Its an objective fact among every country that publishes crime statistics. These countries all vary widely in every other metric you can imagine (social, economic, political etcetera). But, crime being disproportionately commited by men is a universal constant. Nobody has an objectively correct answer to this question, it’s just a prompt for discussion. Share your opinion, whatever it may be. However, please don’t be a dick to other commenters. Disagreement, good faith, many view points and discussion is the goal here.
Women are better are covering it up. I think men are more prone to acts of passion or random bouts of rage, which is difficult to plan for and cover up. It’s often public, loud and messy. Women internalize from an early age that this is not acceptable behaviour if you’re not male, so we reign it in more. But that doesn’t mean the crimes aren’t committed, we’re just always cognizant of the social fallout if we’re discovered.
Anyone who has worked in a retirement home can tell you there are some very sweet ladies who will, on or near their deathbed, tell you how they killed their abusive husband decades ago. Or they share the story like words of wisdom to the younger generation.
I think a lot of women have been put in a corner by society, so they don’t feel a pressing need to play by the rules all the time.
That’s not really a practical answer for a lot of crimes, unless you also presuppose that a large portion of women covering it up are also successfully pinning them on men or preventing them from being discovered at all.
For example in the US, even if you add all unknown murders to women, they’re still totaling less than half attributed to men.
Even in more progressive areas boys are socialized differently. I’ve been in a field where I see early childhood until middle school for years now. And girls, from the beginning, and raised more strictly. They have more care in their clothes, their meals, and the skills they are taught. They rarely fight, and if they do, it’s not on impulse. My theory on why people often say “boys are easier” is because they absolutely neglect them. So the onus is on 3rd parties to often teach them basic skills and rule following, to control their impulses, etc. Even in K-5, boys are the ones who are telling their teachers to fuck off, leaving the buildings without permission, fighting, etc. Parents blame the teacher/staff, if they are present at all, and antisocial behavior gets rewarded again and again.
They’re more capable of doing so.
How so?
I’d imagine a cause they’re more economically able to and usually more physically capable. Plus violent acts are usually baked into most cultures version of masculinity.
The cultural reason was what I was thinking too.
At first, physical capability popped into my mind as well, however can a woman not steal a loaf of bread? Or grab a knife and stab someone, or grab a gun and pull the trigger?
Economically able to could also lead into the gender imbalance in executive positions.
However I would like to hear the person I replied to’s reasoning instead of us guessing or putting answers in their mouth so to speak, as ‘more capable of doing so’ doesn’t really lend much to the conversation.
Women can and women do. Last year a women few miles away decided she had enough of her husband abusing her and decided to stab him in the driveway. Not only did the husband manage to pull out the knife but stab the wife to death. I’ve seen neighbor’s CCTV footage. Luckily/unluckily however you see it she did enough damage that he died before paramedics arrived, but he did so much damage from the same knife, that she died before him. Per cops, Wife did leave a journal entry with intention to murder the guy and expected to be going to jail for murder. But ended up dying before that.
There is clearly difference of strength for any kind of physical contact weapons. Guns for sure are equalizers in that regards.
Yes of course, but the crime was still committed and she had full capability of committing the crime regardless of how it ended up for her. The question wasn’t “why are males more successful at committing a crime”, although this is where my mind went as well.
Probably would have lived if he didn’t pull the knife out
I can’t really disagree on a physical level but this universal constant carries to ALL crime not just violent/physical.
Think about it more deeply.
Can you elaborate on your initial statement instead? Guessing what you think/mean isn’t really a good way to understand your stance.
it could just be a coincidence, i’m not sure if men are naturally more violent or evil than women.
Cos we’re fucking winners
Also I have a pet theory that they don’t they just get away with it more often. So that Skews the data. Also in the US incarnation is just another way to reimplement slavery that’s why African American men are targeted more for prosecution than any other demographic. Plus men are geared by society to be providers for their families so crime is sometimes thought of as an option when people are desperate.
I recognize the whole 13th amendment problem but again this is a blanket thing, not a US thing. I don’t understand your fist statement though, are you saying women actually commit more crime but they just don’t get caught? I can agree with the final part of your comment.
