older, more culpable, and more responsible than their peers — which leads to greater contact with and harsher consequences within the juvenile justice system. In fact, about 220 girls aged 17 or younger are locked up in adult prisons and jails,32 the result of laws that allow the transfer of youth from juvenile to adult criminal courts. In 2023, 292 girls were “waived” to criminal courts from the juvenile system — nearly 8% of all cases “waived.” More than one-third (37%) of those girls were Black.
A look at some of the smaller “slices”: immigration and involuntary commitment
Turning to those who are locked up criminally and civilly for immigration-related reasons, we find that over 1,200 women are held for criminal charges or convictions of immigration offenses by the federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service. The vast majority of people incarcerated for criminal immigration offenses are accused of illegal entry or illegal reentry — in other words, for no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission.
Under the current Trump administration's mass deportation regime, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now civilly detains about 7,700 women and girls, not for any crime, but simply because they are facing deportation. People detained by ICE are physically confined in federally-, privately-, or state-run immigration detention facilities, and in local jails under contract with ICE or the U.S. Marshals. Many of the federally-run facilities in particular have long track records of abusive treatment and inhumane conditions.33 The roughly 600 unaccompanied migrant girls held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) are awaiting placement with parents, family members, or friends, rather than deportation, but we include them in our count because, again, most are held in detention-like conditions.
Adding to the universe of people who are confined because of criminal legal system involvement, we estimate that about 2,900 women are involuntarily committed in a growing number of state psychiatric hospitals and civil commitment centers for underlying criminal charges. Many of these people are not even convicted, and some are held indefinitely. So-called “forensic patients” include people being evaluated or treated for incompetency to stand trial, as well as those found not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill, who may remain forcibly hospitalized for decades or for life. A small number of women convicted of sex-related crimes are involuntarily committed or detained after their prison sentences are complete. Meanwhile, at least 38 states allow involuntary commitment for substance use disorder treatment, and in many cases, people are sent to actual prisons and jails, which are inappropriate places for treatment.
The tentacles of mass incarceration have a long reach
Even the “whole pie” of incarceration in the chart above represents just one small portion (18%) of the women under any form of correctional control, which includes 819,400 women on probation or parole.34 Again, this is in stark contrast to the total correctional population (mostly men), where one-third (35%) are in prisons and jails.
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. Percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.
Nearly three-quarters of women (74%) under the control of any U.S. correctional system are on probation. Probation is often billed as an alternative to incarceration, but instead it is frequently set with unrealistic conditions that undermine its goal of keeping people from being locked up.3536 For example, probation often comes with steep fees which, like bail, women are in the worst position to afford.37 Failing to pay these probation fees is often a non-criminal “technical” violation of probation. Childcare duties further complicate the common probation requirement to meet regularly with probation officers, especially for women with no extra money to spend on childcare or reliable transportation across town. And probation violations — even for these innocuous and understandable reasons — can land women in jail or prison who were never sentenced to incarceration in the first place. 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.
In the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, restrictive pretrial, probation, and parole conditions can also create barriers to accessing reproductive health care. Restrictions on travel are “standard conditions” of supervision in many places, requiring approval from a probation or parole officer to make specific trips. With many states now restricting access to and criminalizing abortion, seeking an abortion or other reproductive care may be difficult or impossible for many of the hundreds of thousands of women on probation or parole in those states. We estimate that 4 out of 5 women (82%) on probation or parole nationwide are impacted by state abortion restrictions. More specifically, (excluding federal probation and post-release supervision) 82% of women on probation and 85% of women on parole live in states that (1) either completely ban abortion or restrict it based on gestational age and (2) list travel restrictions as a standard condition of supervision.
