Hutchinson ? Prison authorities say a surge in the number of women in prison in the last few years is linked mostly to an increase in drug use.

The drug of choice is methamphetamine, a highly toxic and addictive drug used for everything from weight loss to a long-term high.

“There’s no doubt the increase is tied to meth here,” said Reno County Sheriff Randy Henderson.

Scott Powell, who runs the Reno County jail, remembers when crime was almost a male-only business.

“It hasn’t been that long ago that you’d come in here and you’d have four women in a cell, max,” Powell said. “But boy, in 2000 that all began to change.”

The same is true in Kansas’ women’s prison in Topeka, where incarceration numbers are up almost 50 percent in the past eight years.

In 2001, Kansas ranked fourth in the nation in meth labs and Reno County ranked third in Kansas. In 2002, the state and county both ranked fifth, according to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

The spike in female incarcerations began in 1996 at the Topeka Women’s Correctional Facility, the state’s only prison for women.

In 1995, warden Dick Koerner’s prison had 411 inmates. That number peaked at 615 in 2000, and was at 558 this year.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt you can say that in 1996 the war on drugs began to pick up in Kansas,” Koerner said. “There’s the same kind of spike in male drug arrests about that time.”

Koerner said that “between 60 and 70 percent” of his female inmates are serving drug-related sentences.

In Reno County, only slightly more than 100 women served time in the jail in a given month in 1999, and no more than four on any given day, Powell said.

By a year later, those numbers grew almost five times to a record 547 female inmates in August 2000.

“In 1999, when I came in here, we needed a four-person cell,” Powell said. “Then it became eight. Then two eights. Now three eights. Unbelievable.”

This year, from 10 to 24 women are in Reno County’s jail on a typical day.

“Since I took over as sheriff, 95 percent of the women we’ve brought in here have been for drugs,” Henderson said.

Users fall in three categories, Henderson said. They include medicinal users, binge users and the “high-seekers.”

“It can start simple,” Henderson said. “A truck driver uses it to stay awake. Women like it as a weight-loss drug.

“But it escalates quickly to the search for that rush. … Then you need more and more to get to that high you first got. By that point, it’s impossible to get off.”

But Koerner said the Kansas Legislature’s move to tighten sentencing guidelines in 1993 also puts more women in his prison.

“For a long time, I thought judges had more discretion in sentencing women to prison,” he said. “They did what they could to keep the woman out of the prison system.

“But with the advent of those guidelines, some judges felt they lost that discretion. If the guidelines were intended to foster uniformity and consistency, they needed to be applied to women the same as men. That’s a factor in the state numbers, too.”