Yes that women on a whole are smatter about it when they decide to commit crimes. Plus the justice system is also geared to be more lenient on women also plays a factor as they are not thought of as suspect’s and that feeds the numbers that enforces the stereotype. So its feedback loop. Also like i said its my own personal theory I’m not declaring that’s its fact.
Cuz women don’t have the balls to commit crime.
This is a joke.
Testosterone makes dudes crazy.
It is a hell of a drug
I think it could be useful to change the optics a little bit. Instead of seeing it as a purely gender-based issue, it would be interesting to also see it through the intersection of gender and criminality, as well as the associated biases and more.
Some things that come to mind in this respect:
- Men are more likely to become suspects in the first place
This is beautifully illustrated in this answer. In essence, we don’t have statistics on crimes committed; we have statistics on cases closed. Using this statistic (which states men are most common offenders), police is more likely to see men as potential offenders, and as a result, sentence men more. This is reflected in the crime statistics and…you get the idea.
- Men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes, physical abuse, and bullying with physical elements, prompting them to develop more aggressive defense mechanisms
Such victims can often overreact on perceived dangers, causing trouble and sending them through the loop of stirring and thereby expecting more aggression. As a response to physical dangers, men often develop high physical strength (making their response more dangerous) and higher levels of testosterone (contributing to aggression). This is also projected onto a much larger group of men - many boys are preemptively taught to “stand up to bullies” (not by exposing and reporting them, but through the same aggressive defense), sending even those otherwise unaffected through the same loop.
Outside of this particular scope:
- Men have much less freedom of healthy emotional expression
Pretty much the only socially allowed negative emotion a man can have is aggression. Men expressing sadness, grief, fear are often seen as “weak”, “disgusting”, their feelings are invalidated, they are said they’re not “real men”. Eventually, all these emotions turn to anger, which is considered acceptable. Left without proper venting, the person can become danger to others.
- Men have more impulsive sexual behavior
Male sexual drive is more pronounced compared to female one. Lack of sexual satisfaction can be particularly dangerous, clouding healthy judgment in certain individuals. Unlike women, who can channel this into sexual work and other outlets, men are relatively rarely presented such opportunity. This leads to elevated rates of sexual offenses.
They are inherently more violent.
I believe there’s societal causes to the disparity. Part I feel is that when men are in danger and need the safety net, they’re less likely to receive aid. There’s not as vast of a support network for men as there are women. Add in a perception of men being considered expendable throughout history with women and children given priority. Men are more likely to be forgotten by a system that does not value them and their only means of survival may be crime. That’s crime based on poverty and such means.
Crime that is white collar I think comes down to thrill seeking and reward. The propensity for men to be in extreme sports, to be stuntmen, and I believe there were instances there were more male skydivers. It’s the thrill of it and getting away with it. Which leads into also psyche and are men more proportionate to have anti-social behaviors.
What a dumb bait question. Putting aside dubious biological pitfalls, the lived experience of men and women are drastically different and have diverged exponentially in the age of digital isolation. You are trying to draw a simple comparison between fundamentally different subjects. Even experts have trouble dissecting this, yet you think that randoms on a digital forums will generate valuable discussion with one-off snowflake opinions? Troll better
In most cases, I believe it’s a mix of hormones and traditionalism. Men have generally been more likely to seek grandeur by participating in violent activities, or, violent activities are demanded by their particular social group. Sometimes a mix of both.
I think it also it boils down to how gender roles are taught by different cultures. If men are taught to be the risk takers, it only makes sense that boundaries and laws will get pushed more by men. After all, intentionally breaking a law may simply be viewed as a calculated risk and not as something that should never be done.
Honestly speaking, it seems too easy of an answer to just blame male physiology. The social aspects of this can’t be ignore either.
This is it. It’s entirely a social cause. There’s an unstated rule that males are generally disposable unless they have status and/or resources.
This leads to men with low self esteem and nothing to lose, no hope, taking risks and taking out their frustration on society. It’s both for survival, to have some kind of relevance, and because what the hell else are they going to do when the coping mechanisms run out.
I have no idea how to solve this… but it’s entirely caused by capitalism, as per usual. When people are valued only by a dollar amount, this is what happens.
