Female Prisoners: Using Imprisonment Statistics to Understand the Place of Women in the Criminal Justice System (From Women in Corrections: Staff and Clients, P 1-7, 2000, Australian Institute of Criminology -- See NCJ-187936)

• NCJ Number: 187953
• Author(s): Stuart Ross; Kay Forster
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 7 pages
• Sale Source: Australian Institute of Criminology
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Statistics
• Language: English
• Country: Australia
• Note: Paper presented at the Women in Corrections: Staff and Clients Conference held in Adelaide, Australia, October 31-November 1, 2000. Downloaded March 21, 2001

Annotation

This paper provides statistics to show that both the extent and the severity of women's offending in Australia has increased between 1987 and 1999.

Abstract

In the last decade in Australia, and particularly in the last 5 years, there has been rapid growth in the number of women in prison. At the prisoner census on June 30, 1995, there were 835 women in the national inmate population of 17,428. In the 4 years to the June 30, 1999, census, the number of male prisoners increased by 21 percent. Over the same period, the number of female prisoners increased nearly three times as fast, from 835 in 1995 to 1,365 in 1999, a 63-percent increase. At the time of the 1987 prisoner census, males were significantly more likely to be imprisoned for assault, sexual assault, robbery, breaking and entering, and driving offenses. Females were more likely to be in prison for fraud, other property offenses, justice procedure offenses, and trafficking in drugs. Homicide was the only offense group where there were no obvious differences between male and female inmates. In the 1999 prisoner census, most of the sex differences in offending were still apparent; however, the proportion of women in prison for assault was almost the same as that of men.