Reentry is another critical point at which women are too often left behind. Almost 2.5 million women and girls are released from prisons and jails every year,38 but fewer post-release programs are available to them — partly because so many women are confined to jails, which are not meant to be used for long-term incarceration. Additionally, many women with criminal records face barriers to employment in female-dominated occupations, such as nursing and elder care.39 It is little surprise, therefore, that formerly incarcerated women — especially women of color — are also more likely to be unemployed and/or homeless than formerly incarcerated men, making reentry and compliance with probation or parole even more difficult. All of these issues make women particularly vulnerable to being incarcerated not because they commit crimes, but because they run afoul of one of the burdensome obligations of their community supervision.
Like probation before it, electronic monitoring is touted as an “alternative” to incarceration, but it is being used to expand the scope of correctional control rather than reduce the number of people behind bars. The rapid expansion of electronic monitoring in the pretrial context has created “an entirely new path to incarceration via ‘technical violations.’” And ICE’s “Alternatives to Detention” and “Intensive Supervision Appearance Program,” which both rely almost entirely on electronic monitoring, now subject hundreds of thousands more people to constant surveillance and the threat of detention or deportation than just a few years ago. Unlike probation, electronic monitoring is so constrictive that it amounts to a form of “e-carceration.” Unfortunately, the available data are not broken down by sex or gender identity, but with nearly half a million people on electronic monitoring across the criminal legal and immigration systems in 2022, it’s safe to assume that many, many women are confined by this form of mass incarceration as well.
The need for more data
The picture of women’s incarceration is far from complete, and many questions remain about mass incarceration’s unique impact on women. This report offers the critical estimate that a quarter of all incarcerated women are unconvicted. But since the federal government hasn’t collected the key underlying data in 20 years, is that number growing? And how do the harms of that unnecessary incarceration intersect with women’s disproportionate caregiving to impact families? Beyond these big picture questions, there are a plethora of detailed data points that are not reported for women by any government agencies. In addition to the many data gaps and limitations mentioned throughout this report, we’re missing other basic data, such as the simple number of women incarcerated in U.S. territories or who are being held in federal pretrial detention by the U.S. Marshals.
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. Unfortunately, government surveys that break down data between “male” and “female” categories often include trans men among “females” and trans women among “males,” relying on housing assignments as a proxy for gender. In recent years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics had begun collecting data on transgender and nonbinary individuals — for example, it reported data on a small sample of transgender individuals in state prisons in its 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, which we analyzed — but removed questions about gender identity from its surveys in early 2025 when Trump took office. This further muddies the picture of women’s incarceration.
While more data are needed, the data in this report lend focus and perspective to the policy reforms needed to end mass incarceration without leaving women behind.
Get our latest data & analysis in your inbox!
About the data
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. Because not all types of data are collected each year, we sometimes had to combine differing data sets; for example, we applied the percentage distribution of offense types from the previous year to the current year’s total count data, since prison offense data lags by one year. To smooth out these differing levels of vintage and precision among the sources, we choose to round all figures in the graphic. This process may, however, result in various parts not adding up precisely to the total.
- Jails: Calculated based on the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Jail Inmates in 2024, Table 3 (as of June 30, 2024). The Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped collecting data on the conviction status of women in jails in 2005, so we calculated the breakdown based on the 2009 estimate (the most recent available) published in the Jail Inmates at Midyear 2013 — Statistical Tables. Our analysis of offense types is based on the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, 2002. See Who is in jail? Deep dive for why we used our own analysis rather than the otherwise excellent Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of the same dataset, Profiles of Jail Inmates, 2002. While this methodology section illustrates the pervasive dearth of women’s criminal justice data, this 2002 data continues to be the most recent data available of its kind even without regard to gender breakdown. (The Bureau of Justice Statistics finally administered another Survey of Inmates in Local Jails in 2024 and 2025, but the data have not yet been published.)
