Why are women’s incarceration rates rising?

A team of Barnard College researchers is striving to pinpoint why female incarceration rates are rising — while male imprisonment falls — and potential ways in which an array of community organizations, police, prosecutors, and others can help undo that trend.

The scholars, based at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, are building upon a growing body of research exploring what some criminal justice reformers and watchers argue is gender-based discrimination against women and girls from the point of their arrests on through to their time in lockup.

“We launched this project in response to a gap in the knowledge base and analysis about what is pushing incarcerations of these groups,” said attorney, author, and prison reform activist Andrea Ritchie, co-leader of Barnard’s Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action and co-author of the African American Policy Forum report #SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. 

“The question that goes with that,” she said, “is ‘What interventions are most effective in interrupting that process of criminalization?’” 

Additionally, said Ritchie, it’s troubling that overall declines in rates of U.S. imprisonment “are being overshadowed and, in many cases, completely obliterated by the continuing increases in the population of women in women’s prisons. We are not tackling the mass incarceration problem if we are not looking very carefully at how women are now filling prison beds that men are emptying.”

The work at Barnard, which continues Ritchie’s more than 20 years of litigating police misconduct cases, analyzing criminal justice policy, and fomenting reform, is collaborative. Among others partnering with Ritchie and Mariame Kaba, the other main Barnard researcher, are Color of Change, Essie Justice Group, Movement for Family Power, and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.

“As women focused on ending incarceration of women and girls and on the conditions of their confinement, we do this work lacking research and data that is necessary to shaping the narrative as we need it to be told,” said Andrea James, executive director of that latter organization. Existing research “too often doesn’t go deep enough … We also want to show — as we say as part of our Reimagining Communities campaign — the harmful effects, the disruptions that incarceration causes in terms of economics and in terms of our families and our ability to thrive. What are those things that bring us joy that we know are missing, that will help us to thrive?

“It’s just a beautiful space — for thinking about these things — that Andrea and Mariame are providing.”

Members of James’ Boston-based organization and other entities providing advice and other input to the Barnard team held a closed-door brainstorming session in late March to help determine what existing and new questions Interrupting Criminalization should investigate. The overall research, in part, will involve dissecting existing empirical studies and anecdotal evidence collected by, among others, nonprofit groups helmed by formerly incarcerated women, Ritchie said. 

The Barnard scholars will parse what happens to women and girls at the point of their arrest, during their trial and incarceration, and after their release from prison. The researchers’ short list of key questions includes:

• What specific factors result in women accounting for 3 million of the 10.5 million arrests in 2017, the latest year that federal data is available; in nonheterosexuals being 42 percent of people incarcerated in women's prisons; and women of color comprising a disproportionate number of arrests?
• What are the top five charges, nationwide, related to the arrest of Black, Native American, Latin, Asian, transgender, gender-nonconforming, and other groups of women?
• How often does the inability to pay bail result in detention or re-arrests for such minor infractions as veering off an allowed route if you’re a parolee wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and tracked by your parole officer?
• What accounts for what some prison watchers say are stiffer, often random, punishments for women behind bars than for men, including ones that result in females’ original prison sentence being extended? Along those lines, “Gender Injustice,” a 2015 report by the National Women’s Law Center and National Crittenton Foundation, showed that juvenile females received stiffer sentences for the same infractions committed by their male peers.

“You can get written up for wearing boxers or not complying with prison attire. Those rules are more strictly enforced in women’s prisons than in men’s prisons. So are the rules for physical contact. Giving someone a hug if they’ve lost a parent or loved one or custody of a child can get you written up for a violation” and even placed in solitary confinement, Ritchie said.

Showing signs of suicide or some other mental health crisis also can land women in solitary, added Ritchie, author of the book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.

Her experience as a black lesbian who, as a teenager, was sexually assaulted by police, indeed, has informed Ritchie’s ongoing body of work. Her commentary has appeared in a range of national and international publications. She has testified before White House panels about gender and policing and consulted with, among others, the New York Police Department on revamping law enforcement practices.

Any discussion of women in the criminal justice system, Ritchie argues, cannot be separated from the historical placement of women in society. If incarcerated women get written up for, say, hugging each other inside prison, that’s grounded in a longstanding “fear that women’s prisons will be a breeding ground for same-sex sexual activity. People definitely want to regulate and control that because it leaves men out of the equation, right? … There’s this concern accentuated by patriarchy.”

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, a book Ritchie co-authored with Joey L. Mogul and Kay Whitlock, explores some of those themes. Likewise, that subject will be part of the Barnard investigation, whose completion date has not been set. But, as a first step, it will bore into the very nature of arrests that thrust individuals into the criminal justice system, Ritchie said.

“Are assault charges happening when girls are defending themselves from violence in their homes? When police show up for a domestic violence call, and there’s a mandatory arrest policy, and they say ‘Let’s just arrest everybody here’?” Ritchie said. “How do prosecutors decide whether to charge someone who’s clearly a victim of violence? If a woman gets picked up for disorderly conduct, is that simply because police officers are sweeping through streets and arresting homeless people or waiting outside a bar closing for the night for people to come out so they can tag them with disorderly conduct?

She continued, also noting that the research will investigate policing and prosecution practices: “We want to zoom in. People don’t just show up in court to be sentenced. Someone brings them there. What’s behind the charges? What’s the context?”