Category: CCWP In the News

CCWP In the News

For Third Year, California Kills Bill to Help Incarcerated Domestic Violence Survivors

BOLTS Magazine

By: Victoria Valenzuela

September 23, 2025

Advocates in California have pushed for relief for people convicted of harming their abuser, hoping to build on states across the political spectrum that have adopted such reforms.

Just before her 25th birthday, Susan Bustamante confided in her brother about the violent abuse she had suffered from her husband. She says her brother had protected her from her abusive father in the past, so she turned to him again after her husband threatened to hurt her family if she left him. “He told me don’t worry sis, I’ll take care of it,” Bustamante said in public testimony earlier this year. “The idea that he would kill him never occurred to me.” 

After Bustamante’s brother murdered her husband, she was convicted of helping him plot the killing. During her two-day trial, she was barred from testifying about the abuse she endured for years, which wasn’t seen as relevant to her case. Anytime she tried to talk about the abuse during the trial, it was struck from the court record. She was sentenced to life without parole.

At the time she was sentenced, Bustamante’s daughters were eight and 11 years old. She said she missed their weddings, the births of their children and the death of her sister. She was granted clemency in 2017 and released from prison in 2018 after 31 years of incarceration.

In March, Bustamante found herself sitting before California lawmakers, testifying about the abuse she experienced from her husband and how she was silenced in court. She asked for them to pass state legislation to help give other survivors of domestic abuse who are still in prison for crimes related to their abuse a chance at release. She also told lawmakers how the experience of incarceration retraumatized her. 

“I’m a survivor of domestic violence, of child molestation, and a survivor of the California prison system, which as you were speaking earlier, it’s horrific,” Bustamante told lawmakers. “I’m an advocate for victims and survivors who should have the chance to at least tell their stories in court.” 

Read full article from BOLTS Magazine here!

CCWP In the News

Pardon Request for Marisela Andrade de Zarate: Protect a Survivor from Deportation

Davis Vanguard

September 22, 2025

By: Kayla Betulius

Domestic violence and human trafficking survivor Marisela Andrade de Zarate spent 15 years in state prison and nearly two years in ICE detention before finally being released on bond to reunite with her family in California. Women Prison News is urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant her a pardon, recognizing the strength and resilience she has shown in rebuilding her life.

Since her return, Marisela has successfully completed state parole in December 2024, meeting every condition. She now lives in her own home, works steadily, attends school, and is deeply involved in her church and local community. Women Prison News stresses that these accomplishments show Marisela’s commitment to her rehabilitation and her community, making her an ideal candidate for a gubernatorial pardon.

Marisela is also a long-term lawful permanent resident of the United States. Despite the grave danger of violence and even death if forced to return to Mexico, the government continues to pursue her deportation. Women Prison News calls on Newsom to pardon Marisela, preserve her legal permanent resident status, and protect her from the cruelty of deportation to Mexico or another country.

Women Prison News asks: Governor Newsom, please pardon Marisela Andrade de Zarate. Doing so will honor her resilience, keep families together, and uphold California’s commitment to protecting survivors of violence.

 

CCWP In the News

California law silences abuse victims in court. Why won’t the Legislature change this?

Cal Matters 

September 2, 2025

by Susan Bustamante

Thirty years ago, I did the bravest thing I could imagine: I asked for help.

I had survived years of childhood sexual abuse by my father, followed by a violently abusive marriage. For years my husband beat me, threatened me, forced me into isolation and even forced me to have an abortion.

I endured it and stayed quiet until I couldn’t anymore. I had two daughters to protect.

When I confided in my brother and explained what was happening, I believed I was taking a first step toward freedom. I never expected my husband would be killed and that I would be charged with his death, accused of plotting to collect a life insurance payout.

CCWP In the News

2 more former guards at FCI Dublin plead guilty in sexual abuse scandal

By Tim Fong

/ CBS San Francisco

Two former guards at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin pleaded guilty to sexually abusing female inmates, the latest employees to be convicted in a scandal at the now-shuttered prison.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California announced Thursday that 34-year-old Jeffrey Wilson pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a ward and for making false statements to government agency. Lawrence Gacad, 33, pleaded guilty to abusive sexual contact.

Read more from CBS San Francisco here.

CCWP In the News

Quilt Honors Survivors of Forced Sterilization in California Prisons: ‘Together We Rise’

Ms. Magazine

by 

6/26/2025

Six women unveiled a quilt earlier this year they called “Together We Rise! Together We Heal!” honoring the nearly 600 survivors of forced sterilization in California state prisons.

One of those women—Kelli Dillon—was herself sterilized without her knowledge by a prison doctor and began to experience menopause in 2001, while in her early 20s. She shared this with individuals at the unveiling ceremony, speaking to the pain this medical violence caused her. 

