Introduction
Introduction
The criminal justice system was largely built for men. Men make up 90% of the U.S. incarcerated population, but women make up a growing portion.¹ In 2024, women accounted for 27% of adult arrests, nearly twice the share (14%) than in 1980. (Figure 1).²
Figure 1. Female Share of Adult Arrests, 1980-2024
In addition, the number of women in jail has rebounded faster than men since large pandemic-related drops in incarceration occurred in 2020 (Figure 2). Women’s jail incarceration rates increased 33% from 2020 to 2023, compared to a 17% increase in the rate for men.³
Figure 2. Jail Incarceration Rates by Sex, 1983-2023
Yet women’s experiences in the criminal justice system—from the risk factors that lead them to incarceration to how they move through the system—differ from men’s. Women’s pathways to justice system contact are often shaped by trauma, poverty, relationships, and unmet health needs. Many also shoulder caregiving responsibilities and, on average, pose lower risks of criminal behavior, violence, and recidivism than their male counterparts. These differences have important implications for public safety strategies: Approaches that work for men may be less effective for women.
Prior Council on Criminal Justice publications have outlined key statistics and research about justice-involved women, providing essential background for this report:
- Women’s Justice: A Preliminary Assessment of Women in the Criminal Justice System reviews existing research on the factors that drive women’s justice system involvement and the unique needs women experience upon making contact with the system.
- Women’s Justice: By the Numbers presents key trends related to women in the criminal justice system.
- Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Female Imprisonment in the U.S. examines imprisonment trends and disparity for Black, Hispanic, and White women.
Key Drivers of Women's Justice System Involvement
Like women, justice-involved men often experience trauma, unmet health needs, and economic instability. However, these factors are uniquely prevalent and impactful for women.
Economic Instability
Justice-involved women experience distinct economic hardship before entering the system, including being more likely to report unemployment, homelessness, and poverty the year prior to incarceration. For example, in 2016, the most recent year for which data were available, 20% of women in state and federal prisons reported that they were homeless at some point in the year before their arrest, compared to 13% of men.⁴ These factors can increase the likelihood of engaging in behaviors that bring them into contact with law enforcement, such as offenses tied to survival, debt, or unstable living arrangements.⁵
Experiences of Trauma and Abuse
Histories of trauma are widespread among justice-involved women. More than 90% of women with criminal justice system involvement have experienced some form of physical and sexual violence, bullying, gang attacks, or dating violence, or have witnessed extreme violence, including murder.⁶ These experiences often begin in childhood and continue in adolescent and adult intimate partner relationships. More than 70% of incarcerated women also report experiences of domestic violence.⁷
These dynamics—ranging from threats and intimidation to physical or sexual assault⁸—can contribute to or directly lead to justice system involvement, whether through coercion into criminal behavior or through responses to victimization, such as substance use.⁹ Research also indicates that many women who end up in prison for violent crime may have been in extreme danger themselves in the lead-up to the crime. A study published in 2024 found that nearly 75% of women incarcerated for murder or manslaughter in California experienced intimate partner violence in the year prior to their offense.¹⁰ This is more than 10 times the prevalence among women in the community. More than 65% of women in that sample reported that they were in extreme danger of being killed by their partner within the year before their own offense.
Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders
Mental health and substance use disorders are widespread among justice-involved women. According to the most recent national data (2011-2012), 68% of women in jail and 66% of women in prison were diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared to 41% of men in jail and 35% of men in prison.¹¹ Many women also report using substances to cope with the effects of trauma and the symptoms of untreated mental health conditions.¹² Symptoms of these disorders, including substance use itself, often become a driver of women’s criminal behavior, leading to arrests for drug offenses and other crimes.
