The U.S. Incarcerates Women at a Higher Rate Than Nearly Every Other Country in the World

The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, non-partisan group dedicated to producing research on the harm of mass criminalization, has released a new report comparing the incarceration rates for women in every U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world.

Since 2000, the number of incarcerated women around the globe has grown by nearly 60 percent. In the United States, women are incarcerated at a rate of 112 per 100,000 – the second highest incarceration rate for women in the world, following El Salvador, whose incarceration rate for women stands at 245 per 100,000 women. Although only 4 percent of the world’s women and girls live in the U.S., the country contains one-quarter of the world’s imprisoned women and girls.

By a significant margin, South Dakota incarcerates more women than every other U.S. state and every other country around the world, at a rate of 338 per 100,000 women. Montana and Idaho also outpace El Salvador, with incarceration rates of 282 and 277 women, respectively, per 100,000.

Notably, nearly every U.S. state incarcerates women at a higher rate than most of the country’s closest international allies. Even Massachusetts – the state with the lowest women’s incarceration rate (20 per 100,000 women) – locks up more women than all founding NATO countries other than the United Kingdom (36 per 100,000 women).

“While far fewer women are incarcerated than men in the U.S., comparing the women’s incarceration rate to that of men paints a falsely optimistic picture,” the report authors conclude. “The incarceration of women around the world remains a crisis, and even when compared to jurisdictions across the globe, the U.S. states with the lowest levels of women’s incarceration are far out of line with a shameful global status quo.”