October 14, 2026
By Wendy Sawyer and Brian Nam-Sonenstein
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experiences with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? Why are they there? How are their experiences different from men’s? These are important questions, but finding the answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal legal systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly limited data that’s broken down by gender.
This report provides a detailed view of the 198,800 women and girls incarcerated in the United States and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. We pull together data from a number of government agencies and break down the number of women and girls held by each correctional system, by specific offense, in 446 state prisons, 27 federal prisons, 2,765 local jails, 1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 65 Indian country jails, and 148 immigration detention facilities, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. We also go beyond the numbers, including rare self-reported data from a national survey of people in prison to offer new insights about incarcerated women’s backgrounds, families, health, and experiences in prison. This report answers the questions of why and where women are locked up — and much more:
Read the full report from PPI here.
