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The search took place on the morning of Oct. 31, 2013. To this day, I believe the choice of Halloween was intentional. Fear gripped my heart as male and female guards, cadets and staff screamed at us to get up and get dressed and threatened us with solitary confinement if we said a word. The cadets were being trained on how to shake down prisoners and how to treat us in general.
As we stood in front of our cells, female cadets made us strip naked; male officers were present. We stood there as various other men who weren’t on staff walked up and down the hallways watching us.
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
A task force of hundreds of experts, researchers and incarcerated women delivered a lengthy report offering sweeping recommendations about how to better serve women behind bars.
Statewide Women’s Justice Task Force Announces the $1 Billion Proposition: A Groundbreaking Plan to Cut Women’s Prison Population by 50% and Beyond
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Accelerated by the unanticipated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Illinois is on track to become the first state in the nation to achieve such a reduction CHICAGO (PRWEB) April 28, 2021 Today, the Statewide Women’s Justice Task Force, organized by the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI) with funding from major philanthropic organizations, hosted an event to release an historic plan to reduce the number of women incarcerated in Illinois prisons by 50%+ and beyond to an audience of over 300 people.