In 2022, Tracy McCarter, a Black mother and grandmother who was jailed for killing her abusive ex-husband in self-defense, had the murder charge against her dismissed after two long years navigating the criminal legal system. She’d spent six months jailed on Rikers Island, but was later released on electronic monitoring amid the covid pandemic, as activists pressed the district attorney’s office to drop the case. “Dismissing the unjust charge against me can’t give back what I’ve lost, but I am relieved that this nightmare is over, and I am determined to once again thrive,” McCarther said at the time.
Last week, as his presidency nears its end, Joe Biden carried out the largest act of presidential clemency on a single day in modern history. Biden pardoned 39 people and commuted the sentences of 1,500 others. But civil rights activists and other advocates have more demands of the outgoing president, who ran and won on ambitious promises of criminal justice reform.
The Guardian reported this week that survivors of Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, who remain incarcerated, are pleading with Biden to consider granting them clemency, too. FCI Dublin, a women's prison which staffers dubbed the “rape club before it closed, gained notoriety as having one of the biggest prison sexual abuse scandals in modern history. In 2022, the prison’s warden and chaplain were convicted of sexual crimes against prisoners following the testimony of whistleblowers, while dozens of employees were placed on leave and remain under investigation. The prison permanently closed in April, about two years after reports about widespread misconduct, dispersing its residents to other prisons across the country. The outlet spoke with some of the women, who said that recovering from the trauma they experienced at Dublin is impossible while still incarcerated. They also expressed fear of retaliation for their roles as whistleblowers.
These women include Roberta Bell, a lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Prisons over conditions at Dublin. Bell has detailed surviving years of childhood sexual abuse; she was convicted of witness tampering, a firearm charge, and other offenses in a 1992 murder case, but she says her abusive partner coerced her to accompany him to the crime. Bell has been in prison for over 30 years and never met her grandchildren. Another Dublin survivor, identified by the Guardian as Leslie, alleges that a guard sexually abused her for two years at the prison; she currently faces the threat of deportation over a drug conviction. One Dublin survivor, Aimee Chavira, who was also convicted on drug charges, did receive compassionate release in 2023. But, despite therapy, she continues to struggle with severe PTSD from FCI Dublin.
Becki Truscott Kondkar, director of Tulane Law School Domestic Violence Clinic and founding co-director of the school’s Women’s Prison Project, routinely works with criminalized survivors—that is, women who face criminal charges and prison time for circumstances related to abuse they experienced. This includes women who kill abusers, rapists, or traffickers in self-defense or women who are coerced by abusive partners to serve as accomplices in their crimes. Kondkar told Jezebel that clemency can serve as “an important stop-gap when we run out of options” to free survivors within a criminal legal system that seemingly targets them by design. But she stressed that the circumstances at FCI Dublin weren’t isolated—prison sexual violence is rampant, and clemency is only a small piece of much bigger solutions that remain necessary.
Roberta Bell, 53, was lead plaintiff in class-action that won protections for 100s of Dublin survivors. She reported extensive harassment/assault she suffered + witnessed, became leader for younger women struggling to come forward + face intense retaliation as a result. She's pleading for clemency.
— Sam Levin (@samtlevin.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 10:46 AM
A U.S. Senate report in 2022 showed in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons, staff have sexually abused incarcerated residents over the last decade. That same year, New York passed a law expanding the statute of limitations for sex crimes, which gave victims a one-time opportunity to file civil suits. With days of the law taking effect, one single law firm was connected with 750 individuals who said they were sexually assaulted by state prison staff.
“Incarcerated women are usually invisible to the world and their stories are rarely told,” Kondkar said. “In a criminal legal system with so few legal remedies available to incarcerated people after their convictions are final, clemency serves a critical function to redress the system's failures and abuses.”
Women are the fastest-growing demographic of the U.S. prison population; in the last 40 years, the population of incarcerated women has grown 700%. Kondkar stressed that, if Biden is “looking for an example of people facing sentences that are disproportionately high, compared to their culpability, it could make sense to look at incarcerated women.” The sharp increase is aided by the sexual assault-to-prison pipeline, through which trauma, financial hardship, and other consequences of sexual violence increase victims’ likelihood of being incarcerated. It’s currently estimated that 90% of incarcerated women are survivors of sexual assault, per a report by the Vera Institute in 2016. One 2020 survey found that 24% of women who have called the police to report intimate partner violence say that they were consequently arrested or threatened with arrest.
According to Kondkar, criminalized survivors suffer disproportionately as a result of mandatory minimum sentencing policies, which supposedly "reduce disparities and biases," but only serve to decontextualize victims' actions from the abuse they faced.
Kondkar warned that clemency is sometimes rendered less applicable to the experiences of criminalized survivors. “It’s usually based on acknowledging that someone changed over time and deserves a second chance,” she explained. But criminalized survivors are unjustly punished for surviving gender-based violence in the first place. “So, they don’t usually show the remorse” that clemency sometimes requires, Kondkar said, “because that would require them to have remorse for surviving.”
We spoke to two women who reported repeated sexual assaults by guards + said they were explicitly targeted as immigrants
“These officers knew we were immigrants and thought that they could do whatever they wanted to us, because we were going to be deported."
These survivors now face deportation..
— Sam Levin (@samtlevin.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 9:45 AM
In 2012, Marissa Alexander defended herself from her abusive husband by firing a warning shot that caused no physical harm. She was prosecuted and sentenced to a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison before eventually being freed in 2015 in the face of public outrage. In 2014, Nan-Hui Jo escaped her abusive, American citizen partner and took her young child to seek safety. She was arrested for child abduction and portrayed by prosecutors as a violent “illegal immigrant” attempting to game U.S. systems, rather than a victim; she initially faced indefinite detention, but was later sentenced to 175 days in county jail and released on time served in 2015. Perhaps most famously, Cyntoia Brown was imprisoned for 15 years for killing her abuser while being trafficked by him when she was 16 years old. Then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) granted Brown clemency in 2019.
“Prisons replicate intimate partner violence on a larger scale, they sometimes replicate the abusive circumstances that may have played a major role in someone’s trajectory to prison. Sexual violence is ubiquitous in there,” Kondkar said. “Even if there were therapeutic interventions available [to incarcerated survivors], remaining in that setting would make it impossible for that therapy to be useful. There’s no possibility of receiving the trauma-informed care needed to recover from abuse in prisons.”
These are systemic issues that “can’t be addressed with clemency,” Kondkar says. That doesn’t mean Biden shouldn’t offer clemency to as many incarcerated survivors as possible. “The women who have spoken out to tell about their experiences of sexual assault and rape in prison have acted with extraordinary bravery and courage under unthinkable conditions of subjugation and vulnerability,” Kondkar said, referencing the survivors of FCI Dublin, as well as incarcerated survivors across the country. “It is unquestionable that their trauma would be compounded every day they remain in prison, and that they would be acutely vulnerable to retribution.”
Biden has approximately one more month to act.