I had a feeling someone would say “it’s entirely caused by capitalism”. I do think a large chunk has to do with the social settings but I don’t think its 100% of the issue. Saying financial benefit is the root cause is pretty reductive in my opinion. I think crime would still exist in a stateless, classless and moneyless society.
It’s not just ‘financial benefit,’ it’s everything that comes with it. Exploiting the environment and people, consumerism substituting meaning. Individuality over community, and a desperate rat race giving us no time or means to look past the prison bars.
Crime would exist everywhere, but there’s other societal configurations that would reduce it or completely change the distribution.
We have crime in large part because it ‘costs too much’ to prevent it.
You hit the nail on the head.
I don’t think it’s entirely socially constructed. Testosterone has a clear scientific link to aggressive behavior.
I think that’s a pretty well reasoned answer. Can’t really pick anything out I strongly disagree with. Thanks for the contribution!
Violent crime?
Younger people do too. Brain chemistry, social conditioning, men are more likely to commit violent crime, and the effect is magnified because they are physically stronger overall.
Crime in general? Like shoplifting, embezzlement, fraud? Do men commit more? I don’t know if that is true.
AnarchistArtificer has a point, but I think we do have good evidence that men commit more of the crimes of violence. Murder and rape are more commonly committed by men. It could be that they are just more successful at it, for lack of a better word - if I got in a fight with a man my size, I am the one more likely to be harmed, right? But I don’t think so. It does seem evident, from the evidence we have, that men do commit more violent crime.
This doesn’t mean that men are in general violent. Just that the subset of violent people is mostly guys.
To somewhat play Devil’s Advocate, I would highlight that the stats don’t show who commits more crime, but who gets caught more. If no-one arrests you, (or if a court finds you not guilty), you won’t be in the stats.
In my country, for instance, police can stop and search you if they have “reasonable suspicion” that you’re carrying something illegal (stolen good, drugs, weapons etc.). If police are operating under the assumption that men commit more crime than women, they’re far more likely to be suspicious of a man committing the same crime as a woman.
I haven’t read anything that’s about gender bias specifically at this level of policing, but I do know there’s a lot of research (especially in the US) on how racial bias causes black neighbourhoods to be more heavily policed than neighbourhoods with comparable crime levels, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where heavier policing leads to increased belief that black people commit more crime, which leads to heavier policing[1][2]
I do know that after an arrest has been made, women tend to fare better than men; they are less likely to be sentenced, and when they are, they tend to receive less severe sentences than men, even for equivalent crimes[2][4] . This is speculative, but I imagine this has a cascading effect — if there is a crime where the punishment could range from community service to a prison sentence, then the person who gets community service is statistically less likely to reoffend than the person who goes to prison[3]
All that in mind, I’m pretty confident that the gender ratio in crime statistics gives a skewed impression of who actually commits more crime, and that women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime — though I can’t guess on to what degree this is the case. However, it’s entirely possible that women commit crimes at a similar rate to men, or even at a higher rate. We can’t really know.
And to finish off this comment with a slightly more shitposty answer that still links into my broader point, it’s possible that women commit as much crime as men, but the statistics are skewed towards men because women are more effective criminals.
I include this last possibility because I am uncomfortable with how you framed things in your question, with phrases like “crime being disproportionately committed by men is a universal constant”. Statistics are never Truth, and are, at best, only ever an approximation. Stats can give us a sense of clarity in an overwhelming world by reducing down complexity into much more easily parsed, quantitative data, often presented in an easy to visualise manner. It feels objective. However, statistics only serve to mask the underlying bias in what data we choose to collect, who collects it, and how — which means that treating statistics as objective can be dangerous due to making us less aware of biases and inequality, and thus even less objective.
I like the way that the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway puts it; she describes data visualisations as “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere”[4][5]. I’mma quote a long passage from an excellent book here, because I don’t think I can explain it any better than this:
“The view from nowhere—from a distance, from up above, like a god—may be data visualization’s most signature feature. It’s also the most ethically complicated to navigate for the ways in which it masks the people, the methods, the questions, and the messiness that lies behind clean lines and geometric shapes. Haraway calls it a trick because it makes the viewer believe that they can see everything, all at once, from an imaginary and impossible standpoint. But it’s also a trick because what appears to be everything, and what appears to be neutral, is always what she terms a partial perspective. And in most cases of seemingly “neutral” visualizations, this perspective is the one of the dominant, default group.” [5]
To bring things back to our question, I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true, but due to inherent bias in how the data behind these statistics are gathered (i.e. documented inequalities in policing and sentencing), we simply don’t know. Statistics always carries this problem of bias being hidden in the data, but it’s especially tricky when dealing with complex socioeconomic matters such as crime. To me, this is a standout example of an area where we need to be especially cautious that we don’t mistake the stats for truth.
