Incarceration Content Topic Results

Gender-based violence—including domestic violence—impacts an astonishing number of Black women and girls. And when Black women and girls experience gender-based violence, the strategies they take to survive are often criminalized. Ending the systemic punishment and incarceration of Black women and girls requires that we decriminalize survival. This factsheet spotlights the impact of gender-based violence on Black women and girls and the ensuing criminalization that occurs.

Led and driven by currently and formerly incarcerated women, the Leadership of Voices of Experience (LOVE) Project has developed a training curriculum for victim service providers that builds providers’ capacity to support system-impacted women and gender expansive people—people who are transgender, gender nonconforming, gender queer, nonbinary.

This report from the Sentencing Project documents the rates of incarceration for white, Black and Latinx Americans in each state, identifies three contributors to racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment, and provides recommendations for reform. 

Survivors of police sexual violence are rarely heard from or discussed in either conversation, and their experiences generally do not drive organizing and advocacy in either context. This report is intended to contribute to breaking this silence, to summarize what we know about sexual violence by law enforcement officers, and to offer concrete steps toward prevention of police sexual violence and increased safety, support, and opportunities for healing for survivors.

This piece by the Harvard Gazette discusses the history of racialized policing, highlights current issues with policing and the criminal justice system, and outlines community-based ways forward.

This report shows incarceration disparities state-by-state and how those disparities have changed over the last 10 years. It offers recommendations to confront racism in the juvenile justice system.

YWCA undertook a media review for the years 2017-2020 and examined the extent to which women and girls of color continue to be criminalized and racially profiled by law enforcement. Three years after first issuing We Deserve Safety: Ending the Criminalization of Women and Girls of Color, YWCA’s 2020 review paints a disturbing picture of the gendered racial profiling and criminalization that girls and women of color continue to experience.

The National Resource Center for Reaching Victims conducted a series of listening sessions to unearth the impact the COVID-19 health crisis is having on underserved victims of crime and better resource the crime victim services field to respond to those needs. This series of impact briefs summarizes key findings.

This report from the National Black Women’s Justice Institute explores how recognizing the pervasive and systemic nature of sexual violence against Black women, girls, trans, gender nonconforming and nonbinary people by police, penal, and immigration officers, in prisons, jails and/or detention facilities, and in social service, learning, and health care settings, calls into question our reliance on these systems and structures of dominance as responses to sexual violence, and as effective mechanisms of prevention, early detection, and healing.

This document provides an overview of the ways in which America’s history of racism and oppression continues to manifest in the criminal justice system. It also provides a summary of research demonstrating how the system perpetuates the disparate treatment of Black people and explains how the evidence helps account for the hugely disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on millions of Black people, their families, and their communities.

In recognition of Teen Dating Violence Awareness & Prevention Month, this webinar highlights the work of Rights4Girls. Presenters explore how the intersections of race, gender and violence cause the most marginalized girls to be criminalized for their experiences of sexual violence and sexual exploitation.