Report: The Population of Women in Prison Has Tripled Since the 90's

A recently published report by the Prison Policy Initiative brings to light staggering statistics about incarcerated women.

November 23, 2015



A recently published report by the Prison Policy Initiative brings to light staggering statistics about women in prison. The growth of the women's prison population has nearly tripled since 1990, and accounts for nearly 30 percent of the world's incarcerated women. With us to discuss this report is its author, Aleks Kajstura, who's a legal director at Prison Policy Initiative, and director of health and wellness at Dignity and Power Now, Mark-Anthony Johnson. Thanks for joining us, guys.

ALEKS KAJSTURA: Thanks for having us on.

MARK-ANTHONY JOHNSON: Thank you.

ELLIOTT: So Aleks, talk to me about the Prison Policy Initiative's new report on incarcerated women.

KAJSTURA: What we tried to analyze was looking at our incarcerated population. You know, women are often kind of left out of all the statistics and the data. So this was an attempt to quantify how many--how punitive, I guess, the United States is toward women, and how each state is different between each other on policies and incarcerating women, and then how the states compare to other countries.

So for example, you can say, well you know, our state is better than Louisiana, or at least we're not Texas. But when you take, when you kind of step out of that isolationist worldview and look outside of the United States, even some of the “better” states in the country are still, are some of the harshest incarcerators of women in the world.

ELLIOTT: That's right. And in your report you said that Rhode Island, if it were a country, would be the 15th highest in incarceration rate in the world. Talk to me about that.

KAJSTURA: Well, I think at some point--and we don't really have hard facts on historical data for other countries, so we're not exactly sure where the United States peeled away. But as you said, our incarceration rate has, starting in the 1980s, really just skyrocketed. I looked at historical data. And throughout all of the last century, really, we were around a rate of 20 women incarcerated for every 100,000 women we had in the US. So that accounts for our population growth in the US. We still kind of incarcerated the same percentage of women throughout. But starting in the 1980s it has now climbed to over 100 women incarcerated for every 100,000. And you know, just getting to a point where we can have those numbers was really an interesting struggle out of this report, and that's how buried women's incarceration data is in general. So as to the how did we get there and why, those are the next questions that need to be answered.

ELLIOTT: Right. And not only are we incarcerating women at a much higher rate than our international counterparts and other NATO countries, but we're incarcerating women at a much higher rate than we used to. You spoke to that a little bit. Talk to me about that and your research method for this study.

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