8-Day News Blog Log: Women In Jail

I went to the Huffington Post and scrolled through about twenty different political campaign articles until I saw this one that caught my eye. "Women In Jail Are Fastest Growing Segment Of America’s Incarcerated Population" by Melissa Jeltsen details why women are quickly becoming more familiar with prison bars and sexual or domestic violence. Over the past several decades, prisons have been admitting larger numbers of women than in the 1970s (Jeltsen.) Many women come from broken families and suffer from severe mental illnesses but are being put in jails instead of getting the help that they need. Jeltsen claims that to overcome the sudden admittance of women in jails, the government needs to support the women and provide them with money and the care that they need, and I could not agree more. Locally and nationally, we should be able to provide a woman with basic necessities outside of a jail cell.