Webinar on SB 1070: End the Overincarceration and Abuse of Survivors
This webinar features Professor Leigh Goodmark, Director and Founder of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Professor Goodmark is the author of "Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism" published this year. Professor Goodmark discussed her book, Oregon's survivor-defendant population, and how Oregon laws do not account for survivor-defendants' needs with OJRC's Women's Justice Project Director Julia Yoshimoto and OJRC’s FA:IR Law Project Staff Attorney Malori Maloney. This event was moderated by OJRC’s Executive Director Bobbin Singh.
HerStory Oregon Survey Results on Intimate Partner Violence and Trauma (2019)
In the winter of 2017 and the spring of 2018, the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Women’s Justice Project and Portland State University’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice surveyed more than 140 incarcerated women about their experiences through the criminal process – from arrest to sentencing, from intake in CCCF to their thoughts about their future release from prison. The survey results revealed a high prevalence of intimate partner violence and other trauma as contributing factors to the women’s involvement in Oregon’s criminal system. 65% of women in a relationship at the time of arrest reported experiencing abuse in their relationship. | 44% of women in a relationship at the time of arrest said the relationship contributed to their conviction. | Women expressed needing to do what they could to escape the relationship. | Women reported committing crimes to financially support themselves because the abusive relationship left them homeless or without money and resources. | Women described being held accountable for crimes in place of their partners.
Check out the report for more results and for a brief discussion of the issues.
Research in Brief: Research Supports a YES vote on SB 1070
Over a third of women in Oregon have experienced domestic violence. This is higher than the national average, and our communities lack the resources to adequately support these women and their families. In recent decades, there has been more state attention and support for survivors. However, there is a group of survivors who remain ignored and are subjected to continued abuse through the criminal justice system. For too many survivors of domestic abuse, their victimization is a pathway to incarceration. Research over the last few decades has helped us better understand the pathways from victimization to involvement in the criminal legal system. We now better understand that a person who commits a crime to protect themselves or their children or under threat, coercion, pressure, and fear of abuse is less culpable for their actions. Oregon’s current sentencing laws and practices do not adequately consider how domestic abuse contributed to crime, and therefore cause unjust outcomes for survivors of domestic violence and further abuse. SB 1070 is a modest, but significant step toward rectifying current injustice in the system and preventing further abuse.
Check out this Research in Brief to learn more.
Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism by Leigh Goodmark
A profound, compelling argument for abolition feminism—to protect criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, we must dismantle the carceral system.
Since the 1970s, anti-violence advocates have worked to make the legal system more responsive to gender-based violence. But greater state intervention in cases of intimate partner violence, rape, sexual assault, and trafficking has led to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of victims, particularly women of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people. Imperfect Victims argues that only dismantling the system will bring that punishment to an end.
Amplifying the voices of survivors, including her own clients, abolitionist law professor Leigh Goodmark deftly guides readers on a step-by-step journey through the criminalization of survival. Abolition feminism reveals the possibility of a just world beyond the carceral state, which is fundamentally unable to respond to, let alone remedy, harm. As Imperfect Victims shows, abolition feminism is the only politics and practice that can undo the indescribable damage inflicted on survivors by the very system purporting to protect them.
Crime After Crime, a film by Yoav Potash
“[T]ells the dramatic story of the legal battle to free Debbie Peagler, an incarcerated survivor of domestic violence. Over 26 years in prison could not crush the spirit of this determined African American woman, despite the wrongs she suffered, first at the hands of a duplicitous boyfriend who beat her and forced her into prostitution, and later by prosecutors who used the thread of the death penalty to corner her into a life behind bars for her connection to the murder of her abuser.”
Available for rent on Amazon Prime.