Drug and violent offenses charges main reason for women to prison

In recent years, the rate of women being incarcerated for drug offenses has risen significantly. From the late ’70s until this past decade, the drug charges rose from 11 percent to at least 30 percent. Possession had the highest rate, while delivery charges followed closely behind. Also, a great portion of the women in prison have been incarcerated because of violent offense charges, the most common being murder or manslaughter and robbery. However, women in prison over drug offenses are high because the sentence terms given have been extended for these types of charges over the years.

Primarily, many assert, is that the length of sentence given to violent and/or property offenders has stayed constant since the 1980s, and sentence
length of drug offenders has increased… The average maximum length of sentence given to female drug offenders has indeed increased substantially between 1986 to 1997, from 54 months to 84 months, or 55 percent.

Also, the National Institute of Corrections Library shows that the county that has the highest possesion rate is Harris county, with nearly half of the charges coming from this area at 45.88 percent, beating out the other counties tremendously.