LOUISIANA JUSTICE ISSUES

Women’s Unjust Incarceration

Incarceration rates of women are growing at twice the rate of men nationally. In Louisiana, there are 1,500 women incarcerated in Louisiana’s prisons, and this number is growing. Louisiana’s rate of women’s incarceration is already roughly 50% higher than the national average.

A System That Fails to Recognize Trauma and Self-Defense

Women’s paths to prison, and the impact of their incarceration, are starkly different from those of men. In the case of many women, the criminal legal system has failed to recognize their response to violence and trauma, or has relied on narrow stereotypes of what a female “victim” looks like, overlooking ways in which women are victimized. For example, the legal defenses of self-defense do not contemplate many of the circumstances that lead women to prison: killing their abusers or protecting their children from an abusive partner.  

The overwhelming majority of women in prison are survivors of abuse. Studies report rates at 80% and higher. Research has proven a strong connection between women’s experience of abuse and eventual incarceration. By contrast, only around 10% of incarcerated men report having been abused.

The Devastating Impact on Louisiana Families

Women’s incarceration has been shown to be a major contributing factor to the destabilization of families, resulting in greater involvement of children in the criminal legal system. 80% of women in jail are mothers, and 40% parent alone.

Louisiana’s Missed Opportunity for Reform 

Reforms of recent years have focused on decarcerating those held for non-violent crimes, but those reforms have completely overlooked, for example, the 40% of women in Louisiana who are incarcerated for violent crimes, often in response to violence and abuse they have suffered.

Louisiana legislators have failed multiple years in a row to pass proposed legislation that would have allowed people to be resentenced who could demonstrate a nexus between the crime of which they were convicted and the abuse they experienced.