In 2019 and 2020, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, a low-security prison for women. Part of the elite coterie of parents embroiled in the “varsity blues” college admissions scandal, the women were incarcerated for engaging in bribes and fraudulent means of securing college admissions for their children. Because, prior to Huffman’s arrival, the prison made some modest improvements, some news outlets depicted the actresses’ incarceration as “cushy,” referring to FCI-Dublin as “club fed.” Overlooked by those focused on Loughlin and Huffman’s brief and seemingly mild sentence was the fact that, in the past several decades, sexual violence against imprisoned women at FCI-Dublin has been rampant, so much so that incarcerated women have turned to the courts to seek safety and bodily integrity.

In 2023, prisoners who were victims of sexual abuse at Dublin filed for early release. One 43-year-old woman subjected to sexual violence argued that she should be released immediately on humanitarian grounds. By the end of the year, the warden and five former employees faced criminal charges of sexual abuse. In the first week of January 2024—long after Huffman and Loughlin had completed their sentences and reacclimated to a life of privilege and comfort—incarcerated survivors gave testimony in federal court that detailed rape, sexual violence, and retaliation at the hands of prison employees. Incarcerated women have alleged that sexual abuse in the prison had been ongoing since the 1990s. Moreover, despite the recent prosecution of former prison guards and the incarceration of the former warden, sexual violence at the prison persisted. Incarcerated women pleaded with the court to terminate employees who had engaged in abuse, end retaliation against people who reported the violence, permit third-party investigations, and provide medical care and counseling to survivors.

The contemporary struggles of incarcerated women at FCI-Dublin illustrate the constrained options for incarcerated women seeking security, bodily integrity, equality, and justice. As I show in my book, Challenging Confinement, their litigation builds upon earlier movements for equality and dignity in women’s prisons. Incarcerated women’s organizing for civil rights, education, job training, and access to the courts demonstrates the many ways women have turned to litigation when other political strategies failed. Incarcerated women protested injustices within the prisons and tried to make appeals to administrators within departments of corrections. When these attempts at reform fell short, multiracial coalitions of incarcerated activists and lawyers used the courts to try to force prisons to change.

Most histories of mass incarceration have focused on male-centric examinations of Black men and the war on drugs in the late 20th century. But women’s comparatively smaller numbers in prisons and jails should not suggest their marginality in conversations about mass incarceration. Women were one of the fastest growing groups of prisoners in the final decades of the 20th century. In 1980, the total population of incarcerated women was 26,326. By 2015, this number had jumped to 210,291, a 525 percent increase. The number of women in jail, state prisons, and federal prisons decreased substantially in 2020 because of the pandemic, and there were 168,449 women incarcerated in 2021. But as of April 2023, there were still approximately 976,000 women under some form of correctional supervision in the United States, and this number included people incarcerated along with those on probation and parole. Black women are disproportionately represented in incarcerated populations compared to the general population. Black women represent 44 percent of incarcerated women in America, but only account for approximately 13 percent of the population. In 2021, white women were incarcerated at a rate of 38 per 100,000 people. Black women were incarcerated at a rate of 62 per 100,000 people, and Latinx women were incarcerated at a rate of 49 per 100,000.

Beyond statistics, the criminalization and imprisonment of women has enduring effects on individuals, their loved ones, and their communities. Prisons rip caregivers from homes, force children to grow up without parents, and isolate people along lines of race, gender, and class.  There is no greater index of these effects than the treatment of pregnant women in prison. In 2022, it was estimated that 3 to 4 percent of incarcerated women were pregnant when they entered a prison or jail, and approximately 58,000 women admitted to prisons and jails are pregnant each year. While many states have some limits to shackling pregnant women, the practice still occurs. Prison administrators typically justify restraining pregnant women, especially during childbirth, as a public safety precaution. But the practice flies in the face of medical consensus that it harms pregnant women. Congress banned shackling of women incarcerated in federal prisons during childbirth with the passage of the First Step Act in 2018, but this did not prohibit state prisons from continuing the practice.

More generally, the incarceration of women in America highlights the multifaceted harms imprisoned women, especially women of color, and their loved ones navigate within the web of mass incarceration. Imprisoned women are more likely than imprisoned men to have been living with their children when they were arrested. Of parents in state prisons with minor children, 52 percent of women compared to 40 percent of men had been living with their children prior to being locked up. According to information from state prisons, an estimated 27 percent of imprisoned parents are obligated to pay child support while confined and 80 percent of those parents have mounting child support debt that cannot be paid down through meager wages from prison jobs. Some studies have suggested that children of incarcerated mothers are more likely to be incarcerated in their lives than children of incarcerated fathers.

