5 takeaways:

➀ Women and girls make up less than one-fifth of those caught up in the criminal justice system, but the gender gap in incarceration is narrowing. Women and girls make up about 10% of the incarcerated population, and the fraction rises to 15% to 20% if it includes those in jail, on probation or on parole, said Lisa Broidy, Chair of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. It’s not that females are offending more often, it’s that the rate at which boys are being arrested is going down even faster, she said. In 2019, women’s drug arrests are up 216% over 1985 rates compared to a 48% rise in male drug arrests over the same period. And more women are likely to be sent to prison, particularly for drugs, than in the in 1970 and 1980s.

➁ Minority women are far more likely to be in the system. Black girls are 1.2 times more likely than white girls to be detained, 2.7 times more likely to be referred to juvenile justice, and three times more likely to be removed from their homes. Black women are no more likely than white women to use illicit drugs during pregnancy, but they are far more likely to be reported to child welfare services for drug use, Broidy said. Native American women are six times more likely than white women to be incarcerated for drug offenses. “The system is much more comfortable and much more targeted towards incarcerating minority women than white women,” Broidy said.

➂ The criminal justice system is not built to address the problems of women and girls. First, the reasons they offend are different from what drives men and boys. “Hopefully by the end of my talk, you’ll question whether we should call them offenders,” Broidy said. Almost all women and girls in the criminal justice system have experienced early trauma. Often, they have had multiple early traumas, such as physical, sexual or emotional abuse. In the juvenile justice system, 31% of girls have been sexually abused, compared with 7% of boys, Broidy said. The earlier trauma girls experience, the worse their mental health, and the younger they tend to fall into the system, she said.

➃ Most incarcerated women are mothers. They are often the primary caregivers for their child – not the case for most men who go to jail or prison, Broidy said. “They really, really, really want to be good mothers, and they really, really, really feel like the resources to be that mom that they want to be are wholly inadequate. Most of them that I talked to had lost their kids well before they started cycling in and out of jail.” Women are also often incarcerated far from their families, and the visitation rates for women are lower than for men.

➄ Women’s recidivism rates are lower. But there isn’t a lot of research on “what works” to help women succeed after they’ve served their time. “There’s job training on the inside. There’s not a lot of thought to what that training is,” Broidy said. “It’s basically a time management strategy like, ‘Let’s give them something to do, so they’re not getting in trouble while they’re here.’ There’s not a lot of follow-up on the outside to help them actually access jobs that maybe they were trained for.”

Speaker:

Lisa Broidy, Regents’ Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico

This program was funded by Arnold Ventures. NPF is solely responsible for the content.