Author: redcarpet

truthout.org

By Taylor Blackston & Sojourner Rivers
June 17, 2021

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Prosecutors’ offices deal in punishment, not healing, prevention or justice. When candidates running for prosecutor claim to be on the side of survivors of violence, we always need to take a closer look — and recognize the violence inherent in the office itself.

In May, Manhattandistrict attorney (DA) candidate Alvin Bragg published an op-ed with advocate Marissa Hoechstetter in which they assert that it’s time to “center survivors and fight the public health crisis that is sexual violence” by expanding the prosecutor’s office to include a specific sex crimes unit. Not long after,carceral feministsGloria Steinem and Sonia Ossorio announced support for the wealthy Wall Street candidate for Manhattan DA, Tali Farhadian Weinstein. They similarly claim that the expansion of the punishment system will improve the lives of women. The reality is that these carceral feminists, Manhattan DA candidates and the overwhelming majority of DAs across the country, are pushing forward a decades-old agenda of expanding a system that is inherently violent and counter to what most survivors say they need.

One year after the murder of Oluwatoyin Salau, a Black teen activist who was failed by a system unable to provide her safe housing and was, therefore, left more vulnerable to violence, the DA candidates are advocating for devouring the already austere New York City budget to build out the criminalization infrastructure.

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Three months after the violence in Georgia targeting Asian massage workers — after which activists and sex workers denounced the idea thatmore criminalization and police could keep massage workers and sex workers safe — these candidates are advocating against sex work decriminalization.

As Black survivors of gender-based violence ourselves, and as organizers who work to end the criminalization of survival, our vision for a world without gender-based violence requires a world without policing, prisons and prosecution. Carceral feminists — or those who believe punitive practices such as policing and incarceration can solve gender-based violence — continue to claim they speak for all survivors. Yet many of us are screaming from the rooftops that we deserve so much more than the few carceral crumbs governments toss our way.

While carceral feminists may take up much of the public spotlight, radical feminists have long made connections betweeninterpersonal and state violence, showing how law enforcement has perpetratedgender-based violence throughout history and outlining the ways thatcarceral systems have failed many survivors. While it may be true that some survivors feel that the criminal legal system is useful to them, studies have found that around 70 percent to75 percent of sexual violence survivors do not report the violence to the police. Of those who do report to police, crude estimates show that 2.3 percent result in a conviction.

As the experience of Chanel Miller — a sexual assault survivor whose victim impact statement went viral in 2016 — revealed to millions, the court process is frequently retraumatizing and victim-blaming for gender violence survivors, even if a conviction occurs. Survivors are often crushed as the carceral machinery churns along to cage its next victim. Unlike restorative or transformative justice approaches, this legal system does not foster survivor-centered healing and accountability. The things that are precious to so many survivors — the abusive person taking responsibility for the violence they caused, apologizing and outlining how they will stop their violence, and making agreed-upon amends — are not byproducts of this system. The byproduct is more violence. Studies have shown that when the state targets communities with criminalization and incarceration, these communities actually experience increased rates of interpersonal violence rather than less. In short, incarceration does not prevent violence, it fuels it. The Manhattan DA has had over two centuries to become a victim-centered office — ultimately carceral feminists need to reckon with the fact that this is not possible in a system that only cares about punishment and not what survivors actually say they need.

As arecent survey of violence survivors has shown, overall survivors of violence prefer investments in schools, jobs and mental health treatment over more investments in prisons and jails. These realities would not surprise most anti-violence advocates. Since the Violence Against Women Act was first introduced, survivor advocates, particularly those that center the most historically marginalized groups, have stated over and over what communities ask for most while experiencing abuse:somewhere safe to live and somewhere nurturing to heal. Nevertheless, these cries go largely ignored by most bureaucrats and lawmakers. As a result of refusals to invest in actualaffordable housing and sufficient emergency cash assistance, our city’s shelters burst at the seams, as domestic violence has become thenumber one driver of the New York City homeless shelter population. Upon fleeing violence, many survivors and their families then experience the stress of severe poverty and housing insecurity.

