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Globally, women form an underrepresented population within prison systems, as the vast majority of incarcerated peoples are men. Incarcerated women have been and continue to be treated differently by criminal justice systems around the world at every step of the process, from arrest, to sentencing, to punitive measures used. This disparity is largely due to both tangible demographic differences between the severity of crimes committed by male and female prison populations, as well as a persistent belief by society at large that female criminals are better able to be rehabilitated than their male counterparts.

Although women form a minority in the global prison population, the population of incarcerated women is growing at a rate twice as fast as the male prison population. Those imprisoned in China, Russia and the United States comprise the great majority of incarcerated peoples, including women, in the world. Trends observed in the global growth of the female prison population can be explained in part by evolving policies regarding the sentencing and parole of female inmates. As criminal justice systems across the world move towards gender-blind sentencing, this has resulted in a tremendous increase in the rate of female incarceration. Concurrent elimination of parole and toughening of penalties for parole violations in many areas of the world also contribute to high rates of reentry and reoffending, further driving up rates of incarceration of women.

International developments in the political response to social issues, specifically the global drug epidemic, have catalyzed many of the changes in the composition of the prison populations, and subsequently the types of conditions prisoners experience while incarcerated. The War on Drugs has accounted for the large population of female low-level offenders, who are usually imprisoned for narcotic use or possession. The global proliferation of the so-called “War on Drugs” has largely been advocated by Western powers, particularly the United States.

While there is no globally uniform representation among female prisoners in terms of the types of crimes they are imprisoned for, it is widely acknowledged that there are a number of underlying social inequities which make affected women disproportionately more likely to commit crimes and therefore become incarcerated. The most prominent of these conditions is that of poverty, as well as the conditions which give rise to poverty. Another inequity deemed partially culpable for the rate at which impoverished women in particular are incarcerated is  the lack of access to mental health care. Many incarcerated women suffer from mental illnesses, and their incarceration can be directly linked to an absence of treatment for their conditions.

There is massive variation in the quality of living standards both between prisons around the world and between prisons within individual countries. Variations in national wealth, apportionment of national budgets and different approaches to criminal rehabilitation all contribute to the absence of uniformity in prison living standards. Other phenomena, such as the privatization of prisons in many countries with large prison populations, such as the United States, also give rise to variability in the environmental quality of women’s prisons. Once a corporation assumes governance over a prison and its budget, the presiding government has relatively little oversight of the maintenance of prison standards and prisoner wellbeing. There are many ongoing political debates surrounding the continuation of private prisons.