The incarceration of women in the United States refers to the imprisonment of women in both prisons and jails in the United States. There are approximately 219,000 incarcerated women in the US according to a November 2018 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, and the rate of incarceration of women in the United States is at a historic and global high, with 133 women in correctional facilities per every 100,000 female citizens. The United States is home to just 4% of the world's female population, yet the US is responsible for 33% of the entire world's incarcerated female population. The steep rise in the population of incarcerated women in the US is linked to the complex history of the war on drugs and the US's prison–industrial complex, which lead to mass incarceration among many demographics, but had particularly dramatic impacts on women and especially women of color. However, women made up only 10.4% of the US prison and jail population, as of 2015.
The conditions of correctional facilities which house women can be a major cause of health and human rights concerns. Given that the steep rise in the population of incarcerated women has been a relatively recent phenomenon, prisons and jails originally built to accommodate male prisoners have not been adjusted to meet the special needs of women, like providing pregnancy and prenatal care, other gynecological services, mental healthcare, and adequate accommodation for things like menstrual hygiene. Issues with standards of care and adequate prison conditions are worsened by a lack of standards on data collecting and also by the privatization of prison healthcare services, which cannot be as tightly regulated as public services.
Prison and jail population
In the United States in 2015, women made up 10.4% of the incarcerated population in adult prisons and jails.See PDF. Appendix table 3 on page 14 has state by state counts and rates of female incarceration. It says there are 1,942,500 male and 202,600 female inmates in prisons and jails. That is 10.4% female. 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. From 2010 to 2013, the numbers fell for both genders, −0.8% for males and −0.5% for females. For jails the figures for 2000–2010 are 1.8% for males and 2.6% for females, while for 2010–2013 they are −1.4% for males and 3.4% for females. Over this period the female proportion of the incarcerated population has been increasing, at least partly due to compulsory sentencing.
In the late 20th century, Hispanic women were incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of non-Hispanic white women, and black women were incarcerated at four times the rate of white women. However, since the 2000s, the incarceration rates for African American and Hispanic American women have declined, while incarceration rates have increased for non-Hispanic white women. Between 2000 and 2017, the incarceration rate for white women increased by 44%, while at the same time declining by 55% for African American women. The Sentencing Project reports that by 2021, incarceration rates had declined by 70% for African American women, while rising by 7% for white women. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that white women's incarceration rate was growing faster than ever before, as the rate for black women declined. The incarceration rate of African American males is also falling sharply, even faster that white men's incarceration rate, contrary to the popular opinion that black males are increasingly incarcerated.
The Prison Policy Initiative writes: "Incarcerated women are 53% White, 29% Black, 14% Hispanic, 2.5% American Indian and Alaskan Native, 0.9% Asian, and 0.4% Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander."
Within the US, the rate of female incarceration increased fivefold in a two-decade span ending in 2001; the increase occurred because of increased prosecutions and convictions of offenses related to recreational drugs, increases in the severity of offenses, and a lack of community sanctions and treatment for women who violate drug laws. Tough-on-crime legislation and legislation associated with the war on drugs have been connected to the increasing rate of the incarceration of women of color from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This rapid boom of female prisoners is something the primarily male-dominated prison system was not structurally prepared for and, as a result, female prisons often lack the resources to accommodate the specific social, mental, healthcare needs of these women.Acoca, L. "Defusing the Time Bomb: Understanding and Meeting the Growing Health Care Needs of Incarcerated Women in America." Crime & Delinquency 44.1 (1998): 49–69. Sage Journals. Web. March 12, 2012. Many reforms aiming to reduce prison populations have been designed with only men in mind and have thus not helped reduce the number of incarcerated women; this is especially true of state-level reforms. The mass incarceration of females in the US has become a major human rights issue that has been widely criticized by international organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
History
In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s.Banks, Cyndi. Women in Prison: A Reference Handbook. ABC-CLIO, 2003. p.1. Retrieved from Google Books on March 10, 2011. , . The first American female correctional facility with dedicated buildings and staff was the Mount Pleasant Female Prison in Ossining, New York; the facility had some operational dependence on nearby Sing Sing, a men's prison.Banks, Cyndi. Women in Prison: A Reference Handbook. ABC-CLIO, 2003. p.5. Retrieved from Google Books on March 10, 2011. , .