- Immigration detention: The number of women in immigration detention and the facilities they are held in comes from ICE’s Detention Statistics for FY 2026 (reporting populations as of July 20, 2026, which includes the first ten months of the fiscal year). We calculated the total average daily population from the reported numbers of “Female Crim” and “Female Non-Crim” in the “Facilities FY26” spreadsheet, and categorized them by facility type as follows: 10 women held in non-ICE federal facilities (BOP or USMS CDF), 860 in local jails (ISGA or USMS IGA), and 6,808 held in facilities that typically hold only ICE detainees (DIGSA, CDF, SPC, Staging, and Family facilities). The 860 women held in local jails were then removed from the total jail population to avoid double-counting them. Because the federal BOP publishes population data by jurisdiction (as opposed to custody), the women held for ICE in the BOP facilities were already excluded from the federal prison population data.
- Federal: The population under federal jurisdiction includes those held for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS). The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides data on the BOP population in its report Prisoners in 2023; Table 20 reports the percentage breakdown of offense types for the sentenced population as of Sept. 30, 2023, and the total population of women reported in Table 2 for December 31, 2023. We applied the offense type percentages to the more recent total female BOP population. The USMS does not publish data by sex or gender, but we obtained population data by sex and offense type for fiscal year 2025 through our FOIA request 2026-USMS-000875. We removed those held in jails for USMS from the local jails slice, and included them in the federal slice, as explained in the “data definitions and clarifications” section below. We also obtained offense types by sex and status (sentenced versus unsentenced) for fiscal year 2024 in an earlier records request, but this breakdown is not shown on the pie chart. The U.S. Marshals Services does not publish any data by sex on its website.
- State prisons: Prisoners in 2023, Table 2 provides the sex breakdown for the total population as of December 31st, 2023, and Table 16 provides data (as of December 31, 2022) that we used to calculate the ratio of different offense types, which we then applied to the total state prison population as of year-end 2023.
- Military: For the first time, we obtained the Annual Correctional Reports from all branches of the U.S. military for reporting year 2024 through our FOIA request 25-F-3993. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does not publish data on confinement in military facilities by sex or gender identity.
- Territorial prisons (correctional facilities in the U.S. Territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and U.S. Commonwealths of Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico): Estimates for the female populations were calculated based on the percentages of women reported in World Prison Brief data, which we then applied to the total populations reported in Prisoners in 2023, Table 25. The reference dates for the World Prison Brief data range from year-end 2007 (for the Northern Mariana Islands) to November 14, 2022 (for Guam).
- Youth: For youth held for the juvenile justice system, we used the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement tool, reporting data for 2023. The number of unaccompanied migrant girls held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) comes from the “sex” table on ORR’s Unaccompanied Alien Children Data page, accessed September 2, 2026. The number of youth held in facilities in Indian country comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Jails in Indian Country 2024, Table 7.
- Criminal legal system-related involuntary commitment (includes “civil commitment” for sex-related crimes and “forensic psychiatric” commitments arising from underlying criminal charges or convictions):
- Civil commitment for sex-related crimes (At least 20 states and the federal government operate facilities for the purposes of detaining people convicted of sex-related crimes after their sentences are complete. These facilities and the confinement there are technically civil, but in reality are very similar to prisons. People under civil commitment are held in custody continuously from the time they start serving their sentence at a correctional facility through their confinement in the civil facility.): We obtained data directly from 11 states through a combination of public records requests, emails from relevant state agencies, and annual reports published by those agencies. Our estimate of 8 women in civil commitment facilities is a conservative one because we are missing gender data from the other nine states and the federal Bureau of Prisons, and also because California provided a range (“fewer than eleven”), which we counted as 1. The only other states reporting women in civil commitment were New Jersey (5), Texas (1), and Virginia (1). Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Washington all confirmed holding no women with this status. We believe this is a reasonable estimate because of our past communications with the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs Network (SOCCPN), which has conducted an annual survey of these populations from its members for years; the last time the survey data were broken down by sex, there were 7 women committed.