Any real commitment to survivors must involve divesting from law enforcement responses to violence — which most survivors do not benefit from and which many marginalized survivors experience as violent — and redistributing resources to life-affirming and non-carceral supports.

Prosecutors Must Drop Charges Against Survivors

Not only do prosecutors usually fail to provide any respite for survivors of gender-based violence, they also often directly target them with criminalization and incarceration. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has a long history of prosecuting survivors of gender-based violence. In 2007, seven women were arrested for defending themselves after being sexually harassed in the West Village, andfour of them were later sentenced to up to 11 years in prison. Today, that same office isprosecuting Tracy McCarter, a survivor of domestic violence, for the death of her abusive partner. The DA’s office currently housesa Domestic Violence Unit similar to the proposed sex crimes unit that Bragg andHoechstetter propose, and yet it continues to prosecute people for defending their lives.

Meanwhile, DA candidate Farhadian Weinstein pledges to support domestic violence-related mandatory arrest laws, which have been shown to result in some survivors being arrested, due to being mistaken as the abusive person. Notably, theresearcher whose work helped spur the adoption of mandatory arrest laws backtracked when additional data emerged indicating that these laws actually resulted in increased domestic violence for low-income survivors of color.

Steinem and Ossorio are promoting Farhadian Weinstein’s plans for a Bureau of Gender-Based Violence as if a departmental expansion and name change can transform the system’s relationship to survivors. Prosecutors cannot claim to care about survivors while simultaneously criminalizing their survival.

Prosecutors often serve as a criminalized survivor’snext abuser through aggressive character assassinations, monitoring their movement and phone calls, and creating an environment of punishment and fear. New York City jails and prisons are also frequent sites of sexual violence. Criminalization, prosecution and incarceration inherently spread violence; they don’t solve it.

Any discussion about reforming criminal legal systems on behalf of survivors without mention of how these very systems are abusing survivors themselves is incomplete at best, and extremely harmful at worst. This is particularly true forBlack, Latinx, Indigenous, queer and trans survivors who are rarely seen as “real” victims by courts if they fight back, but are also killed at the highest rates when they do not fight back. The city’s next DA must decline to prosecute and drop the charges against all survivors of gender violence — including Tracy McCarter — once elected. Otherwise, their “commitments” to survivors are nothing more than campaign talking points while survivors continue to be penalized by prosecutors in New York City.

Prioritize Survivor Needs, Not the Expansion of the District Attorney’s Office

Survivors shouldn’t have to engage with violent carceral systems to receive the support they need. While gender-based violence is supposedly considered apublic health issue, local and state government officials and prosecutors continue to push for a law enforcement response.

The District Attorney’s office is a law enforcement body, and we know that in ravaged government budgets, when a budget line is added in one place, it means another is lost. Instead of adding more survivor-oriented social workers and medical personnel to the law enforcement budget, we should be building up these resources in other departments. Supports should not be an extension of policing.

Moreover, if these resources are housed in police precincts and district attorney’s offices, they are likely to be used as carrots to pressure survivors into working with cops and prosecutors. As just one example, New York State requires that survivors quickly report a crime to law enforcement to be eligible for Victim Compensation, financial assistance to cover medical bills, counseling or other costs related to their survivorship. This policy coerces survivors into engaging with police to receive emergency economic support. Funding for the prosecutor’s office should be redirected to the resources that survivors have been consistently asking for, such as housing, flexible funds, and other resources that are essential for supporting survivor healing and self-determination. If we funded these needs proactively, we would be investing in the prevention of violence rather than only responding after the fact — and peddling public dollars into institutions that often cause further harm.

