Two new reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan thinktank, reveal that imprisoning women costs up to 75% more than incarcerating men, yet halving their prison time could yield significant savings with negligible impacts on public safety.
Cost Disparities in Women's Incarceration
The research found that keeping women in prison costs roughly $87,000 to $122,000 per woman each year, compared with $70,000 for men. Factors driving higher costs include specialized healthcare needs such as pregnancy care and smaller populations that lead to higher per-person expenses. The studies project that female incarceration could cost as much as $34bn per year by 2035.
“Incarceration for women is very expensive, and we are using this very expensive tool, prison, on what is, on average, a relatively low-risk group compared to men,” said Dr Stephanie Kennedy, the council’s policy director.
Crime Impact of Reduced Sentences
A companion study from the council analyzed data from Illinois and North Carolina, finding that cutting women’s time behind bars by 50% had a negligible effect on crime. Early releases were projected to produce increases in annual arrests amounting to just 0.3% in Illinois and 0.2% in North Carolina. Of those new arrests, nine out of 10 would be for nonviolent offenses.
Researchers estimate that cutting prison time in half for women would net as much as $94.1m in cost savings for Illinois and as much as $102.7m in North Carolina. These figures likely undercount total savings, as they do not account for the unpaid labor of caregiving, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning that must be replaced when a woman is removed from her family and community—a loss estimated at $2.8bn a year.
Personal and Societal Costs
Colette Payne of Chicago, a formerly incarcerated mother of three who served time for what she called “survival crimes” including retail theft, forgery and drug-related offenses, said the findings resonate. “We are primary caregivers and we leave small children behind,” said Payne, now director of the Reclamation Project, a mutual support and re-entry organization. “It was my sister, my brothers, grandmas, fraternal and maternal grandmas of my children, their father, it was – yeah, it was all of them who supported me on my journey to recovery, and healing.”
Kennedy noted that most discussions about incarceration focus on men, ignoring differences that skew the true costs of criminal legal policy, especially since the majority of incarcerated women are mothers. “When you pull a man out of a home and send him to prison, his children stay with their mother, and so someone is still washing hands and putting on jammies and buying groceries and doing homework with those kids there,” she said. When a woman is removed from the home, it destabilizes entire families—an even steeper price to pay.
