Why arrests of women have accelerated in US

A mother faces felony charges after police say she smuggled a knife past a Detroit elementary school guard this month and gave it to her child, who allegedly stabbed a fellow student.

In Eastpointe, Michigan, a woman was deemed competent to stand trial Thursday, after she allegedly fatally stabbed her manager at a McDonald's restaurant.

The two cases are recent examples of the proliferation of females in the criminal justice system, which was the subject of a study released last week that broke down Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics from 1980-2024. Women accounted for 27% of adult arrests nationwide in 2024 compared with 14% in 1980, according to the FBI data.

During that period, there was a 317% jump in arrests of women for violent crime nationwide, while violent crime arrests of men dropped 51% during the same time frame, according to the analysis released Oct. 7 by the Council on Criminal Justice.

The arrest rate for all crimes nationwide was 41% higher for women in 2024 than in 1980, while men's arrest rate during the same period dropped by 41%, FBI statistics show.

"While women generally engage in crime and violence at lower rates than men, women’s share of violent offense arrests has steadily increased, rising from 11% in 1986 to 21% in 2024," the Council on Criminal Justice study reported. "In addition, between 2020 and 2023, women’s jail incarceration rates rose twice as much as men’s (33% vs 17%), and women’s imprisonment rate grew 9%, while the rate for men dropped slightly (less than 1%)."

While demographic arrest data going back to 1980 in Michigan is not immediately available, the percentage of women being arrested has increased in recent years and is comparable with the national statistics, although total arrests have dropped, according to Michigan State Police data.

Of the 295,796 arrests made in 2007, 23.5% or 69,730 were women. In 2020, there were 164,829 total arrests, with 26.3% or 43,486 of them female. Of the 171,775 arrests made in Michigan in 2024, 48,728, or 28.3%, were women, state police statistics show.

Police and criminologists cited varying reasons for the sharp increases, including mandatory sentencing laws, the war on drugs, more women being arrested for domestic violence, lack of mental health facilities, and cultural changes.

Laws that took choices away from police, prosecutors and judges are a major reason for the increase in women being arrested and convicted, said Laura Starzynski, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Wayne State University in Detroit.

"The criminal justice system has traditionally treated women more leniently than men, in all parts of the system, from police making the arrests, to the juries, to judges during sentencing," Starzynski said. "Sometimes, that's paternalism, thinking, 'oh, she couldn't possibly know what she was doing.' But when mandatory sentencing laws came in, it removed discretion."

The 1994 federal Violence Against Women Act used grants to incentivize states to toughen their responses to domestic violence cases. The Act, which in 1995 prompted former President Bill Clinton to form the Office on Violence Against Women within the U.S. Department of Justice, mandated training for police, prosecutors and judges on handling domestic violence cases. The OVW awarded $8 billion in grants from 1995-2018 as an incentive to adopt "get tough" policies that encouraged mandatory arrests.

"Prior to the changes in the domestic violence protocols, if a police officer saw both people with marks on their faces, the attitude was often, 'we'll just figure this out later,' although now, they'll arrest both the man and the woman," Starzynski said. "Those changes in the law have certainly helped women, but they've also resulted in more women being arrested."

A disparity in punishment

Despite the increase in female arrests and incarcerations, there's still a wide gender disparity in the punishment meted out for crimes committed.

In federal cases from 2017-21, "females received sentences 29.2% shorter than males. Females of all races were 39.6% more likely to receive a probation sentence than males. When examining only sentences of incarceration, females received lengths of incarceration 11.3% shorter than males," according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

The report didn't note whether the defendants' past criminal records were a factor in men getting longer sentences.

Women are more likely to suffer from mental illness than men, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, which also has contributed to the rise in females in the criminal justice system, the U.S. Sentencing Commission report concluded.

"Female offenders appear to have different risk factors for offending than do male offenders," the report said. "In particular, female offenders report greater incidence of mental health problems and serious mental illness than do male offenders. Female offenders also report higher rates of substance dependence as well as greater incidence of past physical and sexual abuse."

Taylor Police Chief John Blair said cultural changes have prompted women to behave differently than they once did, which he said has led to more crimes being committed.

"It does seem like women have been more aggressive in the past few years, whereas males are traditionally the ones who'll bring violence," said Blair, who began his police career in 1991. "I think it's probably a cultural thing; society has changed, and especially with social media, you have behavior you never saw before.

"Also, I think women may feel more empowered now, and they're not only fully in the workforce, they're more willing to stand up for themselves," Blair said. "They're not waiting around for men to protect them; they'll confront people if they have a problem with them. And when that happens, with both men and women, sometimes that escalates, and someone can go overboard."

One theory, called the "emancipation hypothesis," suggests that changing gender roles and an increase in females in the workplace exposed women to the same opportunities to commit crimes as men.

The war on drugs, which was started in the early 1970s by former President Richard Nixon but ramped up in the 1980s under former President Ronald Reagan, is also blamed for the increase in nonviolent and violent crimes by women.

"We typically see that women who are involved in crime have greater abuse histories in their past than men," Starzynski said. "That can play a role; they often get involved with drugs to self-medicate due to their abuse history, which may also prompt them to commit other crimes."

The Council on Criminal Justice's Women's Justice Commission, headed by Loretta Lynch, who served as U.S. Attorney General under former President Barack Obama, suggested a tailored approach to handling women in the criminal justice system.

The panel made four recommendations to correct the problem: "Prioritize alternatives to arrest, and connections to services, for women who do not pose a serious threat to public safety; base pretrial detention decisions on public safety and flight risk; expand responses to and consideration of women’s distinct circumstances at charging and sentencing; (and) prohibit all sexual contact between police officers and people in their control or custody.""

“Women are no less responsible for their actions than men, and like men, they should be held accountable when they break the law,” Lynch said in a statement. “As we learn more about what drives women to criminal behavior, we become better equipped to respond effectively and create pathways to more stable families and productive lives. Ultimately, that is how we can better prevent future criminal behavior and interrupt cycles of crime and incarceration.”

The commission plans to release a second set of proposals next year. The new recommendations "will focus on the 'back end' of the justice system, including how to promote success post-conviction and upon reentry," the report said.

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