Published on: Friday, October 20, 2017
Yesterday, the Prison Policy Initiative released a report titled Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017. The report, done in collaboration with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, provides a first-of-its-kind detailed view of the 219,000 women currently incarcerated in the United States. The report breaks down women’s custody by offense category and by location in local jails, state prisons, federal prisons, and youth facilities. According to the report, more than 25 percent of women behind bars have not been convicted and are awaiting trial. Further, “incarcerated women are nearly evenly split between state prisons and local jails,” unlike the two to one prison-to-jail ratio for the entire incarcerated population.
