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Alternative Sentencing

Alternative sentencing is a type of sentencing designed to alleviate the problem of prison overcrowding and to provide a different way of monitoring convicted felons during a period of punishment. Alternative sentencing for women has been instituted as a way of reducing the costs of imprisonment and also because women offenders are seen as less violent and so less of a risk than male offenders.

There have always been women in prison in the United States, but they have never been given the attention or the concern that men have. They have been ignored because of their small numbers and because female inmates tended to complain and not riot, which made it even easier for institutions to overlook their unique needs. This may be one reason why the United States never developed a correctional system for women to replace the reformatory system that fell into disuse shortly before World War II. By the mid1970s, in face, only about half the states and territories had separate prisons for women, and many jurisdictions housed women inmates in male facilities or in women's facilities in other states. This began to change in the 1980s because the nature of criminal justice changed so that the number of women in U.S. prisons jumped dramatically. In 1980, there were just over 12,000 women in U.S. state and federal prisons; by 1997, there were almost 80,000:

In about a decade and a half, the number of women incarcerated in the nation's prisons had increased sixfold. This astonishing increase should not be seen simply as a reflection of the increase in male incarceration during the same period. Women's "share" of total imprisonment has more than doubled in the past three decades, from 3 percent in 1970 to 6.4 percent in 1997. The rate of growth in female imprisonment also has outpaced that of men; since 1985 the annual rate of growth in the number of female inmates has averaged 11.1 percent, higher than the 7.6 percent average incr...

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Alternative Sentencing. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:15, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702274.html