States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context 2025

By kat, 3 November, 2025

States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context 2025

by Emily Widra and Aleks Kajstura Tweet this
Press Release
September 2025

The United States still incarcerates 614 people for every 100,000 residents, more than almost any other country in the world. Women in particular are incarcerated in the U.S. at a rate of 112 per 100,000. This may seem relatively minor, but it’s a scale of women’s incarceration that remains higher than that of any other country except El Salvador. Furthermore, women’s incarceration stubbornly remains at near-historic highs in the U.S., while the country’s overall incarceration rate has been falling.

This report helps make sense of these numbers, providing an updated snapshot of how women in the U.S. fare in the world’s carceral landscape and comparing incarceration rates for women in each U.S. state with the equivalent rates for countries around the world.

25 years of alarming growth in women’s incarceration across the world

Globally, governments incarcerate women at an alarming rate: the number of imprisoned women has grown by almost 60% since 2000, with more than 740,000 women and girls in prison worldwide — including nearly 200,000 women and girls in just the United States alone. Women are particularly vulnerable to laws and practices criminalizing poverty, as well as laws that disproportionately impact them on the basis of their gender or disability, like restrictions on reproductive rights or sexuality, or the policing of mental illness and drug use related to prior experiences of abuse or violence, which are common among incarcerated women. The United States is in no way immune to the proliferation of global women’s incarceration — in fact, it’s a significant driver of it: only 4% of the world’s women and girls live in the U.S., but the U.S. confines one-quarter of the world’s incarcerated women and girls.

World women’s incarceration rates if every U.S. state were a country

Rates calculated per 100,000 women. Read more about the data.

Show all

Figure 1. This graph shows the number of women in state prisons, local jails, and federal prisons from each U.S. state per 100,000 women in that state and the incarceration rate of women per 100,000 in all countries with at least 500,000 in total population.

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In South Dakota, the world’s leader in women’s incarceration, a quick look at state policies and practices makes it clear why the state incarcerates more women per capita than the rest of the world. The state’s reputation for over-incarcerating women, especially for drug-related offenses, means that more than half of incarcerated women in state prisons are locked up for drug convictions, compared to a quarter of incarcerated men. While some states have slowed the rate at which they incarcerate people for drug offenses, the number of women locked up in South Dakota for drug offenses has grown 66% since 2013 compared to only 34% for men. Even though three out of every four women in South Dakota prisons are incarcerated for what the state considers “non-violent offenses,” the state projects that the number of incarcerated women will grow by almost 20% by 2026 — and has even used this projection to justify the construction of a second women’s prison in the state. In Montana, which falls just behind South Dakota and ahead of all countries with an incarceration rate of 282 per 100,000 women, the Department of Corrections has made a similar argument for building a new women’s prison, claiming it will address the number of women held in local jails awaiting space in state prison (even though local jails held only 38 women for state prison authorities in August 2025). In other words, world leaders in women’s incarceration are more willing to build new prisons for billions of dollars than pursue any actual efforts to reduce the number of women behind bars.

Use caution when comparing year‑to‑year data

Without regularly updated data sources that include breakdowns by sex or gender identity, this report cannot provide over time comparisons that suggest broader trends.

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The rapid growth of women’s incarceration, coupled with the longstanding focus on men in the system, is a sign that recent criminal justice reforms have not kept up with the number and needs of incarcerated women. Women often do not have the same access to diversion and other programs that can shorten incarceration. For example, Texas, which incarcerates more women than any other state, has few educational or vocational programs open to the women in its facilities. Wyoming — with the nation’s sixth-highest women’s incarceration rate — only started allowing women to attend an alternative six month “boot camp” instead of serving 6 to 10 years in prison in 2017. To make matters worse, women have to go as far as Florida to serve their time because Wyoming’s camp is only open to men.

Every U.S. state incarcerates women at a higher rate than most of our closest international allies

The scale of women’s incarceration is shameful in many countries, but the scope of the problem in the U.S. is particularly astonishing when viewed in the global context. South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho have higher women’s incarceration rates than any other country in the world. As a whole, the U.S. incarcerates women at a higher rate than any country other than El Salvador. In fact, women in Kentucky face almost the same incarceration rate as women in El Salvador — a country that has been described as an authoritarian police state.

