The United States still incarcerates 614 people for every 100,000 residents, more than almost any other country in the world. Women in particular are incarcerated in the U.S. at a rate of 112 per 100,000. This may seem relatively minor, but it’s a scale of women’s incarceration that remains higher than that of any other country except El Salvador. Furthermore, women’s incarceration stubbornly remains at near-historic highs in the U.S., while the country’s overall incarceration rate has been falling.

This report helps make sense of these numbers, providing an updated snapshot of how women in the U.S. fare in the world’s carceral landscape and comparing incarceration rates for women in each U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world.

25 Years of Alarming Growth in Women’s Incarceration Across the World

Globally, governments incarcerate women at an alarming rate: the number of imprisoned women has grown by almost 60% since 2000, with more than 740,000 women and girls in prison worldwide — including nearly 200,000 women and girls in just the United States alone. Women are particularly vulnerable to laws and practices criminalizing poverty, as well as laws that disproportionately impact them on the basis of their gender or disability, like restrictions on reproductive rights or sexuality, or the policing of mental illness and drug use related to prior experiences of abuse or violence, which are common among incarcerated women. The United States is in no way immune to the proliferation of global women’s incarceration — in fact, it’s a significant driver of it: only 4% of the world’s women and girls live in the U.S., but the U.S. confines one-quarter of the world’s incarcerated women and girls. 

In South Dakota, the world’s leader in women’s incarceration, a quick look at state policies and practices makes it clear why the state incarcerates more women per capita than the rest of the world. The state’s reputation for over-incarcerating women, especially for drug-related offenses, means that more than half of incarcerated women in state prisons are locked up for drug convictions, compared to a quarter of incarcerated men. While some states have slowed the rate at which they incarcerate people for drug offenses, the number of women locked up in South Dakota for drug offenses has grown 66% since 2013 compared to only 34% for men. Even though three out of every four women in South Dakota prisons are incarcerated for what the state considers “non-violent offenses,” the state projects that the number of incarcerated women will grow by almost 20% by 2026 — and has even used this projection to justify the construction of a second women’s prison in the state. 

Read the full article about women's incarceration rates in the U.S. by Emily Widra and Aleks Kajstura at Prison Policy Initiative.