Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration: Processes of Power, Silence, and Resistance

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, thirty-seven percent of female prisoners, compared to twenty-eight percent of male prisoners, had incomes of less than six hundred dollars per month prior to arrest; approximately thirty percent of female prisoners, in comparison to only eight percent of male prisoners, reported receiving some form of weliare assistance prior to arrest (Greenfeld and Snell 1999). Nearly forty-five percent of women in local jails and state prisons and twenty-five percent of women in federal prisons have not graduated high school, with between sixty and seventy percent never having attended any college (Greenfeld and Snell 1999). [...] seventy-three percent of women in state prison, compared to fifty-five percent of men, had a mental health problem in 2005, with nearly twenty-four percent of the women, in comparison to about sixteen percent oí men, having a mental illness (Ditton 1999).