Portside

After decades, a progressive president in Guatemala

Economic disparities that exist between men and women, particularly women of color, are exacerbated for formerly incarcerated women. Lack of structural support increases women’s chances of experiencing poverty, re-offending and returning to imprisonment.

Andrea Circle Bear, 30, had been sentenced to 26 months in federal prison on a drug charge.

In the middle of her senior year at Pomona High in eastern Los Angeles County, Amber Rose Howard was arrested and booked into county jail. Howard had been accepted into several colleges when she was admitted to jail on felony charges.

California has the largest female death row in the U.S., with 23 condemned women imprisoned at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Four women have been executed in the state since 1893.

“I knew that I had come from this very dark place — I was abhorrent to society,” said Michelle Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U. who was released from prison in August after serving 20 years. “But for 20 years, I’ve tried to do right, because I was still interested in the world, and because I didn’t believe my past made me somehow cosmically un-educatable forever.”

Michelle West is one of thousands of women who was charged and incarcerated under the policies that Sessions is now resurrecting. She was sentenced to life in prison and has spent the past 24 years behind bars.

In the supposedly enlightened United States, millions of women lack proper access to menstrual supplies.

When we think of prison protest, what comes to mind? That list would include the Attica uprising, George Jackson, struggles of the Angola 3 activists, the 2013 California prison hunger strike and other crucial resistance - mostly organized by incarcerated men. Often, organizing work done by incarcerated women goes wholly unrecognized. In her book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Victoria Law focuses on women prisoners activism.