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From Protection to Punishment: new report from the Women in Prison Project

June 6, 2011

The Correctional Association of New York’s Women in Prison Project and the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School released a report today entitled, From Protection to Punishment: Post-Conviction Barriers to Justice for Domestic Violence Survivor-Defendants in New York State.

The report, co-authored by the two organizations, finds that domestic violence and women’s incarceration are inextricably linked. Nine of ten women in New York’s prisons report being survivors of abuse, 75% of severe intimate partner violence during adulthood. 93% of women in New York’s prisons for killing an intimate partner were abused by an intimate partner in the past. The report also finds that survivors who act to protect themselves from an abuser’s violence face myriad barriers to justice, including: overly restrictive mandatory sentencing statutes, limited access to alternative-to-incarceration programs (ATIs), restrictions on merit time and work release programs in prison, and obstacles to making parole and receiving clemency.

All of these barriers conspire to result in the reality that women who have survived years of life-shattering abuse are routinely sent to prison for acting to protect themselves and their children, often for long periods of time with little chance for early release.

A central report recommendation is the enactment of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act which would:

  1. establish an ameliorative, alternate sentencing statute for DV survivors convicted of crimes directly related to the abuse they suffered and allow judges to send survivor-defendants to either significantly shorter prison terms than those allowed under current law or to probation and ATIs instead of prison; and
  2. allow survivors who are currently serving long sentences for crimes directly related to their abuse to apply to the courts for resentencing and earlier release.

This bill would be a significant step in continuing New York’s efforts to combat the epidemic of domestic violence and in addressing the long-standing injustices facing survivor-defendants across the state.

Download a copy of the report (1,442 KB)

Read/ watch more about our work on this issue