Bad Girls was created by Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus of Shed Productions following the success of earlier ITV prison dramas Within These Walls and the Australian import Prisoner: Cell Block H.

McManus and Chadwick spent months during 1998 and 1999 visiting real prisons with cast members to research the lives of British female prisoners, and consulted former prisoners like Chris Tchaikovsky as well as organisations such as Women in Prison, NACRO and the Prison Officer's Association.

The series was originally commissioned under the working title 'Jail Birds', but the name was changed after a BBC One documentary series about women in prison used the same title shortly before Bad Girls premiered.

HM Prison Oxford, located within Oxford Castle, was used for exterior shots in Series 1 to 3, while interior scenes were filmed on a replica prison wing set built at 3 Mills Studios; a new exterior set had to be built for Series 4 onwards after the real prison was redeveloped into a hotel.

After ITV decommissioned the series in 2006, 3 Mills Studios kept the prison exterior and a single cell set, which were later reused for an episode of Waterloo Road, an episode of The Bill, and the music video for Rachel Stevens' single 'I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)'.

The exact location of the fictional HMP Larkhall was never officially revealed, though dialogue hinted it was somewhere in South London near areas like Clapham, Peckham and Streatham.

Four episodes featured scenes filmed outside the UK: two Series 3 episodes were shot in Spain, Series 5 opened with a scene in Amsterdam, and Series 7 featured scenes filmed in Peru while being set in Costa del Sol.

The first series' score and theme were composed by Nina Humphreys, but from 2000 Kath Gotts took over as composer, introducing new theme music and incidental scores that evolved across several versions before settling into a final theme for the rest of the show's run.

Kath Gotts, the show's composer from Series 2 onward, later wrote the entire music and lyrics for the stage adaptation Bad Girls: The Musical.

The series peaked at 9.49 million viewers during the ninth episode of Series 2, making it the highest-rated episode of any Shed Productions series.

In the US, after being dropped by BBC America partway through Series 2, Bad Girls found a new home on the LGBT-oriented network Logo TV due to its popularity among LGBT audiences, eventually airing all eight series there.

Series 6 featured a crossover with Shed Productions' other hit show Footballers' Wives, with the character Tanya Turner spending time on G-Wing across three special episodes broadcast on consecutive nights in May 2004.