Two new reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan thinktank, found that the United States spends tens of thousands of dollars more per year to incarcerate each woman than each man, and that halving women’s prison sentences could save millions of dollars with minimal impact on public safety.
Researchers led by Dr. Stephanie Kennedy, the council’s policy director, found that keeping a woman in prison costs between $87,000 and $122,000 annually, compared with about $70,000 for a man. The gap stems in part from women’s specialized healthcare needs — including pregnancy care — and from the smaller population of incarcerated women, which drives up per-person costs for fixed institutional expenses.
“Incarceration for women is very expensive, and we are using this very expensive tool, prison, on what is, on average, a relatively low-risk group compared to men,” Kennedy said.
A companion study examined what would happen if states cut women’s time behind bars by half. Using data from Illinois and North Carolina, researchers found that such a reduction would produce only a 0.3% increase in annual arrests in Illinois and a 0.2% increase in North Carolina. Of those new arrests, nine out of 10 would be for nonviolent offenses, according to the analysis.
The researchers estimated that halving sentences could net up to $94.1 million in savings for Illinois and up to $102.7 million for North Carolina. The authors said those figures likely understate the real savings because they do not account for the unpaid labor that must be replaced when a woman is removed from her home — the caregiving, cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping that others have to take on. That loss is estimated at $2.8 billion per year nationwide.
The female prison population in the United States has grown more than 600% since 1980. If current trends continue, the reports project, annual costs for incarcerating women could reach $34 billion by 2035.
Most incarcerated women are mothers, Kennedy said, and removing a woman from a household has a destabilizing effect that male incarceration does not.
“When you pull a man out of a home and send him to prison, his children stay with their mother, and so someone is still washing hands and putting on jammies and buying groceries and doing homework with those kids there,” Kennedy said. “When a woman is removed from the home,” she added, “it destabilizes entire families — an even steeper price to pay.”
Colette Payne, 58, of Chicago, served time for what she described as “survival crimes” including retail theft, forgery and drug-related offenses. Now director of the Reclamation Project, a mutual support and re-entry organization, Payne said women’s caregiving responsibilities make incarceration especially punishing for families.
“We are primary caregivers and we leave small children behind,” Payne said. She said her sister, brothers, grandmothers and the father of her children all stepped in to support her during her incarceration.