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noun \ˈpri-zən\ 'DEFINITION OF PRISON 1. a state of confinement or captivity

2. a place of confinement especially for lawbreakers; specifically : an institution (as one under state jurisdiction) for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes — compare jail See prison defined for English-language learners » See prison defined for kids » Examples of PRISON

The state plans to build two more prisons. He was in prison at the time. If caught, they're all going to prison. She was sent to prison for robbery. He was released from prison. He's scheduled to get out of prison next month. Her marriage became a prison to her.

Origin of PRISON Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin prehension-, prehensio act of seizing, from prehendere to seize — more at get First Known Use: 12th century Related to PRISON Synonyms: bastille, big house [slang], bridewell, brig, calaboose, can, clink [slang], cooler, coop, guardroom, hock, hold, hoosegow, jailhouse, joint [slang], jug, lockup, nick [British slang], pen, penitentiary, pokey [slang], jail, quod [British slang], slam, slammer, stir [slang], stockade, tolbooth [Scottish]

'                     WOMEN SENT TO PRISON HIGHER % THAN MEN

Females Growth trend over Males
National prison population growth trends

Female state prison population growth has far outpaced male growth in the past quarter-century. The number of women serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757 percent between 1977 and 2004—nearly twice the 388 percent increase in the male prison population. Although the size of the gap varies, female prison populations have risen more quickly than male populations in all 50 states. The trend has also been persistent, with median annual growth rates for women exceeding growth rates for men in 22 of the last 27 years, including each of the past 11 years. [3]

In part, this is due to the small number of women who were incarcerated at the beginning of the boom relative to the number of men, so that increases show up as larger proportional growth against smaller base figures.

Women’s higher growth rate is also due to an increase in the number of women arrested. For example, between 1995 and 2004, arrests of women were up 13 percent while the number of women behind prison bars rose by 53 percent. Female imprisonment rates jumped 36 percent over the same period, compared to an increase of 17 percent for men. Women’s share of the prison population rose from 6.3 percent to 7.2 percent.

While the number of women prisoners has soared, the proportion of women convicted of violent offenses has declined since 1979, when they comprised 49 percent of the women in the state prison system. [4]  One-third of the women serving state prison sentences in 2002 were incarcerated for violent offenses, compared to more than half of the men. Drug offenses now account for nearly one-third of women (up from one in 10 in 1979), compared with just one-fifth of men.Heading text ==GRAPH OF WOMEN'S INCREASE TO PRISON

Part I: Growth Trends and Recent Research

by Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis, Justice Strategies

Introduction

The Institute on Women and Criminal Justice of the Women’s Prison Association is releasing the first volume of The Punitiveness Report, a national study by Dr. Natasha Frost, assistant professor at Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice. Her report presents the first state-by-state compendium of data charting the dramatic increase in the incarceration of women over the past 27 years in the United States. A second volume will look more deeply at factors that increased the risk of imprisonment for women arrested for felony offenses and increased the amount of time spent behind bars.

While women comprise just a small segment of all the people serving prison terms in the U.S., their number is rising at a far faster rate than that of men. Incarceration of women has profound impacts on the families and communities left behind. Dr. Frost’s findings should spark a national dialogue about how women are affected by incarceration. Her findings should also motivate policymakers to examine the trends and prospects for reform in their states.

Growth Trends and Recent Research Findings is presented as a companion to Dr. Frost’s exhaustive study. It provides a brief overview of recent research that provides context for her findings regarding the increased incarceration of women, and discusses the multitude of problems incarceration presents for women and their children. This report also takes a closer look at growth patterns, regional trends, and how states rank on various measures of female imprisonment.

Over the final quarter of the 20th century, U.S. criminal justice policies underwent a period of intense politicization and harsh transformation. Draconian sentencing laws and get-tough correctional policies led to an unprecedented increase in jail and prison populations, driving the United States’ rate of incarceration head and shoulders above that of other developed nations.

The imprisonment boom that began in the late 1970s has swelled the state and federal prison system to more than 1.4 million prisoners. Adding those held in local jails and other lockups (juvenile facilities, immigrant detention, etc.) the total number of people behind bars rises to almost 2.3 million—of which seven percent are women. [1]  At the end of 2004, 96,125 women were serving state or federal prison sentences—almost nine times the number in prison in 1977. [2]

National prison population growth trends

Female state prison population growth has far outpaced male growth in the past quarter-century. The number of women serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757 percent between 1977 and 2004—nearly twice the 388 percent increase in the male prison population. Although the size of the gap varies, female prison populations have risen more quickly than male populations in all 50 states. The trend has also been persistent, with median annual growth rates for women exceeding growth rates for men in 22 of the last 27 years, including each of the past 11 years. [3]

In part, this is due to the small number of women who were incarcerated at the beginning of the boom relative to the number of men, so that increases show up as larger proportional growth against smaller base figures.

