Highlighting efforts to fill a gender gap in second-look sentencing reform efforts

The New York Times has this notable new article about second-look sentencing reform efforts in the states.  The full headline highlights the article’s themes: “Prison Reform Left Women Behind. Then Prosecutors Stepped In.  California passed the nation’s first prosecutor-initiated resentencing law in 2018. Few women benefited from these laws, until now.”  I recommend the lengthy article in full, and here are some excerpts:

In late 2023, Dena Hernandez returned to her room inside the women’s prison in Chowchilla, Calif., and spotted a packet in the mail. It contained a letter saying the Los Angeles district attorney was looking for incarcerated women who might be eligible for shortened sentences. “Your case,” the letter read, “has been identified for initial review.”

Ms. Hernandez was in shock. She was 13 years into a 28-year prison sentence for carjacking. Hours away from her family, she had received just one visit. There were no lawyers puzzling over her case or community groups pleading for clemency. “Is this real?” Ms. Hernandez asked her roommate.

The letter was from an organization called For the People. It said there was a law in California allowing prosecutors to revisit old sentences that are “no longer in the interest of justice.” After going into effect in California in 2019, the law passed in four more states, part of a wave of criminal justice reform efforts washing over the United States.

But of all of the people who had come home under these resentencing laws, very few were women. Ms. Hernandez’s case was about to become part of an effort in California to change that….

[Hillary] Blout founded For the People to help implement the law and, eventually, to push other states to adopt it, too. Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Minnesota all followed suit.  By 2023, according to For the People’s count, roughly 1,000 people had been resentenced. But a trend had emerged: Only a handful were women….

Men, who account for more than 90 percent of the United States’ incarcerated population, inevitably made up a vast majority of cases. But some criteria that prosecutors were using to identify candidates for resentencing had the unintentional effect of excluding women.  In some California counties, prosecutors screened out anyone convicted of violent offenses, regardless of the circumstances.  But Ms. Blout found that women convicted of violent offenses often play subordinate roles in crimes perpetrated by men.  Those men are frequently their abusers.  In some cases, their victims are those abusers.

The criteria left little room for these nuances, and overlooked other societal harms. Women are disproportionately unsafe in prison; while they make up just 7 percent of the federal and state prison population, they account for more than one quarter of victims of sexual abuse by prison staff.  Just last year, a women’s prison in Dublin, Calif., nicknamed the “rape club,” was shut down for its rampant culture of sexual violence.