[1]: Open Access Academic Paper:
“Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence”, (2023), Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01370[2]: More accessible summary of [1]
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/smartphone-records-reveal-racial-disparities-in-neighborhood-policing/[3]: Paywalled Academic Paper:
“Gender Disparities in Sentencing”, (2020), Arnaud Philippe
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12333
Unpaywalled SciDB mirror via Anna’s Archive[4]: More accessible summary of [3], by Michelle Kilfoyle and Arnaud Philippe
https://ceps.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2021/11/17/gender-stereotypes-see-female-criminals-fare-better-in-court/[5]: Old Academic Paper:
“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599
Quote and reference retrieved via [6][6]: Open Access Book “Data Feminism”, (2020), Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein
Fairly academic, but also quite accessible to anyone interested in how socioeconomic inequality shapes how we use data, and how data feeds inequality. I highly recommend this book, it is excellent
Quoted section found hereAnd on the off chance one of you delightful nerds would like to read more, here is a link to the main book page, for your convenience:
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/
^(It’s funny that now I’m no longer in academia, I seem to have fun writing cited essays. Though to be fair, I studied biochemistry, so this is outside of my main wheelhouse — which is probably why I’m so diligent with citing my claims)
An excellent answer. I’m surprised you haven’t been downvoted into oblivion, because this bias is a very unpopular thing to bring up.
Basically all our data suggests that men commit more crime than women across the boars like the original poster said. I don’t necessarily disagree with your comments about bias in data, but your final conclusion I don’t think is accurate:
I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true…
Sure I don’t think we know this with 100% certainty but it is much more than plausible, it is with a high degree of confidence true. If all of the data points to one conclusion I don’t think it is very fair to throw your arms up and say there could be bias everywhere, show that there is bias across the board and then let’s try to account for the bias. I don’t even think you have shown there to be bias.
You also state
women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime
This conclusion I don’t see proven in your analysis, racial bias does not equal gender bias and it’s quite a jump to use that as evidence. Also we have more data than just who is caught or who is sentenced, there are surveys asking if you have ever shoplifted (sure these need to be take with a grain of salt), there’s data about the suspected gender of a perpetrator of crime when it is initially reported. Etc. Etc.
It is a very important thing to keep in mind statistical data is not infallible and in some cases only slightly useful (self reported surveys). But if you take all that into account and look across the board we can be rather confident men commit more crime than women. Not 100% but probably 90%+
You introduce the possibility of bias but don’t really prove there actually is that bias in any data sets. This argument feels dangerous in the opposite direction of what Donna Haraway is warning about, you have taken weaknesses in the entire category of statistical data to throw their conclusions out entirely without having specific reasons to.
By mentioning racial bias, I was making the wider point of how the statistics rely on data that is inherently biased due to how it was collected; Inequality in policing and the judicial system leads to different outcomes.
A concrete example from the UK is that in the year ending March 2024, under the “stop and search” procedures, “there were 59,549 searches of women, […] and 447,952 searches of men […]” (Elided parts of the quote are because the article compares stats to the year prior, which isn’t relevant to our discussion)
That’s a ratio of men and women being searched of around 15:2 . I’m going to treat that as if it were 7:1, because I want to set up a hypothetical. Now obviously this doesn’t include any of the downstream stuff like rates of actually getting arrested, or later found guilty, because that would be far too complex to consider here. Let’s treat stop and search rates as a proxy for crime rates, and consider two different scenarios that could explain these data.
