“As the world’s largest jailer, the United
States, with only 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the
world’s prisoners, has increased its incarceration rate of women by 832 percent
over three decades. The incarceration rate of black women in the United States
has increased by 828 percent over a five year period and black women now
constitute one half of the US female prison population. In Western Australia,
the number of incarcerated women doubled between 1995 and 2001, with Indigenous
women comprising 54 percent of the female prisoner population although
constituting only 2 percent of the state’s population. In Canada, the
representation of Indigenous women in prisons has increased nearly 90 percent over
the past decade and has been declared “nothing short of a crisis”” Harsha
Walia
