eternallybeautifullyblack:One-Third of the World’s Women in Prison Have One Striking Thing in Comm
eternallybeautifullyblack: One-Third of the World’s Women in Prison Have One Striking Thing in Common Zak Cheney They’re locked up in the United States. All 201,200 of them. As you can see, it’s not even close. Citing data from the International Center for Prison Studies, Niall McCarthy of Statistica visualizes how the United States housed nearly one-third of the globe’s incarcerated women in 2013. It’s a huge problem the American public has only begun to recognize. The context: Recently, discussions around the rise of mass incarceration have focused largely on men, most notably, black men. One in 10 black men is in prison on a given day, while they remain nearly six times as likely to be imprisoned in their lifetime than their white peers. While those figures are staggering, they’re also part of a much larger story. Considering how its total prison population grew by 500% in the past 30 years, it might seem unsurprising that America locks up so many women compared with the rest of the world. But here’s the kicker: Growth in the number of female prisoners was nearly 1.5 times that of men for this period. [Continue reading article at Identities.Mic.] -- source link