- Forensic psychiatric commitments (People committed to state psychiatric hospitals by courts after being found “not guilty by reason of insanity” (NGRI) or, in some states, “guilty but mentally ill” (GBMI) and others held for pretrial evaluation or for treatment as “incompetent to stand trial” (IST)): We created an estimate for the number of women held under these statuses based on a national total (18,948 men and women) from the Treatment Advocacy Center’s 2024 report Prevention over Punishment, and the percentage of people held under these statuses who were women in a handful of states where we were able to obtain gender-specific counts. Through a combination of public records requests and state agency data publications, we found that women made up about 15% of the forensic populations from which we obtained data: 17% in Arizona and California, 13% in Minnesota, 12-36% in Pennsylvania (range based on data including several “less than 11” counts), and 20% in Washington. Massachusetts did not report any women committed at the facility holding these patients (0%). Our estimate is the result of multiplying that 15% by the Treatment Advocacy Center’s total. It should be used with caution given the low number of states providing gender-specific data.
- Indian country jails (correctional facilities operated by tribal authorities or the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs): Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Jails in Indian Country, 2024, Table 7, reporting data for June 30, 2024.
- Probation and parole: Our counts of women under community supervision are calculated from the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Correctional Populations in the United States, 2023, Table 4 (showing the total number of women on probation and the total on parole) and Table 10 (showing the estimated number of women who were on both probation and parole when the data were collected). To avoid double-counting those women who had dual probation and parole status, we reduced the total number of women on probation by 1,400 — counting them just once, within the total parole population. This is consistent with our past methodologies, in which we categorize those with dual status by their most restrictive status — counting parole as more restrictive, as people on parole are finishing carceral sentences in the community. For readers interested in knowing the total number of women on parole and probation, ignoring any double-counting with other forms of correctional control, there were 80,400 women on parole and 740,400 women on probation at the end of 2023.
- Several data definitions and clarifications may be helpful to researchers reusing this data in new ways:
- To avoid double-counting women held in local jails on behalf of the Bureau of Prisons, ICE, U.S. Marshals Service, state, and other prison authorities, we removed the 8,466 women from the jail custody population reported by the BJS, as well as from the numbers we used to calculate the number of convicted women in local jails. Our calculation for the number of women held under such arrangements was based on data reported for the total number of people held in jails for federal and state authorities in Table 14 of Jail Inmates in 2024 and our own analysis of the 2002 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, which showed that about 8.5% of those held in such arrangements were women. Because the total numbers of people held in jails for each agency are not broken down by gender, we applied that ratio (8.5%) to the totals reported as held in jails for each agency except for ICE to create estimates by gender. To estimate the most recent number available of women held in jails for ICE, we used ICE’s Detention Statistics for FY 2026 (reporting average daily populations as of July 20, 2026, which includes the first ten months of the fiscal year). We calculated the total average daily population held in jails (860) from the reported numbers of “Female Crim” and “Female Non-Crim” in the “Facilities FY26” spreadsheet that were held in facilities designated as ISGA or USMS IGA.
- Because we removed people held by ICE and people under the jurisdiction of federal and state authorities from the jail population, we had to recalculate the offense distribution reported in Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, 2002 by people who were “convicted” or “not convicted” without the people who reported that they were being held on behalf of state authorities, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (now known as ICE). Our definition of “convicted” in that Survey included those who reported that they were held “To serve a sentence in this jail,” “To await sentencing for an offense,” or “To await transfer to serve a sentence somewhere else.” Our definition of “not convicted” included those who reported being held “To stand trial for an offense,” “To await arraignment,” or “To await a hearing for revocation of probation/parole or community release.”
- Lastly, the youth slice in the main graphic does not include the estimated 220 girls held in adult jails and prisons; these girls were counted in the jail and prison populations of which they are a part. As of 2024, there were 200 girls under the age of 18 held in local jails, and we estimate another roughly 20 girls held in state or federal prisons. To calculate the latter estimate, we multiplied the percentage of youth in adult prisons that were girls, as of 2021 (the most recent year for which data are available on this point), by the reported number of youth 17 or younger in prisons in 2023 from Table 15 of Prisoners in 2023.
