Coletta Youngers: One of things we have found in our research is that women in Latin America are incarcerated at an alarming rate for drug policy offences. This started when we were looking at overall statistics, looking at the impact of drug laws on incarceration in Latin America, which show the relationship between those laws and the prison crisis which the region is confronting.
Nischa Pieris: And this was a growing population. It became very worrying to us that in some countries up to 80% of the prison population for women are incarcerated for drug crimes. We realised that while they were a numerical minority in the global prison population, they were very, very under-represented in their needs, and why they were being incarcerated was for drug crimes.
