The Change Mariner

Women Find a New Arena for Equality: Prison

New York Times:

Becky Pemberton, a nurse, is serving a 35-year sentence at the Mabel Bassett women's prison here for grabbing money out of cash registers in stores in Oklahoma City while she was addicted to heroin.

She did not have a weapon. But the way Ms. Pemberton figures it, she was lucky in her sentence. The prosecutor originally offered her a plea agreement of 100 years.

Ms. Pemberton, 48, is representative of a nationwide trend that state officials, law enforcement authorities and criminologists are struggling to understand: a rapid growth in the number of women being arrested, convicted and sent to prison.

Nowhere has there been more attention focused on that trend than in Oklahoma, where the incarceration rate for women is more than double the national average. The Legislature set up a task force this year to learn why.
Nationally, from 1993 through 2002, while overall crime was falling, the number of women arrested rose 14.1 percent, according to the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Report. In the same period, the number of men arrested fell 5.9 percent.

Some individual crimes show even more striking disparities. While the number of men arrested on charges of aggravated assault fell 12.3 percent in the decade, the number of women arrested on the same charge rose 24.9 percent.

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