The big pictureLearn more about women’s incarceration

Even U.S. states with the lowest women’s incarceration rates lock women up at a pace that rivals that of nations wracked by armed conflict and political instability, or where laws continue to explicitly subjugate women. For example, Rhode Island — one of the U.S. states with the lowest women’s incarceration rate — incarcerates women at a rate of 28 per 100,000. This is higher than the incarceration rate in Colombia (23 per 100,000), where the women’s prison population has increased more than fivefold since 1991, primarily driven by drug laws that disproportionately punish women. New Jersey’s incarceration rate of women — 30 per 100,000 — is the same as the women’s incarceration rate in the United Arab Emirates, a nation where consensual nonmarital sex can result in a prison sentence of six months for women. New York locks women up at the same rate as Bolivia (34 per 100,000), a nation where the women’s prison population increased more than 12% over just seven months in 2024, with more than half of incarcerated women accused or convicted of drug-related or other non-violent offenses.

The true scale of U.S. over-incarceration of women becomes even more apparent when we zoom in on our closest allies: the fellow founding countries of NATO (North American Treaty Organization).

Nearly half of U.S. states, including Georgia, continue to incarcerate women at rates at least four times the rates of our closest international allies:

Figure 2. Compare another state: Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawai'i Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
or compare just the U.S. with its peers.

While every state in the U.S. outpaces most countries in women’s incarceration, the global trend of rising women’s incarceration is alarming on its own. Even among nations that incarcerate women at much lower rates than the U.S., women and girls are locked up for offenses with little to do with public safety. For example, in Australia, women represent only 8% of incarcerated people but 58% of all people incarcerated for fraud, theft, public order, and other “miscellaneous” offenses. In Ireland, 8% of imprisoned women are incarcerated for unpaid court-ordered fines, more than double the percentage of men sent to prison for unpaid fines.

Incarcerated women — who disproportionately report childhood disadvantages, prior victimization and abuse, lower educational attainment, homelessness, disabilities, and physical and mental health conditions — are often further harmed by the carceral system itself. In the U.S., incarcerated women are routinely separated from their families, report disproportionately high rates of substance use disorders, lose their parental rights, are unable to access necessary health care (including pre- and post-natal care), and experience sexual victimization by staff while incarcerated. Incarcerated women are also four times more likely than men to report sexual victimization in prison; women identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual are far more likely than heterosexual women to report sexual victimization (and more than 22% of women in state prison identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual).

In nations with far lower incarceration rates, the conditions of confinement women experience are also troubling: in Canada, imprisoned women report delays in access to medical care, insufficient treatment of opioid use disorder, inappropriate use of medication as a “chemical restraint,” and exposure to sexual violence by staff. In France, imprisoned women have less freedom of movement, less access to programming and activities, and less access to mental health care when compared to incarcerated men. Women will continue to be the fastest-growing segment of incarcerated populations globally until state and national governments address the policies and conditions that end in their incarceration in the first place.

Conclusion

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 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.

Appendix tables

Methodology

Like Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024, this report takes a comprehensive view of confinement in the United States that goes beyond the commonly reported statistics to offer a fuller picture of this country’s different and overlapping systems of confinement.

This broader universe of confinement includes criminal legal system-involved girls held in juvenile residential facilities, women detained by the U.S. Marshals Service (many pretrial), women detained for immigration offenses, and women convicted of sex-related offenses who are indefinitely detained or committed in “civil commitment centers” after completing a sentence. They are not typically included in the official statistics that aggregate data about women in prison and jails for the simple reason that these facilities are largely separate from the state and local systems of adult prisons and jails. That definitional distinction is relevant to the people who run prisons and jails, but is irrelevant to the advocates and policymakers who must confront the overuse of confinement by all of the various parts of the legal systems in the United States.

To provide the most up-to-date assessment of women’s incarceration rates in every state, we use the most recent datasets available. We included these various confined populations in the total women’s incarceration rate of the United States and, wherever state-level data made it possible, in state-level women’s incarceration rates. In most states, these additions have a small impact on the total rate, and they don’t impact the rankings by more than one or two positions for any state. In a few places, however, these other systems of confinement merit closer attention. For example, West Virginia, Minnesota, New York, Louisiana, and Alabama each confine enough children that incarcerated girls account for at least 5% of the state’s incarcerated women. Two states, West Virginia and South Dakota, incarcerate enough girls under 18 years old to increase their statewide women’s incarceration rate by more than 10 per 100,000. In at least three of these states — West Virginia, Alabama, and South Dakota — more than 20% of confined youth are girls, compared to 15% of confined youth nationally.

