FEMALE PRISON POPULATION SOARING

Washington - The number of women in state and federal prisons is at
an all-time high and growing fast, with the incarceration rate for
females increasing at nearly twice that of men, the government
reported Sunday.

Last year, 101,179 women were in prisons, 3.6 percent more than in
2002, the Justice Department said. That marks the first time the
women's prison population has topped 100,000, and it continues a trend
of rapid growth. Overall, men still are far more likely than women to
be in jail or prison, and black men are more likely than any other
group to be locked up.

At the close of 2003, U.S. prisons held 1,368,866 men, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics reported. The total was 2 percent more than in 2002.

Expressed in terms of the population at large, that means that in
2003, one in every 109 U.S. men was in prison. For women, the figure
was one in every 1,613.

According to the Georgia Department of Corrections' Web site, Georgia
prisons are holding 49,274 inmates, 46,071 men and 3,203 women. Nearly
63 percent of those prisoners are black.

Longer sentences, especially for drug crimes, and fewer prisoners
being granted parole or probation are the main reasons for the
expanding U.S. prison population, said Marc Mauer, assistant director
of the Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to long prison
terms for many types of crimes.

The increase began three decades ago and continues. The new report
compared 2003 figures with those from 1995.

The number of women in prison has grown 48 percent since 1995, when
the figure was 68,468, the report said. The male prison population has
grown 29 percent over that time, from 1,057,406.

Year by year, the number of women incarcerated grew an average of 5
percent, compared with an average annual increase of 3.3 percent for
men.

"It coincides exactly with the inception of the war on drugs" in the
1980s and continuing into the 1990s, Mauer said. "It represents a sort
of vicious cycle of women engaged in drug abuse and often connected
with financial or psychological dependence with a boyfriend," or other
man involved in drug crime.

The prison figures do not fully reflect the number of people behind
bars. About 80,000 women were in local jails last year, along with
more than 600,000 men.

The federal prison system held a large share of female prisoners, with
a population of 11,635 at the close of 2003. One state --- Texas ---
held even more, with a population of 13,487. California, the nation's
largest prison system, held 10,656 women. North Dakota had fewer women
in prison than any other state --- 113.

Among other findings in the report:

More than 44 percent of all sentenced male inmates were black, and
many of them were young.

Among the more than 1.4 million sentenced inmates at the end of 2003,
an estimated 403,165 were black men between 20 and 39.

At the end of 2003, 9.3 percent of black men 25 to 29 were in prison,
compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men
in the same age group.

In 11 states, the prison populations increased by at least 5 percent,
led by North Dakota with an 11.4 percent rise.

Eleven other states had decreases. Connecticut had the biggest drop,
at 4.2 percent.