© 2006, cynth’ya lewis reed

all rights reserv’d

Eleven things you should know about women in prison in the U.S. (Researched from www.prisonactivist.org)

1. There are over 90,000 women in prison in the us today. The majority are in prison for economic crimes. The most typical convictions resulting in imprisonment for women are property crimes, such as check forgery and illegal credit card use. 80% of women in prison report incomes of less than $2,000 per year in the year before their arrest, and 92% report incomes under $10,000.
   
   
2. Of the women convicted of violent crimes, the vast majority were convicted for defending themselves or their children from abuse. In California alone there are 600 women in prison for killing their abusers in self-defense. Average prison terms are twice as long for killing husbands as for killing wives.
   
   
3. 54% of women in prison are women of color.
   
   
4. Ninety percent of women in prison are single mothers. They lose contact with their children, sometimes forever. There are 167,000 children in the us whose mothers are incarcerated.
   
   
5. The average age of women in prison is 29, and 58% have not finished high school.
   
   
6. Racism and economic discrimination are inextricably linked to sexism in our culture, creating severe inequalities in the court system and the prison system. For example, Black women are twice as likely to be convicted of killing their abusive husbands than are white women. Black women, on average, receive longer jail time and higher fines than do white women for the same crimes.
   
   
7. 25% of political prisoners in the U.S. are women.
   
   
8. The number of women in prison has increased 138% in the last ten years. This is partly due to the worsening of economic conditions for women, and also due to the increase in arrest rates due to the "war on crime" and "war on drugs".
   
   
9. Women prisoners spend on average 17 hours a day in their cells, with one hour outside for exercise. Compare to men prisoners, who spend, on average, 15 hours a day in their cells, with 1.5 hours outside.
   
   
10. The Women's High Security Unit at Lexington, KY, was closed in 1988 because of a national and international human rights campaign. The prison kept the women in years of isolation in subterranean cells, conducted daily strip searches, allowed extreme sleep deprivation practices, and as policy, condoned a compete denial of privacy, including male guards watching the showers, and an intense campaign of sexual abuse.
    
    
11. The late Senator Hart estimated that the annual cost of corporate crime was between $174-231 billion dollars, while the economic cost of "street crimes" (e.g. burglary and robbery) was $3-4 billion. We must look at why the state focuses on enforcing laws which penalize the types of actions take by poor and working class men and women while systematically ignoring the more destructive white-collar crimes.