Defund the District Attorney’s Office to Radically Invest in Safety

Prosecution cannot address the root causes of violence. The criminal legal system itself is built on anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other oppressive forces that sustain a culture of violence. Unable to recognize their fundamental role in continuing these systems of oppression, any solutions that prosecutors offer outside of shrinking their own power will continue to fall short. For example, something as simple yet consequential as the framing of the issue has implications for who is recognized as a survivor and can access public resources. During this campaign, DA candidates — as well as Steinem and Ossorio — wrongly use a “violence against women” frame to describe gendered violence, which is often used to exclude transgender women and erases many other survivors across the gender spectrum. These instances reinforce what other feminists have long been telling us about the delusions of trusting the criminal legal system to support survivors, when these systems have targeted the communities that many survivors come from.

Conversations about the consequences of relying on criminal legal responses to violence have been happening for decades, from theFeminist Alliance Against Rape newsletters in the 1970s to theMoment of Truth Statement signed by anti-violence organizations across the country in 2020. Prosecutor candidates like Bragg and Farhadian Weinstein are proposing to interrupt gender-based violence with more violence (such as the sexual violence of incarceration). A truly transformative step would be one that shrinks prosecutor power. If prosecutors really want to help gender-based violence survivors, they should cut their budgets and return their funds to the city for community and survivor-led participatory budgeting.

Prosecutors’ offices are using their outsized power and resources to harm so many of us, particularly Black, queer, and other historically marginalized communities. It is time to defund and abolish them all, and give us what we need to live.

Taylor Blackston
Taylor Blackston is a Black queer abolitionist organizer and survivor of sexual violence.

Sojourner Rivers
Sojourner Rivers is a sexual violence survivor, member of Survived & Punished NY and a member of the #StandWithTracy defense team.

nytimes.com

Melena Ryzik
June 11, 2021

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“And So I Stayed” examines how the courts treat women who kill their abusers. The movie played a role in one case that resulted in freedom after a conviction.

In 2013, Tanisha Davis, a 26-year-old woman from Rochester, N.Y., was sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing her boyfriend, at whose hands she suffered, she said, nearly seven years of abuse, including choking, death threats and a beating on the night he died. The judge agreed that she was a victim of domestic violence but said her response did not merit leniency. “You handled the situation all wrong,” he told her. “You could have left.”

In 2021, because of a new law that allows survivors of domestic violence more nuanced consideration in the courts, the same judge released Davis, thanks in part to a documentary that helped frame her case.

It’s not uncommon for documentary projects to have an impact on legal proceedings, once they’ve found an audience and built public attention. But the film that helped Davis, “And So I Stayed,” was not yet released — it wasn’t even finished — when the filmmakers, Natalie Pattillo and Daniel A. Nelson, put together a short video for the court, describing her life.

“You could see the strength of the ties she had to her family and the strength of the support she would have” if she were released, said Angela N. Ellis, one of her lawyers. The prosecutor and judge both mentioned watching the footage when they agreed, in March, to set her free.

In her eight years in prison, Davis, 34, spoke to her son, now 15, every day. Now that she’s home, “I can just call him in the next room,” she said. “I can’t even explain that joy. I cry happy tears all the time.”

For the filmmakers, it was an unexpectedly bright ending to an often heartbreaking and troubling film. “And So I Stayed,” which will have its premiere Saturday at the Brooklyn Film Festival (viewable online through June 13), is personal for Pattillo, who is a survivor herself and whose sister was killed by a boyfriend in 2010. The documentary grew out of her thesis project at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Nelson, her co-director.

Credit: Gwen Capistran

“I didn’t realize how common it was, the gravity of women being incarcerated for defending themselves or their children,” Pattillo said. “Once I found out, I couldn’t stop reporting,” in an effort to show just how misunderstood, and punitive, these cases are within the justice system.

The film’s first focus was Kim Dadou Brown, who served 17 years in prison for killing her abusive boyfriend. She became an advocate, traveling to Albany to needle New York lawmakers about the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, the long-simmering legislation that eventually helped free Davis. Introduced in 2011, it was finally passed in 2019, after Democrats flipped the State Senate.

