SJC Exchange Library

Originally posted by Wendy Sawyer on 03/06/24

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Hi friends,

190,600 women and girls are locked up in the United States on any given day. That's the top-line number from the new report Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, released today by the Prison Policy Initiative. However, that number tells only part of the story of women's incarceration. The report dives deep into the data to provide the most recent and comprehensive look at how many women are incarcerated in the U.S., in what kinds of facilities, and why, as well as detailed data on incarcerated women's demographic makeup and health.

Women in the U.S. experience a dramatically different criminal legal system than men do, but data on their experiences is difficult to find and put into context. The new edition of Women's Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, which the Prison Policy Initiative has published since 2017, fills this gap with richly-annotated data visualizations about women behind bars.

• In the U.S., women are held in 446 state prisons, 27 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 80 Indian country jails, and 80 immigration detention facilities, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
• 58% of women in state prisons are parents to minor children, and of those, most are single mothers who were living with their children prior to imprisonment - making it likely that incarceration uprooted their children and led to termination of parental rights, permanently breaking up their families.
• Nearly 7,000 young women and girls are caught up in the various systems of confinement. Almost half are held in facilities for the juvenile justice system, and almost as many are unaccompanied migrant children in Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities.
• Girls of color and those who identify as LBTQ+ are disproportionately confined by the juvenile justice system. Black girls account for 32% of all girls in juvenile facilities despite making up just 14% of girls under 18 nationwide. Similarly, 40% of girls in the juvenile justice system are lesbian, bisexual, or questioning and gender non-conforming.
• Probation and parole play a significant role in the women's criminal legal system, with an additional 808,7000 women being under these forms of control. They are forced to live under a complex set of rules and restrictions that set them up to fail and threaten them with reincarceration.

Finally, the report breaks down the racial demographics of women in prison and jail, details the number of women on probation and parole, and provides key statistics on the incarceration of girls in juvenile facilities.

The new report is available here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024women.html

Related, in case you missed it, last week we released an updated dataset on the number of people released from prisons and jails each year by sex and state. This is one of our most frequently requested datasets.

I hope you find this useful in your work. (And apologies for any cross-posting!)

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Wendy Sawyer
Prison Policy Initiative
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