As a result of our choice to take a broader view of incarceration, this report creates a unique U.S. dataset that offers a complete look at all kinds of criminal legal system-related confinement of women and girls in each state. We explain our specific data sources in more detail below and provide the raw data for the component parts of our calculations in two appendices to this report.

Data about women’s incarceration remains scarce

Many common criminal justice datasets do not include separate counts of women, which makes it harder to get the full picture. For example:

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has not published the number of people in state prisons and local jails by gender and state in the Correctional Populations in the United States series since the 2015 version of the report. This source provided an estimate of people incarcerated in jail and prison in each state, without double counting people held in local jails for state authorities.
The number of women under military jurisdiction has not been reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the past two decades.
Separate counts of women committed to state psychiatric hospitals due to criminal charges or convictions are not available.

The missing data on women held in psychiatric commitment (for evaluation or treatment as Incompetent to Stand Trial or Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity) nationally and in each state is particularly significant. Having data on justice-involved psychiatric patients is critical when looking at efforts to end women’s mass incarceration in particular, because incarcerated women experience mental health problems at rates significantly higher than incarcerated men. The incarceration data we do have reveal a system that is clearly broken, but fixing it would be easier and more efficient if policymakers had complete and detailed information about where and why women are incarcerated.

A note about data disaggregated by sex and gender in this report

Even the available data that are disaggregated by sex are frustratingly limited, in that they typically only differentiate between “male” and “female,” ignoring the reality that the gender identities of confined people (and all people, for that matter) are not limited to this binary. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has begun to collect data on transgender and nonbinary individuals; for example, it reported data on a small sample of transgender individuals in state prisons in its 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, which we analyzed. Meanwhile other non-government organizations such as the National Center for Transgender Equality, Black & Pink , and the Vera Institute of Justice are beginning to fill this data gap with large-scale surveys. The U.S. Trans Survey asks respondents about recent experiences with policing, incarceration, and immigration detention. Although currently incarcerated individuals are not included in the sample, 2% of the respondents to the 2015 survey were incarcerated in the previous year. Black & Pink and Vera’s 2024 report Advancing Transgender Justice is based on their 2019-2022 survey of 280 currently incarcerated transgender people in state prisons. This field of research has a long way to go before the data are consistently collected and reported by gender identity rather than an administrative categorization of “male” versus “female.” The use of the terms “women” and “girls” in this report reflect these present data limitations. For more on the limitations of gender-specific data and how the current data misclassifies trans men and women, see our 2024 report, Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie.

In 2025, the United States’ federal government undertook a concerted effort to erase any mention of the existence of transgender, non-binary, and other gender minorities — as well as other LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, people of color, immigrants, and countless other groups of people — from federal websites, datasets, and publications. These changes will undoubtedly diminish the already-limited information available about the experiences of incarcerated trans and non-binary people in the coming months and years. The federal government’s removal of trans and non-binary people from government data collection and reporting is not just a surface-level change of policy; this kind of systemic erasure threatens to strip fundamental rights from the most marginalized people, which includes those behind bars.

Detailed data notes and sources

For the 50 U.S. states, we calculated women’s incarceration rates per 100,000 women and girls in the population to reflect our holistic view of confinement, which include:

women in state prison in each state,
women in local jails in each state,
women in federal prison from each state,
women held by the U.S. Marshals Service from each state,
women held in jails in Indian country in each state, and
young women and girls held in youth confinement (or “juvenile justice”) facilities from each state.

The raw data are available in the accompanying appendix tables, and the individual sources were as follows:

