Interesting new Quick Facts report from US Sentencing Commission on "Women in the Federal Offender Population"

I am so pleased to see and to be able to report that the US Sentencing Commission is continuing to produce a steady stream of its insightful little data documents in its terrific series of reader-friendly "Quick Facts" publications.  Regular readers may recall from this prior post, roughly five years ago, the USSC started putting out these publications as a way to "give readers basic facts about a single area of federal crime in an easy-to-read, two-page format."

This month brings this new Quick Facts on "Women in the Federal Offender Population," and here are just a few data tidbits from the document that caught my attention:

• Females make up a small percentage of federal offenders. The proportion of federal offenders who were women decreased slightly from 13.3% in fiscal year 2013 to 13.1% in fiscal year 2017.

• More than two-thirds of female offenders (68.0%) had little or no prior criminal history (i.e., assigned to Criminal History Category I).

• Weapons were involved less frequently (6.1%) in cases involving women than in cases involving men (10.1%).

• More than three-quarters (76.9%) of female offenders were sentenced to imprisonment, which is less than the rate for male offenders in fiscal year 2017 (93.8%).

• For each of the past five years, female offenders were sentenced within the guideline range in less than half of all cases (40.2% in fiscal year 2013 and 36.6% in fiscal year 2017), compared to 49.8% and 49.2% for male offenders.

• The average sentence imposed slightly increased over the last five years, from 27 months in fiscal year 2013 to 28 months in fiscal year 2017.