The act is among the few laws in the country that grant judges more leniency in sentencing domestic violence victims who commit crimes against their abusers. It follows a growing, research-backed understanding of the patterns of abusive relationships, and the unique hold they have on people within them.

“Leaving is the hardest part,” and the most dangerous, Dadou Brown said. “I thought that all men hit, and so I stayed with mine, so I knew which way the blows would come.”

After Dadou Brown, a Rochester native and former health-care worker, was paroled in 2008, she volunteered with survivors and crisscrossed the state for rallies — even when money was tight because her felony status made jobs hard to find, she said. With 17 earrings (one for each year of her incarceration) and her signature false eyelashes, “she’s just a force,” Pattillo said. “It’s pure tenacity. That’s Kim.”

When the bill passed, there was elation among its supporters and the filmmakers. But they kept their cameras rolling.

One case that was considered a surefire test of the act was that of Nicole Addimando, a young mother of two in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who in 2017 fatally shot Christopher Grover, her live-in boyfriend and the children’s father. The film includes police camera footage of that night, when she was found disoriented and driving around in the wee hours, her 4- and 2-year-olds in the back seat.

Her case made national headlines because of the severity of the abuse she said she endured: bites and black eyes; bruises and burns to her body, including while she was pregnant, that were documented by medical professionals; rapes that Grover videotaped and uploaded to a porn site. In the film, a social worker calls it not just assault, but “sexual torture.” In 2020, Addimando was sentenced to 19 years to life for second-degree manslaughter; the judge denied that the survivors justice act was applicable.

“I felt like we failed her,” said Dadou Brown, who was at the sentencing.

In the film, Addimando is heard mostly as a voice on the phone from prison; in one call, her mother tries to console her that at least she’s alive, that she escaped the abuse. “I’m still not free,” she replies, weeping.

Though there are no nationwide statistics on the number of women incarcerated after defending themselves against abusers, federal research suggests that about half of the women in prison have experienced past physical abuse or sexual violence, a majority from romantic partners. Black women are disproportionately victimized through both intimate partner violence and the justice system: They are the most likely to be killed by a romantic partner and more likely to end up in prison, according to Bernadine Waller, a scholar at Adelphi University.

In bringing stories like these to the screen, said Nelson, the filmmaker, the aim was not to dispute who pulled a trigger, but to contextualize those convicted. “The legal system forces you to create the perfect victim,” he said, “and a prosecutor will do everything in their power to characterize a survivor into not fitting into that box.” (In Addimando’s case, the judge said she “reluctantly consented” to the sexual abuse.)

Garrard Beeney, a lawyer for Addimando, who is awaiting a decision on her appeal, said the documentary’s examination of the way the judicial system treats survivors is “a necessary, but I also think, not sufficient step,” in changing the process. Police, prosecutors, and judges have to be educated on how to think about domestic violence, he said. “We need that kind of retraining more immediately than a gradual process of understanding.”

For Pattillo, who had two of her three children while making the film, some moments felt overwhelmingly raw. “There’s survivor’s guilt, always, when you’re dealing with trauma,” she said, adding, in reference to Addimando, “Why did I get to be OK and not Nikki? Why do her kids not get to be tucked in by her every night?”

But it was also “very healing,” she added, “to have a hand in making sure the survivors feel seen and heard and believed through this film.”

It originally ended on a dark note, at a vigil for Addimando. Then came the Davis case. The filmmakers were there on the day she was released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Reacclimating to life outside — during a pandemic — is still challenging, Davis said last week. But she wanted her story told as a warning for victims, and a beacon. The filmmakers plan to make the documentary available to those in the legal system — “a tool kit,” Nelson said, on how to employ the new law.