Women’s higher growth rate is also due to an increase in the number of women arrested. For example, between 1995 and 2004, arrests of women were up 13 percent while the number of women behind prison bars rose by 53 percent. Female imprisonment rates jumped 36 percent over the same period, compared to an increase of 17 percent for men. Women’s share of the prison population rose from 6.3 percent to 7.2 percent.

While the number of women prisoners has soared, the proportion of women convicted of violent offenses has declined since 1979, when they comprised 49 percent of the women in the state prison system. [4]  One-third of the women serving state prison sentences in 2002 were incarcerated for violent offenses, compared to more than half of the men. Drug offenses now account for nearly one-third of women (up from one in 10 in 1979), compared with just one-fifth of men.

Male prison populations catch cold while women get pneumonia

The rise of the female state prison population has been constant but uneven over the past quarter-century, punctuated by growth spurts in the early and late 1980s and mid-1990s. Median annual growth rates fell after 1995 and have remained in the single digits since then. Nonetheless, many states continue to see significant population growth, including nine where numbers shot up by over 10 percent in 2004.

The pattern of growth in female prison populations generally tracks changes in male prison populations, which also underwent periods of rapid expansion in the early and late 1980s. But women have been hit much harder, experiencing growth spikes that reached higher, lasted longer and often began earlier than those affecting men.

For example, while the growth rate for male prisoners shot up a little more than twofold between 1980 and 1981, from 5.4 percent to 14 percent, the growth rate for female prisoners increased four-fold, from 3.8 percent to 17 percent. The following year, the male growth rate fell below 12 percent while the female growth rate kept climbing to more than 18 percent.

An even more remarkable growth spurt took place between 1987 and 1990. Both the men’s and women’s prison populations began and ended the four-year period with annual growth rates hovering around seven to eight percent. In between, however, annual growth in the women’s prison population hit record levels, topping 25 percent, compared to a peak rate of less than 14 percent for males. To paraphrase the old saying, when the male prison population caught cold, women came down with pneumonia.

The gap between male and female prison population growth rates has widened recently, producing an annual rate of increase for women that roughly doubled the rate for men in six of the last seven years. The number of women added to the state prison populations each year remains high despite lower growth rates. In fact, the expansion that has taken place since 1999 (11,689 new female prisoners) exceeds the total female state prison population in 1980 (11,113 women).

Regional prison population growth trends

National trends play a significant role in patterns of state prison population expansion, as evidenced by the simultaneous growth spurts that took place at the beginning and end of the 1980s. Three in five states saw female prison population growth rates reach a 25-year high-water mark in 1981 (six states), 1982 (six states) or 1989 (14 states). The latter year was an extraordinarily punitive one for women: 43 states saw population increases in the double digits while half saw their numbers jump by more than 25 percent. But growth in women’s prison populations also varies by geographic region. [5]

The Northeast: Turning the corner on female prison population growth?

Northeastern states logged extraordinarily rapid growth during the 1980s followed by below-average growth during the 1990s. [6]  The region saw record growth in 1989 when most states saw their female prison population jump by more than a third. Between 1999 and 2004, however, the total number of women housed in Northeastern state prisons fell by 11 percent (976 prisoners), driven by prison population declines in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The Pacific states: From boom to bust and back

Pacific states also saw unusually high rates of growth during the 1980s, including nine years with median growth rates in the double-digits. [7]  The pattern in the years that followed has been erratic. The region’s female prison population actually fell slightly in 1991 but resumed its climb the following year. The turn of the century ushered in a more substantial 1,347-person decrease in the region’s female prison population, reflected in every Pacific state but Oregon. But by the end of 2004, the decline had been erased by the addition of 2,003 women to prisons in Pacific states.

The Midwest and South: Setting the national growth trend

Depending on how one looks at it, women’s prison populations in the Midwest and South either set the national trend or tracked it closely, rising rapidly in the early and late 1980s and mid-1990s. [8]  Southern states (excluding Texas) were more likely to see below-average growth rates during the 1980s, but the region has nearly matched national median rates since then. Midwestern states’ median growth rates have hovered at or below those of the nation as a whole since 1999 with the exception of 2004, when the region’s annual growth rate shot to more than 8 percent.

The number of women added to Southern prisons each year remains substantial. The region recorded its second-largest annual increase in 1999 (2,007 women), and its fourth-largest increase took place in 2002 (1,853 women). Almost a quarter (23 percent) of Southern female prison population growth since 1979 took place in the last five years.

=== MOUNTAIN STATES AND SOUTHERN STATES LEAD RISE IN WOMEN SENT TO PRISON 

Every region has seen women’s prison populations increase by leaps and bounds. But the pace and persistence of growth in the Mountain states set the region apart from the rest of the country. Over the past 27 years, the total female prison population of the Mountain states has risen by 1,600 percent—twice the national population growth rate of 757 percent.

'''The explosion of women’s prison populations in the Mountain states began in the 1980s and has continued in recent years. The region’s total female prison population has increased by 56 percent since 1999—four times the 13 percent increase felt nationally. Fully 38 percent of the growth in the Mountain states’ female prison population over the past quarter-century occurred during the last five years.'''