Focusing on incarcerated women’s experiences illustrates the interlinking gendered and racialized harms that prisons bring to families and communities. Moreover, as the history of incarcerated women’s prisoner organizing shows, imprisoned women have long struggled against the misogynistic norms and racialized practices that are foundational to the functioning of American prisons, demonstrating how the struggle against incarceration is itself a feminist project.

The recent litigation to eradicate sexual violence against incarcerated women in California builds upon earlier social movements and legal campaigns that sought to implement safety, humanity, and equality in prisons for women. In the 1960s, as part of ascendant civil rights and Black power movements, incarcerated people made prisons sites of political activism. In doing so, prisoners solidified connections between the struggle for racial justice and a violent, virulently racist criminal legal system. As Dan Berger writes, “Throughout the civil rights era, black prisoners and their allies devised a series of ways to forge freedom from violence that were most dramatically located in exposure.” Incarcerated people filed lawsuits, wrote memoirs, published newsletters, and launched protests that were designed to reveal and eradicate the violence, racism, and sexism in prisons. Though often overlooked in mainstream histories of civil rights, prisons were incubators for new political movements that critiqued the limits of freedom and the state’s reliance on incarceration in the late 20th century. Incarcerated people documented the violence through litigation, prison memoirs, and uprisings. In what became known as the prisoners’ rights movement, incarcerated people sought both quality-of-life reforms that were shaped by ideals of equality and social justice while also pursuing alternatives to confinement and advocating for the abolition or diminishment of carceral systems entirely.

Imprisoned and criminalized women were at the forefront of these struggles, where they specifically highlighted the ways that the carceral state enacted gendered, sexual, and racialized violence against predominantly Black and brown working-class women. For example, the defense of Joan Little, a Black woman who was accused and acquitted in the murder trial regarding the death of a white jailer who had sexually assaulted her while she was in custody, brought together a broad coalition of women’s rights organizations, anti–death penalty groups, and Black power activists who made her case resonate with people across the country. In her book Free Joan Little: The Politics of Sexual Violence and Imprisonment, Christina Greene writes about how the Little case “reflected the complex cross-currents surrounding racial and sexual politics of the 1970s,” advancing a critique of prisons and policing as fundamental sites of gendered violence.

In the 1970s and 1980s, incarcerated women built upon the gains of the prisoners’ rights movement that had flourished in men’s prisons and worked to recognize feminist ideals in carceral facilities. They did so especially through launching civil rights lawsuits and organizing pressure campaigns within prison, where incarcerated women and their lawyers fought to bring the victories of the women’s liberation movement to state prisons. In Michigan, Kentucky, and Nebraska, imprisoned women won major lawsuits in federal courts, where federal judges concluded that women were being discriminated against because of their sex. To remedy sex discrimination, the courts ordered that the women in state prisons needed equal access to courts, education, and job training programs. They did so by putting in place a rule of parity, which meant that the programming and opportunities in women’s prisons had to be equal to what men received in a larger network of state prisons. But incarcerated women also leveraged the discourse of women’s rights to get the federal courts to improve carceral spaces more generally by demanding reforms that would increase access to education, job training, and legal advocacy.

One of the most substantial victories occurred in Michigan, where incarcerated women launched the country’s first major class-action lawsuit, Glover v. Johnson. Filed in 1977 by women imprisoned at the Detroit House of Correction, the suit alleged that Michigan’s Department of Corrections violated women prisoners’ constitutional rights by failing to provide them with the same rehabilitative opportunities that they provided to incarcerated men. It would soon become the first major lawsuit in which the federal court forced state prisons to remedy discrimination based on gender.

The class representative for the suit was Mary Heinen McPherson (formerly Glover). Before she was sent to prison to serve a life sentence, she had almost completed her degree in nursing. She was deeply disappointed to find that there were no opportunities for her to continue pursuing higher education in the Detroit House of Correction, which was the only prison for women and managed by the city of Detroit until the state opened Huron Valley Correctional Facility for Women in 1977. The idea for a lawsuit, however, germinated in law classes that Heinen McPherson attended while in prison. Taught by volunteer female attorneys, these classes instructed Heinen McPherson and her incarcerated peers on the ins and outs of civil and criminal procedure. Heinen McPherson vividly remembered the experience of learning the law amid the squalor of the prison. “We’d go once a week and sit and have our law class, but the plaster was falling on us from the ceiling,” she reflected, adding “There were bugs and flies and rats and mice. It was a jungle. And I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that life could be like that. Mary and other incarcerated women also had been in touch with male codefendants from their criminal cases and they compared notes on prison conditions and programs. From conversations and letters with incarcerated boyfriends and husbands, women learned that incarcerated men could access college courses, vocational training, and paralegal programs across a network of state prisons for men—programs that incarcerated women could not participate in.