Dadou Brown was also at Bedford Hills; she drove Davis’s family there. Her advocacy, Dadou Brown said, had become her life’s calling. “I feel so fortunate to have so many dream-come-true moments,” she said. “Even coming home from prison. My next dream-come-true moment will be bringing Nikki home.”

New Jersey is closing a women’s prison, but it won’t get at the root of the problem

washingtonpost.com

Jessica Adler
June 16, 2021

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Last week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced his intention to close the state’s women’s prison, Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, as a means of “completely breaking [a] pattern of misconduct.” Murphy reported being “deeply disturbed and disgusted” by an April 2020 Justice Department report citing a “pervasive culture” of violence and sexual abuse in the institution.

Headlines referred to the findings as “shocking,” but they actually echo centuries of accounts of abuse and neglect endured by women in U.S. prisons, as well as more recent reports of mistreatment. While the closure of Edna Mahan may stop cruelty at one facility, it is an incomplete solution to a deeper and widespread problem: The United States’ jarringly inhumane system of incarceration poses unique dangers to women.

That has remained true throughout U.S. history, though prison conditions have varied by period, region and other factors. Reports of physical and sexual abuse in 19th-century penitentiaries were rife, as were tales of extreme neglect. In western New York, in the mid-1820s, women were placed in an attic above the kitchen of the new state prison. Aside from being visited by a steward who brought food and removed waste once per day, they were largely abandoned.

In the South, women in prison camps undertook forced labor — building roads, tending crops — alongside their male counterparts. Under a system that supported both white supremacy and the Southern economy, all incarcerated people faced threats of corporal punishment and abuse. But, as detailed by Talitha LeFlouria, Black women in particular were “subjected to fiendish acts of physical cruelty, often of a sexualized nature, and raped with impunity.”

At the turn of the 20th century, reformers who voiced concerns that prevailing prison conditions undercut public safety and democratic ideals pushed state governments, mainly in the Northeast, to construct all-female reformatories focused on rehabilitation rather than just punishment. Results of prison-based agricultural and domestic education programs at facilities like Edna Mahan — founded in 1913 as Clinton Farms — would be, they imagined, “shown in many happy homes, many clean and upright lives, many parasites turned into producers,” as the Clinton Farms 1917 annual report put it.

Only some were deemed worthy of such high hopes, however. Women’s prisons, like others, were segregated and racialized, and White women had the most extensive access to reformatory-style programs.

In the post-World War II years, many Southern and Western states lacking dedicated women’s prisons invested in such facilities. By that point, the reform impulse had largely waned, and women, like other incarcerated people, were increasingly “warehoused” in institutions hidden from public view and scrutiny.

Constituting a relatively small portion of the prison population, and commanding little sympathy from lawmakers, they increasingly took claims of abuse and neglect to the courts. In cases like Barefield v. Leach in New Mexico (1974), Grosso v. Lally in Maryland (1977) and Glover v. Johnson in Michigan (1979), women argued that they had even less access to vocational and educational programs than their male counterparts.

Other litigation focused on women’s heightened risk of sexual harassment and violence. In a 1977 lawsuit, women incarcerated at Bedford Hills in New York alleged that correctional officers violated their privacy and left them “‘involuntarily exposed’” in a variety of ways, including by looking “‘over the curtain which we use to cover the doorways to our cells when we are on the toilet.’” An appeals court opinion stipulating that women could dress in shower stalls and request that male guards close their cell door slots when they used toilets, Juanita Diaz-Cotto notes, failed to address “the widespread fear among women prisoners … [of] greater sexual and other abuse.”

Women protesting poor treatment faced the prospect not only of being rebuffed, but also of violent repression. According to a 1975 civil action, after receiving no response to written grievances, more than 30 people incarcerated at the North Carolina women’s prison in Raleigh gathered in the prison yard for a “vigil” with the aim of presenting their complaints directly to facility officials. They were met instead by guards wearing riot helmets and wielding billy clubs. As the protesters assumed “the traditional non-violence posture … by lying down and going limp,” the men forcibly moved them inside. By the end of the confrontation, the women said, they had injuries, including scratches on their faces and broken ribs, and they had been tear-gassed.

