Advocates for domestic violence survivors in Illinois celebrated earlier this month when Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill into law making it easier for incarcerated survivors of domestic violence to get reduced sentences.

House bill sponsor Rep. Kelly Cassidy was among those cheering. First elected in 2011, she has since written legislation designed to help incarcerated survivors of gender-based and domestic violence, including the resentencing bill that was signed into law in August. The idea is that women who received harsh sentences without a court hearing about their histories of abuse should get an opportunity to tell their stories in court and potentially be resentenced.

“We can write all the laws in the world but until we start taking women’s lives seriously and valuing them and believing them, we’re going to keep having more tragedy,” Cassidy said.

Illinois is taking this view into account with a series of new laws. Only New York and California — and now Oklahoma — have comparable resentencing statutes, although efforts to change laws are underway in several other states. Since the laws involved reducing sentences, tough-on-crime lawmakers remain hard to convince.

But Illinois women’s advocates have had success getting laws passed and the state’s become sort of a laboratory, Cassidy said. “We’ve now figured out how to do it and could easily share it across other jurisdictions.”

Cassidy, who had herself grown up in an abusive home, found her passion for criminal justice reform while working in the 1990s as a policy assistant at Cook County State’s Attorney Office — the equivalent of a district attorney’s office — where she managed a pilot program that provided resources to people facing domestic violence with an increased risk of escalation.

Read the full article about incarcerated domestic violence survivors by Isabella Volmert at The Associated Press.