Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons

This article Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During her 12 years incarcerated, Laura Purviance was part of the settlement for unconstitutional strip searches in a Los Angeles County jail, sexual harrassment from a supervising officer at the Central California Women’s Facility and the suicide of her neighbor at the California Institution for Women. As a survivor of domestic violence, Purviance said these experiences were deeply triggering for her.

When she spoke up about the conditions she faced, Purviance said no one would listen. She said that “there’s a sense that the people that work here are in control, and we’re less than human.” But as her sentence progressed, she learned about the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, or CCWP. It is a grassroots organization of formerly and currently incarcerated women dedicated to supporting system-impacted women and challenging the abusive conditions inside California women’s prisons.

“This system is supposedly here to rehabilitate us, but it’s not,” said Purviance, who is still incarcerated at California Institution for Women. “So when I reached out to the CCWP, they absolutely went above and beyond to connect with me about that experience, to support me through my healing, to be able to speak about and move forward with that.”

But their work to support incarcerated women goes beyond that. The CCWP, along with coalition partners across California, recognize that like Purviance, many people in women’s prisons experience a cycle of trauma through incarceration. Now they are fighting to close the doors to the remaining two women’s prisons in the state — the California Institution for Women and Central California Women’s Facility — altogether.

Up to 90 percent of women in prison experience some kind of trauma prior to incarceration. Advocates say that women often fall into the system when trying to meet their basic needs — such as participating in acts of robbery, sex or drug trafficking, property crimes, or being in an abusive relationship — that might lead them to defend their lives or be charged as an accomplice. They also say incarceration does not address trauma, but only perpetuates it, and that women often get left out of the larger conversation.

In place of incarceration, these advocates are pushing for community-based resources that address housing, poverty, mental health and jobs, to get to the root of incarceration causes. Activists have been holding rallies, marches, town halls and creating research reports documenting the harm of women’s incarceration. They say ending women’s incarceration is important as ever, at a time when one federal prison was ordered to close because so many women were assaulted, a woman in a California prison died a preventable death from a heat wave and many more women are getting transferred to ICE for deportation after prison, among other issues. 

“This is about supporting people in their communities and meeting people where they’re at, especially when it comes to incarcerated women,” Purviance said. “Coming to prison is not going to heal that. Being out in our communities that are able to support us, that’s what’s going to work.”

Closure is possible

This past summer, many California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, facilities faced a heat wave, with some even experiencing temperatures up to 114 degrees. In early July, the heat wave became deadly. Adrienne Boulware, a grandmother incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, died of a heat stroke that advocates say was preventable. She was on her way to cool off in a shower when she dropped to the floor and started shaking.

In the aftermath of Boulware’s death, CCWP members called out the prison for failing to implement what they say were basic heat precautions. They held a large rally outside the Central California Women’s Facility, wrote letters to CDCR administrators, generated press and met with wardens and legislative teams to raise awareness about prisons as a climate issue. They also demanded free cooling rags to be distributed to the incarcerated population. Not long after, their request was granted, and the CDCR also promised them they’d install water stations in the prisons.

“It’s every year that this is an issue,” said Courtney Hanson, development and communications coordinator with the CCWP. “These things are all systemic, and we have to fight tooth and nail to just get the most basic, small movement in the right direction.”

The CCWP was started nearly 30 years ago in May 1995, when incarcerated women in California banded together to fight for better access to health care and challenge the medical abuse and neglect in prisons through filing a lawsuit, Shumate v. Wilson. They successfully escalated their complaints to the state Senate, where they were able to give testimony about the medical neglect. The connection the women formed through their collective battle for better living conditions grew into the CCWP.

In the past, they have successfully advocated for reparations for women who were involuntarily sterilized, ended the shackling of pregnant women and prevented ICE deportations of recently released women. Most recently, their advocacy in solidarity with the incarcerated women who were sexually abused in a federal prison in Dublin, California, put pressure on the Bureau of Prisons to close the facility. Now they want to close the remaining prisons and find alternatives to incarceration.

Their advocacy to close the two California state prisons for women picked up steam when they joined Communities United for a Responsible Budget. Together they produced a report last year that underscored the issues inside women’s prisons, such lack of medical care, sexual abuse perpetrated mainly by prison staff guards and family separation. 

“All of those issues point to an inescapable conclusion that women’s prisons do not make our communities any safer,” Hanson said.