The quilt, created with fabric scraps inside and outside of prisons and coordinated by activist Linda Evans of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, visualizes the intense violence that many incarcerated women, especially incarcerated women of color, faced and continue to face. It connects to a much longer history of how forced sterilization is and was used to sterilize disabled women and women of color across the United States over the past century. 

California Coalition for Women Prisoners’ members created a quilt, “Together We Rise, Together We Heal” to honor the healing, hope and resilience of women who underwent forced sterilization. (CCWP)

In many ways, the institutionalization and pathologization of disability in the U.S. mirrors how incarcerated individuals are and were stripped of their reproductive rights.

As the country grapples with the deadly aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, these six women remind people that medical violence is and has been permissible in this country. The quilt’s message also serves as a reminder of the continuation of early 20th century efforts to sterilize women, whether that’s because of disability, race, religion or ethnicity, and to ultimately serve white supremacist ends. 

During the Social Purity and Eugenics Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists sought to preserve and uplift a pure white, Protestant race by “protecting” white women’s virginity and encouraging them to have children. (Pronatalists got their start during this time as well.) At the same time, they were forcibly sterilizing women of color, especially Black and Native women, poor women and disabled individuals.

Kelli Dillon testifies on going through a forced hysterectomy in a California prison. Her experience is captured in the PBS documentary Belly of the Beast. (PBS Independent Lens)

Alongside social campaigns that outlawed alcohol consumption, sex work and the distribution of contraception and “pornographic” materials through the mail—as well as xenophobic, paternalistic laws against a flood of Southern and Eastern European and Asian immigrants to the United States—these social purists fought for the passage of laws enabling doctors and institutions to forcibly sterilize people.

These laws took off in the early 20th century, around the same time that these purists campaigned for unsightly beggar ordinances that restricted disabled people from appearing in public. 

This social experimentation and implementation of eugenics on a massive scale is perhaps best immortalized by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s official opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell. The 1927 case upheld the legality of state institutions forcibly sterilizing anyone “afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility.” Central to the case was Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, who was sterilized at about the same age as Dillon. Holmes argued that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” referring to Carrie’s mother Emma, Carrie herself, and her child Vivian. 

Buck was not alone. Between the 1920s and the 1980s, thousands of women were forcibly sterilized, often without their knowledge, in an effort to reduce the population of people of color. The slang term “Mississippi appendectomy” refers to the forced sterilization of poor Black women, including civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, as a reflection of wider racial medical violence.

In 1961, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization of Black women was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.” (Wikimedia Commons)

In 2020, these histories were revisited as immigrants detained in the U.S. accused the facilities they were held in of forcibly sterilizing them. 

Just last month, another case of forcible sterilization—which highlights one of thousands of Indigenous women and poor women in Peru under Alberto Fujimori’s government—was heard before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Guatemala City. 

It wasn’t until 2013 that the practice of sterilizing incarcerated women as a form of birth control was outlawed in California.

In 2021, another law required the state to pay reparations; however, to this day, women are still denied access to their medical records and compensation on the claim that endometrial ablation procedures are not a form of birth control. 

California is currently only one of three states that has created processes and has begun to pay reparations to people who have been forcibly sterilized. A group of researchers in Utah are pushing to become the next state to compensate people who were forcibly sterilized. At one time, Utah was the leading state for forced sterilization in the country, according to Axios‘ Erin Alberty.

However, the fight and the practice of forced or coerced sterilization of incarcerated women continues in the U.S. While the case Relf v. Weinberger outlawed the use of federal funding for involuntary sterilization, forced sterilization is still exercised in some correctional facilities. The true number of these cases and extent of this medical violence is difficult to quantify, as is the question of whether incarcerated individuals can and are providing informed consent to these procedures. Reparations are still difficult to access as some reparations committees do not consider reproductive procedures with fertility-reducing implications a form of intentional sterilization. 

For disabled individuals, who still face exploitative systems of institutionalization and are denied marriage equality in the U.S., forced sterilization remains legal in some states where this is permissible in specific situations. As Julia Métraux wrote for Mother Jones earlier this year, most states still have laws on the books that permit doctors and institutions to sterilize disabled individuals where disabled individuals are held, sometimes against their will.

Just two months ago, Maria Elena Figueroa—a woman who fought against forced sterilization and one of 10 Mexican American plaintiffs to sue the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for forced sterilization—died. The case Madrigal v. Quilligan highlighted the impact of racism, medical abuse and language barriers on reproductive justice within the healthcare system. Figueroa gave birth to her daughter in 1971 and had her fallopian tubes tied without consent to the procedure. Instead, her husband gave consent and signed the form without her knowledge.

Although not incarcerated, Figueroa stood as an advocate for thousands of women grappling with this history of medical violence and for the growing awareness of these long-standing ramifications.

At the same time, many others have in the last three years turned to voluntary sterilization in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned to protect their health and reproductive rights.