The increase of women in US jails has far surpassed the growth of male prisoners, study said, which is linked to trauma, sexual violence and mental health issues 
 
 Women held in local jails represent the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, according to a new study. The researchers found that trauma, sexual violence and mental health issues were all closely wrapped up with the swelling numbers. 
 
 “While we started to see a decline in the incarceration and jailing of men, we haven’t seen a comparable kind of trend for women,” said Laurie Garduque, director of Justice Reform for the MacArthur Foundation, which co-published the report with the Vera Institute. Since 1970, the number of women in US jails has increased by 14 times, far outstripping the growth in the male prison population, even though in raw numbers there remain many more men locked up. 
 
 The majority of those women entering jail are black and Hispanic, mirroring demographic trends that cross gender lines. Women, however, tend to enter jails in more vulnerable situations than men, as a higher percentage of women in jail were using drugs, unemployed or receiving public assistance at the time they were arrested. 
 
 Never mind a second chance. Our incarcerated women need a first one | Christia Mercer Read more 
 
 “The same factors that result in many men being in jail are certainly the case for women, but they’re at even greater risk because of a number of factors that come into play,” Garduque said. 
 
 For example, about a third of all women in jail have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression – more than twice the rate that exists for jailed men and about six times that of women in the general public. 
 
 Sexual assault is also a common thread for women who find themselves in the criminal justice system. Women represent just 13% of the jail population, but make up more than two-thirds of the victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization. Eighty-six percent of women in jails reported experiencing sexual violence at some point in their life, roughly four times the rate of women in the US at large. 
 
 Most people detained in jails, as opposed to prisons, have not been convicted of any crime and are awaiting trial. The vast majority of women in jail have been charged with nonviolent property and drug crimes, and so-called “public order” offences, which include prostitution. 
 
 Elizabeth Swavola, one of the authors of the report, said women who become incarcerated are “encountering a system that was created for the majority of people who are in the criminal justice system, who are men. It doesn’t really account for the differences that women bring to the system.” 
 
 This means that in addition to often entering jail in more perilous situations than men, women also tend to leave more damaged as well, the report said, even though women are much less likely than men to be in jail for the commission of a violent or otherwise serious crime. 
 
 “For women, jail can be especially destabilizing because most jail environments were not designed with them in mind and do not take into account the particular adversities they have experienced,” according to the report. 
 
 “Many women leave jail with diminished prospects for physical and behavioral health recovery, with greater parental stress and strain, and even more financially precarious than they were before becoming caught up in the justice system.” 
 
 About 80% of the women in jails have dependent children, and the report noted that the fees and fines attached to criminal justice proceedings can have a long-term detrimental on the financial and physical wellbeing of these households. In a majority of these cases, the mother is a single mother. 
 
 Strategies outlined in the report to combat this trend range from supporting more lenient pretrial release, to diversion programs meant to pair offenders and suspects with community resources. A program in King County, Washington, for example, trains officers to recognize “eligible people” for certain social services and to encourage them to “refer them to a case management process after arrest but prior to booking them into jail”. 
 
 Swavola said that while these cases are encouraging, they don’t do enough holistically to address the underlying issues that have been increasingly driving women into jails. “I haven’t seen any reforms that are system-wide, looking at women specifically, and how they might be experiencing the system differently at every single decision point,” Swavola said, adding: “And that’s really what we need.” 
 
 Highlighting the outsized role that local jails play in sustaining mass incarceration has been a major priority of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice challenge program. Earlier this year, it paid out more than $10m in jail reform grants to cities who pledged to cut their jail populations by at least 15%. 
 
 “We’re becoming increasingly convinced about how significant a problem this is, and what it reveals about our society,” Garduque said. “The people who are being held in jail are predominantly low-income people from communities of color who are being held pretrial or have committed low-level offenses.” 
 
 Gardique added: “The returns in terms of public safety are questionable, and the costs – the social, the moral, not just the fiscal costs run quite high.” ||||| (Over all, the nation’s jail population increased to 745,000 in 2014 from 157,000 in 1970.) 
 
 Much of the increase in the number of jailed women occurred in counties with fewer than 250,000 people, according to the study, places where just 1,700 women had been incarcerated in 1970. By 2014, however, that number had surged to 51,600, the report said. 
 
 And even as crime rates declined nationally, the trend toward jailing women in rural counties continued: Incarceration rates for women in sparsely populated counties rose to 140 per 100,000 in 2014 from 79 per 100,000 in 2000, the study found. During the same period, incarceration rates for women in the nation’s largest counties decreased to 71 per 100,000 from 76 per 100,000. 
 
 “Once a rarity, women are now held in jails in nearly every county — a stark contrast to 1970, when almost three-quarters of counties held not a single woman in jail,” the report said. 
 
