Although men continue to comprise 90 percent of the prison population, women’s incarceration has increased 800 percent over the past thirty years, and the incarceration rate for black women is double that of white women. Today, women are more likely than men to be imprisoned for drug-related offenses—a particularly troubling reality given that 62 percent of women in state prisons have minor children, many of whom are forced into foster care or left with relatives who scarcely have the means to care for them.
