together, fearless and unified
The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons
The University of California Sentencing Project (UCSP), in collaboration with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center, is proud to announce the release of its groundbreaking report: “Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons.”
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By Officer Bimblebury Posted by Vanguard Administrator August 27, 2023
SACRAMENTO, CA – The California Legislative Women’s Caucus here hosted a briefing last week focused “on sexual harm perpetuated by Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) staff,” sponsored by survivors and advocates from California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), Survived & Punished, UnCommon Law, Prison Law Office, and Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition (SWFC).
The groups coordinated the testimony at the hearing, and said in a statement they have formed Solidarity Committee for Incarcerated Survivors (SCIS) to investigate the “horrific environment of fear and coercion that breeds abuse and assault in prisons…while working to secure protections and resources for currently and formerly incarcerated survivors.”
The hearing, according to SCIS, follows charges recently brought against former corrections officer Gregory Rodriguez, who the coalition charges “has been connected to the abuse of more than one percent of all the incarcerated people at CCWF.”
The coalition said its goal is to “shed light on the systemic and unchecked nature of such pervasive abuse,” and encourage California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to implement policy changes “crucial for investigating abuse and protecting survivors.”
“We must address the abusive and retaliatory culture inherent to the prison system that allows someone – and anyone – like Rodriguez to use their position of power to coerce, intimidate, and abuse vulnerable incarcerated people,” said Amika Mota, Executive Director of Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition.
Mota added, “The entire system must be overhauled to prioritize the safety of victims and witnesses and create survivor-led programs to support recovery.”
Advocates claim incarcerated survivors and witnesses of sexual assault by prison staff experience retaliation when they speak up, and “many are silenced through threats to remove ‘privileges,’ such as visitation or phone calls, physical violence, and intense surveillance.”
They also cited “the CDCR protocol for investigating sexual abuse, which mandates strip-searching the victim and isolating them in solitary confinement.”
“This response, and the lack of safe reporting, effectively institutionalizes sexual violence and compounds the traumatic violence that survivors have experienced,” argues Katie Dixon, Campaign and Policy Organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
In a 2017 pleading, the #MeTooBehindBars lawsuit, advocates said they tried to “hold CDCR accountable for violent assaults by CCWF correctional officers who used abusive physical force and verbal assaults, including homophobic and transphobic threats against queer and gender non-conforming people.”
The SCIS maintains there is still no meaningful change, and are asking for “investigations into abuse at the hands of staff conducted by an independent group, removal of personnel accused of abuse from the prisons they work in during investigations, expedited release of survivors and access for survivors to comprehensive and self-determined healthcare and victim services that are also independent of CDCR, including access to lines of communication that are not surveilled.”
“I want to forget, but my body betrays me as a vehicle carrying these memories. I want to forget the time I was taking a shower in county jail only to turn and find an officer watching me. I want to forget being sexually assaulted by that same officer while I was handcuffed in shackles being escorted to the yard,” said Latasha Brown in the testimony.
Brown added, “I want to forget having a flashlight shone on me until I flashed my genitals. I want to forget what his hands feel like as they grope me. But my body betrays me as a vehicle carrying these memories. I want to forget the things that have happened to me at CCWF by multiple officers, including one whose name everybody in this room knows. Since I am completely at the mercy of my captors, I have a feeling of perpetual uneasiness as I know the lengths they will go to cover up their misconduct.”
By the time her husband brought her to the United States, Marisela Andrade had already borne the brunt of his anger repeatedly. The recently married 18-year-old knew that the move would not stop his violence, but she never imagined that her new life would include being trafficked, arrested and sentenced to life without parole.
Now age 44, Andrade has survived and overcome all of these horrors. In 2018, California’s then-Gov. Jerry Brown commuted her sentence to 15 years to life, enabling her to apply for parole. She did so in 2021 and was granted parole.
But instead of walking out of prison, she was met by immigration officers who handcuffed her and drove her to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) holding facility in Fresno. Later, she was transferred to an ICE prison in Aurora, Colorado, far from her family and the support network she’d built during her 15 years in prison.
Now, she faces deportation to a country she has not lived in since the first month of her marriage.
Andrade was 15 years old when she met the man who would become her husband — and trafficker. They married three years later. On their wedding night, her husband beat his 18-year-old bride. It wouldn’t be the last time he hit her.
The next month, the couple moved from Mexico to California. Andrade doesn’t know why they moved. “He never said anything to me,” she told Truthout. “There was no explanation of why we were doing this.”
By then, Andrade had learned to do everything that her husband said or risk a beating. That didn’t change when they arrived at her husband’s brother’s house. She stayed in the room that the couple shared, coming out only to cook meals for the family.
“I was scared of him,” she explained. “I always did whatever he wants. I didn’t come out without his permission [or] he would beat me up.”
The abuse continued after she became pregnant. During her first pregnancy, her husband beat her so hard that she miscarried. After that, the couple had three daughters. They became another means of abuse — her husband threatened to take the children if she ever attempted to report his violence. Terrified, she remained quiet.
Then, he began forcing her to have sex with other men. The first time was with one his friends. She cried and asked the man why he was forcing himself on her. “I already paid for you,” he responded.
Over the next several years, her husband forced her to have sex with several other men. “I don’t understand why my husband did that to me,” she said. “Because when somebody loves you or you marry somebody, they shouldn’t do what my husband was doing to me. They shouldn’t hit me.” But she was unsure what she could do. “I’m coming from a little town in Mexico and here was a different world,” she recalled.
She also feared for her daughters. She tried to keep them with her, but that did not protect them from her husband’s wrath. Once, he beat their 4-year-old for taking items off the door.
Within a year, Andrade had had enough. “I felt, at that time, it was him or me,” she said. “I was so tired of the domestic violence. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to my daughters.” By then, her daughters were a year-and-a-half, 5 and nearly 11. She feared that the sexual abuse would extend to them.
She broke the silence, confiding in her sister-in-law. That sister-in-law introduced Marisela to the man who would become her co-defendant in her husband’s death. Andrade recalled that she told him what had been happening and recruited him to beat her husband. “I wanted him to feel the way I feel,” she said. The two made plans by text and, on the agreed-upon night, Andrade placed sleeping pills in her husband’s coffee and left the door unlocked. Her co-defendant kidnapped and killed him. His body was later found in the trunk of the man’s car.
Andrade was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping. At the time, Andrade believed she was only guilty of kidnapping because she had enlisted someone to beat her husband, but firmly believed that she was innocent of murder. She went to trial — and lost. She was sentenced to life without parole.
“It was hard to understand the life sentence,” she recalled. But she remembered vowing, “One day, I will come out.”
When Andrade arrived at Valley State Prison for Women, she spoke no English. She had heard that prisons were full of drugs and sexual assaults and, terrified, barely left her cell. Many imprisoned at Valley State spoke no Spanish, leaving Andrade isolated with her fears.
Her brother took custody of her daughters. He kept her updated on their lives. Andrade wrote letters regularly, though the girls never responded.
Slowly, with the help of the women around her (and cartoons), she began to learn English. She enrolled in the prison’s self-help groups, including those that focused on domestic violence and abuse dynamics. She vowed never to get into trouble again. And she kept that promise. During this time, she never incurred a rule violation, disciplinary infraction or even an administrative infraction, or an action as inconsequential as having too many pieces of property, being late or absent from work or a program, using vulgar language, or failure to comply with prison grooming standards.
Still, her chances of freedom seemed remote. One day, she overheard a conversation in the prison yard and the word “commutation.” She stopped and asked the woman about that word.
She … was granted parole. But instead of walking out of prison, she was met by immigration officers who handcuffed her.
Commutation is a form of clemency which shortens a person’s prison sentence. For Californians serving life without parole, it is their only chance at leaving prison alive if they have exhausted their legal appeals.
The woman told her what forms to request from the prison library. Then, she helped Andrade fill them out and send them.
Many people applying for commutations wait years for a response. But by the next year, Andrade was called for an interview. She described her marriage, the abuse and her responsibility for setting in motion her husband’s death.
In 2018, citing her history of significant abuse, efforts to transform her life and lack of prison disciplinary history, Governor Brown commuted her sentence to 15 years to life. It made her eligible to appear before a parole hearing, but she still had to convince the board to let her go.
Three years later, she appeared at her first hearing. She was one of 62 people in California women’s prisons granted parole that year. She was elated, though it would not be the end of her time behind bars.
Andrade had not realized that her conviction could lead to deportation. Though a parole commissioner mentioned an ICE detainer at her hearing, Andrade did not understand. She began making plans for her release and envisioning a life without fear and violence.
One week before her release, prison officials told Andrade that she would not walk out of prison a free woman. Instead, they kept her for five additional days until immigration officers could take her to immigrant detention to await deportation hearings. It’s an occurrence so common that advocates call it the prison-to-deportation pipeline.
Andrade was frightened about returning to Mexico, where her life would be in danger. Fortunately, another incarcerated woman had connected her with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, an advocacy group for incarcerated women and trans people in California. The coalition had been reaching out to people serving life without parole in the state’s women’s prisons. The coalition was part of ICE Out of California, a coalition of 100 community and statewide coalitions working to end state agencies’ cooperation with ICE.
When they learned about the ICE detainer, the group began a campaign urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant her a pardon, which would remove the threat of deportation.
Two days before her December release date, ICE decided to hold Andrade without bond. The agency charged her as removable because of her conviction, which ICE classified as an aggravated felony that rendered her deportable. On her release date, immigration officials took her from the prison to a private immigration prison in Aurora, Colorado.
She’s not alone. According to ICE Out of California, California state prisons transferred 3,200 people to ICE custody between 2019 and 2020.
In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum with guidelines for detention and deportation. Those guidelines prioritized noncitizens who were classified as threats to national security, border security and public safety. But the memo also listed several mitigating factors that favored not pursuing detention and deportation, including a person’s status as the victim of a crime and whether that person was eligible for humanitarian or other immigration relief. (In June 2022, a federal court in Texas vacated that memo, but it had been in effect when ICE made its decision to detain and begin deportation proceedings against Andrade.)
Two days before her December release date, ICE decided to hold Andrade without bond.
In 2022, California senators failed to pass a bill that might have helped thousands of future Mariselas. The VISION Act would have blocked state prisons and jails from transferring noncitizens to ICE custody once they completed their sentences. It passed the State Assembly, but fell three votes short of passing in the State Senate. But even if the legislature had approved it, Governor Newsom had already vetoed similar legislation in 2019, stating that it could “negatively impact prison operations.”
This year, advocates are at the legislature with a modified bill — the HOME (Harmonizing Our Measures for Equality) Act, which blocks transfers of noncitizen incarcerated people who have been released through recently enacted criminal justice reforms, such as youth parole, elder parole, or a bill allowing resentencing for domestic violence survivors. It would also protect immigrants and refugees who have been granted clemency, such as Andrade. The act only applies to cooperation between state prisons and ICE. It does not extend to local jails, which between 2018 and 2019 transferred 3,700 people into ICE custody.
The act’s author, Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, stated at a press conference, “The state of California has created a dual system of justice, which treats immigrants differently after they have paid their debt to society and have been paroled. They are not given the opportunity to restart their lives and go home,” she said. “It is a complete injustice in our judicial system.”
Pam Fadem, who works with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners on immigrant defense and the campaign to free Andrade, agrees. Both the VISION and HOME Acts would apply to noncitizens who have already finished their prison sentences or been approved for release by the governor’s appointed parole board. “If you’re being paroled, you’ve been deemed rehabilitated and no longer a threat to the community,” she stated.
Furthermore, Fadem reminded Truthout, California is a sanctuary state: “We should be providing sanctuary to people.” Many of the people with whom the ICE out of California coalition work came to the United States as children. Although she had been married one month earlier, Andrade, at age 18, was little more than a child when she arrived in the U.S. “This is their home, not someplace that was their ancestral home,” Fadem said.
While neither bill protects against deportation, Fadem notes that being allowed to return home can mean the difference between staying and deportation. “If people have the chance to go home, they can establish their roots in the community, in their faith communities, in their families and in working. Then they have a stronger argument against deportation,” she pointed out. “When you hand somebody directly over to ICE directly from prison, what can you say when you get to immigration court [and the judge asks] ‘What have you been doing for the past 10, 15, 20 years while you’ve been in prison?’” But those who have been allowed to rebuild their lives can show their ties to the community and have a stronger argument against uprooting them from these ties.
Andrade agrees. Had she been released into the community instead of transferred to ICE detention, she would have already been able to start working and established herself in the community. She would be much further along in reconnecting with her daughters.
Andrade spent the next 14 months in an immigrant prison in Colorado, far from her support network, without a bond hearing.
There, she filed an application requesting protection under the Convention Against Torture. It was initially denied but, upon appeal, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that the judge had not considered all relevant evidence. That application is still pending.
In December 2022, with the help of advocates, Andrade also filed an application for a pardon.
A pardon is another form of clemency that the governor can issue. For noncitizens, a pardon removes the threat of deportation. It also restores a person’s civil rights, making them eligible for jobs that otherwise bar those with felony convictions.
Although Andrade had been moved thousands of miles from friends, family and advocates, they did not stop fighting for her. After she filed her pardon application, they organized monthly email and telephone blasts to Governor Newsom, urging him to pardon Andrade. They connected her with an immigration attorney who is helping her apply for asylum under the Convention Against Torture.
“Ms. Andrade’s home is here in the United States,” Marisela’s attorney Julia Rabinovich told Truthout. “She left Mexico as a teenager, and now faces credible threats on her life should she be deported to Mexico.”
In March, a federal judge ruled that Andrade’s 14-month detention without a bond hearing violated her constitutional right to due process. On March 29, she was released on bond. She was allowed to return to California, where she now is not only rebuilding her life, but learning what it feels like to make her own choices, including what to wear and what to eat. She has learned that she loves Chinese and Japanese foods, which her husband, who continually kept her on a diet to keep her from gaining weight, never allowed her to try.
If allowed to remain in the United States, Andrade plans to go back to school. While in prison, she worked with people with disabilities. Now, she hopes to work with aging people.
“In the United States, Ms. Andrade can not only continue to heal from the abuse she suffered, but can also serve as a leader and mentor for others,” Rabinovich said. “Ms. Andrade believes no one deserves to suffer in silence, and if she is able to stay here in the United States, she plans to share her story and offer resources and hope to other survivors of abuse, so that their lives can have a different trajectory than her own.”
And, though her future remains uncertain, Andrade wants to help others the way that the California Coalition for Women Prisoners helped her. If she could speak directly to Governor Newsom, she would ask, “Give me an opportunity. I can demonstrate that I’m not a danger to society. I want to help with my testimony to help others, so they don’t make these same mistakes that I do in life.”
At around five in the morning on Aug. 31, 2020, Patricia Medina heard a knock on the wall of her prison dorm in Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA. She hadn’t slept at all that night. The correctional officer called her name.
“Your pass is here, it’s time to go,” Medina remembers them telling her.
It was her parole date. In a moment when she should have been filled with excitement to leave after 17 years, Medina was instead consumed by dread and uncertainty — she had no idea what would happen next because she was facing a detainer from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She hadn’t heard anything about her impending deportation to her native country, Belize, since ICE agents interviewed her three months after she arrived in prison— almost two decades ago. Her green card had expired and she now faced the threat of deportation after prison.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Medina said in a recent interview. “I was just hoping and praying that they wouldn’t show up, that maybe my paperwork would get lost somewhere. You wish for all these things because you don’t want to believe that it’s going to happen.”
She had 30 minutes to say goodbye to her dorm mates, many of whom she had befriended, gather her belongings and head to the release building.
As she walked out of her dorm, she felt her heart pounding and wondered if there would be an agent waiting for her. Medina, 54 at the time, hadn’t been to Belize since she was 12 years old, when her parents brought her to the U.S. She had no ties there. Her two sons, parents and siblings were in California, and she would also have to give up a construction job she already had lined up following her release if she were deported.
As she got closer to the building, she saw an ICE van.
“My heart just dropped,” Medina said, “My stomach was in knots. It’s kind of like when reality kind of sunk in.”
When she entered the release building, she was handcuffed and shackled, then escorted to the van, where they informed her that she would be flown to an immigration detention center in Aurora, CO, where she would appear in immigration court before being sent to Belize.
Now 58 years old, she lives alone in a country she had not been to since she was a child. Medina worries she might never see her parents, sisters and children again, as her parents and sister suffer from health issues that prevent them from traveling.
“I might not get to see them again in this lifetime and it breaks my heart,” Medina said. “It’s rough emotionally, financially, physically, mentally…This is existing, I have no purpose here. I was hoping for an opportunity to remain in the states so I can reconnect with my children and make amends in person.”
“I’m just hoping something really changes for all these people that are going through what I went through,” Medina added. “Think about the families these people are leaving behind.”
For decades, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has been transferring individuals to ICE before their parole date after applying a “potential immigration hold” status it created to individuals the department believes to be “foreign-born.” Medina is one of 7,824 people just over the last five years that CDCR transferred to immigration detention to be deported.
While many countries of birth are reported during the prison intake process, legal experts and advocates for the rights of incarcerated people have said that CDCR immigration hold policies can also be discriminatory, unlawful and based on racist assumptions. Public records obtained by ScheerPost show that it predominantly impacts Latinos and Asians.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) have filed a lawsuit against the CDCR and CDCR Secretary Jeff Macomber for such practices that have impacted thousands. The 7,824 people transferred from 2018-2022 included at least 250 U.S. born citizens and an additional 600 cases reported as coming from “unknown” countries of birth. CDCR did not respond to repeated questions about what “unknown” meant and what was done to these people.
“If CDCR is unable to ascertain the individual’s place of birth from the
information received or the information indicates the individual may be a foreign national, CDCR inquires with ICE for an official determination,” CDCR Press Secretary Terri Hardy wrote in a statement to ScheerPost.
CDCR did not answer questions regarding why the potential hold system was created, why people facing these holds are blocked from accessing some prison programming and housing available to incarcerated U.S. citizens, and why some U.S. citizens are also targeted by their immigration policies. ICE media representatives declined to comment on this story citing a pending lawsuit.
The names of thousands of people in CDCR custody with a potential hold are sent to ICE to verify their immigration status. According to a CDCR representative, there are currently 6,058 people in state prisons with a CDCR “potential hold” and 7,037 more facing ICE detainment as of July 2023, which means their hold was verified and processed by ICE.
A CDCR representative told ScheerPost that “the Department contacts ICE prior to the individual’s release date to arrange a pick-up to occur within five calendar days before the scheduled release date” and that if ICE does not pick up the individual by their release day, the individual will be released “under parole or probation supervision.”
CDCR internal memos obtained by the ACLU show that the “potential hold” policy goes back to 2005, but CDCR had a similar policy in 1992 that also involved cooperation with immigration authorities, said ACLU attorney Sana Singh. In 1977, the federal government created the International Prisoner Transfer Program that permits the transfer of incarcerated people back to their country of birth during their sentence, which applies at the state and federal level if approved by the BPH. The CDCR Employee Operations Manual states that CDCR “Coordinates with the BPH to facilitate return of inmates to their country of citizenship” in compliance with this program.
Correspondence between CDCR staff and ICE agents obtained through the California Public Records Act by the ACLU shows that CDCR proactively sends ICE lists of people they believe to be “foreign born” — determined by skin color, race, ethnic group identification, ancestry— even if their reported country of birth is the U.S.
Last October, Roth Chan submitted a request to join a program at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA to prepare her for release from prison. Trying to make positive changes in her life, Chan, 37, had been spending her remaining year of incarceration studying for her high school diploma equivalent—the GED—volunteering in classes, attending church services and bonding with women in her support groups.
When Chan checked on her application for the reentry program, her prison counselor said it was denied because she was facing a “potential immigration hold, even though she is a U.S. citizen born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley in California. Although her parents emigrated from Cambodia, CDCR internal records identified her as Mexican.
“It made me feel hopeless,” Chan recalled.
She said in a phone interview that when she explained her legal citizenship to her counselor in October 2022, she was told that CDCR could not remove the hold and she would have to wait for ICE to interview her within 31 days. She said she never got that call. Chan said in January 2023, she filed a request to eliminate the potential hold but was “denied” the next day because ICE had not yet responded to CDCR’s request for a “potential detainer investigation.”
In late May 2023, Chan’s “potential immigration hold” was removed by CDCR without explanation. Chan said that she was never given any justification for why she was facing an immigration hold as a U.S. citizen.
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In 2018, the California Values Act prohibited local law enforcement from assisting and complying with immigration enforcement, and mandated that the CDCR could not let immigration agents interview an incarcerated person without the person’s written consent. Nor can CDCR limit access to rehabilitative and educational programming, or consider immigration status when determining prison classification (although the CDCR manual still states that “inmate workers … will not be eligible to receive external accredited certificates” that every other inmate worker receives).
The California Constitution also prohibits law enforcement from treating people differently on the basis of assumed national origin and ethnicity. California is home to the largest immigrant population in the U.S., with 10.5 million immigrants, 5.8 million being naturalized citizens and more than 2 million individuals having lawful immigration status in the state, leaving 2.7 million undocumented and eligible for deportation.
There have been three recent attempts by the state legislature to prohibit CDCR’s cooperation with ICE, and the most recent bill — the HOME Act — is making its way through the Assembly this summer. California is following the path of Illinois, Oregon and Washington D.C., which have created legislation that blocks state prisons from cooperating with immigration officials.
Resolving an immigration hold from prison can be difficult, current and former incarcerated individuals said in interviews. ICE often takes months or years to verify citizenship, in many cases not until parole dates are near, according to the ACLU lawsuit.
The 7,824 individuals impacted by these transfers to ICE detention in lieu of parole from 2018-2022 are from more than half of the countries in the world. This includes the transfers of 5,040 people reported to be born in Mexico, 499 from El Salvador, 346 from Guatemala and 138 from Vietnam. CDCR did not provide information about how many people were deported from these transfers.
Nataly Marinero, a domestic violence survivor and transgender man who has spent 15 years in the California Institution for Women in Corona, CA worrying that he would be sent back to El Salvador, which he fled at age 17 after experiencing the trauma of sexual assaults and ongoing violence due to his sexual orientation and identity.
“I suffered a lot in my country,” Marinero recalls.
When he came to the U.S., Marinero said he felt free and less depressed than in El Salvador. He could live as an open transgender man. He feared that he would be sent to jail or be killed if he was returned to his native country.
“I don’t want to feel like I had to hide my sexuality,” Marinero said. “It’s very traumatic.”
Marinero, 37, has been in CDCR’s custody since 2008 and is nearing his release date. In his time in CDCR, Marinero read many books, worked in the kitchen, went to school for his GED and did other rehabilitative programming in the evenings.
In March, Marinero had a parole hearing where he was found eligible for release by the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH). According to transcript documents obtained by ScheerPost, the BPH said that Marinero “is not the same person that came to prison … [he] has made improvements on [himself] to the point that [he’s] not an unreasonable risk to public safety,” but moments later remarked that “[he’s] very likely to be deported.” Marinero was supported by the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, which urged Gov. Newsom to stop his transfer to ICE, stating in a petition: “Despite BPH recognizing Nataly’s transformation and rehabilitation, [CDCR] plans to turn Nataly over to ICE for deportation to a country that is known to actively target transgender people.”
Marinero’s case was referred to an en banc BPH hearing, where supporters were able to speak on Marinero’s behalf and urge the board to intervene in his ICE transfer.
On Aug. 23, the BPH found Marinero was suitable to return to his California home. After years of grassroots organizing in a campaign with the CCWP, Marinero will be released to the community, where he looks forward to connecting with his supporters.
He said this has been “a stressful situation. The unknown [was] driving me crazy.”
“After 17 and a half years of being locked down, I’m finally going to get to see my friends,” Marinero said, speaking of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners. “I’m so happy.”
The ACLU and ALC in their lawsuit are seeking a court order requiring CDCR to comply with the California Constitution and California Values Act, which prohibit the use of state resources to assist immigration enforcement. Filed in April, the lawsuit “vindicates the fundamental rights guaranteed to every person in California to be free from unlawful discrimination” and said CDCR’s immigration policies are unlawful based on discriminatory classifications that violate California law.
“If not for the fact that they’re immigrants or that CDCR has perceived them to be immigrants, they would just be allowed to go home to their families and communities, or have access to programs, services, and activities, just like any other person in custody,” said Sana Singh, an attorney with the ACLU representing the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Roth Chan, the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, Root & Rebound and Anouthinh “Choy” Pangthong, said, “This creates a dual system of punishment that discriminates against our immigrant communities.”
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For nearly 19 years in prison, Pangthong faced the threat of deportation. He has memories of an imaginative childhood playing outdoors and roaming around Stockton amid his family’s travels for migrant farming work up and down California. At the age of 17, he remembers calling his mother from a youth detention center one day and learning that she had become a naturalized citizen, and because of this, he, too, became a citizen.
“She’s been working all these years for that moment, and so when she became a citizen, she was like, ‘Son, we made it,’” Pangthong recalled.
But two months later when Pangthong turned 18 and was transferred to San Quentin State Prison, he was interviewed by two immigration agents who asked him questions about where he was born and how he got to the U.S. Pangthong answered their questions.
“I told them that I am a citizen and they just disregarded that,” Pangthong said.
Pangthong remembers thinking it unbelievable that ICE was trying to determine his status in the U.S. when he was already a citizen. Within a month, he was called to his counselor’s office where he was given a form that stated that he was facing an immigration hold.
In the time that followed, Pangthong informed his counselor, the associate warden and other high-ranking officials at his annual classification meetings that he is a citizen and asked to have his hold removed, but they said there was nothing they could do to help him. According to Pangthong, they told him to contact ICE but did not give him any directions on how to do so. He remembers feeling helpless that his assertions of his citizenship were being ignored, even though he had proof.
“It was frustrating, I don’t even know what the steps were,” Pangthong said. “That added to a different type of heaviness that I already felt just being in prison.”
After more than a decade passed, Pangthong said he felt even more stressed because he started to worry about going before a parole board with an immigration hold on his record. At one point he said he hoped to stay in prison just to avoid being deported.
“Throughout my sentence, it was always in the back of my mind, like, ‘What if they deport me and I’m a citizen,’ having to worry about when I am released, being scooped up by ICE,” Pangthong said.
Pangthong said immigration holds were not uncommon in prison. He said there were times his friends would get released, but later he would learn they were actually picked up by immigration authorities.
“It wasn’t a rare thing … those bittersweet moments where somebody I know gets to be free from prison, but only to go to another prison,” Pangthong said.
In 2017, three years before he would be released, Pangthong met a visiting immigration attorney at a program called ROOTS, or “Restoring Our Original True Selves” — who, coincidentally, had been helping his friend remove a potential hold. Pangthong wrote to the attorney who agreed to work with him pro bono about his case.
The process of corresponding with the attorney and gathering paperwork to send an affidavit proving Pangthong’s citizenship to the Department of Homeland Security took several months. Pangthong said it also involved having retraumatizing conversations with his family — worrying if he would get sent to Thailand, where they had fled a war — and they wondered if they would also be impacted by immigration enforcement. A month after the letter was sent, he received a letter from the DHS confirming that he was a citizen and saying that his hold would be removed immediately.
“For 19 years, I just had this detainer on me for no reason,” Pangthong said.
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Pangthong and Chan are plaintiffs in the lawsuit against CDCR and Macomber to end the policy that currently has six percent of the CDCR population in a “potential hold” status.
“CDCR’s potential hold and ICE notification policies risk wrongfully transferring U.S. citizens, like Pangthong and Chan, and lawful permanent residents to ICE custody,” the ACLU/ALC lawsuit stated.
According to the lawsuit, CDCR placed and continues to impose a potential hold on Maria Hernandez, a U.S.-born citizen, but that also is being ignored by CDCR officials. It states, “CDCR assumed that Ms. Hernandez was not born in the United States and placed a potential hold on the basis of actual or perceived race, ethnicity, ethnic group identification, color, ancestry, national origin, or indicia of national origin.”