 The counties with the highest rates of jailed women are nearly all rural and include Nevada County, Calif.; Floyd County, Ga.; and St. Charles Parish, La. Each has a population of fewer than 100,000 people but a rate of incarceration for women of more than 280 per 100,000, according to the Vera Institute. 
 
 Like Ms. Martin, 46, who was arrested on shoplifting charges 10 times and was held in jails and prisons throughout Louisiana from 1994 to her final arrest in 2005, the study found that a vast majority of the women are poor, African-American or Latino, and have drug or alcohol problems. About 80 percent have children. 
 
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 Most have been charged with low-level offenses, including drug or property crimes like shoplifting, but a growing number are in jail for violating parole or probation, for failed drug tests or for missing court-ordered appointments. Others are unable to make bail or pay court-mandated fees and fines, the report said. 
 
 The trend echoes what has occurred in policing over the past two decades, as the police and prosecutors have focused on offenses that might have once been overlooked, even as rates for more serious crimes have declined, according to the Justice Department. The result, critics say, are overcrowded prisons and jails, many of them filled with nonviolent offenders. 
 
 “As the focus on these smaller crimes has increased, women have been swept up into the system to an even greater extent than men,” said Elizabeth Swavola, one of the authors of the Vera report. 
 
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 The study found that women accounted for 26 percent of total arrests in 2014, compared with 11 percent in 1960. 
 
 And the most common offenses that led to arrests involved drugs. 
 
 Between 1980 and 2009, the arrest rate for drug possession or use doubled for men but tripled for women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 
 
 The troubles caused by the arrest of a woman responsible for supporting a family can sometimes never be undone, said Laurie R. Garduque, the director of justice reform for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which funds the Safety and Justice Challenge, whose mission is to create fairer, more effective local justice systems. 
 
 “It has a cascading effect,” she said. 
 
 During an interview, Ms. Martin said that her children — ages 10 to 16 when she was last arrested — had all once excelled in school, but that they had lost their ability to focus during her absences after the shoplifting arrests. None of her five children, who were taken care of by one of Ms. Martin’s nieces, graduated from high school, and her eldest two were incarcerated for various periods, she said. 
 
 “I missed a lot of time,” said Ms. Martin, who recently received her associate degree in business office technology. “You live with a lot of regret, a lot of guilt — tremendous guilt — when you have kids in the street trying to survive.” ||||| Since 1970, there has been a nearly five-fold increase in the number of people in U.S. jails—the approximately 3,000 county or municipality-run detention facilities that primarily hold people arrested but not yet convicted of a crime. Despite recent scrutiny from policymakers and the public, one aspect of this growth has received little attention: the shocking rise in the number of women in jail. 
 
 Women in jail are the fastest growing correctional population in the country—increasing 14-fold between 1970 and 2014. Yet there is surprisingly little research on why so many more women wind up in jail today. This report examines what research does exist on women in jail in order to begin to reframe the conversation to include them. It offers a portrait of women in jail, explores how jail can deepen the societal disadvantages they face, and provides insight into what drives women’s incarceration and ways to reverse the trend. ||||| Study: The Growing, Disproportionate Number Of Women Of Color In U.S. Jails 
 
 Michelle Scott, 38, has been arrested at least five times from 2000 to 2007 in Florida, according to court records. Most of her charges stem from stealing cars or some other type of theft. Since her last arrest, Scott has struggled to pull her life together. The mom of a 12-year old boy and an adult daughter, Scott, who is black, struggles with depression, and currently lives in a homeless shelter working less than 20 hours a week as a housekeeper. Because of her criminal history, stable jobs and housing are hard to come by. 
 
 "I want to see the system change, especially for single mothers with a criminal history," she says. "It's a lack of resources out there and they just tell you there's not much they can do to help you. You're on your own." 
 
 In some ways, Scott's story resembles that of a lot of women who've been through the criminal justice system. About 80 percent of women in jails are single mothers, according to Overlooked: Women and Jail in an Era of Reform, a newly released study from the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that focuses on criminal justice reform and strengthening families. 
 
 "I want to see the system change, especially for single mothers with a criminal history," she says. "It's a lack of resources out there and they just tell you there's not much they can do to help you. You're on your own." 
 
 The study takes a wide-ranging and historical look at how jail systems in the U.S. affect women, a topic that has seen very limited research. Liz Swavola, one of the study's' authors and a senior program associate at the Vera Institute, said much of the existing research on the criminal justice system is male-centered. "This research is just a first step, but there needs to be more data with a specific eye on women and gender," she said. 
 
 Though there is an ongoing national discussion about federal prison reforms, Swavola says, local jails have been overlooked and left out of the those conversations, to the detriment of women. "Reform needs to happen at every decision point across the criminal justice system," she says. 
 
 To be sure, the jail population is mostly male. Women represent 15 percent of the jail population in smaller counties, and slightly less in larger counties. But according to the study, the overall population of women in jails has ballooned since the 1970s, from just under 8,000 to nearly 110,000 nationwide in 2014, with low-income women of color disproportionately represented — 64 percent of women in jails across the country are women of color. 
 
