{"id":8963,"date":"2019-07-17T11:48:48","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T15:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=8963"},"modified":"2024-06-07T12:28:45","modified_gmt":"2024-06-07T16:28:45","slug":"women-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/17\/women-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"Testifying before Congress about the mass incarceration of women"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, our Legal Director, Aleks Kajstura, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20191130151145\/https:\/\/judiciary.house.gov\/legislation\/hearings\/women-and-girls-criminal-justice-system\">spoke to members of the House Judiciary Committee<\/a> at a hearing about the mass incarceration of women and girls. &#8220;Today&#8217;s hearing begins a discussion about women in the criminal justice system,&#8221; said subcommittee chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA). &#8220;After decades of policies that led to mass incarceration, we are finally at a point of examining the policies and the consequences.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>Testifying alongside Piper Kerman, Jesselyn McCurdy, Cynthia Shank and Patrice Onwuka, Kajstura spoke about the urgency of reducing women&#8217;s incarceration. She highlighted a few of the most alarming data points from our research on women and gender, including:\n<\/p>\n<ul class=\"list\">\n<li>The U.S. is home to only 5% of the world&#8217;s female population, but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/global\/women\/2018.html\">accounts for nearly 30%<\/a> of the world&#8217;s incarcerated women.<\/li>\n<li>1 in 4 incarcerated women <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\">have not even been convicted.<\/a><\/li>\n<li>In a number of states, women&#8217;s prison populations are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/women_overtime.html\">growing faster than men&#8217;s<\/a>; in others, women&#8217;s prison populations are growing even as men&#8217;s are declining.<\/li>\n<li>3 out of 4 women under correctional control <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/reports\/pie2018women.html\">are on probation,<\/a> a system that sets up women &#8211; and particularly mothers &#8211; to fail.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/global\/women\/2018.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/NATO_US_2018_women.png\" alt=\"graph comparing the U.S. to other founding NATO countries on rates of women's incarceration.\" width=\"630\" height=\"463\" class=\"featureimage\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Despite this unacceptable status quo, the hearing sent a hopeful message: Lawmakers across the aisle are finally paying attention to women&#8217;s mass incarceration. &#8220;It is critical that we understand how and why women become involved in the system, what happens to them when they are incarcerated, and what their trajectory is once released,&#8221; said Bass.\n<\/p>\n<p>Watch the full hearing here &#8211; jump to 1:03:00 for Kajstura&#8217;s testimony: <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20191130151145\/https:\/\/judiciary.house.gov\/legislation\/hearings\/women-and-girls-criminal-justice-system\">https:\/\/judiciary.house.gov\/legislation\/hearings\/women-and-girls-criminal-justice-system<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Women\u2019s experiences with the criminal justice system serve to highlight the faults of the whole system,&#8221; our Legal Director explained to members of the House Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[46],"class_list":["post-8963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shorts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8963"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16072,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8963\/revisions\/16072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8963"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}