Footnotes
This is most powerfully illustrated in our work comparing individual states’ incarceration rates to other countries. See also the underlying data. ↩
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. The Bureau of Justice Statistics had recently begun to collect data on transgender and nonbinary individuals — for example, it reported data on a small sample of transgender individuals in state prisons in its 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, which we analyzed — but removed questions about gender identity from its surveys in early 2025 when Trump took office. Other non-government organizations such as the National Center for Transgender Equality, Black & Pink , and the Vera Institute of Justice are nonetheless beginning to fill this data gap with large-scale surveys. The U.S. Trans Survey asks respondents about recent experiences with policing, incarceration, and immigration detention. Although currently incarcerated individuals are not included in the sample, 2% of the respondents to the 2015 survey were incarcerated in the previous year (similar 2022 survey data have not yet been released as of this publication). Black & Pink and Vera’s 2024 report Advancing Transgender Justice is based on their 2019-2022 survey of 280 currently incarcerated transgender people in state prisons. This field of research has a long way to go before the data are consistently collected and reported by gender identity rather than an administrative categorization of “male” versus “female.” The use of the terms “women” and “girls” in this report reflect these present data limitations. 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 number of state prisons includes both “confinement” and “community based” facilities, and includes those authorized to hold “female only” and “both” men and women. The number of federal prisons reflects those designated as “female facilities” on the Bureau of Prisons website. The number of local jails is based on “active jail reporting units” (that is, facilities not jurisdictions), and assumes that all jails have some capacity to hold women (as of the 2019 Census of Jails, 2,728 jails had a female average daily population of 1 or more; the complete 2024 Census of Jails data have not been released as of this publication). Similarly, the number of Indian country jails includes all such facilities in 2024 (although only 65 facilities held women and girls at the time of the survey). The number of juvenile facilities is the total number of “out of home placement” facilities in 2022, not necessarily only those holding girls. Finally, the 148 immigration detention facilities include those holding both men and women. ↩
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. In our analysis of the data, we focused on state prisons, which account for a much greater share of the total incarcerated population, and wherever possible, we used the self-reported gender identity of respondents instead of the administrative sex variable, which was defined by whether the facility holding the respondent was a “women’s” or “men’s” prison. ↩
For example, our report The Gender Divide: Tracking Women’s 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. ↩
The drop in girls held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) might seem like a positive development, but it reflects the same antagonism towards migrants as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda: fewer children seeking asylum are making it across the border. Furthermore, these girls are being held for much longer periods than their predecessors: the average length of stay in fiscal year 2026 (as of late July) was 190 days, compared to 117 in 2025 and just 30 in 2024. A 2019 evaluation by the Office of the Inspector General found that longer lengths of stay with ORR are associated with deteriorating mental health, including more frustration, hopelessness, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. ↩
In 2023, women made up about 7% of the federal prison population, but almost 20% of those released from the Bureau of Prisons after applying First Step Act time credits (nearly 3,000 women). Their overrepresentation among these releases is at least partially explained by their differences in offense types (i.e., often held for drug offenses or fraud as opposed to statutorily ineligible offenses) and more limited criminal histories as compared to the total Bureau of Prisons population. ↩
While true “flight risks” are uncommon, women often do have a hard time making it to scheduled court dates for various reasons, and these absences also frequently lead to jail detention. Our analysis of jail data shows that charges for “failure to appear” (FTA) in court — a typically innocent mistake that is treated as a crime in and of itself — make up a larger share of women’s bookings than men’s: 8.2% of women’s jail bookings have FTA as a sole charge compared to 6.6% of men’s jail bookings. Bookings with FTA in combination with other charges bumps the numbers up to 14.8% for women and 12.7% for men. It’s important to note that most women (and people in general) are not missing court in an attempt to evade justice; rather, researchers have pointed to unmet child care needs, medical issues, and transportation problems that might especially impact women. However, the data remain scant on what drives missed court dates for women. ↩
