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? Further, how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the number of women behind bars? These are important questions, but finding those answers requires disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal legal systems and unearthing the frustratingly limited data broken down by gender.
This report provides a detailed view of the 172,700 women and girls incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the 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 the specific offense. In this updated report, we’ve also gone beyond the numbers, using rare self-reported data from a national survey of people in prison, to offer new insights about incarcerated women’s backgrounds, families, health, and experiences in prison. This report, produced in collaboration with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, answers the questions of why and where women are locked up — and so much more: