A multi-city conversation about women in the criminal justice system.

Females are doing hard time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, our society knows almost nothing about these girls and women, much less why they have ended up where they are.

Most of these females are neither serial killers nor sex offenders, although these are certainly the people who most easily (and understandably) capture media attention. For their part, celebrities who commit crimes tend to serve relatively brief sentences—sometimes, their time in detention amounts to a few minutes—yet they receive an inordinate and inexplicable amount of “news” coverage. The same cannot be said for over 1.3 million women and girls who are currently under some form of correctional supervision, roughly two-thirds of who were caught committing non-violent offenses. Most of those offenses, in turn, tend to relate to drugs, petty theft, and/or prostitution.

Although incarcerated women come from all walks of life, there is no denying the fact that most were subsisting on little or no income before they were arrested—fully one-third did not have stable housing or were living on the streets--and that a disproportionate number are women of color. Common threads weave through the lives of females who end up in the system, including untreated drug/ alcohol abuse, mental illness, and traumatic histories of molestation, rape, and/or domestic violence. Across the board, girls and women in the criminal justice system suffer from these realities at far higher rates than their male counterparts.

If and when girls and women finish serving their sentences, they are typically released back into conditions that nearly guarantee their eventual re-arrest or re-incarceration. Indeed, most females who do time leave detention far worse for the wear in every possible way, having been removed from society (and from their families) for months, years, even decades at a time. While there are notable exceptions, women behind bars receive little or no vocational training; educational opportunities (the average woman comes in with an 8th grade reading level); substance abuse treatment; or psychological counseling while they are locked up. Worse yet, many females leave the system having suffered physical and sexual abuse, gross medical negligence, punitive segregation, and other indignities far beyond the intent of their sentences.

It should be a matter of national urgency (and response) that nearly 1 in 99 Americans are currently imprisoned, and roughly 1 in 30 are under correctional supervision—the highest per capita rate in the world. At least 2.5 million children have at least one parent in prison at this very moment.  It may be easier for those of us who don’t have to deal with the burden of having a loved one locked up (exorbitant collect call fees, long journeys to distant prisons, even interstate transfers of parents and spouses) to think of prisoners and their families as the ‘other.’ Where violent, non-consensual, and injurious crimes are concerned in particular, there is a place for punishment, restitution, and reconciliation when and where possible. But the scope of mass incarceration is now so indiscriminate that it demands conceptual and structural reform. Whether we consider the situation from a fiscal or social welfare perspective, we can no longer afford to ignore it. 

When we talk about women in prison specifically, we are talking about mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. That is, if we are talking about them at all. And this is precisely what the Women Behind Bars Project seeks to address.