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Tag: incarcerated women
How Idaho Entrapped An Ex-Offender Into Voting Illegally

How Idaho Entrapped An Ex-Offender Into Voting Illegally

Laurie Erickson just came home from the Ada County Jail in Boise, Idaho.

Detained since March 1 of this year, Erickson admits she violated the law, although without any of the required intent.
Erickson voted in the 2020 presidential elections when she was on parole at the time for possession of a controlled substance, so she pleaded guilty to one count of felony illegal voting/interference with an election on June 23, 2022 which subjected her to a maximum prison sentence of five years and/or a $50,000 fine. She’s now serving a three-year sentence of probation for the new charge.

Erickson was working as a food delivery driver when parole officers picked her up. She’s back at it already, having dropped off orders from Chicago Pizza and Pojo’s Family Fun Center within an hour or two of walking out of the jail.

While she was detained, Erickson lost three months of income, though, and feared she’d lose her home. She didn’t, but only because her landlord likes her and her boyfriend, according to Mark Renick, Erickson’s friend and director of re-entry services at St. Vincent de Paul Southwest Idaho, a charity affiliated with the Catholic Church. If the landlord wasn’t fond of them, she’d likely be homeless right now.

So some luck wove its way into the plot line of Laurie’s recent past. But it's not all easy. Erickson has three months of back rent to pay and the court fees and costs stemming from the last three months total $1395.50 which she has to pay by July 2025, which is hard since that first shift delivering food she made $38.88. Only $100 of the total assessment is a punitive fine according to Renick.

Erickson’s story seems both cautionary — ineligible people shouldn’t cast ballots — and excessive — almost $15 per day for a charge that the state of Idaho didn’t really want to incarcerate her for (they had to take her into physical custody without a warrant because parolees aren’t allowed bond when charged with a new crime). It was an offense against the public order of Ada County, Idaho that the the Gem State ultimately valued at a whopping C-note.

The story seems unfortunate and preventable until one realizes that Erickson never sought the voter registration form that kicked off this mess. She received the form in the mail and returned it to get an absentee ballot; Idaho was one of 25 states where absentee ballots had to be procured by the voters themselves; counties were allowed to inform residents of this any way they chose and Ada County mailed out registration packets.

Erickson says she probably wouldn't have voted if the form didn’t arrive at her home unsolicited.

It’s not as if she was on a hunt for the form and just happened to pick one up at the parole office, where they’re available. Erickson says she saw signs when she was incarcerated on the original drug charge that said that once all fines and fees are paid and someone’s been out a year, they’re eligible to vote.

The signs, she says, were misleading because, when combined with the appearance of a voter registration form that arrived after she had been home for a year and paid off all of the legal financial obligations imposed by Idaho’s criminal legal system, they led her to believe she wasn’t committing a crime. She had no intent to break the law.

Initially, Erickson’s story sounds like entrapment. In Idaho, entrapment is an affirmative defense, with the burden of proof resting on the defendant who claims it. All Erickson would have had to do is prove that a state agent gave her the idea of voting --I'm looking at you, registrar who ordered forms mailed to residents because of the pandemic -- and that a state agent persuaded her to commit the crime. And she would have to show that she wasn’t ready and willing to vote as an ineligible person.

She could have tested this at trial, but Erickson was advised, incorrectly, by other inmates that there’s no entrapment defense in Idaho which is why she entered her plea of guilty last month.

Disenfranchised people voting isn’t a huge problem, numbers-wise. The conservative Heritage Foundation compiled a database of 1365 instances of proven illegal voting. Of those 1365, only 278 are for voting by an ineligible person. And of those 278 instances of voting by an ineligible person, only 77 were ballots cast by a person who was convicted of a felony whose rights had not been restored. Slightly over five percent of illegal votes are cast by people who’ve been disenfranchised by their status as convicted felons.

The larger problem is how situations like Erickson’s discourage positive and lawful conduct. “We are law abiding citizens and they act like we are scum because we voted,” she told me.

That’s a problem because voting correlates with lower recidivism. Offenders in states that permanently disenfranchise people are 10 percent more likely to reoffend. Back when former Florida Governor Charlie Crist re-enfranchised 155,315 offenders, less than one percent of the restored citizens recidivated, very likely because the ones who voted weren’t subject to arrest when they performed their duty as citizens.

