FEMALE PRISON POPULATION HITS RECORD HIGH

The female population in state and federal prisons has soared to a record
high in the United States and shows no sign of slowing, with the
incarceration rate for women growing nearly twice as fast as that of men,
the Department of Justice announced Sunday. North Carolina mirrors this
national trend, recently experiencing difficulty housing this growing
population of female inmates.

The increasing number of female prisoners has several social consequences
as more and more children are growing up with incarcerated mothers. "[The
women] have an impact on their children," said Jay Williams, visiting
associate professor of sociology at Duke. "That could create more criminals
[of their children,] and more criminals would have an impact on everyone on
the Duke campus."

According to the Department of Justice's report, 101,179 women were in
prisons last year in the United States, a 3.6 percent increase from the
year before. Women account for almost 7 percent of the national prison
population.

Even though the male prison population dwarfs the female population by a
factor of almost 15, the number of women in prison has ballooned 48 percent
since 1995, when only 68,468 women were incarcerated nationally. During
that same period, the male prison population has grown much more slowly, at
29 percent.

North Carolina echoes this nationwide trend-the total number of imprisoned
women in the state rose to 2,256 inmates in 2003, up more than 500
prisoners since 1995, according to the DOJ report.

Ryan King, a research associate for The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit
advocacy organization that promotes alternatives to incarceration, said
there are several reasons for the increase in the female prison population.

"It's been the war on drugs that has had the most significant impact [on
the prison population]," King said. Typically, women become involved with
drug abuse and become financially or psychologically tied with a man
involved in drug crime, he said.

Women who had peripheral roles in the drug trade were not incarcerated at
such high rates before the inception of the war on drugs in the 1980s and
1990s, King explained. Now there are mandatory minimum sentences which put
drug offenders in jail for five to 15 years.

Williams, on the other hand, speculated that the rising female prison
population can be attributed to the fact that women are committing more
violent crimes. "[Women] used to be involved in crimes like prostitution
and property theft, but violent crime and person-to-person crime will get
you into prison faster," he said.

"More people are going into prison and are staying there longer," King
noted, citing changes in sentencing laws and stricter enforcement of laws
as main reasons for the population increase in penitentiaries.

North Carolina is struggling to accommodate its increasing prison
population. "We've known for the past several years that the growing
women's population would exceed our capacity," said Keith Acree, a
spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Correction. Recently, he
added, the state has been "bursting at the seams with inmates."

Paying for prisons presents a funding dilemma in many states, including
North Carolina. Generally, state legislators would rather spend money on
other projects, such as schools, than prisons. Since housing inmates
carries high financial costs, it is often underfunded, causing overcrowding.

To ameliorate the crunch, however, the state was forced to build three new
facilities, each holding up to 1,000 inmates, across the state. The state
also converted a men's prison into a women's prison to mitigate the
overcrowding in prisons across the state.