WUNRN
USA – Nearly 1/3 of All Global Female Prisoners Are Incarcerated in the United States
By Niall McCarthy – September
23, 2014
According
to the International Centre for Prison Studies, nearly a third of all female
prisoners worldwide are incarcerated in the United States of America. There are
201,200 women in US prisons, representing 8.8 percent of the total American
prison population.
China
comes a very distant second to the United States with 84,600 female prisoners
in total or 5.1% of the overall Chinese prison population. Russia is in third
position – 59,000 of its prisoners are women and this comes to 7.8 percent of
the total.
Across the world, 625,000 women and children are being held in penal institutions with the female prison population growing on all five continents.