Our research found that women who could not make bail had an annual median income of just $11,071 (in 2015 dollars). And among those women, Black women had a median annual income of only $9,083 (just 20% that of a white non-incarcerated man). When the typical $10,000 felony bail amounts to a full year’s income, it’s no wonder that women are so often confined while awaiting trial, even on low-level charges. ↩
These estimates are based on the systems of confinement for which we have information about conviction or sentencing status. For women, that includes federal prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service, state prisons, local jails, and youth confinement. For the total incarcerated population, those systems also include jails in Indian country and military facilities. ↩
Moreover, while these data aren’t available nationally for local jails, we know that among people in state prisons, women report fewer prior arrests and incarcerations on average than men, suggesting that their criminal histories are less likely to contribute to a harsher sentence. ↩
Even a few days in jail can have profoundly negative consequences for people’s employment, health, housing, government benefits, and more. For more information, see our briefing, Research roundup: Evidence that a single day in jail causes immediate and long-lasting harms. ↩
In particular, being pregnant and giving birth in jail can be especially perilous and deadly for both mother and child. One study that examined local news coverage of 35 jail births found that most births happened unassisted in unsanitary jail cells, roughly a quarter of children died during or after birth, and repeated calls for medical assistance were routinely ignored. ↩
Moreover, other research has linked counties with higher levels of jail incarceration to elevated death rates among Black and white women in jail compared to men. ↩
A gender analysis of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Indicators of Mental Health Problems Reported by Prisoners and Jail Inmates 2011-12 report (the most recent available in this series) is available in our 2017 briefing New government report points to continuing mental health crisis in prisons and jails. And for anyone still unsure of the harms of jail, just look at the suicide rates in U.S. jails. ↩
For instance, research on pretrial confinement confirms that women’s inability to afford bail has a particularly negative impact on families. For more examples of the costs of women’s incarceration on families and communities, see the section called “What These Estimates Do — and Do Not — Capture” in the Council on Criminal Justice’s report The Rising Cost of Women’s Justice System Involvement. ↩
This figure (30%) is based on the limited offense data available by sex; therefore, it excludes any women held for violent offenses by the U.S. military or in territorial prisons, jails in Indian country, civil commitment facilities, or state psychiatric hospitals — the systems for which offense data by sex are not available. ↩
The 2017 study based on the 2011-2012 National Inmate Survey (the most recent available that includes findings about sexual orientation) found that 42.1% of women in prison (state or federal) and 35.7% of women in jail are sexual minorities, compared to 9.3% of men in prison and 6.2% of men in jail. The study also confirmed that “[t]here is disproportionate incarceration, mistreatment, harsh punishment, and sexual victimization of sexual minority inmates.” Our more recent analysis of women in state prisons, which used data from the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, found that over 22% of women in state prisons report being lesbian or bisexual, compared to 2.5% of men who report being gay or bisexual. ↩
These percentages were calculated from Table 10 in Prisoners in 2023 - Statistical Tables. The nonspecific “other” category includes women reported as two or more races and other groups not broken out in the table. (The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides data on the racial and ethnic identities of women in prisons, but not jails.) By contrast, the total adult female population of the U.S. as of July 1, 2025 was 56% white (not Hispanic), 13% Black (not Hispanic), 19% Hispanic, 0.7% American Indian or Alaska Native (not Hispanic), 7% Asian (not Hispanic), and 4% other (3.6% were two or more races, not Hispanic, and 0.2% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic), according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Estimates of the Resident Population by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025. ↩
These disparities don’t stop at incarceration. Even once released, women are at greater risk for homelessness and unemployment, with Black women being hit hardest. Additionally, our 2019 briefing Policing Women: Race and gender disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force found significant racial disparities in arrest rates for women (but not men) in police-initiated traffic and street stops. 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. Black women were arrested in 4.4% of police-initiated stops, which was roughly three times as often as white women (1.5%), and twice as often as Hispanic women (2.2%). In 2024, we noted that police are using force against more women: 28% of people experiencing the threat or use of force by police in 2022 were women, compared to 13% in 1999. ↩
