Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Why Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Pennsylvania has an incarceration rate of 725 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than many wealthy democracies do.
- Each year, at least 170,000 different people are booked into local jails in Pennsylvania.
- In Pennsylvania, Black people constituted 11% of state residents, but 37% of people in jail and 47% of people in prison.
Girls
- Pennsylvania’s youth incarceration rate is the seventh highest in the nation, according to data from the Justice Department, and imprisons far more children of color.
- In 2015, the state had 2,826 juveniles in facilities, with black children outnumbering white children more than 9-to-1.
- Many of these youth were away from home and disconnected from their families and other supports for long periods: 1,870 youth experienced out-of-home placements of more than 28 days in 2018 as a part of a delinquency disposition, and the median length of stay in out-of-home placement was.
Impacted Women
- Since 1980, the number of women in jail in Pennsylvania has increased 1,023%, and the number of women in prison has increased 966%.
- The number of women in Pennsylvania’s jails has increased more than 19-fold, from 242 in 1970 to 4,754 in 2015.
- The number of women in Pennsylvania’s prisons has increased more than 12-fold, from 215 in 1978 to 2,793 in 2017.
Gun Violence
- Nearly 1,600 Pennsylvanians died by gun violence in 2019, an average of four people every day.
- In 2015, in PA, there were 1485 firearms deaths: 533 of which were homicides and 932 of which were suicides.
Violence Against Women
- In 2019, 112 victims lost their lives to domestic violence in Pennsylvania. This number includes 68 females and 44 males.
- In the last 10 years, more than 1,600 people have died from domestic violence-related incidents in Pennsylvania.
- In 2006, 64 women were killed as a result of domestic violence.
Impact on Children
- Approximately 5,349 children in Pennsylvania specifically have a mother incarcerated in a Pennsylvania state prison. About 72 percent of females incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prison have at least one child.
- In 2011-2012, 7 percent of all PA children had the experience of an incarcerated parent.
- In Pennsylvania, about 81,100 children have a parent in state prison, according to 2014 data from the state’s Department of Corrections. Those numbers do not include children with parents in federal prisons or county jails.