According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics report, there were 101,179 women in prisons in 2003, up 3.6 percent from 2002. It is the first time that the female prison population topped 100,000.

The report showed that the incarceration rate for women is increasing at nearly twice that of men. Since 1995, the number of women incarcerated has increased 48 percent, compared with 29 percent for male prisoners.

Each year since 1995, the female prison population grew an average of 5 percent, compared with male prison population growth rate of 3.3 percent.

Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, which promotes alternatives to long prison terms for certain crimes, attributed the increased U.S. prison population to longer sentences, especially for drug crimes, and fewer inmates being granted parole or probation.

"It coincides exactly with the inception of the war on drugs in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s," Mauer said. "It represents a sort of vicious cycle of women engaged in drug abuse and often connected with financial or psychological dependence with a boyfriend or other men involved in drug crime."

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