 And while local jail populations are among the fastest growing correctional populations for both men and women, the U.S. Department of Justice reports that from 2000 to 2010, the female jail population grew at a faster rate than the male population. 
 
 Small counties with less than 250,000 people are seeing the fastest rate of growth for women in jail, the Vera Institute researchers found. For instance, in Stokes County, North Carolina, women made up 32 percent of the jail population in 2013, much more than the national average. 
 
 Swavola said existing research does not clearly explain the fast growth of the women's population in small-county jails, but she pointed out that smaller counties can have fewer resources for social services, mental health resources and employment opportunities. "In those communities, they rely on incarceration to deal with people with mental and behavioral challenges," says Swavola. 
 
 64 percent of women in jails across the country are women of color 
 
 Laurie Garduque, director of Justice Reform for the MacArthur Foundation, which funded the study, says in many places around the country, jails have essentially become warehouses for the poor. Like men, most women in jail ended up there for nonviolent offenses. The study found that in Davidson County, Tennessee, for example, 77 percent of women were booked into jail on misdemeanor charges. The most common charge was failure to appear after receiving a citation. 
 
 "Much of the problems that bring women into the criminal justice system...tend to be low-level offenses or nuisance behavior that do not pose a risk to public safety," says Garduque. 
 
 In their analysis, the researchers also found that 32 percent of women in U.S. jails suffer from serious mental illness, including major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Garduque says the trauma of being in jail can make it harder to cope with existing mental health problems. She says police officers, corrections officers and other employees in the criminal justice system need better training on how to interact with people with mental illnesses, and that this new research shows that mental health programs need to be more accessible outside of jail. 
 
 "Our aim here is not to improve mental health programs in jails," says Garduque. "Our aim is to provide those resources on the community-based level to prevent women from penetrating the system." 
 
 What's more, many women enter the jail system having already experienced significant trauma. "There is a history of physical and domestic abuse for a lot of our moms," says Samuel Luddington, deputy director of programs at Children of Inmates in Miami, which helps incarcerated parents stay connected with their children. Luddington says the current system wasn't set up to provide that sort of care. 
 
 As for life after jail, re-entry programs that are developed with gender in mind are among the most effective, says Swavola, the co-author of study. For instance, Connecticut tried out a pilot probation program along those lines from 2007 to 2010. The project was based on the Women Offender Case Management Model developed by National Institute of Corrections. It was designed to take into account risk factors that girls and women tend to face at higher rates, such as domestic violence and mental illness. and partner abuse. It also encouraged women to have a voice in their own case management. 
 
 A review of women on probation who participated in the Connecticut program found those women were about 11 percent less likely to be arrested again after one year compared to women who did not participate in the program. 
 
 In Los Angeles, a women's re-entry court serves as an alternative when women on probation or parole get a new felony charge. "In lieu of a prison or jail stay, it provides intensive mental health and substance abuse treatment services, case management, and employment support specifically for women," researchers reported. 
 
 But these examples and results are not widespread across the country, and that needs to change, says Swavola. "We need to think think about how to support women and help them to succeed," she says. "Reforms are not reaching women." 
 
 Scott, the Florida mom of two who is currently living in a homeless shelter, says life after jail has been incredibly challenging. She participated in parenting classes with Children of Inmates in Miami to strengthen her bond with her children, and said that helped. "It was all about rebuilding that relationship and trust because I was in and out of their lives because of the choices I made," says Scott. 
 
 Now, she says she would like to provide for her 12-year old son, who lives with his father. But so far, Scott hasn't found safe housing or full-time employment. "Because of my past and background, I get denied all the time," she says. "It's really disappointing, but I have to to think of my child and continue to make the right choices while I wait on a door to open."
– The number of women locked up in jails around the country is increasing at a level not matched by the male jail population, according to a report released by the MacArthur Foundation and Vera Institute. The Guardian reports there were 14 times more women in US jails in 2014 than in 1970. Most of the increase comes from jails in small, rural counties, where incarceration rates for women nearly doubled between 2000 and 2014, according to the New York Times. The number of women in jail in the most populous counties actually declined during that time. One of the report's authors tells NPR the reason may be that rural counties lack resources besides jail for women with mental illnesses and other issues. The report found about one-third of jailed women have a serious mental illness—approximately double the rate for jailed men. Women are also two-thirds of the victims of sexual abuse by jail staff despite being only 13% of the jail population. For these and other reasons, the report's authors conclude jailed women are more vulnerable than their male counterparts. Furthermore, they are largely jailed for minor infractions that don't impact public safety, such as failing to appear in court for a citation. There were about 110,000 women in jail on misdemeanor charges in 2014. Meanwhile, the number of men in jail—not to mention the overall crime rate—has been declining.