8 AMERICAN BLUES THEATER With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender. This report provides a first-of-its-kind detailed view of the 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even larger picture of correctional control. We break the data down to show the various correctional systems that control women, and to examine why women are locked up. In stark contrast to the total incarcerated population, where the state prison systems hold twice as many people as are held in jails, incarcerated women are nearly evenly split between state prisons and local jails. The explanation for exactly what happened, when, and why does not yet exist because the data on women has long been obscured by the larger picture of men’s incarceration. The disaggregated numbers presented here are an important first step to ensuring that women are not left behind in the effort to end mass incarceration. ABOUT WOMEN’S MASS INCARCERATION In The Spitfire Grill, “Percy” is newly released from prison. The below chart and article—edited here for length—from the ACLU and the Prison Policy Initiative examines the data regarding incarcerated women in the United States as of 2017.