Troublingly, state and federal facilities that hold women are disproportionately operated by private companies, which don’t have the same level of transparency and oversight as public facilities. According to Table 2 of the 2019 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities, 47% of all facilities authorized to hold women (which includes those that hold only women and those that hold both men and women) are privately operated, compared to 23% of facilities authorized to hold men. Of the facilities authorized to hold only men or women, 29% of women’s facilities were private, compared to 15% of men’s facilities. Women in ICE detention are also more likely to be held in private facilities: 86% of women in immigration detention are held in private facilities, compared to 65% of men. ↩
According to The Prison Flow Project, the geographically large states of Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Utah have just one state prison that holds women. Even in states with more than one women’s prison, the primary facility is often located far from major population centers. For example, Logan Correctional Center in Illinois held 70% of women in the state prison system in June, 2023, but it is located nearly 200 miles from Chicago, by far the most populous city in the state. ↩
In our analysis of the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates dataset, only one-third (33%) of people in state prisons reported any visits with their minor children while incarcerated. When asked why their children hadn’t visited them in prison, parents most frequently blamed the distance from the prison (33%). ↩
It may seem like 2016 data about prison populations would be outdated by now, but because this survey takes a much deeper look into pre-incarceration life experiences, these data remain essential to understanding incarceration today. Moreover, the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not conduct this survey regularly; before 2016, it was last fielded in 2004. ↩
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has published its own reports that include findings about people in both state and federal prisons; however, these reports are generally not as detailed as our own analysis. You can read our in-depth analyses of the data in the following reports and briefings: Beyond the Count: A deep dive into state prison populations, Chronic Punishment: The unmet health needs of people in state prisons, Both sides of the bars: How mass incarceration punishes families, The state prison experience: Too much drudgery, not enough opportunity, and What the Survey of Prison Inmates tells us about trans people in state prison. ↩
Incarcerated women are uniquely susceptible to being punished for menstruating. Our analysis of prison disciplinary policies and testimonies collected from incarcerated women indicate that vaguely-worded rules and broad officer discretion create the conditions for women to be sanctioned for normal bodily functions — jeopardizing their access to programming and subjecting them to punishments ranging from loss of visitation to fines and fees and placement in restrictive housing. ↩
For more information about pregnancy and prenatal care in correctional settings, see the Pregnancy in Prison Statistics (PIPS) project, spearheaded by Dr. Carolyn Sufrin of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Public Health, and the Enhanced Perinatal Programs for People in Prison (E4P) project, led by Dr. Rebecca Shlafter at the University of Minnesota. ↩
Women in prison often forgo pregnancy and menstrual healthcare due to unaffordable medical copays. ↩
Marginalization, trauma, mental health problems, and self-medication with drugs and/or alcohol are recurrent themes in studies of incarcerated women. 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. Another study of women in jails found that 98% had experienced trauma in their lifetimes. For more context about women in prison, see the sidebar Context: What’s behind women’s prison growth? in our report, The Gender Divide. ↩
Most children in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody are held in shelters. A small number are in secure juvenile facilities or in short-term or long-term foster care. With the exception of those in foster homes, these children are not free to come and go, and they do not participate in community life (e.g. they do not attend community schools). Their behaviors and interactions are monitored and recorded; any information gathered about them in ORR custody can be used against them later in immigration proceedings. And while the majority of these children came to the U.S. without a parent or legal guardian, those who were separated from parents at the border are, like ICE detainees, confined only because the U.S. has criminalized unauthorized immigration, even by persons lawfully seeking asylum. ↩
Data disaggregated by sex and race for the population confined in “out of home placement” by the juvenile justice system are available through the Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement tool. The racial and ethnic distribution of all girls under age 18 in the U.S. were calculated from the Census Bureau’s Annual Estimates of the Resident Population by Sex, Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023 (using data from 2023, when the juvenile facility data were last collected). It should be noted that juvenile facilities in Indian Country held an additional 40 American Indian or Alaska Native girls in 2024, not counted in the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement. ↩