In scenario 1, we would assume that for each gender, the number of people stopped and searched is proportional to the number of people who commit crimes, I.e. that:
the gendered ratio of stop and search (7:1) ≈ the gendered ratio of crimes committed (7:1)
Now for scenarios 2, let’s assume that this isn’t the case, and that actual ratio of crimes committed is 𝒳 :1, where 𝒳 is unknown; although my belief is that 𝒳 lies somewhere between 1 and 7 (i.e. that women commit more crimes than is recorded in the stats, but likely not significantly more than men do), 𝒳 could even be larger than 7.
There’s a lot of possible reasons why we might find that 𝒳 ≠ 7. Police may actually use stop and search as a tactic to harass women (depressingly common based on what we’ve seen of police abusing their power against women), leading to women being over counted in the stats compared to their actual crime rates; or maybe police are less likely to stop and search women because they’ve found that to find contraband like drugs, a more invasive search would be necessary (I, and many women I have known have occasionally hid small, secret items in their bras, and I imagine many criminals would have had the same idea); or maybe police officers are worried about being accused of abusing their power to harass women, so their personal sense of professional risk leads them to be less likely to stop women. I’m not trying to make the case for any of these in particular, merely assert that there are many plausible reasons why the ratio of stop and searches might be different to the ratio of crimes committed.
In both scenario 1 and 2, our data shows us the same thing: that men commit more crimes than women at a roughly 7:1 ratio. However, in scenario 2, this conclusion is an incorrect one, due to bias in how the data was collected. The crux of my point is that we don’t know whether reality is closer to scenario 1 or 2, and we don’t have a way of knowing because we have no way of counting true rates of crime; anything that tries to study crime is inevitably going to have a heckton of false negatives — that is, criminals who get away with it. And every innocent person who has been imprisoned is a false positive. False positives and false negatives are a problem in any statistical study, but I am arguing that this is especially significant in this case due to well documented inequalities in policing, affecting multiple axes of oppression. That’s why I brought up racial bias — to highlight the many flaws of policing as a method of data collection.
Often when we run into the problems of false positives and false negatives in statistics, we are able to estimate how accurate our proxy measurements are by comparing them to a reference gold standard. During COVID, for instance, when Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs) were being tested, we were able to test them against PCR tests, which were known to be extremely accurate. We have no such reference standard when it comes to crime stats — all we have is the proxy. What I am advocating for is that we keep this in mind, and take any crime statistics with a hefty dose of salt
Your reply here I pretty much agree with completely but you have moved the goal posts quite a bit from your initial comment.
What I’m gathering from your comment here is that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself. Totlally agree with that.
But your original point that we just don’t know if women actually commit less crime than men is not supported here as I don’t believe it was in your original comment. Virtually all the data I have seen (and I admit I’m nowhere near a subject expert on this) suggests men commit more crime then women. This goes beyond police searches, convictions, etc. Its everything. It is extremely unlikely that there is enough types of bias across the entire dataset of crime stats across the world to make it so women commit roughly the same amount of crime as men (or even more crazy MORE crime).
Now one of the big issues with this is that “crime” is a squishy definition, if we count speeding of 1mph over the limit than just the number of miles driven per gender would be enough to sway the stats. Cause everyone speeds all the time pretty much which is a “crime”
I’m using this:
“that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself.”
to argue that the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats.
I mean, I’m a scientist, and so my whole thing is about grappling with the fact that statistics are just a proxy for the thing we actually care about. But the thing that makes statistics useful in science is being able to estimate how uncertain we are in our data — if we don’t have sufficient understanding of the data and how much it’s affected by bias, then it’s pointless to rely on it in our analyses. Less than pointless, actually, because it’ll lead us to a false sense of confidence where we think we somewhat understand some phenomena, but in reality we’re digging in the completely wrong areas.
the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats
This right here is what I’m arguing against. I’d go so far as to say applying this at a macro level is dangerous and destructive (and let me be clear I am not accusing you of doing anything dangerous or destructive, this has been a lovely conversation and I hope I carry no offense. A politician saying this would scare me, but talking about this in a small setting is interesting and productive).