The lawsuit also mentions Brian Buckle, a naturalized citizen who was facing an immigration hold in CDCR custody despite insistence that he is a U.S. citizen and CDCR’s own records indicating the same. The lawsuit says that in June 2020, instead of being released from prison and spending Father’s Day with his family, Buckle was transferred and detained in immigration detention for 36 days. There, he was also repeatedly ignored when he presented evidence of his citizenship and was urged to sign deportation paperwork until an immigration lawyer got involved and ICE verified his citizenship.
It mentions another naturalized citizen who has and continues to face a potential hold in CDCR custody since 2017, and three other people who were facing potential holds and were repeatedly ignored when they told CDCR staff that they were citizens — these holds weren’t removed until after ICE had instructed CDCR to do so, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also mentions instances where, according to CDCR’s own records, they classified some people as Hispanic who were of other ethnicities, including Chan, who is Cambodian but was classified as Mexican.
This policy is illegal, Singh states: “With this unlawful targeting of immigrants and refugees, the California prison system is also failing at its alleged mission to provide people with the tools to return to their communities, to have access to rehabilitative and educational programs.”
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, transfers from California’s prisons and jails accounted for most of ICE’s bookings into detention centers — so much so that they began transferring incarcerated people to immigration centers in Colorado. California detention centers had reached capacity, causing the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Southern California Chapter to intervene by sending a petition to the California Supreme Court to “halt all local law enforcement transfers to ICE during California’s state of emergency due to COVID-19.”
“For over a decade, we’ve been working on trying to break the links between state and local law enforcement and ICE,” said Carl Takei, Criminal Justice Reform Program Manager at the Asian Law Caucus.
Since the California Values Act went into effect in 2018, there have been further legislative efforts to place restrictions on CDCR’s immigration policies, such as the VISION Act in 2020 that would have restricted CDCR’s cooperation with ICE, but last year it fell three votes short In the state Senate. In 2019, Gov. Newsom vetoed a similar bill on the basis that it would “negatively impact prison operations.”
The bills faced opposition from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents CDCR correctional officers, and from the California Police Chiefs Association, calling it “a major threat to public safety.” Takei said that there was also a lot of overemphasizing immigrants and crime. A recent study by the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance found that there is no correlation between immigrants and high crime rates, and that citizens are more likely to commit a crime than an immigrant.
“Scaremongering has too often drowned out the discussion that we need to have about what kind of system we want to have, whether that system was fair and equitable for immigrants and how this impacts immigrants and their families throughout the state when CDCR and other law enforcement agencies engage in discrimination like this,” Takei said.
“At the end of their time in custody, immigrants who have benefited from criminal justice reforms … never get the same opportunity to reunite with family and experience the benefits of that parole,” Takei said. “CDCR contacts ICE and ensures that rather than being able to leave the prison gates, immigrants who are granted parole get shackled and placed into an ICE van and taken to an ICE detention facility directly from the prison.”
In April 2023, Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo introduced the HOME Act, a bill that would “prohibit the CDCR from detaining people on the basis of a hold request, providing an immigration authority with release date information, or responding to a notification request, transferring to an immigration authority, or facilitating or assisting with transfer requests.”On Aug. 14, the bill passed the Senate’s Appropriations Committee and is now going through the Senate and Assembly, and if passed, will go to Gov. Newsom’s desk.
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Since his release in 2020, Pangthong has been advocating for immigrant and formerly incarcerated communities by participating in community events and hosting a podcast focused on storytelling and changing the narrative around these topics.
In early July, Pangthong attended a convening in Stockton of community members and advocacy organizations rallying in front of an ICE check-in center in support of a resident. There, he noticed the terrified looks on the community member’s family not knowing what was going to happen, and the many other families there as well.
“When the judge sends us to however many years, that is how many years we’re supposed to serve,” Pangthong said. “Deporting individuals, ripping folks apart from their family — that’s another form of punishment and that does nothing for public safety.”
Pangthong said that he hopes that the HOME Act is passed to keep families together and end the double punishment faced by immigrants caught up in California’s criminal justice system, and so that community members can feel safe from the harm of deportation.
“The ‘R’ in CDCR is supposed to be for rehabilitation,” Pangthong said. “If these practices aren’t stopped, then it just creates more harm. …What I really want out of [this lawsuit] is for CDCR to stop its practices and its policy against foreign born nationals.”
Victoria Valenzuela is an investigative reporter based in California covering issues in criminal justice. She currently oversees the criminal justice coverage as a reporter at ScheerPost. She is also a fellow with the Law and Justice Journalism Project. In the past, Valenzuela has also worked with ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She is completing graduate studies at the University of Southern California, where she also helps teach a class on the power and responsibility of the press.
hen she was 20 years old, Sheená King was sentenced to life without parole. Two years earlier, King’s boyfriend had coerced her into fatally shooting another woman, threatening to kill her and her family if she refused. She was convicted of murder, which, in Pennsylvania, mandates life without parole.
It’s a sentence that King, now age 50, and other advocates call “death by incarceration.”
“Freedom is ensured when my ashes are shipped to my daughter in a cardboard box,” she explained in a newly released report on women and trans people serving similar sentences.
The term “death by incarceration” encompasses those like King who have been sentenced to life without parole. In recent years, it has also expanded to include people who are serving life sentences that allow for parole as well as virtual life sentences of 50 years or more. More than 203,000 people, or one in every seven people in U.S. prisons, are serving one of these types of sentences.
In Pennsylvania, 8,242 people (or 12 percent of the state’s prison population) are serving one of these sentences. The state has the second-highest amount of life without parole sentences — 5,375 people — in the nation. (Florida, which has 10,438 people serving life without parole, is first for that dubious distinction).
As of March 2023, Pennsylvania’s two women’s prisons confined 1,871 women, trans and gender-nonconforming people. Of those, 197 — or over 10 percent — are serving life without parole sentences.
