This post is a summary of the report Women, Incarceration, and Violent Crime in Massachusetts by Rebecca Stone, Susan Sered, Cherry Russell and members of the Women and Incarceration Project at Suffolk University’s Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights
A petite woman now in her fifties, Paula describes herself as having been “a very troubled kid.” After a childhood in foster care, Paula was homeless on and off for years. Often turning to sex work as her main source of income, she served a number of short jail sentences for drugs or trespassing. She survived multiple encounters and relationships with abusive men, has been prescribed “dozens of medications for anxiety” and spent several brief stints in psychiatric hospitals. Paula has one conviction for a crime the courts have labeled violent: assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. She explains, “I was living on the streets, drinking and [taking] pills and heroin. I was at the end of my rope and my family shut me off with [no more] money. I went to my sister’s house. We fought, I pushed her, and she called the police.” Paula clarifies that this was not punitive but rather her sister was desperate to get her straightened out. “Now we are wicked close.” After a year in prison at MCI-Framingham and then a post-release facility, Paula was back on the streets dealing with the same problems of poverty, insecure housing, anxiety and substance misuse, and now a crime labeled violent on her record.
The Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) announced its intention to close MCI-Framingham, the state’s primary prison for women. Though fewer than 200 women are housed in DOC custody, Governor Baker’s administration plans to construct a new women’s prison at an estimated cost of $50,000,000. Opponents to that plan argue that it’s time to stop investing in punishment and incarceration and that $50,000,000 could be better used supporting families, education, local businesses and services that build up people, not prisons.
The population of approximately 140 women incarcerated for violent crimes in Massachusetts has emerged as a sticking point in efforts to balance concerns for public safety with commitment to the rights and well-being of women. To help ground these concerns in research, a group of scholars, social workers and attorneys associated with Suffolk University’s Women and Incarceration Project carried out a review of the scholarly literature on women, violence, and crime.
The full report can be found here: Women, Incarceration, and Violent Crime in Massachusetts.
Four takeaways from the research
● The categorization of crimes into violent and non-violent is inconsistent and carries problematic gendered baggage.
Some acts that people may not consider to be violent (for example, burglary of an empty home or driving under the influence) are categorized as violent in some jurisdictions. (O’Hear, 2019). The Massachusetts Department of Correction categorizes all crimes against persons and all sex crimes as violent while all property and drug offenses are categorized as non-violent. Thus sentences for sex work or other offenses “against morality” are classified as violent crimes (Cannata et al., 2021).
More broadly, conventional notions of proper femininity often lead to harsher punishment and stigma for women seen as violating conventional gender norms (Kruttschnitt & Gartner, 2008). Women of color tend to be perceived as deviating from societal standards of femininity and treated especially harshly within the criminal legal system (Carlyle et al., 2014).
● Women are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes.
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Women with a violent governing offense makeup only 2% of the total Massachusetts DOC jurisdiction population (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2021).
Nationally, women who have been victims of childhood abuse are substantially more likely to be arrested for violent crimes both as juveniles and as adults than women who have not (Widom & Osborn, 2021). In a national study of women serving life sentences (nearly all for murder), 80% reported having experienced physical abuse, 77% experienced sexual abuse, and 84% witnessed violence at home (The Sentencing Project, 2019).
Men are the offenders in 80% of incidents of intimate partner violence (Fridel & Fox, 2019). Rates of men killing women within marriage are five times greater than the rates of women killing men (Ellis, Stuckless, & Smith, 2015).
● Women released from prison after serving time for violent crimes are unlikely to commit a subsequent violent crime (Nellis & Bishop, 2021).
Individuals sentenced for what are labeled as violent crimes have low rates of subsequent arrests for such crimes (Nellis & Bishop, 2021). A meta-analysis of studies examining predictors of recidivism rates of violent versus non-violent crimes found that even women with criminal histories that contain purported acts of violence tend to be subsequently arrested for crimes that are labeled non-violent rather than violent (Collins, 2010).
Researchers found only a 3% recidivism rate among the nearly 200 elderly people serving life sentences in Maryland who were released en masse in the wake of the Unger v. Maryland ruling that their sentences were unconstitutional (Justice Policy Institute, 2018). These findings are especially relevant in Massachusetts where the majority of women incarcerated for murder are above the age of 50 (Cannata et al., 2021).