New research from the Council on Criminal Justice projects a significant spike in the number of women in the justice system and the cost associated with imprisoning women over the next decade.
For their report, the authors examined historical population data across systems settings, including prisons, jail, and parole. They also reviewed current trends regarding the direct costs of women’s justice system involvement and the costs borne by families and communities when women go to prison.
By 2035, the report authors project the number of women under correctional control will rise to 1.1 million, which represents a 10 percent increase since 2022. This growth will be concentrated in confinement settings; the number of women in prison is expected to increase by 27 percent over the next decade, while the number of women in jail is projected to increase by 20 percent. As a result of increases in population and per-person expenditures, the report also projects the costs of women’s justice system involvement will rise by some 34 percent, increasing from a range of $23 billion to $26 billion in 2025 to $30 billion to $34 billion by 2035.
The authors estimate that it costs some 25 percent to 75 percent more to imprison women than men. In 2025, imprisonment cost about $70,000 per person annually. Yet, the report authors estimate annual costs of $87,000 to $122,000 per woman as a result of structural and operational factors like smaller facilities, which increase the per-person expense because fixed costs are spread across fewer individuals. Additionally, women’s facilities often house people across multiple security classifications, resulting in different housing arrangements, supervision levels, and programming with the same facility. Women’s higher rates of physical and behavioral health care needs also increase per-person expenses, which can be further elevated by the need to transport women to external providers for services that not available onsite.
Notably, the authors theorize these estimates understate the full economic impact of women’s incarceration because many costs borne by families, caregivers, communities, and public systems cannot be reliably quantified. For example, women’s incarceration can cause disruptions to housing and family stability, increase reliance on systems like child welfare and public healthcare, and negatively impact children’s long-term outcomes.
One area that can be measured is the loss of household production — the unpaid labor required to maintain a household and care for its members. Using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the authors estimate women’s imprisonment caused a $2.8 billion annual loss in household production in 2025. By 2035, they estimate this annual loss to increase to some $3.8 billion.