State prisons and local jails: In previous iterations of this report, we used the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Correctional Populations in the United States series which provided a combined state prison and local jail count for each state that avoided double-counting people held in the physical custody of jails on behalf of state prison systems. Unfortunately, these data have not published by state since 2015, so we replicated that methodology as closely as possible using the data from the Prisons Report Series: Preliminary Data Release, 2023, the National Prisoner Statistics Survey, 2021, and Vera’s Incarceration Trends dataset to calculate comparable total combined state prison and local jail populations for each state, as explained below.
- State prisons: In Prisons Report Series: Preliminary Data Release, 2023, the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes the total jurisdictional state prison populations and the number of people under state jurisdiction sentenced to more than one year in state prison by sex. To estimate the total jurisdictional state prison populations by sex (regardless of sentence length), we applied the percentage of the sentenced-to-more-than-one-year population that were identified as “female” to the total jurisdictional population for each state. These population totals include people held under the jurisdiction of state prison systems that are physically confined in local jails.
- Local jails: Since the Bureau of Justice Statistics has not published the confined population of local jails by state since the 2019 Census of Jails, we elected to use more recent data on statewide custodial jail populations estimated and published by the Vera Institute of Justice in their Incarceration Trends dataset. However, because (a) many jails “rent” space to state prison systems and (b) these systems report data differently, we adjusted Vera’s jail data to avoid double-counting people physically confined in jails but under the jurisdiction of a state prison system. To calculate the number of women held in local jails, excluding those held for state authorities, we first estimate the number of women held in local jails for state authorities. To do so, we calculated the percentage of people held in local jails for state authorities who are women based on 2021 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Corrections Statistical Analysis Tool (CSAT-Prisoners). We then applied that 2021 percentage to the total 2023 jurisdictional state prison population (as calculated above) to estimate the number of women held in local jails for state authorities in 2023. Next, we subtracted that number from Vera’s custodial jail populations, resulting in a final estimate of the number of women held in local jails (excluding those held for state authorities).
- U.S. Territories and Commonwealths: For the U.S. Territory of Guam, we used the percentage of people in prison who are women (3.9% in 2022) and the prison population (928 people in July 2025) as reported in the World Prison Brief to estimate the number of women imprisoned in Guam. For the remaining U.S. Territories and Commonwealths — American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico — we calculated the populations based on the percentage of people in prison who are women (as reported in the World Prison Brief) and the most recent total prison populations reported in Table 25 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Prisoners in 2022 — Statistical Tables.
Federal prisons and U.S. Marshals Service: While federal prosecutions are nominally the result of federal policy, we attribute federal convictions to individual states in part because federal prosecutions affect state residents and in part because federal prosecutions are often coordinated with state prosecutors and state law enforcement. (In this way, our methodology departs from the way the Bureau of Justice Statistics calculates state rates. In Correctional Populations in the United States, 2022, people detained by or for the U.S. Marshals Service are not included at all, and other people incarcerated under federal jurisdiction are included in the total national incarceration rate but do not affect state incarceration rates.) In July 2025, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 6.6% of people in federal prison were women, so we applied this percentage to the reported total jurisdictional federal prison population of 154,853 people on July 24, 2025, resulting in an estimate of 10,220 women in federal prison. We then developed a ratio of the state of legal residence for the Bureau of Prisons population as of March 2025, based on the Bureau of Prisons’ response to our FOIA request. We then applied this ratio to the total of 10,220 women in federal prison in July 2025 and the average daily population of 4,451 women in the U.S. Marshals custody, as reported in response to our FOIA request (2025-USMS-001575). We then combined these numbers to estimate the total number of women incarcerated under federal correctional authority. The national incarceration rate includes 1,229 women in custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals with no state of legal residence in the United States who are identified as “foreign.”
Indian country jails: For the national incarceration rate, we used the estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (which imputes data for non-reporting facilities) as reported in Table 6 of Jails in Indian Country, 2023: 590 women and 50 girls were held in Indian country jails on June 30, 2023. For the state rates, we used the reported number of “female” adults and juveniles held in each Indian country facility in the Annual Survey of Jails in Indian Country, 2023. Eight facilities did not report populations in the 2023 survey, so we used the most recent data reported by five of those facilities in previous iterations of the survey, including 2022 populations for two facilities in Arizona and one facility in Montana, as well as 2021 populations for one facility in Arizona and one facility in Montana in our statewide incarceration rates. Three facilities have not reported populations since before 2019, so we did not include those three facilities in Arizona, North Carolina, and South Dakota in our calculation of state incarceration rates.
Youth confinement: For youth held for the juvenile justice system, we used the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement: Sex of Residents by State, 2023. In our calculation of the national incarceration rate, we included 246 girls who had no reported state in this dataset and were therefore not included in the calculation of state incarceration rates. We defined “youth confinement” to include all juvenile justice-related placements outside of the home. This methodology better reflects the realities of youth confinement and brings us closer to showing the full scope of confinement for all people across the country. The inclusion of these less restrictive forms of confinement for youth is consistent with our approach for the adult system, which includes halfway houses and other forms of community confinement as a part of the entire adult system.

