Jamiles Lartey – Women in jails are the fastest growing incarcerated population, study says

Women held in local jails represent the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, according to a new study. The researchers found that trauma, sexual violence and mental health issues were all closely wrapped up with the swelling numbers. “While we started to see a decline in the incarceration and jailing of men, we haven’t seen a comparable …

Rebecca McCray – There Are More Women in U.S. Jails Than Ever Before

An unusual thing happened last year: The number of people in U.S. prisons declined. After decades of exponential growth, both the state and federal prison populations dropped slightly, reflecting the steady embrace of policy reforms enacted over the last decade intended to curtail corrections costs. Yet as prison populations in many states have declined, the number of women in jails has skyrocketed. …

US jails are warehouses of sick, poor and low-risk people

Jail is not supposed to be where you put the mentally ill or those too poor to pay bail. Nor is it supposed to be where African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians go for crimes that don’t land white people behind bars. But that is what they are increasingly becoming. The primary purpose of jails, unlike prisons, is to …