Created by the Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie provides a detailed view of the 172,700 women and girls incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control.
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 not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal legal systems (1), but also unearthing the frustratingly limited data that’s broken down by gender. (2)
This report pulls together data from a number of government agencies and break down the number of women and girls held by each correctional system by 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 (3), 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.
