One of Eight Prisoners Now Released is a Woman

Loaded on Sept. 15, 2024 by David Reutter published in Prison Legal News September, 2024, page 61

Filed under: Gender Discrimination -- Women, Statistics/Trends. Location: United States of America.

by David Reutter
As resources are stretched by millions of people released annually from U.S. prisons and jails, advocates struggle to obtain accurate information about the scope of the need. The nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) responded with a report on February 29, 2024, finding that a significant percentage of those released are women.
PPI used data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to create estimates of releases by sex. BJS’s most recent Annual Survey of Jails from 2022 does not break down releases by state; that is done by the less frequent Census of Jails, the most recent from 2019
But data on releases by sex or gender identity is important because “the mass incarceration of women has been overlooked” despite growing twice as fast as men’s incarceration, PPI said. Since over half of incarcerated women are mothers, and women are more likely their children’s primary caregivers, “entire families are harmed when a woman is put in prison or jail.”
Using BJS data, PPI was able to create “rough estimates” of prison releases by sex in 2022: About 51,228 from women’s state prisons, plus another 3,951 from federal prisons for women. On top of that, PPI estimated 1,678,855 women were released that year from local jails. See: How many women and men are released from each state’s prisons and jails every year? PPI (Feb. 2024).
That’s over 1.7 million women released from incarceration every year—more than the total female population of 22 states. It is especially troubling given challenges women face in getting reproductive healthcare behind bars, as PLN has reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2023, p.35.]

One of Eight Prisoners Now Released is a Woman

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