Although action could be dangerous, incarcerated women and their advocates consistently organized and spoke out. In October 1980, the radical newsletter No More Cages,presented firsthand reports from Ohio’s Reformatory for Women at Marysville. Harsh disciplinary procedures, medical neglect and guards’ physical brutality were rampant, according to imprisoned women. “We are,” they said, “extremely desperate.”

Yet, with the public clamoring for harsher policing and sentencing, prison officials, policymakers and the courts too often ignored such pleas, even as the population of women at risk in U.S. prisons and jails exploded. Over the past 40 years, according to the Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700 percent, from 26,378 in 1980 to 222,455 in 2019.

The Justice Department report about Edna Mahan reveals that women in prisons face terrifying dangers — dangers that resemble those encountered and fought by generations that came before them. Perhaps more disturbing, the New Jersey facility is hardly an anomaly.

Despite the department’s assertion that there have been egregious violations of constitutional rights at Lowell, policymakers and state officials have embraced the twin strategies of intransigence and repression modeled by their historical forebears. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) did not respond to requests for comment from the Miami Herald upon the release of the Justice Department findings and ignored calls to oust Lowell’s warden. Meanwhile, Florida Corrections Secretary Mark Inch maintained that the report “over-generalized.” All the while, conditions inside apparently remained threatening. In February, a judge granted a protective order for women incarcerated at Lowell and other Florida facilities who alleged that they were subjected to “unconstitutional isolation practices” in retaliation for outspokenness about prison conditions.

While Murphy is at least taking action, it remains to be seen whether closing Edna Mahan and transferring the 400 women imprisoned there to other facilities will help them avoid the rights violations, violence and sexual abuse that have long defined the experience of incarceration in the United States.

The “pattern of misconduct” in need of remedy, it is clear, extends far beyond one institution.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy said that he would shut down Edna Mahan, New Jersey’s only women’s prison, because of a “long history of abusive incidents.”

nytimes.com

Tracey Tully | June 7, 2021

Just over a year ago, the Justice Department offered a scathing indictment of New Jersey’s only prison for women, describing a culture of sexual violence by guards so entrenched that it violated prisoners’ constitutional protections from cruel and unusual punishment.

But the string of scandals continued. After a day of mounting tension in January that included prisoners flinging bodily fluids at guards, officers violently removed several women from their cells during a midnight raid. One woman was punched in the face 28 times, the state’s attorney general said.

On Monday, in a stunning declaration that the problems were beyond repair, Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced that the prison, Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, would be permanently closed.

The governor’s decision comes as states and cities around the country are reckoning with violence and abuse behind bars, and as officials are beginning to heed calls to rethink incarceration.

In New York City, there are plans to shut down the notorious Rikers Island jail complex and replace it with smaller, community-based lockups. Other states, including California, Connecticut and Missouri, have moved to close facilities amid a decline in the prison population tied to decreased crime rates and an emphasis on drug treatment instead of incarceration for some offenses.

After the violent overnight raid on Jan. 11, New Jersey suspended 34 prison staff members, and later charged 10 with crimes ranging from assault to official misconduct.

The shutdown is expected to take years, and it is unclear where the 384 women housed at the prison in western New Jersey would go.

Groups that work with prisoners appeared divided on the plan to close Edna Mahan, with some hailing it as an opportunity to further reduce the population of women behind bars, while others worried about the upheaval the move could cause.

Women at Edna Mahan were already reeling from the January attack, and Mr. Murphy’s announcement follows more than a year of extraordinary Covid-19-related restrictions. Visitors were barred, and prisoners lived in fear of contracting the virus, which raced unchecked through many of the country’s large, crowded prison facilities.

