silverguide.site –

Two new reports raise questions about the economic tradeoffs of incarcerating women – a prison population that has grown more than 600% in the United States since 1980.

Imprisoning women costs as much as 75% more than incarcerating men, but some of those costs could be offset by halving the amount of time women spend in prison with minimal impacts to public safety, according to new reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan thinktank.

“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,” said Dr Stephanie Kennedy, the council’s policy director.

Kennedy and her colleagues found keeping women in prison cost roughly $87,000 to $122,000 per woman each year, compared with $70,000 for men. Women’s specialized healthcare needs, including pregnancy care, and smaller populations translated to higher per-person costs. The studies found that female incarceration could cost as much as $34bn per year by 2035.

A companion study from the council questions whether that’s money well spent.

Using data from Illinois and North Carolina, the researchers found that cutting women’s time spent behind bars by 50% had a negligible effect on crime, with early releases projected to produce increases in annual arrests that amount to just a fraction of 1% – 0.3% in Illinois and 0.2% in North Carolina. Of those new arrests, nine out of 10 would be for nonviolent offenses, according to the analysis.

Researchers estimate that cutting prison time in half for women would net as much as $94.1m in cost savings for Illinois and as much as $102.7m in North Carolina.

Those savings are likely an undercount, the authors say. The figures don’t account for the unpaid labor of caregiving, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning that need to be replaced when a woman is removed from her family and community. That loss is estimated to be $2.8bn a year.

The studies’ findings are of no surprise to formerly incarcerated women like Colette Payne of Chicago, a mom to three boys who served time for what she called “survival crimes” that included retail theft, forgery and drug-related offenses.

“We are primary caregivers and we leave small children behind,” said Payne, 58, who is now director of the Reclamation Project, a mutual support and re-entry organization. “It was my sister, my brothers, grandmas, fraternal and maternal grandmas of my children, their father, it was – yeah, it was all of them who supported me on my journey to recovery, and healing.”

Kennedy said that most discussions about incarceration are about men and ignoring the differences skews the reality of the true costs of criminal legal policy, particularly since the majority of incarcerated women are mothers.

“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,” she said.

When a woman is removed from the home, she said, it destabilizes entire families – an even steeper price to pay.