At a Glance
In the United States, the incarceration rate of women is growing 50 percent faster than that of men, yet their voices and experiences are left out of the conversation around criminal justice reform and mass incarceration. Women incarcerated in Wisconsin face gendered disparities in housing, economic opportunity and family unity due to policies surrounding incarceration and supervision. Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) is a statewide network of formerly incarcerated people, and women within EXPO identified the need for their own space to support one another and address the gender-specific impacts of mass incarceration. FREE, a project led by women members of EXPO, aimed to create a statewide network of women civic leaders who have experience with incarceration and make their voices heard through collective action on issues that affect their lives. FREE has made great progress towards its goals by forming statewide chapters for impacted women, developing leadership and wellness programming and addressing the challenges formerly incarcerated women face at a policy level.
The Challenge
In the United States, the incarceration rate of women is growing 50 percent faster than that of men, yet their voices and experiences are left out of the conversation around criminal justice reform and mass incarceration. In Wisconsin, around 3,000 women and girls are incarcerated, and over 13,000 women are under supervision of the state on parole and probation. Women incarcerated in Wisconsin face gendered disparities in housing, economic opportunity and family unity due to policies surrounding incarceration and supervision. The impact of this inequity is far reaching and has a particularly negative effect on children as 80 percent of incarcerated women have children. However, only 37 percent of these children are able to live with another parent during their mothers’ incarceration. In order for women to regain custody of their children, they must secure housing and have money to pay for childcare while they seek and maintain employment.
Project Goals
Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) is a statewide network of formerly incarcerated people that works to end mass incarceration, eliminate all forms of structural discrimination against formerly incarcerated people and restore formerly incarcerated people to full participation in their communities. Women within EXPO identified the need for their own space to support one another and address the gender-specific impacts of mass incarceration.
FREE, a project led by women members of EXPO, aimed to create a statewide network of women civic leaders who have experience with incarceration, and make their voices heard through collective action on issues that affect their lives. The project’s long-term goal was to advance upstream policy and systems change by:
- Conducting research and power analyses to select specific targets for change based on the priorities of impacted women.
- Building a coalition of allies and policy champions to educate the communities and relevant agencies.
- Launching advocacy strategies to shift targets within agency policies or through the budgeting process.
Results
Despite challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, FREE has made great progress towards its goals by:
- Hiring part-time organizers and a full-time statewide program director to build momentum in the Madison, Milwaukee and Chippewa Valley chapters.
- Hosting monthly, virtual chapter meetings which gathered 20 regular leaders and 15-20 program attendees.
- Introducing two statewide meetings that drew around 50 impacted women and other allies who do not reside in locations with FREE chapters.
- Increasing the visibility of FREE by engaging with the public as conference and panel speakers at the Toward One Wisconsin’s Inclusivity Conference, the Wisconsin Partnership Program’s Healthiest State Summit and the 2021 University of Wisconsin 4W Initiative and Women and Gender Studies Consortium Conference.
The meetings that were hosted around the state created a platform where women could share the challenges they faced after their release from incarceration- namely issues surrounding housing, economic opportunity and family unity. Focusing on housing instability, FREE designed a three-part workshop to further refine the challenges women face. Three themes emerged from this workshop including insufficient transitional living programming, discrimination in the private sector housing market and contradictory information within state and local policies surrounding re-entry. FREE leaders are currently building relationships at the state and local level to address these aspects of the housing crisis.
Through this work, FREE has fostered new partnerships with the Wisconsin Association for Perinatal Care, the Ostara Initiative/Minnesota Prison Doula Project and Dr. Julie Poehlamann-Tynan from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Looking to the Future
Funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program as well as the Just Recovery Initiative through the UW–Madison Population Health Institute’s MATCH program has created opportunities for this project to expand its work through continued policy and systems change, community engagement with public health allies and family reunification programming.