Report: More Women Serving Extreme Sentences in the United States

The num­ber of women serv­ing extreme sen­tences in the United States has increased sharply in the last decade, a September 2021 report by a col­lab­o­ra­tive of crim­i­nal law reform orga­ni­za­tions has found.

The report, In The Extreme: Women Serving Life Without Parole and Death Sentences in the United States, released September 22 by The Sentencing Project, the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, and the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, deter­mined that the num­ber of women serv­ing sen­tences of life with­out pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole soared 43% between 2008 and 2020, far out­pac­ing the over­all 2% increase in women impris­oned for vio­lent crime dur­ing that time. The increase in death-in-prison sen­tences for women was near­ly 1.5 times greater than the 29% increase in life with­out parole sen­tences for men in the same time frame.

“The num­ber of women serv­ing life with­out parole has increased sub­stan­tial­ly and faster than men serv­ing life with­out parole,” Ashley Nellis, the author of the report, told the news orga­ni­za­tion, The 19^th*, which reports on gen­der, pol­i­tics and pol­i­cy. ​“The sys­tems that we have in this coun­try that are sup­posed to pro­vide safe­ty nets, and are sup­posed to keep peo­ple safe and pro­tect com­mu­ni­ties, I think are fail­ing women,” she said.

The orga­ni­za­tions ana­lyzed data on the more than 6,600 women serv­ing sen­tences of life with­out parole and the 52 women on death row in the United States today. They found that death sen­tences peaked for women in 1990 and have declined in the years since, after life with­out parole became a more wide­ly avail­able sen­tenc­ing alter­na­tive. Death-in-prison sen­tences for women peaked in 2013 and have declined in the fol­low­ing years but, the report notes, the total num­ber of women serv­ing sen­tences of life with­out parole con­tin­ues to rise. 

The report not­ed a cor­re­la­tion between heavy usage of life with­out parole sen­tenc­ing and cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing, find­ing that states with a high num­ber of women serv­ing life with­out parole sen­tences that autho­rize the death penal­ty also have at least one woman on death row. Florida has the most women serv­ing life with­out parole, with 241 impris­oned, and aver­aged an ​“alarm­ing” 11 life with­out parole sen­tences per year dur­ing the peri­od stud­ied. Pennsylvania and California fol­lowed with 193 and 179 women serv­ing death in prison sen­tences, respectively.

The report finds that the dis­pro­por­tion­ate growth of extreme sen­tenc­ing for women is attrib­ut­able, at least in part, to ​“gen­der-based stig­ma and bias that neg­a­tive­ly affects [women’s] court out­comes.” However, the report says, “[t]heir expe­ri­ence of vio­lence — both as vic­tims and as per­pe­tra­tors — are dis­tinct from the expe­ri­ences of men, but women are sub­ject­ed to a crim­i­nal legal sys­tem that does not acknowl­edge these important differences.” 

One crit­i­cal fac­tor that dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly sub­jects women to extreme sen­tences is manda­to­ry min­i­mums that require equal­ly harsh pun­ish­ments whether an offend­er is a major or a minor par­tic­i­pant in the crime. The report notes that women fre­quent­ly have sub­stan­tial­ly less­er involve­ment in these crimes, often have long his­to­ries of sex­u­al abuse and domes­tic vio­lence, and are often coerced into par­tic­i­pa­tion in the crimes by dom­i­neer­ing roman­tic part­ners. The laws, how­ev­er, do not afford the sen­tencer dis­cre­tion to impose less­er sen­tences based upon their less­er cul­pa­bil­i­ty and, where they do, courts rou­tine­ly fail to rec­og­nize trau­ma from domes­tic abuse as a mitigating factor. 

In the Extreme also reports that extreme sen­tences are even more dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly imposed on Black women charged with killing their inti­mate part­ners. For a vari­ety of rea­sons, includ­ing racism, sex­ism, eco­nom­ic mar­gin­al­iza­tion, and stig­ma, Black women have unique vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to domes­tic vio­lence and are less like­ly to be believed when they assert that they com­mit­ted the killing to pre­vent them­selves from being killed or from suf­fer­ing fur­ther physical injury.

Report on Women on Death Row Worldwide for Drug Offenses

The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Harm Reduction International, issued a sec­ond report on women fac­ing extreme pun­ish­ment. The report, ​‘No One Believed Me’: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty for Drug Offenses, was released in con­junc­tion with United Nations Human Rights Council meet­ings in Geneva, Switzerland on October 5, 2021. 

While impos­ing the death penal­ty for drug offens­es vio­lates inter­na­tion­al law and glob­al human rights treaties, Harm Reduction International esti­mates that at least 3,000 peo­ple are on death rows for drug offens­es world­wide, with an unknown addi­tion­al num­ber on death row in China. ​“In coun­tries that pun­ish drug offens­es with death,” the report states, ​“a large major­i­ty of the women on death row were con­vict­ed of drug-relat­ed offens­es.” Those sen­tenced to death for drug offens­es are rarely major play­ers in the drug trade, and the report found that in many cas­es, women sen­tenced to death ​“trans­port­ed drugs under the influ­ence or pres­sure of a male part­ner, who typ­i­cal­ly suf­fered few­er or no criminal consequences.”

The report exam­ines the cir­cum­stances in which women com­mit drug offens­es and are cap­i­tal­ly charged and the impact of gen­der bias on their pros­e­cu­tion and sentencing.