Women and gender non-conforming people experience disproportionate levels of crime, greater rates of trauma, and have unique needs often unmet by the justice system.
Gender-responsive practices are applied throughout our operating programs to enhance safety and reduce the chances of re-victimizing justice-involved women. These practices range from using better tools to assess women’s needs to offering comprehensive services to victims. At the Midtown Community Court, we are meeting the unique needs of women involved in prostitution by using a trauma-informed curriculum that seeks to establish the building blocks of a healthy relationship and more positive thought processes.
In addition, the Center offers national training and technical assistance to help jurisdictions around the country implement simple reforms to better meet the needs of justice-involved women.
On our 'New Thinking' podcast, former coordinator of Gender and Justice Initiatives, Afua Addo, speaks with the Center's Matthew Watkins about Project SAFE.
Initiatives
Project SAFE
Project SAFE works to improve the services offered to criminalized black women who are survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault.
Survivors of sex trafficking are usually treated as criminals rather than victims. But some courts have begun to recognize that those arrested on prostitution charges are often victims of coercion, violence, and trauma. Our video, From Defendant to Survivor, profiles the innovative approaches being taken by courts in Los Angeles, New York City, and Columbus, Ohio.
Women and gender-expansive people are uniquely vulnerable to the widespread violence, dysfunction, and lack of access to essential services on Rikers Island. This report contains policy recommendations to safely and effectively reduce the number of these individuals in New York City jails to below 100 in order to achieve the planned closure of Rikers Island by 2027.
These guiding principles were created as part of the Abusive Partner Accountability and Engagement Training and Technical Assistance Project, an initiative funded by the Office on Violence Against Women. They are designed to inform abusive partner intervention programming (APIP), also known as battering intervention, at all stages of intervention—development, implementation, and evaluation. The goal of the principles is to enhance not only programs but also the broader community response to accountability and engagement for people who cause harm through intimate partner violence (IPV).
A new national commission bringing awareness to the unique issues women face in the criminal justice system started its journey with a visit to our Brownsville Community Justice Center.
The routine violence and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the jails on Rikers Island are well documented but to get a full picture of the harms we must also look at the impact on women and families.
In this article, our Director of Treatment Court Programs Monica Christofferson comments on the increasing acceptance of medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) in the drug court system. The story follows Tennessee Judge O. Duane Slone, his pilot programs with MOUD, and the successful recoveries of participants like Rachel Solomon. In short, as Christofferson put it: “MOUD works.”