the size of a Chihuahua’s, and she died.

About a year later, she had another baby, and then a third. She threw a cooler through the window of a truck, which belonged to a man who had fathered one of the children, after she found another girl at his apartment. She had been drinking and taking Xanax. Feeling startled by her own actions, she got into her car, backed out of her spot in the parking lot and accidentally hit him, scraping the skin of his feet and fracturing his femur.

He charged her with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and three months before her 22nd birthday, Ulibarri was sentenced to prison for the first time. Two more times followed as she spent a significant portion of her20s there. She was on her way to serve a fourth sentence when she demanded help instead, fighting to enroll in Tulsa’s intense outpatient program, Women In Recovery.

Oklahoma has led the country for decades with its rate of female incarceration, a gap that continues to grow. Right now, women in Oklahoma are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than in the rest of the country. In 2015, 60 out of every 100,000 women in the U.S. were incarcerated, while in Oklahoma, it was 155 out of 100,000, according to a bipartisan task force assembled by Gov. Mary Fallin.

After seven months of investigating the disparity – Oklahoma also incarcerates the second highest rate of men and its overall incarceration rate is 78 percent higher than the national average