More recent national survey data confirm these patterns in the community. In the general population, men are more likely than women to report past-year illicit drug use (10% vs. 8% when excluding cannabis).¹³ But among people arrested and booked within the past year, the pattern reverses: 46% of women report illicit drug use compared to 41% of men when excluding cannabis. Women in this group are also more likely to report use of methamphetamines (24% vs. 18%), heroin (11% vs. 4%), and fentanyl (8% vs. 2%). These findings demonstrate that women’s behavioral health challenges begin well before incarceration and highlight the importance of early, community-based intervention.
Substance Use Among Justice-Involved Women
The Council on Criminal Justice released a publication in September 2025 titled Illicit drug use among justice-involved females: Findings from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. This publication examines how drug use patterns differ for people with recent justice system involvement who are still living in the community.
Women's Risk Profiles and Offense Patterns
Men are arrested at much higher rates than women across all offense types, but since male arrest rates have declined more steeply from their peaks in the 1990s and early 2000s, women’s share of arrests has grown (Figure 3). For example, although women engage in violence at lower rates than men, their share of violent offense arrests rose from 11% in 1986 to 21% in 2024.
Figure 3. Adult Arrest Rate and Share by Offense Type and Sex, 1980-2024
Women score lower, on average, than men on risk-need assessment tools across key criminogenic domains, including antisocial attitudes, criminal history, and aggression.¹⁴ Women are also about 8% less likely than men to be rearrested, 9% less likely to be reconvicted, and 13% less likely to be reimprisoned within five years of release from state prison.¹⁵
Despite these lower risk and offending patterns, women’s arrest and jail incarceration rates have trended upward over the last several decades, while comparable rates for men have trended downward.¹⁶ From 1982 to 2007, the number and rate of women in prisons and jails rose sharply, mirroring increases seen for men, then leveled off through 2019, even as men’s incarceration declined. Both dropped in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but women’s numbers have since rebounded faster. Between 2020 and 2023, the women’s jail incarceration rate rose 33% (compared to 17% for men), and the women’s imprisonment rate grew 9% (versus dropping slightly, less than 1%, for men). By 2023, about 186,000 women were incarcerated nationwide. (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Women's Incarceration, 1982-2023
Family Impact of Women's Incarceration
Because women are more often the primary caretakers for children, elderly family members, or disabled loved ones, their justice involvement can be particularly destabilizing for families. Incarcerated mothers are more likely than incarcerated fathers to be the sole or primary caregiver of their children before entering jail or prison.¹⁷ As a result, their children are more likely to enter the foster care system.¹⁸ Such disruptions generate measurable economic and social costs, from increased child welfare expenditures to long-term impacts on family well-being and community stability.
Reorienting Policy and Practice
Understanding women’s histories and pathways into the justice system has important implications for assessing risk, deploying system resources, and tailoring effective diversion programs and correctional interventions. By better tailoring system responses for justice-involved women, states, local jurisdictions, and community organizations can prevent crime, strengthen families, improve health, and break cycles of victimization and incarceration.
The early stages of the criminal justice process are critical, as they provide a key opportunity to identify the distinct challenges facing women, reduce further system involvement, and preserve families. While interventions designed for women on the system’s front end exist, the Commission’s extensive review of current federal, state, and local programs suggests that they are relatively scarce, disconnected, and localized. In addition, data on justice-involved women are limited, making it difficult to identify the full scope of the problem, and there is a lack of rigorous evaluation to guide the development and proliferation of promising practices.
The Commission has developed four recommendations to improve outcomes for women during the early stages of the criminal justice process. Each recommendation is accompanied by a summary of its rationale and a list of detailed actions to guide implementation. While the recommendations may benefit all people, many of those presented here benefit women and their families in distinct ways. Future reports will examine challenges women face during incarceration, under community supervision, and through the reentry process and identify opportunities to improve outcomes.
What about justice-involved transgender people?
Data on transgender people involved in the justice system are scarce, largely because most correctional systems have only recently begun to collect the numbers. In 2016, roughly 4,000 (0.3%) of people in state and federal prisons self-identified as transgender.¹⁹
Policy and practice related to transgender people in the justice system warrant research and analysis that is beyond the scope of this Commission.