Incensed at their exclusion from these vital rehabilitative opportunities, Heinen McPherson and other women, many of whom listed themselves as “Jane Doe” to escape retaliation, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court where they argued they were being discriminated against based on gender. They fought for educational programming, job training, and access to the courts that did presently not exist in the women’s prison. At trial, they underscored the gendered ways the state treated incarcerated women differently. In the historic 1979 decision, Judge John Feikens found that the state prisons were “bound to provide women inmates with treatment and facilities that are substantially equivalent to those provided the men.” Heinen McPherson recalled how incarcerated women shouted with joy when they heard the news of the decision. The coalition saw the 1979 decision as a clear step in the right direction toward more opportunities for women in prison. And indeed, a series of prison reforms that facilitated college courses for women, access to the courts, and job training followed the suit, opening access to college and other educational and vocational programming for imprisoned women.

Through organizing and protests, incarcerated women pursued a new understanding of equality, civil rights, and bodily integrity, and specifically articulated how prisons proliferate violence against women.

Glover v. Johnson was interpreted as a major victory for incarcerated women around the country. But Judith Magid, one of the lead attorneys on the case, hesitated to embrace parity as a true victory for women’s rights. In the decision, Judge Feikens had established a rule of parity, and the order forced the state to offer similar opportunities for incarcerated women to what men received across a network of state prisons. Magid expressed her reluctance to cement parity in prison litigation. She stated, “The suit does not endorse the programs offered to male prisoners,” adding, “On the contrary, they are also too few and too limited in scope.” In other words, the issue of parity did not address the fact that rehabilitative and educational programming for prisoners in general, in men and women’s prisons alike, were too few and far between, and ensuring gender parity could not address this fundamental deficiency. Making matters worse, the state of Michigan fought the Glover remedies. Technically, litigation concluded in 1999 when the court held that the state was in compliance with the equal protection mandate. However, given the state’s long-standing reticence to comply with the suit, Judge Feikins made clear his concern that the state would ditch rehabilitative programs once the litigation ended.

Some aspects of the prisoners’ rights movement for women mobilized outside of the courts and went beyond addressing inadequate prison conditions and programming by forcefully critiquing the practice of mass imprisonment itself and pushing for decarceral remedies. In Georgia, for example, the Southern Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Universalist Service Committee’s Moratorium on Prison Construction advocated for diversion programs, which allowed women to work in communities close to their homes and submit to correctional supervision during their nonworking hours, and a halt to prison construction for women. By 1981, Georgia’s women’s prisons were severely overcrowded. The Georgia Women’s Correction Center, commonly known as Hardwick, was designed to hold fewer than 200 women, but in 1981 it held 390 prisoners, many of whom had to share bunk beds to manage the overcrowding. An investigation of Georgia prison conditions by the ACLU published in its Women’s Rights Report found that most women in Hardwick were Black and the average age of a prisoner was 21 years old. The population of incarcerated women in Georgia went from 310 to 605 prisoners from 1972 to 1981. From 1980 to 1982, the state, under pressure from women’s advocacy groups, set up diversion programs for women convicted of property crimes with thin criminal records. In 1980, the Georgia Alliance for Prison Alternatives (GAPA) successfully led opposition to prison construction for women in the Atlanta area, but the state increased the carceral capacity of Hardwick by 200 additional beds, which included mattresses placed on the floor in the prison’s dayrooms, in 1982. GAPA had campaigned against the expansion, but criminal courts in Georgia continued to throw more women into prison rather than invest in diversion programs and probation. While the scale of Georgia’s diversion programs ultimately expanded in lockstep with the increasing rate of incarceration for women—thereby undermining their ability to reduce the state’s population of imprisoned women—activists and imprisoned women’s pressure campaigns in the 1980s demonstrate collective efforts not merely to reform prisons but to stem the skyrocketing growth of women’s incarceration altogether.

Imprisoned women and their allies’ fight against systemic sexual abuse and violence provided another stage of struggle in the movement to reform and abolish women’s prisons. Beginning in the 1980s, men were allowed to work as guards in women’s prisons in Michigan. A flood of complaints and lawsuits documenting sexual violence and rape followed. Incarcerated women in 19 states and Washington DC made similar reports of sexual violence, harassment, and abuse, documenting a truly national crisis of sexual terror in the nation’s prisons and jails. While the allegations were largely denied or ignored by states, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the US Department of Justice investigated imprisoned women’s claims. In 1996, Human Rights Watch concluded a two-and-a-half-year investigation of the conditions of women’s prisons in California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Washington DC. The organizations published a series of reports that explained their findings that rape and sexual abuse of prisoners were common and often uncontested by incarcerated women with diminished power in an oppressive institution. The findings of these reports were widely circulated in stories published in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times that sounded alarms regarding sexual violence in prison.

