Female Offenders and Special Needs

Female Arrests

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), report crime and arrest data from more than 12,000 city, county, and state law-enforcement agencies in the United States. According to the UCR publication Crime in the United States, 2009, law enforcement, nationwide, made an estimated 13,687,241 arrests in 2009. Approximately 580,000 were for violent crimes, and about 1.7 million were for property crimes. Specifically, the highest arrest counts were for drug abuse violations (1,663,582), driving under the influence (1,440,409), and the property crime larceny-theft (1,334,933). Of total arrests, 26.3 percent were of females.

Correctional programs treat a predominantly male offender population and are often ill equipped to handle women's self-care, health, and mental health needs.

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Female rates of arrest are highest for prostitution (disorderly conduct and vagrancy), property crimes (larceny, embezzlement, forgery, and fraud), [Page 167]substance abuse (driving under the influence, drugs, and liquor law violations), and simple assault. The offense category of simple assault includes mostly minor incidents of threat or physical attack against another person, such as scratching, biting, throwing objects, hitting, and kicking.

Although females are underrepresented in serious personal and property crimes, such as homicide, rape, robbery, and burglary, 10-year arrest trends, reported in UCR, indicate the female percentage of arrests has risen 11.4 percent. During the same time frame, the percentage of arrests for men has decreased 4.9 percent. The offense profiles of women have shifted toward greater involvement in robbery (up 40.8 percent), burglary (up 26.7 percent), and larceny (up 37.3 percent).

In 2009, 83 percent of female arrests in the United States were of women over the age of 18. One fourth (25 percent) of the female offenders were between the ages of 25 and 35. Five percent of women arrested were younger than 15, and the peak age for an act of juvenile delinquency was 16. In regard to age of female offenders, the 10-year arrests trends remain unchanged.

Females in Confinement

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) publication Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 2008 reported that state and federal correctional authorities had jurisdiction or legal authority over 1.6 million prisoners. Additionally, 785,556 inmates were held in custody in local jails. An estimated 207,700 women, or 9 percent of those incarcerated in 2008, were held in prisons or jails. That represents a 33 percent increase in female prisoners since 2000.

Female incarceration rates were considerably lower than male incarceration rates at every age. Black females (with an incarceration rate of 349 per 100,000) were more than twice as likely as Hispanic females (147 per 100,000) and more than 3.5 times more likely than white females (93 per 100,000) to have been in prison or jail on June 30, 2008.

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