ABSTRACT
In midyear 2000, there were 93,234 women in US state and federal prisons, and this number reached 111,403 by midyear 2006 (Sabol et al. 2007b: 5). During the same period, the number of women in jail increased from 70,414 to 661,329 (Sabol et al. 2007b: 5). These increases followed two previous decades when the female prison population increased 800 per cent, and the jail population increased 450 per cent (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2006). The nearly three decades of dramatic increases resulted in large part from the war on drugs and get tough sentencing policies (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2003; Richie 1996, Wellisch et al. 1994). Confirming the relevance of drug involvement to women’s increasing rates of incarceration, a higher percentage of women than men were in prison because of drug offenses (29 per cent vs 19 per cent) for 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available (Sabol et al. 2007a: 8), and even larger proportions were convicted of offenses committed because of drug-centered lifestyles. Similarly, studies of jails have shown that increasing proportions of incarcerated women have used illegal drugs or abused alcohol (Hartley and Marks 2002; Lo 2004).
