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Women In Prisons

Decent Essays

Some of the most neglected, misunderstood and unseen women in our society are those in our jails, prisons and community correctional facilities. While women's rate of incarceration has increased dramatically, tripling in the last decade, prisons have not kept pace with the growth of the number of women in prison; nor has the criminal justice system been redesigned to meet women's needs, which are often quite different from the needs of men.
There are many reasons for the growing numbers of women in the criminal justice system, but the primary one is the increase in drug-related convictions and the advent of mandatory sentences for these offenses. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, over 60% of the women in their custody are serving …show more content…

It states that when trying to treat women offenders for substance abuse problems, it can become very complex due to a number of barriers that the facility faces just to get the services for in prison and post-prison compared to male prisons. The rate in which offenders reoffended upon release from prison was different between each state and each treatment group. For example, in New York the offender-based substance abuse program showed that women in the treatment group had substantial decreases in reoffending in comparison with women who had partaken in other kinds of prison programs. A detailed study of women inmates were entered into a reviewing clinical study of substance abuse treatment for one year. Every one of the women who participated in this program had experienced either some type of abuse whether it was sexual, physical, or observing violence to traumatic events happening in their lives such as disasters or accidents. All of these reasons being the cause for effect as to why they suffer from substance abuse. Information was collected from the women being questioned about their past experiences with different forms of abuse and obtained through an Initial Trauma Review. after the time of the study over 70 % of the women had been victims again of sexual abuse, some …show more content…

Rehabilitation needs a positive atmosphere and subjects who want help to work. Nothing is 100% but this study showed that prisoners who took it serious and had the correct methods, took full advantage of the rehab. All of the inmates that participated in the substance abuse programs reported that they had found some aspects of the programs to be beneficial and most of them said that they had made a significant progress in addressing their substance abuse problems. A lot of the time inmates will enter a rehabilitation program just so that they can get some time reduced off from their sentence. If the rehabilitation program is relevant to the crime in which the inmate committed then the rehabilitation program will more than likely be successful. Previously, substance abuse treatment, research and recovery has been primarily based on the male prison population, more times than not ignoring the needs of women. While this neglect has a serious impact on women and treatment programs in the free world, the problem is magnified for women in the criminal justice population. Most female prisoners are poor, undereducated, unskilled, single mothers, and a disproportionate number of them are women of

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