From !9th News:
Women represent about 9 percent of all incarcerated people in the United States, but data about their circumstances is spotty at best. We do know that in recent decades, imprisonment rates for women have increased dramatically, growing at twice the pace of men’s incarceration. A report published this month by the nonprofit think tank Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) provides one of the most comprehensive recent assessments of the realities facing women and girls held in the country’s prisons and jails.
PPI teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to pull data from several government agencies, which can often be fragmented or out of date. The numbers from PPI’s report show that the Covid-19 pandemic briefly disrupted the upward incarceration trends for women before they returned to “business as usual.” They also show that incarcerated women are more likely to enter correctional facilities with physical and mental illnesses and more likely to be held in jails than in prisons. These are all factors that shape women’s experiences while in custody.
“The carceral system was not developed with women in mind,” said Cynthia Roseberry, acting director of the justice division at the ACLU. “Women are impacted in tremendously different ways than men: From the places where they’re imprisoned, to their experiences inside, to the difficulty of reentry, women are impacted significantly.” Continue reading >>>
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