NEW REPORT CALLS FOR URGENT DECARCERATION OF WOMEN IN MASSACHUSETTS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BOSTON, MA — October 30th, 2024 — Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts’ (PLS) today released a comprehensive report on women’s decarceration titled “The Way Home: The Urgency of Decarcerating Women in Massachusetts.” The report’s release comes as the state has achieved significant reductions in women’s incarceration rates, with pretrial detention rates down 30%, county incarceration rates down 42%, and state prison incarceration rates down 63% since 2017.
Despite these reductions and declining crime rates, the state is pursuing plans to build a new $50 million women’s prison. “Building a new prison will only shift existing harms and traumas to a new location,” said Sarah Nawab, Director of the Women’s Incarceration Conditions and Reentry Project at PLS. “Incarcerated women, who are the true experts on the issues they face, have reported that they need meaningful pathways to release and community support, not a new prison.”
Testimony and interviews from incarcerated women illustrate what well-known statistics tell us: that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated women have experienced trauma prior to incarceration, which is then compounded by their experiences behind bars. One in six women incarcerated in Massachusetts is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, and the state parole board approves women for parole at less than half the rate at which it approves men for parole. Additionally, Massachusetts has the second oldest prison population in the country, with 33% of incarcerated people aged 50 or older.
The report recommends strengthening existing pathways to decarceration through greater use of clemency, pre-trial release, and proposed legislation, including a prison construction moratorium, parole reform, expanded medical parole, and increased use of primary caretaker diversion. It also calls for creating new pathways to decarceration, such as ending life without parole sentencing, passing “second look” legislation allowing sentence reconsideration, establishing elder parole for those over 54 who have served at least 15 years of their sentence, and abolishing the use of joint venture sentencing that allows courts to convict people of murder even where they are not directly involved with loss of life.
The report features testimonials from currently and formerly incarcerated women, including success stories of those who have been released and are now contributing to their communities. Their experiences demonstrate that community-supported reentry can be highly successful when proper resources and support are provided. “You give this community back its mothers, its sisters. Women who have lived through the struggle and can help people going through it too,” said one woman currently incarcerated at MCI-Framingham quoted in the report.
The full report is available at plsma.org/TheWayHome.
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Contact: Aaron Steinberg, PLS Communications Director, asteinberg@plsma.org