Given their relatively small percentage, the experiences of people sentenced to death by incarceration are often overlooked and under-reported. Now, a new report brings their stories — which often start with violence from loved ones — to the forefront.
“From Victim to Victor” draws from surveys and follow-up interviews detailing the life histories, prison experiences and policy recommendations of 73 women and trans people serving similar sentences in Pennsylvania’s women’s prisons. The report is researched and written by incarcerated people in partnership with outside advocates from the Abolitionist Law Center, the Human Rights Coalition and Let’s Get Free: The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee.
While its scope is limited to those in Pennsylvania’s women’s prisons, the report reflects the reality of women and trans people serving lengthy or lifelong sentences nationwide — and their efforts to challenge the system that has doomed them to die behind bars.
“For decades I have felt like a discarded thing, locked away from society thousands of miles from home and forgotten by all except a handful of people who care deeply for me,” King, who wrote the report’s introduction, told Truthout by e-message. “I participated in writing the report for the women around me who feel as I feel but aren’t able to articulate or to give voice to their emotions. It is incumbent upon me to speak for those who cannot.”
Over 60 percent of the women and trans people surveyed for the report had never been arrested before the arrest that led to their sentencing. Strikingly, 75 percent had been abused as children. More often than not, the violence happened at the hands of men that they knew — fathers, mothers’ boyfriends, uncles, brothers or family friends.
The violence often continued into adulthood. More than 80 percent said that they later became involved in abusive romantic relationships. Their accounts point to a common story arc in women’s prisons: a lifetime of patriarchal violence.
That story arc isn’t limited to Pennsylvania. Nationally, 86 percent of those in women’s jails reported experiencing sexual violence before arrest; 77 percent also reported partner violence.
One-third of those who responded to the survey were convicted for the death of a romantic partner. In 85 percent of those cases, participants reported that that partner had been abusive. In convictions for the death of someone other than a romantic partner, such as King’s, male violence frequently played a significant role.
That’s what happened to Jamie Silvonek. She was 14 years old when her 20-year-old boyfriend, whom she described as controlling and violent, killed her mother, who had opposed their relationship. Silvonek was charged with first-degree murder as an adult and sentenced to 35 years to life.
For the next four years, she was incarcerated in Muncy’s Youthful Offender Unit, where children are held in isolation away from incarcerated adults. But Silvonek was still in the presence of adult prison staff who regularly abused her verbally and emotionally.
“They regularly forced me to stand in front of their office while they verbally disparaged and humiliated me. They sometimes forced me to stand in front of their office for hours at a time as they degraded and taunted me,” she recounted for the report. When she attempted to report their abuse, they retaliated by writing her numerous misconduct tickets. Those tickets increased her isolation and fraught mental state, preventing her from talking with her family and lessening the few opportunities to interact with other young people in that unit.
Others also described how the violence they faced on the outside continued past the prison gates. “I’ve been the topic and receiver of physical and emotional abuse that traumatized me before prison, just to be thrown away into another abuser’s arms called the Department of Corrections,” Kimberly Joynes told Truthout.
Abuse perpetrated by prison staff is not uncommon. Between 2016 and 2018, the latest years for which data is available, prisons and jails nationwide reported 45,581 allegations of staff sexual harassment and abuse. Fewer than 2,200 allegations were substantiated. A lack of substantiation does not mean that an assault did not occur; it simply indicates that investigators report that they did not find enough evidence to determine whether it occurred.
That’s what happened to Tracey Nadirah Shaw, who had been repeatedly raped by a prison officer for four years. The officer had threatened her family if she reported his assaults, causing her to remain quiet. The attacks stopped only after she was moved to a different housing unit. Years later, she learned he was applying to become manager of her housing unit. She reported his rapes to prison authorities, her family and an outside monitoring agency. Prison investigators dismissed her claims as not only unfounded but, because so much time had elapsed, frivolous.
By June 1, 2003, Sarita Miller’s use of crack cocaine, which had started as a way to block out her father’s abuse, had become an “insatiable desperateness.” One night, she went to her dealer, intending to get crack from him. They drove to the home of another person, Rita Nagel, whom Miller hoped would give them money.
“I knew that Ms. Nagel was friendly with some of the drug addicts,” Miller explained. “She would show compassion and allow some of us to wash her car, run errands, etc.” Miller planned to fabricate a sob story to get a few dollars. Instead, she said, once Nagel opened her door, “My co-defendant pushed his way in and began brutalizing her. I stood back frozen and watched. I did nothing to help her. I couldn’t believe it!”
When her co-defendant threatened to do the same to her if she did not act, she hit Nagel in the head with a hammer. Nagel died from their attack. Miller was charged with first-degree murder and robbery.
At trial, Miller’s dealer took the stand and told a different story — that Miller alone had killed Nagel, then later took him to the apartment to see the dead body. He was offered immunity in exchange for his testimony. A jailhouse informant, who later received probation for robbery and assault, told a similar story — that Miller had boasted about the murder while in jail.
In addition, prosecutors called Miller’s female lover, who testified that Miller had allegedly confessed the murder. But they didn’t limit questioning to the alleged confession. Instead, Miller recalled, “My lesbian affair was brought up in front of the jury and my sexual performance with my ex-partner [was also discussed.]” Miller was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
She wasn’t the only one whose sexuality was used to demonize her in front of the jury. Michelle Hetzel, who was convicted after her husband killed her ex-girlfriend, recalled, “My relationship with a girl was the biggest talking point. At trial the rings we exchanged were passed around to the jury. The rainbow sticker on my car was photographed and blown up for the jury.”
Her request for a separate trial was denied. Her attorney never brought up her husband’s abuse nor the fact that he had been her foster brother, that he was seven years older than her, and that their relationship began when she was a minor.
