Women behind bars

The female prison population is booming around the world.

Prisons were conceived by men and for men, not for women. And yet, the number of female inmates is on the rise: over 625,000 throughout the world, onethird of which are in the United States, followed by China, Russia, Brazil and Thailand, according to the data collected by the International Centre for Prison Studies. Women held in correctional facilities across the globe remain a very small portion of the total prison population, fluctuating between 2% and 9%.

However, as pointed out by the Women and Imprisonment Handbook published by the United Nations in 2014, the percentage of women in prison is increasing and is doing so at an even faster rate than the percentage of men. In England, the number of women behind bars has doubled over the past ten years, while the United States witnessed a 757% increase in female incarceration between 1977 and 2004 and Argentina a 193% increase in 12 years. Various countries, from Bolivia to Kyrgyzstan, from Greece to Holland and Finland, share a similar trend.

Beyond the figures, the causes of this phenomenon are diverse and complex. Have women become more violent or has our society changed? Tougher prison policies and a more severe penal system have undoubtedly inflated the number of women landing in jail, mainly for minor offences. Drug-related crimes are at the top of the list – from possession to drug dealing. Theft is second on the list, next to the so-called “moral offences”: as the UN report explains, especially “where legislation derives from certain interpretations of religious laws, women are often discriminated against and imprisoned.” In Nepal, for instance, before the law was updated in 2002, 20% of female inmates had been jailed for illegal abortion under the charge of infanticide.

According to American psychologist and researcher Stephanie Covington, head of the Center for Gender and Justice in California, “the theory promoted by the media says that if you give women more freedom, if women are emancipated, they become more like men, and so they become more aggressive and violent. But this is not what the data suggests. The research shows that the percentage of violent women has increased by merely 1.4% in the last 30 years.”

Covington remarks that “basically there haven’t been any major changes over the last 200 years. The point is rather how our definition of the word ‘aggression’ has changed.” Moreover, “women’s violence is different from men’s violence. For example, women who commit homicide generally kill somebody they know. It is very seldom that they murder a stranger. With men it could be either way. Men are more violent.”

Social factors also come into play, driving women into committing more crimes as well as making them more likely to come into contact with the legal system. For some women, widespread isolation, increasing economic disadvantages and a crumbling family welfare are pushing them more and more towards forms of criminal behaviour. In many countries, women land in prison because they can’t afford to pay fines and are “likely to be detained pretrial due to their inability to afford bail or the services of a lawyer,” writes the UN. Many women already suffer from alcoholism or drug addiction (75% in Europe) before entering prison. Notwithstanding local complexities that set different parts of the world apart, and despite national peculiarities which make the impact of incarceration more or less severe on the female population of each country, women held in penal institutions are confronted with a number of common issues all around the world.

In many countries, women’s access to justice is not the same as men’s. Their educational level or, in some cases, illiteracy as well as their social background and often the lack of economic resources associated with it are discriminating factors for female inmates. In some societies, the lack of legal assistance puts women at enormous risks: not only are they unable to afford a lawyer but they could also end up signing compromising statements that have unfavourable legal implications. Unfortunately, another common issue affecting women at all different latitudes is the violence they experience even prior to incarceration: physical and verbal violence, sexual abuse and torture that can be reiterated even behind bars, especially – as data reveals – immediately following arrest.

As a consequence, female inmates are five times more likely to develop psychological problems or mental illnesses than their male counterparts. If it is true that prisons were conceived by and for men, it should not come as a surprise that being an inmate is harder for women and for mothers in particular. “The real question is whether prisons, or rather prisons as they currently exist, really work, both for men and for women,” says Dr. Covington, who also claims that “prisons have largely failed in their re-education role.”

“Many people are in prison because they broke the law,” she adds, “and they probably need to be there, so our communities are and feel safe. But many of them, like the majority of women in jail, are not high risk, violent people. Research says that if you want to change human behaviour, you have to do so by positive reinforcement, through incentives and rewards for good conduct, not through punishment.”