Virtual Event 3/28 Hosted by CCWP - #ClosureIsPossible: Making California Women's Prisons Obsolete
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Join the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and three leading activists in a vital virtual conversation about making women’s history by closing women’s prisons in California and across the country. What will it take to make this vision real?
-Andrea James, JD - Founder & Executive Director of The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls
-Rachel Herzing - Organizer and activist, Co-author of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment
-Piper Kerman, Author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison
The 2023 comprehensive report From Crisis to Care points to an inescapable conclusion—women’s prisons only perpetuate catastrophic trauma and harm. To reverse intergenerational cycles of gendered and racial violence and poverty, California needs to invest in community controlled resources that are life affirming and health promoting. Our communities need to develop non-carceral, non-punitive forms of accountability and close women’s prisons! In Massachusetts and other parts of the country campaigns to close women’s prisons are already underway.
As of February 2024 , there are 3,374 people incarcerated in women’s prisons in California, 70.8% less than in 2010 when there were 12,668! This dramatic reduction was a result of strong, persistent legal challenges and advocacy campaigns by dozens of organizations and thousands of people from our communities, resulting in marked policy changes in California. Collectively we were able to reduce the population of women’s prisons by over 9,000 in little more than a decade. We can decarcerate a few thousand more and close the state’s two women’s prisons!
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