New Jersey released thousands of inmates from its jails and prisons to try to slow the spread, yet a New York Times database found that 31 of every 100 prisoners eventually contracted the virus, nearly three times the statewide rate of infection.

Bonnie Kerness, a program director with the American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, said Mr. Murphy should have allowed lawmakers and advocates time to evaluate recommendations outlined in a state-funded report that was also released on Monday before making the sweeping closure announcement.

The damning 73-page report presented a portrait of a facility beset by administrative chaos.

“Wouldn’t it be more logical to punish the abusers and continue the work on reform of the organizational culture?” said Ms. Kerness, who is in regular communication with women at the facility.

“The beatings were a condition of confinement having nothing to do with the physical structure,” she added.

Jeanne LoCicero, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the shutdown was an incomplete solution. “Changing a name or location does little to check the systemic and cultural issues plaguing our state’s prison system, and it will not prevent further injustices,” she said.

The number of women housed at Edna Mahan, a sprawling facility in Hunterdon County that first opened in 1913 and can house more than 700 people, has been declining, tracking a nationwide trend. In June, it housed the 384 nonviolent and violent offenders in three compounds.

Edna Mahan would be the third prison to close in New Jersey in several years, and Mr. Murphy, a Democrat who is running for re-election, said the women would be relocated to a new prison or “other facilities.”

William Sullivan, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, Local 105, the union that represents the state’s 6,000 correction officers, said he was blindsided by the announcement. Mr. Sullivan said the decision appeared to be aimed at distracting from the problems laid out in the report, including pay disparity and guard recruitment challenges.

“I think it’s an overreach — more of a feel-good kind of maneuver rather than a fix-the-problem reaction,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, a national criminal justice reform group based in Washington, said the decision matched the goals of nationwide efforts focused on lowering the number of female prisoners nationwide and relocating those who are sentenced to prison to be closer to their families.

“There should be a priority to keep people close to home,” Ms. Porter said.

Any proposal to build a prison is likely to face fierce opposition, as has happened in Massachusetts and Texas, where proponents of reducing incarceration have fought against the construction of new lockups.

And in New York, several candidates in the upcoming mayoral election have attacked the move to replace Rikers Island, leaving the plan’s future uncertain.

Mr. Murphy has ignored a drumbeat of criticism by legislators who have demanded that he fire his corrections commissioner, Marcus O. Hicks, in response to the Jan. 11 melee. The Justice Department report found pervasive sexual abuse at Edna Mahan and called for sweeping changes to address “systemic failures.”

Women were regularly sexually assaulted by guards and sometimes forced to engage in sex acts with other prisoners while staff members looked on, the report, issued in April 2020, found. Several guards had been convicted in 2018 and 2019 of sexually assaulting women, but the problem persisted.

The report ordered New Jersey to implement reforms that ranged from adding female staff members and cameras to removing defunct, empty facilities where some of the abuse occurred.

In response, state correction officials made some staffing changes and added additional stationary and body-worn cameras. The state hired an advocate for victims of sexual assault, Helena Tomé, as a liaison to the women in the state’s care.

The corrections department also hired a private consultant, the Moss Group, weeks after the January cell extractions, and Mr. Murphy commissioned the state’s former comptroller, Matt Boxer, to conduct a private investigation as the state’s attorney general pursued criminal charges against officers.

The result was the report released on Monday, which documented weeks of tension before the January episode.

“Officers felt that inmates were not being held accountable for their actions and that their supervisors were not protecting them,” the report states.

The officers, Mr. Murphy said, “abused their power to send a message that they were in charge.”

He said he had concluded that “the only path forward is to responsibly close the facility.”

Within hours of Mr. Murphy’s announcement, two state senators said the development offered a welcome opportunity to rethink where and why women are imprisoned.

“As we plan for the future,” said Senator M. Teresa Ruiz, a Democrat who represents Essex County, “we should ensure that our women who have suffered abuse and neglect for so long can be transferred to facilities closer to their homes where they can receive support from their families.”