As of 2024 (the most recent data available), about 200 girls were held in adult jails and an estimated 18 were held in state and/or federal prisons. (Our estimate for those in prison is based on the most recently-reported percentage of youth in federal or state prisons that were girls — 3.45% in 2021 — multiplied by 513, the total number of youth 17 and younger held by state or federal prisons). This number does not include the 40 “juvenile” girls held by facilities in Indian country; those girls are held in separate facilities from adults. ↩
In addition to growing its detention infrastructure, ICE has also rapidly expanded its overall surveillance and control over the non-criminal migrant population by growing its electronic monitoring-based “alternatives to detention” program. ↩
Pretrial supervision is another form of correctional control, but one for which very little data exists. It is not included in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ regular Correctional Populations reports, and is therefore excluded from the figures in this report as well. ↩
Probation also varies tremendously between states. ↩
In analyzing a one-day snapshot of jail rosters in 2024, we found that women were more likely to be stuck in jail for a technical violation of probation or parole than men: 9% of women in jail had been admitted with only a charge of a violation, compared to 6% of men. ↩
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 woman’s navigation of probation. Considering that 70% of all women, and 81% of Black women on probation in particular, make less than $20,000 a year, these circumstances are only getting harder as governments unnecessarily restrict essential benefits, like vital federal food assistance (known as SNAP). ↩
Approximately 1,938,141 women and girls were released from adult correctional facilities as of the most recent counts. According to our own analysis of data from the National Prisoner Statistics program, 53,440 women were released from state and federal prisons in 2023. And according to data from the 2024 Census of Jails, about 1,884,701 women and girls were released from local jails nationwide between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. (For this jail estimate, we use annual admissions as a proxy measure of releases, since the average length of stay for women is just 18.6 days.) ↩
A 2020 law review article on the use of record clearance and expungement mechanisms notes that “several studies have found that women represent almost 50 percent of those seeking records clearance, as compared to approximately 25 percent of those arrested, due potentially in part to the desire of women to enter ‘caregiving’ fields such as nursing and geriatric care, whose licensing requirements often bar individuals with criminal records. This suggests that criminal records act as a particular impediment to women…” ↩
Acknowledgements
All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, but this report builds on the successful collaborations of the many versions of this report we have produced since 2017. For this year’s report, the authors would like to thank Aleks Kajstura for her foundational work on previous iterations of this report.
Finally, we’d like to thank each of our individual donors — your commitment to ending mass incarceration makes our work possible.
About the authors
Wendy Sawyer is the Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. Along with directing the organization’s research priorities, Wendy is the author (or co-author) of several major reports, including Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie, Beyond the Count: A deep dive into state prison populations, All Profit, No Risk: How the bail industry exploits the justice system and Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems. Wendy also publishes briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women’s incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.
Brian Nam-Sonenstein is a Senior Editor and Researcher at the Prison Policy Initiative. He is the author of several major reports, including Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026, Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2025, Cut-rate care: The systemic problems shaping ‘healthcare’ behind bars, and Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct. Brian also published briefings explaining why ending mass incarceration is an economic justice issue and how providing housing can help interrupt a major pathway to prison created by the criminalization of homelessness. In addition to his work as a researcher, Brian plays a pivotal role in supporting other members of the Research Department in shaping the framing and messaging of their publications in a way that maximizes their impact and reach.
About the Prison Policy Initiative
The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harms of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Through big-picture reports like Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, as well as in-depth reports on issues such as probation and parole, the organization shapes the public conversation on mass incarceration and helps the public more fully engage in criminal legal system reform.
Events
- November 18-21, 2026:
Members of our Research team, will be attending the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in Chicago from November 18th through the 21st. Please reach out if you’d like to set up a meeting.
Not near you?
Invite us to your city, college or organization.