Boom in female inmates focus of national meeting

Over the last 20 years, the number of women in prison has jumped from 4.3% of the total US prison population to 6.8%. The list of reasons includes gender-blind sentencing, but it appears as if the spokeswoman for the recently created National Workshop on Adult and Juvenile Female Offenders plans to stress harsher drug laws as the reason. See Press Herald article here.

Considering that men are far more likely than women to be locked up, (rather than sent to treatment), for drugs and that even with the gender-blind sentencing guidelines men in the US still recieve an average sentence length twice that of women regardless of the severity of the crime see DOJ statistics, (table 5-5), methinks this is yet another attempt to pretend female criminals really aren't criminals.

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