New Report Looks at Strategies to Cut Incarceration of Illinois Women by Half
Colette Payne (right) speaks at the annual Mother s Day vigil, organized by Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, outside Cook County Jail in Chicago. Payne and other organizers at the Women s Justice Institute released a report detailing the impact of incarceration on women and explaining how to dramatically reduce the Illinois women s prison population.
Between 1980 and 2014, the number of women incarcerated across the United States increased by 700 percent. In Illinois, womenâs incarceration increased by 767 percent during that same time period. While that number has slowly decreased over the past two decades, the 1,418 women in the stateâs prisons at the end of 2020 is still more than quadruple the 401 women imprisoned in 1980. (These numbers only include people in Illinoisâs âwomenâs prisons;â they exclude people in womenâs jails and trans women in menâ