The Hidden Crisis of Women in Jails
The number of women impacted by incarceration in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since 1980. Despite this dramatic and unprecedented rise, women—particularly those held in local jails—have not been seen as a distinct or pressing priority in research, policy development, and reform efforts.
Nearly half of all incarcerated women are held in local jails, yet existing research and reform efforts typically group jail and prison populations together as “incarcerated women” or focus primarily on prisons. While these efforts are important, they leave a critical gap in understanding the pathways to and experiences within jail settings for women. This is a critical gap: many women who end up in jail are navigating complex challenges that compound with other factors, like caregiving responsibilities, unstable housing, domestic violence, and unmet health needs, but systems are not always designed to address these with a gendered lens. This can have detrimental impacts both during incarceration and after release, especially so for women of color.
This report examines these changing dynamics from 2018 to 2024 using national data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Annual Survey of Jails alongside case-level data from jurisdictions participating in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), with additional insights from early 2025 trends where available.
In summary, this analysis finds that:
After declining before and during the pandemic, the population of women in jail has risen since 2021.This has reversed much of the progress made in prior years, both nationally and, more substantially, in SJC sites.
When compared to men, rates of women held in SJC site jails have fared worse post-pandemic, with larger proportional increases in incarceration rates, booking rates, and average length of stay (ALOS) at release.
Women are more likely to be booked on a new misdemeanor charge than men, including property and drug-related offenses.
Women of color continue to be disproportionately booked and incarcerated at higher rates than white women, highlighting the importance of intersectionality when studying patterns in jail trends.
Despite a reduction in overall new charge bookings between 2018-2019 and 2024, new charge bookings for UCR-person, expanded violent, and domestic violence charges have increased for women.
The findings in this brief point to a more complicated picture of progress than overall jail population trends might suggest. While many jurisdictions made real gains in reducing jail use before and during the pandemic, those gains have not held equally for women; in the post-pandemic period, the gap has even widened. The pandemic and its aftermath may have disrupted reform efforts or introduced new pressures—economic hardship, housing instability, strained social services—that are contributing to increased system involvement for women. This underscores the need to revisit and strengthen any of the approaches that were working locally in SJC sites to visibly reduce jail populations before 2020, and to ask more directly why those approaches have proven less durable for women than for men following the pandemic.
Overall, these findings suggest that, alongside broader reform efforts, there is a need for better data tracking to inform more careful, context-specific approaches to ensure that women, especially those involved in complex domestic violence situations, are treated fairly and appropriately. Together, these findings underscore key areas where disparities persist and where more tailored, gender-responsive, survivor-informed strategies may be necessary to achieve more effective reform.