Last week, the Prison Policy Institute released its latest comprehensive study on mass incarceration in the U.S. The report’s primary focus is highlighting how many people are locked up by type of facility and offense committed. Our recently released three-part report takes a layered approach to analyzing criminal justice statistics for females involved with the federal criminal justice system. Instead of focusing on one aspect of the system, such as the incarceration rate of local jails, state prisons, federal jails, or federal prisons, we focus on three elements of this complex system: arrests, sentencing, and incarceration rates.
The Criminal Justice System
Chart 1 provides a simplistic view of our criminal justice system and the various elements involved in the operation. Beginning with getting arrested, there are different potential outcomes in each step of the process. It’s problematic that individuals in positions of power make many of these decisions unilaterally. Prosecutors decide if and when to press charges, judges decide what type and length of sentence to issue, and parole boards decide whom to release and under what conditions. All these things have helped lead to some of the disparities we observe between gender, race, and ethnicity in the three elements analyzed in our report.
Chart 1: The Criminal Justice System
Source: Produced by Jerry Pender, Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race.
Each independent element, from arrest to incarceration, presented unique trends during the period analyzed in the study. Federal female arrests are trending upward overall, but what happens when you disaggregate the data by race, citizenship status, or offense type? Read Part 1, Female Federal Arrests and Booking Trends 2000 – 2021, to see how these variables affect arrest trends, and Part 2, Female Federal Sentencing Trends 2000 – 2021, to see how they affect sentencing outcomes.
Next week, we will wrap up this series with the release of Part 3, FemaleFederal Incarceration Trends 2000 – 2021. This final report examines the incarceration trends for females in federal prisons by race, ethnicity, age, citizenship status, and offense type.
Happy Women’s History Month!
