Incarceration of women
Within the last decade, the rate of incarceration for women in China has increased by 46%. Women make up only 6% of the total population of individuals in prison within the country. While it is difficult to correctly evaluate the statistic regarding the total number of women incarcerated due to the underreporting of these cases, China is on track to imprison more women than the United States.
Penal system in China
Hard labor still was the most common form of punishment in China in the 1980s. The penal system stressed reform rather than retribution, and it was expected that productive labor would reduce the penal institutions' cost to society. Even death sentences could be stayed by two-year reprieve. If a prisoner was judged to have reformed during that period, his or her sentence could be commuted to life or a fixed term at labor. The Prison Law of the People's Republic of China was enacted December 20, 1994. Since then the Chinese prison system has operated under supervision of the Bureau of Prison Administration which falls under the Ministry of Justice . All these divisions of government are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The head of the prison administration is Liu Zhenyu, his official title is Director-General. The prisons in the provinces are then further managed by local offices of justice. The Ministry of Justice states that it holds prisoners in over 700 establishments across the country. There are also thirty extra penitentiaries for juveniles. The corrections system in China has an official population of 1,649,804 inmates (mid-2015), including pre-trial detainees . The prison population rate is 118 per 100,000 people. Female offenders make up 6.5% of the total prison population and 0.4% of prisoners in China are of foreign nationality. In general, the prison population rate is going down in China. In 2008, the prison population rate in China peaked with a rate of 121. There was a plateau created in 2010 as the prison population rate remained the same . Some issues against human rights that prisoners experience are, “…executions without due process, illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as “black jails,” torture and coerced confessions of prisoners…” . There is a laundry list of issues presented on the U.S State Department’s Humanities report for 2016. These include but are not limited to failure to protect refugees, extrajudicial disappearances of citizens, and discrimination against women and minorities .
The Criminal Law that took effect on January 1, 1980, removed criminal punishment from the discretion of officials, whose arbitrary decisions were based on perceptions of the current party line, and established it on a legal basis. The specific provisions of that law listed eight categories of offenses.