Three additional categories of confinement are included in the national incarceration rate for the United States, but not in state incarceration rates, because state-level data by gender or sex were not available:

Immigration detention: The number of women in immigration detention, and what facilities they are held in, comes from ICE’s Detention Statistics for FY 2025 (reporting average daily populations as of May 27, 2025). We calculated the total average daily population of women from the reported numbers of “Female Crim” and “Female Non-Crim” in the “Facilities FY24” spreadsheet. The 194 women held in local jails for ICE were removed from the total, nationwide jail population to avoid double-counting them. However, we could not reasonably remove them from the state incarceration rates, as we could not identify their home states: ICE frequently transfers and detains people far from their homes and communities. The vast majority of people detained and incarcerated for criminal immigration offenses are accused of illegal entry or illegal reentry — in other words, for no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission.
Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody: According to the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Program’s data table, 626 unaccompanied migrant girls were held in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) as of July 31, 2025. Most children in ORR custody are held in shelters and a small number are in secure juvenile facilities or in short-term or long-term foster care. With the exception of those in foster homes, these children are not free to come and go, and they do not participate in community life (e.g. they do not attend community schools). Their behaviors and interactions are monitored and recorded; any information gathered about them in ORR custody can be used against them later in immigration proceedings. And while the majority of these children came to the U.S. without a parent or legal guardian, those who were separated from parents at the border are, like ICE detainees, confined only because the U.S. has criminalized unauthorized immigration, even by persons lawfully seeking asylum.
Civil commitment for sex-related crimes: The number of women held in civil commitment for sex-related crimes — three women nationally in August 2024 — was shared via email correspondence with Shan Jumper, the president of the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Program Network (SOCCPN). And according to SOCCPN’s Common Questions about Civil Commitment, there are “a few women throughout the country who have been committed.” It should be noted that while this estimate only includes civil commitments related to sex-related crimes, thousands of people — including an unknown number of women — are civilly committed to psychiatric hospitals by courts in the course of criminal proceedings (for example, for evaluation or restoration of competency to stand trial). In our 2025 report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025, we include the total number of these “forensic” civil commitments. Unfortunately, because we do not know of a way to estimate how many of these people are women, this aspect of confinement is excluded from this report. And of course, many more women are civilly committed to psychiatric facilities for reasons wholly unrelated to criminal charges.

A note about the District of Columbia and U.S. Territories and Commonwealths: This report focuses on comparing individual states to other countries, so we chose to not include the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands in the main graphic in this report, although we did make separate NATO comparison graphics for these jurisdictions. The women’s incarceration data for D.C. and the territories, where they exist, are included in Appendix Table 2 and the final women’s incarceration rate calculations for D.C. and the territories are:

JurisdictionWomen’s incarceration rate
per 100,000 women

District of Columbia

U.S. Virgin Islands

American Samoa

118

Guam

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

Population data for each state, used to calculate the incarceration rates, reflect the total “female resident population” on July 1, 2023 for all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia as reported in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates Subject Tables, Table S0101: Age and Sex. The April 1, 2020 “female populations” of the American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands were published in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 Decennial Census of Island Areas.

For the incarceration rates of other countries, we used the most recent incarceration rate data available from the Institute for Criminal Policy Research’s World Prison Brief in July 2025. For this report, we accepted the World Prison Brief’s definition of country, excluding countries only for reasons of population size. To make the comparisons more meaningful to U.S. states, we included only independent nations with total populations of more than 500,000 people. Women’s incarceration data was not available for Cuba or Uzbekistan, which were included in States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024. For Bosnia and Herzegovina, we were unable to locate separate estimates of the total women’s population for the Federation and the Republika Srpska. However, to include these nations in our analysis, we combined the women’s prison population of the Federation (54 women) and the Republika Srpska (11 women) and calculated a total women’s incarceration rate based on the combined total women’s population of 1.79 million as reported in the 2013 combined census.

In order to make the graph comparing the founding NATO nations to individual states, however, we had to make two exceptions to this policy. First, we included Iceland, which is a founding NATO member, even though its population is below 500,000. Second, we aggregated the total incarcerated and total population data for the three separate nations of England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, into the one member nation of NATO, the United Kingdom.

For the population data for most countries, we used the United Nations’ World Population Prospects File POP/-3-3: Female population by select age group, region, subregion, and country, annually for 1950-2023. For countries within the United Kingdom (England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland), we used the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics’ “Estimates of the population for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland” (File: Mid-2023, Table MYE2 — Females).

