Gotham Gazette
Second Chance Efforts Must Center Incarcerated Women Who Never Had a First Chance
By Donna Hylton
This April, as we do every year, we hear about the need to offer system-impacted people a “second chance” to re-enter society and live their lives freely. But to realize true, transformative change, we must acknowledge the reality of our country’s incarceration crisis: many people entangled in the criminal legal system never had a first chance to begin with. This is especially true for incarcerated women, who are so often left out of the conversation.
I know firsthand how our country harms and excludes women who are incarcerated from living free and full lives. I spent 27 years behind bars in a New York maximum-security prison — more than two of which were spent in solitary confinement. And while the contours of my story are unique, the theme is all too common: our country’s crisis of mass incarceration locks hundreds of thousands of women away from loved ones, discards lives, and rips apart entire communities. This is true in New York and every other state across the country.