In fact the better behaved parolees are more likely to land in a mess like this. According to Los Angeles attorney Arash Hashemi, who represents people on probation and parole, it’s the good parolees who can most easily fall victim to erroneous instruction.

"If you're actually someone who's trying to rehabilitate yourself and, you know, be a productive member of society, you're actually going to put your faith in your parole officer [and other government officials.]...So if they tell you you can go vote and you listen to them, then I think for them to later on say, no, you committed a crime is unfair,” said Hashemi in an interview.

Erickson should have done more due diligence and made an inquiry to her parole officer. But she didn’t see the need to do so because she was mailed the form. And even checking with a parole officer wouldn't have been dispositive. In North Carolina, where the voting rights status of people on probation and/or parole remains in limbo pending litigation, registration forms are still available at parole offices, where parolees may end up violating the law and the terms of their release if they vote.

“You'd be surprised. A lot of people who were incarcerated when they get out, they're not that sophisticated with the everyday procedures that you and I take for granted," Hashemi said.

Erickson will be eligible to vote again in Idaho in 2025, after the 2024 presidential election. “I know all I want to know now…enough that I’ll never vote again,” she texted me.

It’s not the best news I’ve heard from someone who’s just been set free.

If you would like to donate to the Facebook fundraiser to help Laurie Erickson get back on her feet, please do so here.


Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

For Women In Prison, The Only 'Choice' Is No Choice

For Women In Prison, The Only 'Choice' Is No Choice

Abortion is the new protection racket.

Three states among the 28 that will ban or restrict abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned — Arizona, Florida, West Virginia — have specifically vowed to “Protect Life in the Womb at 15-Weeks Gestation.”

If elected, Michigan Republican gubernatorial hopeful Garrett Soldano wants to “protect” the DNA of fetuses by banning abortion.
“It is my sincere hope that, in addition to the criminal bill passed this session, this civil liability bill will provide strong, additional protection of the life of unborn children in Oklahoma,” said Wendi Stearman, the Republican state representative who sponsored the bill that defines fertilization as the start of life — one that would be the most restrictive in the country when Gov. Kevin Stitt soon signs it as partial fulfillment of his promise to make Oklahoma the most anti-abortion state in the country.

Even Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito got into the protection game. In his leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Alito wrote that “Roe [v. Wade]’s central holding” was “that a state may not constitutionally protect fetal life before ‘viability.’” He and four other justices want states to protect fetal life at all stages.

One need look no further than prisons and jails to see that the purpose of regulating reproductive rights isn’t to protect anyone but rather to frustrate a woman’s will.

Because women have no choice inside them, prisons and jails would be the perfect place to execute consistent reproductive guidelines; after all, prison is a place devoid of choice. Reproductive rules should be clear in these places because the authorities who make them have absolute control. Policy is much easier to implement when few — maybe none — can effectively challenge it.
But correctional reproductive practices are entirely inconsistent.

Only 21 states have codified anything regarding an inmate’s access to abortion. In the remaining 29, it’s overly generous to describe situations as administrators’ “case-by-case” decisions. Essentially, prisons and jails can make it up as they go.

And that’s exactly what they do. A pioneering study, published online last year by the Guttmacher Institute and Johns Hopkins University, of 22 state prison systems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and six local jails — places that house 57 percent of incarcerated women — found 11 states that explicitly allow abortion for incarcerated persons in the first and second trimesters and three that don’t allow it at all.

But it’s not clear that the states that say they allow choice and freedom mean it. The abortion rate was 1.4 percent for prisons and 18 percent for jails, the latter being much closer to the national rate of 20 percent.

Their lower abortion rates doesn’t mean that prisons are more restrictive than jails. Jails and prisons aren’t the same facilities; in 44 states, defendants are detained in jails while sentenced inmates live in prisons. It would make sense that women who enter custody pregnant and choose an abortion would make that choice in the earlier part of their incarceration.

The Guttmacher/Johns Hopkins study may be groundbreaking but it has limited utility. Examination of these statistics provide no insight into whether incarcerated women wanted and chose the pregnancy results they live with. And there’s reason to doubt that they do.

