Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Women Are Languishing Behind Bars for Surviving

Victoria Valenzuela Substack

Many women are incarcerated for defending their lives against their abusive partner or being coerced to commit a crime by their abuser.

Imagine being in a relationship where you don’t feel safe. You try to escape, but your partner retaliates and tries to end your life, so you take action to defend it physically, or even with the gun they would’ve used on you — then instead of being met with resources and help, you are put in handcuffs and possibly facing life without parole or mandatory minimums.

Or, you are threatened by an abuser into committing a crime for which you are punished for, even though you never wanted to do it in the first place and the alternative is being harmed by them.

This is the reality for many people, especially those in women’s prisons.

For many of them, they never even get to share their stories and are solely looked at and sentenced for their act. The justice system failed and continues to fail them. This “erasure of their experiences of violence blocks them from being seen or understood as ‘victims of violence’ by systems designed to support and/or punish them,” according to a report called “Defending Self-Defense” by Survived and Punished, a national grassroots organization advocating for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

“If the violence is unabated, we risk losing our lives. If we defend ourselves, we risk losing our freedom.”

— Marissa Alexander, an author of “Defending Self-Defense”

In the report, Alexander recalled her own experience where even though she had a protection order in place against her abuser who attacked her, she was detained and law enforcement dismissed her side of the story. Even though she fired a warning shot to scare her abuser without harming anyone, she was arrested and given a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. She wrote, “the second we choose to survive, in every interaction we have, from arrest to incarceration, we encounter judgment, discarded looks, negative stereotypes, and invalidation.”

The Center for Disease Control estimates that one in three women experience rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. It also estimated that every day, four women will be killed by an intimate partner, and half of homicides are related to domestic violence. Black and transgender women are more likely to be harmed and criminalized.

The report stated:

“Despite the sustained conditions of life-threatening interpersonal violence, when survivors take action to defend themselves and save their own lives, they are punished severely. Research confirms that the legal system creates a no-way-out bind of ‘risking your life’ or ‘risking your freedom.’

…

Thousands of survivors of sexual/domestic violence are warehoused in jails, prisons, and ICE and juvenile detention centers — places that are themselves locations of systemic sexual violence.”

Additionally, ProPublica recently found that immigrant survivors of domestic violence who call the police are being picked up by Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents and taken to immigrant detention centers.

Advocates say incarceration only perpetuates a cycle of trauma they are already experiencing. The report said that prisons, “intensify and institutionalize domestic and sexual violence.” More than 90% of people in women’s prison, if not all of them, experience some kind of trauma before incarceration. Strip searches, loss of agency and control over activities, and constant threats to comply or else be punished with loss of privileges and even solitary confinement are some of the conditions that perpetuate trauma in women who already experienced harm.

Most efforts to provide pathways home for incarcerated survivors and end criminalization more broadly are led by formerly incarcerated survivors themselves.

“I’m a survivor of self- defense. I nearly lost my life, as well as some other people, to the abusive relationship I was in, and then I was further abused and criminalized and literally almost killed by the criminal justice system in the process afterwards. So I’m very passionate about this because I am working to try to prevent what happened to me and my family and loved ones from happening to other people.”

— Anastazia Schmid

Groups like Survived and Punished, which are composed of survivors and allies, have been advocating for divestment from police, legislative pathways home for survivors, and more community-based resources to support survivors.

The report made several recommendations on how to support survivors and end criminalization. They suggested to defund systems of criminalization such as law enforcement and prisons, and reduce the number of people who are incarcerated through supporting legislation that aims to decriminalize and decarcerate.

For multiple consecutive years, California has been trying to pass a Justice for Survivors law that gives incarcerated survivors a chance to petition to get out of prison and share their experiences in court, as many of their circumstances are erased during the sentencing and conviction period. However, all efforts died in the legislature with the most recent one, AB 910, being held in the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this year.

The report also called for investments “in universal basic income and healthcare, childcare, transportation, and victim services that are non-punitive, free or low-cost, safe, accessible, and independent from systems of criminalization,” as well as emergency housing for those in immediate danger. These resources would support and empower survivors to leave their abusive situations and help them get representation if they are arrested.

They also suggested an end to pretrial detention and perpetual incarceration, including transfers from jails and state and federal prisons to ICE detention centers. Another suggestion was to reduce prosecutor’s power to go after survivors, have more skilled, well-resourced defense attorneys, and increase public defense and legal aid funds.

Additionally, there is another campaign more broadly to close the women’s prisons in California. Justice advocates and abolitionists such as the California Coalition for Women Prisoners say that if the state provided pathways for survivors of trauma and women with low-level crimes to come home, there would be so few women left in prisons that the state could close them. They say it is better for them to deal with their trauma out in the communities, not prisons.

In an article for Waging Nonviolence about the campaign to close the women’s prisons, Laura Purviance, an incarcerated domestic violence survivor, said:

“This is about supporting people in their communities and meeting people where they’re at, especially when it comes to incarcerated women. 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.”

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Editor’s note: We selected this artwork for its direct commentary on violence against women and the incarceration of abuse survivors. Its demand—“Save Our Sistas From Domestic Violence and Incarceration”—captures the injustice of a system that can punish women without adequately considering the abuse they endured.

The image appeared in connection with “Movement-Based Participatory Inquiry: The Multi-Voiced Story of the Survivors Justice Project”, which examines New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, passed in 2019. The law allows qualifying survivors to seek reduced sentences, alternatives to incarceration, or resentencing.

We include the artwork as part of our reporting and commentary on these intertwined forms of violence, and to examine the political message the work itself conveys. We believe this editorial use supports a fair-use claim. Readers are encouraged to read the original article linked above.

Image disclosure: The version displayed here was digitally expanded using AI to fit a widescreen format.