Prison Statistics
News and Updates
Gift Givers Present Pick up Day
Who’s helping the 1.9 million women released from prisons and jails each year:
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Given the dramatic growth of women’s incarceration in recent years, it’s concerning how little attention and how few resources have been directed to meeting the reentry needs of justice-involved women. After all, we know that women have different pathways to incarceration than men, and distinct needs, including the treatment of past trauma and substance use disorders, and more broadly, escaping poverty and meeting the needs of their children and families.
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To read the full report, click here.
The Gender Divide: Tracking Women's State Prison Growth:
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The story of women’s prison growth has been obscured by overly broad discussions of the “total” prison population for too long. This report sheds more light on women in the era of mass incarceration by tracking prison population trends since 1978 for all 50 states. The analysis identifies places where recent reforms appear to have had a disparate effect on women, and offers states recommendations to reverse mass incarceration for women alongside men.
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To read the full report, click here.
The Marshall Project Women in Prison Link Collection
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Since 2014, The Marshall Project has been curating some of the best criminal justice reporting from around the web. In these records you will find the most recent and the most authoritative articles on the topics, people and events that are shaping the criminal justice conversation. The Marshall Project does not endorse the viewpoints or vouch for the accuracy of reports other than its own.
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To view the link collection, click here.
For people leaving prison, rebuilding a life is hard even without a pandemic:
Cynthia A. Golembeski explains in her PBS News Hour Article just how difficult rebuilding a life can be for previously incarcerated individuals, with or without the presence of a global pandemic. The media has certainly shone a light on prison populations in recent months as more than 64,000 inmates and workers have become infected with the coronavirus so far, killing hundreds, and some incarcerated people are being released ahead of schedule from COVID-19 hotspots. With or without media coverage, however, researchers have been finding that individuals leaving prison face enormous obstacles in their transition out of the correctional system in the form of over 44,000 indirect obstacles.
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To read the full report, click here.
GOODWorks Participates In SB-13:
GOODWorks was proud to participate in the passing of SB-13 this past May! SB-13 called for the humane treatment of incarcerated women and transgender people in the Connecticut prison system. The push for change was sparked when news broke of a pregnant inmate forced into chains upon entering labor and culminated in the passing of this bill that allows for improving prenatal healthcare in the system as a whole. SB-13 also mandates that all female inmates be given feminine hygiene products at no personal expense, as well as sets a standard for the protection of transgender people in prison in regards to privacy. Read more about SB-13 here.
Women and Mass Incarceration
This 2019 Report details just how massive of a problem the United States decentralized criminal justice is and reveals the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender. In this article, we find a detailed view of the 231,000 women and girls incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even broader picture of correctional control. Statistics clearly show that mass incarceration targets girls and leads to increased rates of recidivism. Of the girls confined in youth facilities, nearly 10% are held for status offenses, such as “running away, truancy, and incorrigibility”. Among boys, such offenses account for less than 3% of their confined population. These statistics are particularly troubling because status offenses tend to be simply responses to abuse. To read the full report, click here
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A Growing Prison Population
Over the past quarter-century, there has been a profound change in the involvement of women within the criminal justice system. This is the result of more expansive law enforcement efforts, stiffer drug sentencing laws, and post-conviction barriers to reentry that uniquely affect women. Women now comprise a larger proportion of the prison population than ever before; the female prison population stands nearly eight times higher than its population count in 1980. More than 60% of women in state prisons have a child under the age of 18.1 Between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700%, rising from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 222,061 in 2014.
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To read the full report, click here.
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Prison & COVID-19
With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender.
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See more stats here
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Health Information & Advisories
The CT Department of Corrections is continuously updating their statistics regarding inmates who have tested positive for COVID-19. Daily updated numbers can be found at the link above. Currently, our affiliate, York CI has experienced NO positive cases.
Department of Correction COVID-19 Tracker and Coronavirus Information Page"
York Correctional Institute Statistics
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York CI Website (For all updated information regarding prison statistics and COVID status click here)
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August 2020: 511 inmates
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$121.62 a day to house an inmate (read more)
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5.5% of all CT inmates are housed at York
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The prison population in Connecticut (link)
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Link to all York CI Programs