The number of women incarcerated in the U.S. has grown more than 750% since 1980, with an estimated 225,000 in prison or jail today. Women’s pathways to prison are often different than men’s, and so are their needs while incarcerated — especially when it comes to health care. Take, for instance, the alarming number of mothers who routinely remain shackled while giving birth.
Yet all too often, the conversation around the criminal justice system continues to overlook women’s experiences. Research in the field also tends to focus on gender-nonconforming and transgender inmates solely for the “problems” they present, rather than what they need — or their protection and well-being — when they're placed in facilities that presume a binary system of biological gender.
A “ProVisions: Women in Criminal Justice” conversation Feb. 26 from Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality (CSWGS) will explore the wide array of gender dynamics at play in the U.S. criminal justice system, and particularly in Texas.
The online discussion, which is free and open to the public, will bring together experts working on the front lines of social change, policy and advocacy in Texas today. It's part of CSWGS’s yearlong programming arc on “Gender, Race and Political Engagement.”
Sasha Legette, executive director of Pure Justice; Maggie Luna, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health Peer Policy Fellow for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition; and Sukyi McMahon, criminal justice policy director of Austin Justice Coalition, will speak on the panel, which will be moderated by Rice assistant professor of sociology Brielle Bryan.
“We specifically picked organizations working outside of the criminal justice system to either reform or abolish the criminal justice system as we know it,” said CSWGS associate director Brian Riedel. “These three women have very different experiences relative to the system, but are allied in their positioning and thinking.”
Legette, an attorney and professor who founded Pure Justice in 2015, has pursued criminal justice reform as a legislative aide for the Georgia State Senate and in externships at the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education.
Luna experienced the prison and jail systems firsthand before finding a different path and graduating from the Anthony Graves Smart Justice Speaker’s Bureau at Texas Southern University prior to joining the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.
McMahon began her work as a human rights activist with Refuse & Resist! in 1999 and now also works with the Columbia University Justice Lab. She attracted national attention last year as she and the Austin Justice Coalition pushed for more police oversight in the state capital. McMahon also recently published a popular op-ed in The Hill calling for President Joe Biden to appoint a secretary of racial justice.
Continuing CSWGS’s programming theme, this year’s Gray/Wawro Panel in Gender, Health and Well-Being on March 4 will tackle “The Gender of Migration, The Migration of Gender” with another online panel.
“ProVisions has always been a preview of issues that come up in a subsequent event,” Riedel said. “The reason we chose the timing for ‘Women in Criminal Justice’ and the Gray/Wawro Panel on the gender of migration is because these get intimately tied up in the criminalization of migrants — and many of these migrants are women.”
Talking through these issues is one thing. But with this year’s programming arc, CSWGS aims to provide not only critical conversations, but also constructive advice from its speakers.
In addition to the ProVisions and Gray/Wawro Panel panel, look for a March 10 talk on voting rights by historian Martha Jones and an April 16 graduate symposium featuring a public keynote from Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Center for Peace and Justice.
“We’re hoping that this will be a very positive year in the sense that it focuses on activism and on what people can do about these structural issues,” said CSWGS director Helena Michie, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of English. “We're really interested in what happens next — how we move from an analysis of what's gone wrong to implementing changes.”
Register for the Feb. 26 ProVisions panel on “Women in Criminal Justice” online. The 11:30 a.m. panel is free and open to the public; registration ends Feb. 24.