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How Post-Prison Reentry Programs Fail Queer Women

The Marshall Project Jan 25, 2018
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How Post-Prison Reentry Programs Fail Queer Women-giving compass
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If the goal of reentry programming is to empower people returning from incarceration to make the most of their lives, then the system is failing women. For nearly two years, I volunteered and conducted research at a privately-owned halfway house in Pennsylvania. It was a facility for women recently released from prison or who had violated the terms of their probation. As a behavioral health expert, my work with the residents focused on helping to identify their reintegration needs.

These women—many of them reconciling histories of substance misuse, violence, trauma, racism, sexism, and isolation—were working hard to rebuild their lives and draft plans that were sustainable and healthy. Sadly, I saw many penalized for pursuing lives post-incarceration that supervisors deemed “risky” simply because they did not fit gendered or heteronormative ideas of success. For queer women especially, it created challenges to reentry instead of eliminating them.

Queer residents were further vexed by the refusal of probation officers and halfway house supervisors to approve home plans that included same-sex female partnerships. None of the women I met at the halfway house could cite positive past relationships with men,  Residents shared that house staff and probation officers often encouraged plans that involved a male partner, whether or not he was economically secure, but discouraged plans that included a criminally uninvolved, economically secure female partner.

Read the full article post-prison reentry fails queer women by Erin Kerrison at The Marshall Project.

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Human Rights is a complex topic, and others found these selections from the Impact Giving archive from Giving Compass to be good resources.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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    Incapacitation: How Much Does Putting People Inside Prison Cut Crime?

    Does putting more people in prison markedly reduce crime outside prison walls—at least while those people are still in prison? I think that in writing my full report, I approached the research on this question with just as much skepticism as I did with deterrence. Yet the incapacitation research better withstood my scrutiny. I am convinced that decarceration on the scale proponents hope for measurably increases crime in the short run. In 2001, the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, which gives judges nonbinding guidance on sentencing, modified a recommendation in a way that caused people of a certain age to be sentenced to significantly less time in prison. In particular, the commission lowered the age at which, when counting prior offenses, judges should stop considering a defendant’s juvenile record. Since judges generally sentence people with more priors to more time, and since the juvenile record age limit fell from 26 to 23 years, 23-25-year-olds with juvenile priors saw those erased from consideration, and received shorter sentences. In a study exploiting this sudden change, Emily Owens calculates that time served for this group fell an average 222 days. Read the source article at Open Philanthropy Project


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