The United States incarcerates women at a rate higher than every other country except for Thailand, according to a new report.
And if every U.S. state were its own country, the top 25 countries with the highest rates of female incarceration would be U.S. states. The top three would be West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, according to a report by the non-profit organization Prison Policy Initiative released this week.
Thailand sits at number 26 on that list, followed by the U.S. at 27, and the next 17 jurisdictions are all American states.
The report found that though the U.S. has only 5 percent of the world’s female population, it accounts for nearly 30 percent of incarcerated women globally, twice the percentage as in China and four times as much Russia.
“Our report shows that once you look at the world outside our borders, even the states with the lowest levels of incarceration are some of the most punitive jurisdictions on earth,” said Aleks Kajstura, Legal Director of the Prison Policy Initiative and who helped prepare the report.
Currently, the U.S. incarcerates women at a rate of 127 per 100,000. There are currently 206,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails, the report found.
West Virginia incarcerates women at a rate of 273 per 100,000. Oklahoma’s rate is 226 followed by 220 in Kentucky. Thailand sits at 130 per 100,000. The lowest U.S. state is Illinois, which incarcerates 88, and sits above El Salvador (87).
“Much of this data was stitched together for the first time, and it shows that states cannot remain complacent about how many women they incarcerate. Any policy decisions on incarceration need to take women into consideration,” Kajstura said.
In 2014, 59 percent of women in federal prison were serving time for drug offenses and 4 percent were in prison for violent offenses. In state prisons in 2013, 24 percent of women were incarcerated for drug offenses and 37 percent were imprisoned for violent offenses, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
View the full report here.