Unlike prisons designed for men in the United States, state prisons for women evolved in three waves, as described in historical detail in "Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons" by Nicole Hahn Rafter. First, women prisoners were imprisoned alongside men in "general population", where they were subject to sexual attacks and daily forms of degradation. Then, in a partial attempt to address these issues, women prisoners were removed from general population and housed separately, but then subject to neglect wherein they did not receive the same resources as men in prisons. In a third stage of development, women in prison were then housed completely separately in fortress-like prisons, where the goal of punishment was to indoctrinate women into traditional feminine roles.
Despite the widespread historical shifts in female incarceration, there have been documented instances of women being held in men's prisons well into the twentieth century, one such example being the nearly two years that Assata Shakur was imprisoned, primarily in men's facilities, in the 1970s. In 1973 Shakur was held in the Middlesex County Jail in New Jersey, supposedly due to its proximity to the courthouse. She was the first, and last, woman ever imprisoned there, and was held in deplorable conditions including isolation and twenty-four hour observation. While Shakur was eventually transferred to a women's prison, her treatment illustrates the fact that women were held in male facilities far into the twentieth century.
Some fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson called for a "war on crime". Consequently, Johnson presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which allowed for the first time in America, a "direct role for the Federal Government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons." Republican and Democratic policymakers worked together in fighting this war on crime, which would later become a war on drugs. The term "war on drugs" was officially introduced during the Nixon administration to condemn all unapproved drug use, and it refers to federal, state, and local government policies created to eliminate drug use within specific communities.
The Reagan administration further pressed the sales of illegal drugs as a critical political issue. President Reagan's Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 focused on the activities of inner-city youth and small-time drug dealers. Severe sentencing laws, especially mandatory minimum sentences, which were a part of Reagan's crime bill and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 engendered mass increase in imprisonment. For example, between 1980 and 1998 the U.S. incarceration rate rose almost 300 percent. The passage of the United States Federal Sentencing Guidelines also compelled judges to give lengthy sentences even when they believed the defendant was not a threat to society. In 1984, Congress also enacted statutes imposing mandatory minimum sentences for drug and weapons offenses, as well as adopted definitions of "drug related activities" and harsh sentences for those with any connection to drugs. This was intended to keep individuals with any sort of connection to drugs "'off the streets' and behind bars" for extensive periods of time. These strict guidelines sent men and women away for decades. The war on drugs has targeted individuals beyond those using or addicted to drugs by also victimizing those who are "unwittingly, unknowingly, or peripherally" involved in drug-related activity. Together, the war on crime and war on drugs have produced contemporary mass incarceration in America,"distinguished by rate of imprisonment far above all other industrialized nations and involving the systematic confinement of entire groups of citizens."
The war on drugs has had specific and devastating consequences for women, especially women in relationships with partners or relatives who use or sell drugs, as well as women who have no other choice but to become involved in the drug trade to support their families in the "absence of living wage jobs and in the face of cuts to public assistance." The number of women in prison and the time they spent inside grew significantly throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1986 and 1999, the number of women incarcerated in state prisons for drug-related offenses increased by 888 percent. More so, it has also expanded the criminalization of people by race and gender. For example, there has been a distinct increase in the number of incarcerated African American and Latina women in the U.S., who make up a disproportionate number of women arrested, charged, convicted, and incarcerated for drug-related offenses. The incarceration rate for African American women for all crimes, driven by drug-related offenses, increased by 800 percent between 1986 and 2005, compared to a 400 percent increase for women of all races.
Even though the number of crimes committed by women has remained relatively constant, the rate of imprisonment has continued to increase. As of 2018 there are over 219,000 women in prisons and jails in the United States, and it is commonly believed that this is a factor of increased incarceration in response to drug offenses.
Sexes of guards and staff As of 2007, in most of the Western world, the guards in female prisons are exclusively female. Meanwhile, in same year, about 40% of prison guards in American women's prisons are men. In some facilities, most of the prison guards are men: Silja Talvi, author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, argued that in theory gender equality makes sense in all occupations, but in practice having male guards watch over female prisoners is problematic. Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, this was true in the United States. Men usually worked in perimeter posts, such as gate posts, rather than having direct contact with female prisoners. Male employees previously had restricted positions. Both acts integrated the workforce, and after the acts passed male employees gained increasingly direct contact with female prisoners.
Social factors leading to incarceration