What I have seen from your argument is the possibility for bias at a few different levels of hypothetical data. Now again I’ll caveat that this is not my area of expertise and I’m probably not doing a great job representing the body of literature, but let’s examine a few studies to hopefully demonstrate what I mean. In this study accessing women’s arrest rate for violent crime there are some interesting charts that help illustrate my point (which is largely unrelated to the focus of the paper). They came up with this set of graphs:
I’ll grant that these partially illustrate your point (the part I said I agreed with), the arrest rate for a crime is not necessarily tied to the act of doing the crime itself, and it does so by comparing victim reports of crime with arrest records as a victim report has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or not. Now you could also say that maybe it is less likely that a victim of a woman committing assault is less likely to report they were victimized along with them less likely being arrested. Sure I could even get behind that, but does that account for the 10-20 fold difference in both of them? That would be wild.
For an ever clearer example of this let’s look at another citation (shared author as before) looking at gender differences in drunk driving. In this analysis it was found that 30% of self-reported drunk drivers are women, 25% of DUI arrests are women, and 18% of legally intoxicated drivers in fatal crashes are women. Here we would need to come up with an explanation that up to triples the “real” counts of DUI driving for all three of these stats. We’d have to say well women are 2x less likely to self report than men (why?), they are 2x less likely to be pulled over for DUI (maybe because cops don’t target them as much?) , and that they are 3x less likely to cause accidents that result in death (I guess they are just better drunk drivers by a massive margin).
Even if there are potential for bias in the data you can then account for it with other studies, for the last point the cleanest way would be to ask “are women better at driving under the influence than men?” and a study that tried to tackle exactly that found that “women displayed greater impairment than men on all behavioral tests and also reported higher levels of subjective intoxication compared with men.”
Sure we could poke and prod at hypothetical biases in this data but just because you can generate a plausible explanation for bias doesn’t mean you should “largely disregard the stats”. The reason I claim this is dangerous at the macro level is because this is how you get climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, smoking and lung cancer deniers, and on and on. There are times where it is appropriate to raise eyebrows at statistical findings, but with something as clear cut as violent crime with men vs women it is not it.
I might be wrong but there is a uptick in female violent crime. I believe crime has to do with the themes in society and the anti human super structure that is pushing many to their limits. A lot of familicides…and crime in general has gone up. At least certain crimes. We are all edward bernays butt babies and our likes and dislikes are imprinted on us at a young age… some rebel but most do not… so simply, we are a byproduct of our environment. That environment is now a digital cage that has background processes that can trigger events. Not precise but just good enough. Broad strokes for the epstein folks. Women uphold the patriarchy so men follow and live up to their roles at least in breeder communities. Domestic violence occurs in other unions as well but I personally think the breeders have it the hardest in that arena. Man is taught to be terrible communicators and to be violent. toy guns and shit… we got jizzlane maxwells everywhere. It is just a shitty baby diaper of a world really. A lot of the terrible things that go on in the USA could be prevented by a redistribution of wealth.
the female jail incarceration rate went up by 12%, while the male rate fell by 10%. As overall incarcerated populations rebounded in 2021 and 2022 after COVID-related reductions, the increase of the female populations outpaced those of men.
- Females report that they make up a larger share of violent crime victims: 51% of all violent victimizations in 2022 compared to 41% of all victimizations in 1993, the start of the data series. (This figure is drawn from the National Crime Victimization Survey; it excludes homicides and includes simple assaults.)
- Growth in arrest rates for women (41% higher in 2019 than in 1980) is due in part to a rise in arrest rates for violent crimes (63% higher in 2019 than 1980) and drug crimes (317% higher in 2019 than 1980).
- The incarceration rate for women in U.S. prisons and jails increased dramatically (+431%) from 1982 through 2007, and then flattened as the number of incarcerated men began to fall. Between 2010 and 2019, the year before the COVID pandemic jolted the criminal justice system, the female jail incarceration rate went up by 12%, while the male rate fell by 10%. As overall incarcerated populations rebounded in 2021 and 2022 after COVID-related reductions, the increase of the female populations outpaced those of men.
- More than half of the women in state and federal prisons are parents to minor children, and an estimated three of four women in local jails are mothers. Prior to incarceration, mothers were more than twice as likely as fathers to be the sole or primary caretaker of their children.
- Most justice-involved women come from backgrounds of poverty and trauma, and they are more likely than justice-involved men to be victims of physical and sexual abuse, suffer severe substance use and mental health issues, and to have experienced homelessness in the year prior to incarceration.
We are all capeable of great evil, just wait til you get drafted
