Nowadays, issue of female imprisonment has become one of the important human rights matter in the world. The paper explores, based on international statistics, now more than half a million women and girls are held in penal institutions throughout the world, either as awaiting trial, pretrial detainees (remand prisoners) or having been convicted and sentenced. The statistics related to the women entered into the prisons from selected years in Iran declare that during this period, 90,498 women suffered from the custody. The major objective of the paper is to demonstrate the need of reducing women prisoners. In this regards the criminal justice system as a whole has a particular role to offer social assistance both to the women and to their families and to find and implement alternatives to imprisonment for women.
