Created: May 10, 2021 05:35 PM
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ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) One in four women and one in 10 men report being the victim of domestic violence and in some of those cases victims have been forced to fight back. A new law in New York State is now helping those who killed their abusers get a reduction in the amount of time they are required to spend behind bars.
“I thought that he was going to be my protector you know he was just so awesome and everybody thought he was awesome,” Kim Dadou-Brown of Rochester recalled.
New Report Looks at Strategies to Cut Incarceration of Illinois Women by Half
Colette Payne (right) speaks at the annual Mother s Day vigil, organized by Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, outside Cook County Jail in Chicago. Payne and other organizers at the Women s Justice Institute released a report detailing the impact of incarceration on women and explaining how to dramatically reduce the Illinois women s prison population.
Between 1980 and 2014, the number of women incarcerated across the United States increased by 700 percent. In Illinois, womenâs incarceration increased by 767 percent during that same time period. While that number has slowly decreased over the past two decades, the 1,418 women in the stateâs prisons at the end of 2020 is still more than quadruple the 401 women imprisoned in 1980. (These numbers only include people in Illinoisâs âwomenâs prisons;â they exclude people in womenâs jails and trans women in menâ
To what extent should the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act be applied?
How should the long-term impact of repeated abuse be measured, or the length of time between an instance of abuse and a criminal act be considered?
Such questions, considered by the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, could soon decide Nicole Addimando’s fate. In doing so, the panel of four justices may also provide clarity for the application of a two-year-old state law that s relatively lacking in legal precedent, while intended on providing sentencing leniency for those driven to criminal activity by domestic violence.
“Does (a criminal act) have to be a sense of immediacy as to spatial and time orientation?” Judge William Mastro asked Putnam County Assistant District Attorney Larry Glasser during a virtual appellate court hearing Thursday. “Does the act apply because of the history (of abuse), or does the state require imminency of conduct that creates the reaction that ends up in th
To End Mass Incarceration, We Need to Bust the Myths That Prop It Up
CatEyePerspective / iStock / ChuckSchugPhotography / E+ / Getty Images / Truthout
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One of the most pervasive myths about incarceration is that it makes a society safer. Now, a leading journalist who focuses on the criminal legal system has taken on that question in her new book.
Victoria Law is a prolific reporter who is perhaps best known for spending years in the trenches exploring the experiences of women in prison. Her work always centers the voices of impacted people, while maintaining a broad lens on mass incarceration and digging deep into a wider variety of issues related to prison and jails.