Read the entire methodology

Footnotes

Criminal legal system data — when disaggregated by demographics — are most often limited to a “male” and “female” binary. The repeated use of this binary across most data sources limits our ability to include information about transgender, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming identities in this report. For more detail on this, see the methodology. ↩
The World Bank reports that the 2024 worldwide population of women and girls was 4.05 billion, with 169 million in the United States. ↩
Based on imprisonment rates calculated by Bureau of Justice Statistics’ and published in the Prisoners series — which only include women under state and federal correctional authorities — South Dakota consistently has one of the top five highest state incarceration rates among women in the U.S. for the past fifteen years. ↩
The distinction between “violent” and other crime categories is a dubious and subjective one; what constitutes a “violent crime” varies from state to state and from policy to policy, and acts that are considered “violent crimes” do not always involve physical harm. The Justice Policy Institute explains many of these inconsistencies, and why they matter, in its comprehensive and relevant report, Defining Violence. ↩
In Figure 1.10 of the South Dakota Department of Corrections’ statistical report, the state estimates that the number of incarcerated women will grow by almost 20%, from 589 women to 706 women. ↩
Sharp-eyed readers may notice that, in past versions of this report, the U.S. had the highest women’s incarceration rate of all countries (among those with populations of at least 500,000 people). However, the latest international incarceration data indicates that El Salvador incarcerates women at a higher rate than the United States and at a rate higher than 47 U.S. states. This reflects a recent dramatic increase in incarceration in El Salvador, rather than any meaningful policy change to reduce incarceration in the U.S. (although, as we’ve reported, the U.S. incarceration rate also dropped as a result of temporary court slowdowns and changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic).

In the past few years, El Salvador has been “run as a police state” with military and police indefinitely detaining people without providing a reason or access to a lawyer: the incarceration rate of 1,659 per 100,000 people in 2024 was three times the total incarceration rate in 2021. This increase is reflected in the rapidly expanding incarceration of women in El Salvador as well: in 2021, approximately 2,600 women were incarcerated, and as of 2024, this number has tripled with more than 8,000 incarcerated women. The current incarceration rate — for women and men — in El Salvador is likely even higher than the latest available data from March 2024, considering the nation has incarcerated at least 81,000 people between March 2022 and August 2024. ↩
The World Prison Brief data on the United Arab Emirates’ incarceration rates are from 2014, when women were still legally obliged to “obey” their husbands and lost spousal maintenance if they left the “marital home” or refused to travel abroad with their husband “without a lawful excuse.” Even after these laws were changed, United Arab Emirates’ laws continue to severely restrict women’s rights and mobility, according to Human Rights Watch. ↩
See “Prisoner characteristics, Australia, Table 1.” ↩
At the same time, the federal government continues efforts to transfer trans people in federal prisons into facilities based on their assigned sex at birth. ↩
As of 2016, nearly 9 out of 10 people incarcerated for immigration offenses by the Federal Bureau of Prisons were there for illegal entry and reentry. We know of no newer source of detailed information about these offenses. ↩
There are three countries with more than 500,000 people that were not included in this report, nor the 2024 States of Incarceration: The Global Context:
- Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea: In 2016, the U.S. State Department estimated between 80,000 and 120,000 people were imprisoned in North Korea. There is no estimate of how many women are incarcerated.
- Eritrea: The U.S. State Department’s 2023 report highlights “harsh and life threatening” conditions in Eritrea’s prisons and jails (including “unofficial” facilities), but does not provide an estimate of how many people — or women — are incarcerated.
- Somalia: After the publication of our States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024, the World Prison Brief was able to update the estimated prison population to 2,799 people in 2023 based on a UN mission report. There is no estimate of the percentage who are women.
↩

See the footnotes

About the authors

Emily Widra is a Senior Research Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative and is the author of several reports including States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024, One Size Fits None: How ‘standard conditions’ of probation set people up to fail, as well as our Where People in Prison Come From report series. She is the organization’s expert on health and safety issues behind bars, including COVID-19 in prisons and jails. Her previous research also includes analyses of mortality in prisons and the combined impact of HIV and incarceration on Black men and women.

Aleks Kajstura is the Legal Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. She directs the organization’s campaign to end prison gerrymandering (the practice of using prison populations to distort democracy via redistricting). Aleks has also published several reports on women’s incarceration, including previous versions of States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context, as well as our Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie reports.

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harms of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Through big-picture reports like Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, as well as in-depth reports on issues such as probation and parole, the organization helps the public more fully engage in criminal justice reform. The organization also launched, and continues to lead, the national fight to keep the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering).

Acknowledgements

All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, and this report is no different. The author would like to thank current staff members for their insights, editorial guidance, and technical assistance. Lastly, we would like to thank our donors and funders who make this work possible.

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