Despite the bad publicity, states were slow to implement meaningful reforms. In Michigan, incarcerated women once again turned to the courts to stop physical and sexual violence and dismantle the prison culture that permitted such abuse. In 1996, incarcerated women filed Nunn v. Michigan Department of Corrections in federal court, which alleged guards targeted prisoners for sexual abuse because the MDOC refused to train and discipline its employees. In 2000, the incarcerated women and the state entered a settlement that put in place clear policies to curtail retaliation and sexual violence. The settlement also articulated guidelines for training new employees, increasing prisoner education, and establishing a clear process to document and investigate allegations of sexual abuse.

National attention regarding sexual violence in prisons gained momentum, in part because of the work of women’s groups and coalitions of advocates and incarcerated women. From 1990 to 1996, the Civil Rights Division in the US Department of Justice had secured convictions in seven cases in which male employees had raped incarcerated women in local, state, and federal detention centers. In 1997, the US Department of Justice sued women’s prisons in Arizona and Michigan because of invasions of privacy on behalf of prisoners and allegations of sexual assault by prison guards. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which officially acknowledged sexual violence in jails and prisons and funneled federal resources to study sexual violence against incarcerated people

Even with renewed national focus on violence in prisons, incarcerated women continued to document abuse and retaliation, suggesting the limitations of legal and legislative prohibitions when the state proved unwilling to embrace reform. In Michigan, it was not until 2007, a decade after the initial case was filed in federal court, that a final agreement established a policy that only female guards could patrol areas where incarcerated women were vulnerable to sexual violence. Male guards were prohibited from working in women’s bathrooms, housing areas, or showers. The final settlement acknowledged that men could not be trusted to ensure women’s safety in specific areas of the prison.

The case was considered a victory by some advocates interested in reforming prisons, but it also highlighted the continued shortcomings of legal reforms and the persistent possibility of violence in state custody. In many cases, the courts did not move fast enough to enact remedies that protected imprisoned women from sexual violence while in prison, instead only granting them some form of redress long after the abuse had already occurred. Another case filed in the state court, for example, Neal v. Michigan Department of Corrections, alleged that male prison employees engaged in systemic sexual abuse, misconduct, and harassment and violated women’s rights that were protected in Michigan’s main civil rights legislation, the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. In 2009, the plaintiffs and the state reached a historic settlement of $100 million, and over 900 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women sought money for surviving sexual abuse in prison from 1993 to 2009. While undoubtedly welcome news for the plaintiffs, this form of monetary compensation fell far short of the incarcerated women’s initial goals of securing protections while incarcerated.

After serving 26 years behind bars, Mary Heinen McPherson was released in 2002. She cofounded the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), which offers arts programming to all prisons in Michigan and is housed within the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She received her MSW degree from the University of Michigan in 2012. In 2020, reflecting on her work for incarcerated people, Heinen McPherson stated, “I put a lot of thought and care into what I do. I am really dedicated to serving prisoners and prisoners’ families and former prisoners and my community that has the most severe disabilities and disadvantages that aren’t even understood.” With PCAP, Heinen McPherson continues a legacy of prisoner struggle that she helped shape, encouraging prisoners to critique incarceration and imagine a radically different future for themselves and those they love. “It’s been an amazing journey of seeing how the power of law, seeing the power of truth, seeing how women that fought to be heard were honored and respected,” she reflects, recalling her participation in the Glover lawsuit.

Despite clear shortcomings and much more work left to do, the history of imprisoned women’s organizing sheds new light on how prisoners articulated and acted upon their own sense of injustice behind bars. Through organizing and protests, incarcerated women pursued a new understanding of equality, civil rights, and bodily integrity, and specifically articulated how prisons proliferate violence against women. By filing state and federal lawsuits, they raised awareness of the distinctly gendered and racialized violence embedded in the routine functioning of the prison, showing how the mass incarceration of women has enduring, detrimental effects on individuals, families, and communities that stretch across generations. In doing so, their organizing made clear that that the imprisonment of women—and efforts to reduce or eliminate the practice—is a feminist issue. Through their efforts, they laid the groundwork for new reforms, critiques, and visions of abolishing American prisons.