News: Updates on Women’s Prisons

In the year she was out of prison, Gwen Levi, 76, was thriving. But Levi’s season on the outside ended June 12 after she attended a computer word-processing class in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Jasmine Rose Jones is a woman. But for much of the last 23 years, she was incarcerated in a men’s facility, and she says she was subjected to rape, sexual assault and abuse, just because she is transgender.

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.

“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.

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

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.

On June 2, the California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument in a case that raises serious questions about the constitutionality of how California’s death penalty has been applied.

CCWP’s ally, Freedom Archives recently processed a new collection of materials related to Bay Area women’s’ prison organizing during the 1970s, the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project (SCWPP).

A group of 44 California district attorneys sued state prison officials Wednesday trying to force a halt to emergency state rules that they claim would allow the early release of 76,000 inmates.

Rollins, who is 25 and transgender, was recently moved from the state’s only women’s facility to New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, according to online prison records. No other person listed as “female” statewide is incarcerated in a male facility, records show.

Theresa Martinez was a formerly incarcerated activist and survivor who died in March under cruel racist circumstances. Voice of Witness mourns the loss of Theresa Martinez, a narrator in VOW’s book Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons.

The Biden administration stood up for the safety of transgender women in a first-of-its-kind court filing, saying that it’s unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” to systematically place trans women in men’s prisons and to deny gender-affirming health care to incarcerated trans people.

Today, a federal court ruled that California’s ongoing violations of the rights of prisoners, including systemic fabrication of information supposedly provided by confidential sources, should be subject to extended judicial monitoring.

New Jersey has agreed to pay almost $21 million to several women who said they were sexually abused while incarcerated at New Jersey’s only women’s prison and to other former inmates, officials announced Wednesday.

What is Life is a podcast by Pennsylvania reporter Josh Vaughn that gives people serving life without the possibility of parole in Pennsylvania a chance to tell their story in their own voice.

Joseph J. Martinez was accused of abusing female inmates at Springer Correctional Center from the moment they arrived at the facility in October 2016, according to a New Mexico State Police probable cause statement in a criminal case against the former guard.

The California Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the current cash bail system Thursday — a decision that some feel could lead to numerous releases and a more just future for marginalized communities.

Nobody could remember a rally ever happening outside New Jersey’s only women’s prison. Saturday may have been the first.

The current spotlight on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexually abusing his staff is consistent with his history of structurally misogynistic treatment of the people — especially survivors of gender-based violence — incarcerated in New York prisons. The breadth of Cuomo’s interpersonal abuse is disgusting and infuriating. Unfortunately, it is not surprising…

On Thursday, March 11, Senior U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken handed down a blistering ruling that ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to institute a series of changes with which the judge hopes to put a stop to what she describes as a pattern of systemic abuse of incarcerated people with disabilities at five of the state’s prisons.

As states have begun COVID-19 inoculations at prisons across the country, corrections employees are refusing vaccines at alarming rates, causing some public health experts to worry about the prospect of controlling the pandemic both inside and outside. A statewide survey in California showed that half of all correctional employees will wait to be vaccinated.

Today, as the world commemorates International Women’s Day, 35 Palestinian women are yearning for freedom in Israeli prisons and detention centers. Amongst whom are 11 mothers, six wounded prisoners, and three administrative detainees…

After watching the documentary “Belly of the Beast,” Mary J. Blige was incredulous. “I could not believe what I was seeing,” Blige said. “But somewhere in the back of my mind, all my life, I always felt like women weren’t being treated properly in prisons. Black women were just being treated like slaughtered pigs.”

The Danbury Federal Correction Institution in Connecticut is one of three federal prisons that were singled out for prompt action last spring by former Attorney General William Barr because of its vulnerability to Covid outbreaks. At a federal compound in Connecticut, inmates in precarious health “are like sitting ducks,” one lawyer said.

Winter Storm Uri left the federal medical camp at Carswell, and the 1066 women confined there, without heat or hot water during a frigid weekend that dropped as log as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. “If They Can’t Take Care of Us, Release Us”.

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970.

Inmates reported being beaten while handcuffed at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in New Jersey, the state’s only prison for women. For Trimeka Rollins’s daughter, who is 24 and transgender, New Jersey’s only women’s prison was supposed to be…

In need of a life-saving bone marrow transplant for leukemia and positive for COVID, DeReta Steverson, incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW), is still not eligible for compassionate release in California, even under the state’s much-hyped release program.

The United States executed Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, early on Wednesday, making her the first female prisoner to be executed by the federal government since 1953.

Allegations of guards sexually assaulting prisoners at the state-run women’s prison in Springer continue to mount. Albuquerque attorneys representing several inmates who say they’ve been sexually assaulted at the facility have filed another complaint…

Throughout Lisa Montgomery’s life, authorities repeatedly failed to stop the extreme violence and abuse that she suffered. On Christmas Eve, a federal court ruled that the government had acted illegally…

California’s prison system, which has been exceptionally hard-hit by the coronavirus, has started vaccinating some inmates — but none so far at the 25 prisons that have been most overwhelmed by infections

“Some of us wear masks even in our beds, but it feels futile,” said Sarah Jo Pender, incarcerated at the Rockville Correctional Facility, one of Indiana’s three women’s prisons. “There is little to do except watch the infection spread and wait my turn to suffer.”

Federal prosecutors said a Florida women’s prison has failed to protect prisoners from sexual abuse by facility staff in violation of the inmate’s constitutional rights.

A state prison medical facility in the Central Valley houses inmates with special medical needs. At least 150 of its 2,400 inmates are positive for COVID-19.

A fast-moving coronavirus outbreak at FCI Dublin, a federal women’s prison in Alameda County, has infected more than 20% of the prison’s population, according to data released Wednesday. The mass spread of the virus in jails and prisons around the country…

Coronavirus infections inside prisons have exploded in recent weeks with one of the worst surges taking place in California, where more than 40,000 inmates and staff across the state’s 35 prisons have tested positive for the virus.