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Why Should We Care About Women's Reentry Needs?
Some Facts at a Glance
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From the late 1800s to the early 1970s, the number of people incarcerated in the United States remained stable at approximately 250,000. Today, there are more than 2 million people in prison in America. Children of incarcerated women are 6 times more likely to be incarcerated than other children.
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While 92% of those incarcerated are men, the rate of incarceration for women has increased 645% in the last twenty years compared to a 300 percent increase for men. African-American women are the fastest growing group of prisoners today. Women often serve longer sentences for the same crimes as men.
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The majority of new commitments to state prison, for men and women alike, are for non-violent offenses. Seventy percent of women incarcerated were convicted of non-violent crimes, largely property crimes and non-violent drug offenses.
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The overwhelming majority of people incarcerated will be released, and released without adequate psychological counseling, educational or occupational training.
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WRITE-NJ Mission Statement:
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We are an independent nonprofit organization committed to helping incarcerated women in New Jersey prepare for and pursue higher education and viable occupational training so to effectively reduce he women’s chances of successful transition back to the community and thus, the likelihood of recidivism.
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What we offer: Experience:
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Between our co-founders, we offer experience from more than 183 university credit-hours taught behind bars (more than 67 different sections of college classes at six facilities, for men and women, in two states, with over eleven years continuous teaching time in prisons, combined). Additionally, we offer our experience from eight non-credit workshop versions of courses behind bars prior to the inception of WRITE-NJ. Since the creation of WRITE-NJ, we have continued to offer non-credit college preparatory courses, in addition to our credit-bearing course offerings, in the form of the WRITE Workshop Series.
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Who we are not:
We are not researchers in this capacity. Although we support research endeavors, and ourselves engage in research as part of our professorial requirements, we do not do any research with protected populations, such as inmates, that could in any way jeopardize an educator’s ability to maintain access to the facilities in which we teach or that would jeopardize the confidentiality of our students.
Our organization does not support exploitative research efforts with inmate populations as we have serious questions about incarcerated people’s ability, ethically, to consent to participation in a prison context.
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