Renae Badruzzaman, Health Instead of Punishment project director at Health Impact Partners, said that incarceration leads to worse health outcomes from medical neglect and by experiencing and witnessing high rates of interpersonal, physical, emotional and sexual violence and trauma. She also said that the use of solitary confinement and separating people from their families and communities “perpetuates that cycle of violence and trauma.” 

Badruzzaman said that instead of incarceration, investments should be made “into safe and stable affordable housing, increased employment, affordable health care, mental health care and accessible and reliable transportation, as well as non-carceral and non-punitive forms of accountability for harm.” She said that incarceration does more harm than good.

“What came forward [from this report] was this sharpened focus on gender identity based discrimination and violence, as well as the criminalization of trauma and gender identity,” Badruzzaman added.

The number of women incarcerated in California is already trending down. Since 2010, there has been a 70 percent drop — from 12,600 to just over 3,000 — of the state’s population of incarcerated women, resulting from policy change and practices pushed by advocates. Still, taxpayers foot an enormous bill to maintain the carceral system. In 2019, the CDCR reported that California invests $405 million a year in its women’s prisons.

“This is a reasonable demand to say ‘Look at all the gains over the past decade that have reduced the women’s prison population,’” Hanson said. “We can and should name that California’s north star should be shutting down both of these remaining women’s prisons and having alternative systems entirely.”

People in women’s prisons still face medical neglect and abuse similar to the conditions that led to the Shumate v. Wilson lawsuit in 1995 and the forming of CCWP, said Chyrl Lamar, a program and outreach advocate with the CCWP. She said that when she was incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility, she knew a woman who was paralyzed from being given the wrong medications. Lamar herself spent a year fighting for a knee surgery while the medical staff tried to just give her medication for the pain. She said that a lot of the time, prisons aren’t prepared to offer the treatment people need, and just give them temporary fixes that do not address the real medical issue.

Lamar has been involved with organizing on CCWP’s sterilization reparation task force, advocating for the hundreds of women who were involuntarily or forcibly sterilized by medical staff while in state prisons up until just over a decade ago. In October, she also flew to Detroit to help a team of 2,000 volunteers phone bank and canvas ahead of the election. She said that she has been part of CCWP since a member of the organization picked her up from prison and helped her acquire resources.

“The system is broken, and doesn’t seem like anybody wants to try to fix it,” Lamar said. “That’s why CCWP is trying to find a solution.”

Community resources

At the same time that they are fighting to close the prisons, the CCWP is also uplifting ways that someone can be released from prisons to start bringing people home, said Katie Dixon, campaign and policy organizer with the CCWP. She said some ways they are doing this is compassionate release, resentencing, clemency and bringing home domestic violence and human trafficking survivors.

“What we’re learning is that while we are fighting for the closure, we must also be not only demanding that freedom is necessary, but also working towards advocating, promoting and ushering pathways to freedom,” Dixon said.

Dixon said that she believes programs that offer job training and housing for women can make a big difference and be better suited for them than prison. When it comes to programming, Dixon said the focus is usually on providing opportunities to men. She said the campaign hopes to work with community members and local officials to find alternatives to incarceration and reimagine what it would look like to address harm differently. 

Dixon said that it is important to invest in resources such as job opportunities, affordable housing, healthcare and universal basic income, to address root causes of many people’s incarceration. She also said it is important to give young people opportunities to thrive, especially those who grow up in resource-barren neighborhoods. 

“We want to talk about shutting both of the women’s prisons down and not looking for another institution to send people to,” Dixon said. “We want to really get people engaged around a whole different alternative to incarcerating.”

Similarly, Lamar said that incarceration is so expensive that society should instead be allocating the investments into organizations that help people come home. Many formerly incarcerated people come out and contribute to society because they are already used to programming and work to keep their minds active, Lamar said. 

“I think if everything was put in the right place by the community and started giving them help, instead of giving them prison terms, the majority of people would probably do good,” Lamar said. “Society needs to work on how to help people stay out, instead of locking them up.”

With so many incarcerated people in women’s prisons being survivors of abuse, Purviance said that it is important to end the cycle of trauma and offer healing in the community instead. She said prison prolongs the trauma most people already have, and it is better to offer them resources and resentencing avenues that help them come home and thrive. She said she hopes to see the California Institution for Women and Central California Women’s Facility demolished.

“People don’t commit crimes because they’re bad people or because they just don’t care if they’re committing crimes. [They see it as the only way] for them, under those circumstances, to respond to life,” Purviance said. “So let’s really focus on having healthy, strong communities where people are getting their basic needs met, so that crime isn’t happening.”

This article Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/inside-the-campaign-to-close-californias-remaining-womens-prisons/