Make of It What You Will: A Jump in Women’s Prison Admissions?

While updating our Illinois Prison Dashboard to reflect the most recent data on state prison populations, admissions, and releases, we noticed something interesting—and maybe significant? But definitely interesting.

The Dashboard is populated with Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) data that have long been publicly available, but not very easy to assemble or analyze. We introduced the Dashboard so you can find all the information in one place, and in a form that’s easy (once you get the hang of it) to filter and explore.

If you go to the newly updated Prison Admissions page, and look at statewide IDOC admissions through the end of 2025, you’ll see a 10% uptick in prison admissions from 2024 to 2025—unusual in itself, since the long-term trend in Illinois (leaving out post-COVID correction years) has been one of steady, year-after-year declines.

But if you look a little closer, as we did, breaking down the admissions data by sex, you can see something that looks even more striking: admissions of women to Illinois prisons jumped 30% in 2025.

What’s behind that?

Short answer: we don’t know completely. The rate of increase in women’s prison admissions was more than three times that of the men, which makes you wonder. Because the Illinois Prison Dashboard enables us to filter the admissions data by sentencing county, admissions type, and offense/offense level as well as sex, we can zero in at least a little to see what’s going on:

• Most 2025 women’s prison admissions (85%) were attributable to new sentences—as opposed to women being returned to prison for violations of Mandatory Supervised Release—and so was most of the year-to-year admissions increase (82%). So whatever may be behind this one-year jump, it reflects something happening at the court level, not with parole authorities.
• Two-thirds of the court admissions increase involved women convicted of Class 3 and 4 felonies, the lowest felony classes. In terms of crime type, three out of four of the increased court admissions involved either drug (41%) or person offenses (35%).
• While all regions of the state contributed to the increase in women’s prison admissions, the trend was driven largely by big increases in court admissions from Cook County and Central Illinois. Cook County saw a 46% increase in women’s court-ordered admissions (a total of 97 more women admitted to prison in 2025), accounting for about 38% of the state increase all by itself. Similarly, the 38 counties in the Central Illinois region saw a 38% increase in women’s court admissions (82 more women in 2025), accounting for 32% of the state increase.

But bear in mind that these are relatively small numbers: women accounted for 1,361 Illinois prison admissions in 2025—only 8% of the total—and the 30% increase amounts to 312 additional women. Also, we know from the Illinois Sentencing Dashboard that most women sentenced for felony offenses in Illinois (85%) receive probation, not prison sentences. And though the statewide Sentencing Dashboard does not yet reflect 2025 sentencing data, preliminary data suggests that women’s felony probation sentences also increased in 2025. From the data dashboard the Center developed in collaboration with Cook County stakeholders, we know that felony sentences to probation for women increased at roughly the same rate as the increase in prison sentences that year. So whatever caused the prison admissions increase, it’s probably not that courts have gotten more punitive with women overall. It might just be a downstream effect of felony case disposition delays, perhaps associated with implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act.

We’ll keep an eye on it. Or you can!