Incarcerated Women

I spent years visiting prisons and courts. At every turn, facilities forced me to comply with invasive searches that left me feeling sexually violated.

In Georgia, a person can be charged as a “party to a crime” for simple acts like answering a phone or loaning gas money. I—and many women incarcerated alongside me—are trapped in prison for crimes committed by men or abusive partners.

On Wednesday, Tiana Hill testified before the U.S. Senate Human Rights Subcommittee that staff at the notorious Clayton County Jail insisted she wasn’t pregnant—until she gave birth on a metal bed.

I’m incarcerated in a women’s prison. So-called “true crime” shows prey on us, alter our stories, and take advantage of our trauma. I would know—I’ve been the subject of at least three docudramas.

Two years after Elena’s death, I try to understand why I was given a child just to lose her. 

If I protect and guide someone else’s child in here, maybe someone will do mine out there.

I experienced my first childbirth while I was incarcerated in a county jail.

Advocates say the Cook County Sheriff’s Department’s house-arrest policies trap women in unsafe situations—and often force mothers to choose between their safety or their children.

Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. Research for The Appeal shows that at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.

As of Thursday, 993 incarcerated women and 62 staffers at Lowell Correctional Institution have tested positive for the virus. Two women have died.

Nicole Poston was sentenced in July for punching a police officer after she slipped free from a handcuff. Life sentences, even for nonhomicide offenses like Poston’s, are ‘a major factor’ in mass incarceration in the U.S., a criminal justice expert said.

Harris, now 72 and blind, had been serving a life sentence for the shooting death of her husband, a man she said had abused her for years. Last month, the Arkansas Parole Board agreed to free her.

Texas’s governor has proclaimed that ‘safe practices save lives,’ but prisoners say that advice can’t be followed in the state’s prisons, where unsanitary conditions have left the novel coronavirus ‘spreading vigorously.’

Eraina Pretty has served 42 years in prison in connection with a 1978 store robbery. A new law that might have led to her release has been derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Harris, now 72 and blind, was sentenced to life in prison in 1985. Since she first started petitioning for executive clemency in 1998, the state’s parole board recommended her for release five times.

Andrea Circle Bear was confined within FMC Carswell while suffering from the novel coronavirus. ‘She was serving a 26-month sentence that ended up being a death penalty,’ one maternity specialist said.

The onset of COVID-19—and the need for social distancing—gave an unexpected boost to efforts against plans for a new prison in Washington.

With COVID-19 rapidly spreading across the state, there’s heightened concern that the conditions inside Lowell Correctional Institution, coupled with the prison’s sizable elderly and pregnant population, could foster a deadly outbreak.

Josie Duffy Rice and guest co-host Zak Cheney-Rice talk with Emma Ketteringham, the managing director of the Bronx Defenders Family Defense Practice, about the relationship between the criminal justice system and family court, and how together they can wreak havoc on American families.

With Appeal staff reporter Lauren Gill.

“We will prioritize family integrity and family unity at every stage of the process to the extent we can do so.”

With Appeal staff reporter Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg.

The state said Michelle Heale shook the baby to death, but some experts say her conviction was based on debunked science.

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Two years ago, the executive director of Just Detention International, an organization whose mission is to end sexual assault in jails and prisons, wrote in an opinion piece for […]

Incarcerated women, half of whom are in local jails, have histories of trauma that require care, not criminalization.

More than three years after heavy rains and flooding devastated the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, officials have reached an agreement to build a new facility.