Incarceration of women

This article discusses the incarceration of women in correctional facilities. According to a study reported in September 2014 by the International Center for Prison Studies, as of August 2014, across the world, 625,000 women and children are being held in penal institutions with the female prison population growing on all five continents.

Early facilities were considered inhumane with little regard for health and safety. Men and women were housed in a large room where the strong preyed on the weak. As of 2007, in most of the Western world, the guards in female prisons are exclusively female. As of that year there are males who work as guards in women's prisons in the United States. However, some states have laws requiring female officers as well as a female superintendent. While most states have only one or two institutions for women, some facilities are considered "unisex" and house both male and female inmates in separate areas.

According to the national report of female prisoners, as of November 2015, Brazil's the 5 country with the most women prisoners in the world, there are 37,380 or 6.4% of the total Brazilian prison population.

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, as of August 2014, the Chinese women prison population is the second largest in the world (after the United States) with 84,600 female prisoners in total or 5.1% of the overall Chinese prison population.

In Great Britain, in 1996 a new policy was passed, and women no longer have to be restrained while giving birth when serving their sentence. The British services for human rights and the United Nations standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners say that no one should be subjected to degrading punishment. Some prisoners refuse to go to child care events or funerals because of the humiliation the restraints show. Women in Britain fought for their right to not be restrained while giving birth to their child, however they must be restrained while being escorted to and from the hospital. More women than men try to escape the prison system in Britain. Of those women who escape almost half escape while receiving medical attention at a hospital.

Russia is in third position: 59,000 of its prisoners are women or about 7.8 percent of the total Russian prison population.

In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s. The first American female correctional facility with dedicated buildings and staff was the Mount Pleasant Female Prison in Ossining, New York; the facility had some operational dependence on nearby Sing Sing, a men's prison. In the 1930s, 34 women's prisons were built, by 1990 there were 71 women's prisons in the country, but only five years later there were 150 (Chesney-Lind, 1998:66).

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