'''Tough, tougher, toughest: Mountain and Southern states lead the rise in female imprisonment rates' Analysis of median incarceration rates for the various regions shows similar patterns with some critical differences. Southern states experienced the smallest proportional growth in female imprisonment rates. But because the South began the 27-year period with much higher rates than the rest of the country—a median of 11 per 100,000 residents compared to a median of five per 100,000 residents elsewhere—increased use of incarceration had a greater impact there. '''

While the typical Midwest state added 40 female prisoners for every 100,000 residents between 1979 and 2004, and the typical Pacific state added 46 per 100,000, the median incarceration rate for Southern states grew by 57 per 100,000—second only to a Mountain state increase of 77 per 100,000. As for the Northeastern states, it took a decade of breakneck growth to reach the place where Southern states started in 1977. What can research tell us about the problem?

WHY ARE WOMEN SENT TO PRISON

The question of whether the increased involvement of women in the criminal justice system reflects actual changes in their involvement in an expanding range of activities considered criminal or changes in law enforcement and sentencing policies and practices has received some attention. The 1970s saw a great deal of debate in the media over whether the women’s movement for equal rights would produce an era of “liberated” women criminals who would venture into serious, violent criminal activities. ==

FEMINIST MOVEMENT/& FEMALE CRIMES (shoplifting, prostitution,BAD CHECKS) Some academics claimed that increased arrests of women were evidence that the feminist movement was driving new trends in women’s involvement in crime. [11]  Others countered that close analysis of arrest data indicated that increased arrests of women were largely occurring in categories conceived as traditionally female such as shoplifting, prostitution and passing bad checks. [12] The war on drugs and other drivers of female prison population growth

WAR ON DRUGS "CAUGHT IN THE NET"  (AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN & lATINA)

Other efforts to explain the sharp increase in women’s imprisonment have focused on the “war on drugs,” with its emphasis on street-level sweeps of those engaged in the drug trade and harsh mandatory sentencing. The crackdown on drug crime was sold to the American public as the answer to an escalating epidemic of male violence. Yet despite their roles as relatively minor players in the drug trade, women—disproportionate numbers of them African American and Latina—have been “caught in the net” of increasingly punitive policing, prosecutorial, and sentencing policies. [19]  Once in the system, women often have little choice but to accept plea bargains and then face mandatory minimum sentencing laws that restrict judges from mitigating the impact of their sentencing decisions in consideration of their family situations or their obvious need for substance abuse treatment.

==SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION:

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The importance of rigorous evaluation of prison-based drug treatment programs is crucial given an increasingly larger population of incarcerated drug users in the recent decade as well as a paucity of outcome evaluation results. This report showed that treatment programs in prison, when properly implemented, can work. The findings showed that offenders who completed the residential drug abuse treatment program and had been released to the community for three years were less likely to recidivate or use drugs. Our findings consistently showed that the residential Drug Abuse Treatment Programs (DAP’s) in the BOP contributed to a reduced likelihood of post-release failure among men, when failure was defined as arrest for new offense or revocation and when failure was defined as return to drug use. Among female inmates, while the effect of treatment was not statistically significant, the failure rate for recidivism and drug use of treated inmates compared with untreated inmates suggested a positive effect for treatment.1 Our findings also showed positive effects of in-prison treatment on employment among women. In addition to providing information on the effectiveness of prison-based intensive drug-treatment on 3-year post-release outcomes, this report described the federal substance abusing population and provided information on what types of incarcerated drug users are more likely to volunteer for and enter treatment

==REFERENCES: 1.Webster's 1828 English Dictionary Search Webster's 1828 2. FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS 3.nglin, M. D. and Y.-I Hser (1987). Addicted women and crime. Criminology 25: 359-397. Anglin, M. D., Y.-I Hser, and M. W. Booth (1987). Sex differences in addict careers. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 13(3): 253-280. Anglin, M. D., Y.-I. Hser, and W. McGlothlin (1987). Sex differences in addict careers. 2. Becoming addicted. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 13(1 & 2): 59-71. Anglin, M. D., D. Longshore, S. T. Turner, D. McBride, J. Inciardi and M. Pren

Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women Correctional Facilities

Correctional Facilities

7205 Highway 74 St. Gabriel, LA 70776 P:225-642-5529

Blume, S. B. Chemical dependency in women: Important issues. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 16: 297-307, 1990 Chandler, S. M., Kassebaum, G. Drug-alcohol dependence of women prisoners in Hawaii. Affilia, 9: 157-170, 1994 Flaherty, E. W., Kotranski, L., Fox, E. Frequency of heroin use and drug users' life style. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 10: 285-314, 1984 Griffin, M. L., Weiss, R. D., Mirin, S. M., Lange, U. A Comparison of male and female cocaine abusers. Archives General Psychiatry, 46: 122-126, 1989

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