Helen Fair. The 60% rise in the size of the world’s female prison population numbers since 2000 - compared to a rise in the male prison population of around 22% - is a cause of great concern.

Women in prison are more likely to have a history of trauma, abuse and mental health issues, homelessness and substance abuse, and to have experienced sexual and/or domestic violence. Imprisonment adds to their psychological distress and prison systems are ill-equipped to deal with their trauma.

Many women prisoners are mothers who have usually been either the primary or the sole caregiver to their children. So the consequences of more and more women being imprisoned are serious for families and communities as well.

Many of the reasons for the rapid increase in female prison populations have poverty as their root cause. Women are disproportionately charged with offences such as shoplifting, soliciting for prostitution, and low-level drug crimes. Because of poverty, they will be unable to pay fines, or afford bail or legal representation, making prison more likely. Other causes include an absence of woman-centred support services, diversion programmes or alternatives to custody.

We have also seen a general trend towards more use of mandatory sentences and increasingly long custodial sentences, especially to punish repeat offenders or people who commit drug offences. This trend of growing punitiveness in countries’ legal systems has certainly played a part in the upward trend in female imprisonment.

HF. Yes, I’d say data availability has improved since we launched the World Prison Brief (WPB) database in 2000, but there is still a long way to go.

Currently only 33 countries out of the 223 on which WPB holds information produce at least monthly data accessible through the website of the prison administration or relevant Ministry. A further four countries produce quarterly data, and 57 produce annual figures (including through surveys such as the Council of Europe’s Annual Penal (SPACE) statistics). For the remaining 129 countries and territores either no data at all is available, or it is sourced through news articles, reports to UN bodies, Parliamentary reports, and other ad hoc sources.

This is in our view unacceptable, and we urge your readers to press for regular, official prison populations data from their governments and prison authorities.

An additional cause for concern is that many countries only publish data on the total number of prisoners, with no disaggregation to show, for example, the number of women, pre-trial, juvenile and foreign prisoners.

HF. At ICPR we feel strongly that national governments and prison administrations have a clear responsibility to publish timely, accurate, easily accessible information on the numbers of people in their prisons, jails and police lock-ups. Without this, it’s impossible for them to ensure that prison administrations have adequate staffing and material resources and that these resources can be adjusted in line with changing trends.

When prisons are left in an overcrowded, under-resourced state, as is the case in at least two thirds of all countries worldwide, conditions become unsafe and the health of prisoners, staff and wider communities is put at risk. Any hope of rehabilitation is destroyed, and prisons simply become inhumane warehouses for society’s marginalised.

Transparency on who is being held in prison, for what reason and for how long is vital to ensure administrations can be held to account for their justice policies, and in order to inform targeted policy reform. Sadly, we are still a very long way from that degree of transparency.