Hetzel and her husband were both convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Over half of the report’s participants were incarcerated for a crime involving a white victim. This includes Miller, who is Black and Muslim, and Hetzel, who is white. Studies have indicated that sentences are often higher in cases involving deaths of white victims, particularly white women.
Pennsylvania is one of nine states that requires life without parole for felony murder, or being present when a death occurs during another criminal act. More than 20 percent of the report’s participants are imprisoned for felony murder.
Despite the prospect of dying in prison, many of these women have attempted to transform their lives. While in county jail, Miller completed her high school diploma and took college classes. Once in state prison, she enrolled in classes and self-help groups, including violence prevention, substance abuse programs, victim awareness, financial literacy classes and vocational programs.
She began therapy to address past physical and sexual abuse from adult relatives and to understand how that violence shaped her life and actions. She also decided to ensure that incarcerated women had their own outlet for their voices, collaborating with Let’s Get Free, a Pittsburgh-based group supporting imprisoned women and trans people, to publish Daughters, a biannual magazine specifically by and for incarcerated women.
King completed every program offered at SCI Muncy, including graduating with an associate’s degree in religious education, a bachelor’s degree in Christian counseling and completing 32 vocational programs. She also became certified as a peer educator to help others undergoing similar struggles.
Joynes, too, has completed every program offered at SCI Cambridge Springs, the state’s other women’s prison. She is now taking correspondence courses from Colorado State University toward two bachelors’ degrees — one in sociology and another in psychology.
Silvonek is also enrolled in college. She is also learning to advocate not only for herself but for others who were ensnared in the legal system as juveniles. “At 22, I am far from the insecure, impulsive 13-year-old child I once was. I am working hard to become a woman that my family and community is proud of,” she wrote in an e-message to Truthout.
But their pathways to transformation aren’t easy in a prison environment. Many, including King, described struggling with mental health with little to no support from prison medical staff. Instead, staff frequently punish them when they most need mental health support. Silvonek attempted suicide several times; each time, she was stripped of her clothing, placed in solitary confinement and denied reading materials and access to her family.
Participants also described being punished for minor rules violations, most often for contraband, or items that they were not allowed to have. These items were often not dangerous at all. King, for instance, was sent to solitary for 30 days for having fruit salad. Other contraband for which women have been punished include perfume, earrings, a lamp, ketchup and a seasoning packet.
Nationwide, the majority of people in prison are parents. Two-thirds of the report’s participants have children. Nearly 60 percent of those parents were arrested before their children were 5 years old. Not surprisingly, their lengthy imprisonment has frayed their relationships. Several said that they did not know much about their children’s lives, while others had lost touch altogether.
King’s children were 3 years old and 4 months old when she was arrested. She was fortunate that her mother and sisters cared for them, avoiding foster care and permanent separation. Still, she said that her incarceration devastated her family. “At ages 30 and 33, [my children] still have enduring effects of my incarceration,” she wrote. Her son is currently serving the same sentence as her — a life sentence without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.
Not only have family ties been frayed, but those sentenced to death by incarceration fear aging and dying behind bars.
Joynes and King were 20 when they entered prison. King recently turned 50 and Joynes will be 62 this summer. Without clemency or legislative change, they face decades — and death — in prison.
Nearly half of all Pennsylvanians serving life without parole are over age 50. More than 21 percent are age 60 or older. While report participants ranged from ages 20 to 80, the average age was 55 years old. They described witnessing neglect of those who were aging and expressed fear that they, too, might be treated horrifically as they lost the ability to care for themselves.
“[Life without parole] means you will die in a dirty diaper, begging for someone to come help you and be abused for losing your memory,” 57-year-old Maria Spencer stated in the report.
For those serving life without parole, clemency, in the form of a sentence commutation, is currently their only chance for release.
While some states allow their governors discretion to commute sentences, Pennsylvania requires unanimous approval from all five members of the Board of Pardons and Parole. Even if the board grants unanimous approval, the governor can still deny clemency. Between 1999 and 2022, only 57 lifers received commutation; 45 were granted by Tom Wolf between 2015 and 2022. In contrast, between 1970 and 1995, Pennsylvania governors commuted 285 life sentences.
As of 2020, 8,242 people in the state were serving a sentence characterized as death by incarceration. The report highlights three bills that could provide other avenues for that elusive second chance.
Senate Bill 135 would provide parole eligibility for those serving a life-without-parole sentence except for those convicted in the deaths of law enforcement.
SB 136 would ensure that all incarcerated people are able to see the parole board once they turn 55 years old, have served 25 years of their sentence, or have been diagnosed with a chronic, terminal or debilitating illness. The law is similar to one in California, which requires that people who reach age 50 and have served 20 years in prison be eligible for a parole hearing.
SB 385, or Alternative Sentences for Domestic Violence Survivors, would mandate the court consider an individual’s history of partner abuse as a mitigating factor in the sentencing process, allowing the court to impose a sentence below the state’s sentencing guidelines. It also gives the judge the discretion to not imprison the person at all. Survivors who are already incarcerated would receive consideration for resentencing or release. New York passed a similar bill in 2019.
Behind bars, Sheená King and Kimberly Joynes have been active in advocating for all three. King urges those around her to encourage their families to contact lawmakers, attend rallies and vote for candidates who support these changes. In past years, she also wrote form letters for women whose families lived in red districts.
Although she will have her first parole hearing when she is nearly 50, Silvonek is also actively advocating for SB 135 to give others that chance. She is also planning to advocate for children who, like herself, were tried and punished as adults.
Meanwhile, all three hope that the report will bring both more understanding to women’s imprisonment for crimes involving violence and more support for bills that allow them (and everyone else) a second chance.
“I hope this report will cause a tsunami among the people,” Joynes told Truthout. “I want the public servants and the politicians to stop serving with their eyes closed knowing the needs of the uneducated and poor.”