Last year a Nebraska prisoner sued for access to abortion services after she was denied transport to a local clinic. But for the ACLU jumping in and filing suit to secure an emergency order, administrators’ decisions might have been final. It was just the most recent example of a woman’s choice being intentionally obstructed; it’s happened in other states like New Jersey, Virginia, and Alabama.

But prisons aren’t so invested in women having babies; what prison administrators want is control. From 2003 to 2014, the California Department of Correction of Rehabilitation sterilized 1400 women prisoners without their informed consent. A documentary released in 2020 titled Belly of the Beast shed more light on this atrocity.

It appears that women who expressed a desire for future childbearing were targeted for these illegal procedures. A doctor asked then-inmate Kelli Dillon if she wanted children in the future and she answered in the affirmative. The doctor then proceeded to perform a hysterectomy on Dillon, telling her both that she could have children in the future and that cancer necessitated his extreme surgical decision. Neither of the doctor’s statements were true. It stands to reason that if Dillon had forsworn children her reproductive organs might have remained intact.

This isn’t some extension of the right to life movement infiltrating correctional spaces. Ann Hose’s case is proof that carceral systems seek to impede a woman’s choice even if she wants to keep a pregnancy. A nurse in a Hawaii prison injected inmate Hose with depo provera, a contraceptive injection, without her agreement. Hose wanted to maintain the pregnancy; she asked to call her husband to discuss her decision but wasn’t allowed.

We know about all of these cases because they made their way to media outlets after someone filed suit over the decisions forced on the plaintiff women. Scores of untold stories await, tales of women who want to give birth being denied that right and women who want to terminate their pregnancies being prevented from doing so.

Those cases will be hard to suss out. In 2015, a woman confined at the Lauderdale County, Alabama Detention Center sued for access to an abortion clinic with lawyers from the ACLU representing her. Before the case was resolved, the woman agreed to carry the child to term and filed an affidavit averring that no one had coerced her to change her mind, but even the woman’s own counsel recognized the immense pressure that jail officials can apply to disabuse an inmate of her choice.

Once advocates and attorneys get involved, the problematic management of women’s reproductive freedom tends to subside. But that’s because courts have consistently held that incarcerated women do, in fact, have an unfettered right to abortion while Roe’s ruling remains in place. Without that right, a woman like the Alabama inmate might not get the assistance she needs to file in court.

Even if the precedent established in Roe v. Wade stayed intact, one national rule on reproductive rights in carceral settings would be almost impossible to develop, as the Tenth Amendment gives power over both public safety — which means policing and corrections — and health policy — such as reproductive rights — to the states.

In the absence of a single sensible, overarching practice, the best way to predict how a correctional facility will react to a pregnant inmate is to ask the incarcerated woman what she wants. Prison administrators will then oppose her choice — no matter what it is.
Decisions made for inmates reveal the truth about anti-choice laws outside of prisons and jails; they’ve never been shields wielded with protective intent, but swords used to separate women from their freedom.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside the facility. She wrote a“Prison Diaries" column for The New Haven Independent and a blog that earned several professional awards. She recently won a reporting fellowship from the Education Writers of America. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

Transgender Prison Inmates Face Troubling Issues Of Sexuality And Danger

Transgender Prison Inmates Face Troubling Issues Of Sexuality And Danger

The issue of where corrections officials will house transgender women isn’t going to go away soon. The March 16 temporary reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act mentioned where transgender inmates should live. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced a bill to house inmates based on their genitals alone. There’s a bill on Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk to prevent the press from accessing transgender inmates’ files.

So far, analysis of polices placing transgender women in women’s prisons has focused on safety. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed suit to challenge California’s SB 132, a law that allows any male prisoner to identify as transgender and get moved to a women’s facility, vowing to fight for incarcerated women “until their safety and dignity are restored.”

Under the heading “Reaffirming the need for the elimination of violence against women,” Article 8 of the Women's Declaration International’s (formerly the Women’s Human Rights Campaign) Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights wants transgender women out of women’s spaces because “single-sex services and physical spaces …provide them with safety, privacy, and dignity.” The message is clear: when trans women are around, there’s no safety.

Casting the conversations around housing transgender inmates in terms of safety is a mistake. It’s better to analyze these policies’ effects on rehabilitation which, after all, is supposed to be the mission of corrections.

Saying transgender women pose a safety threat when housed with other women was a bad move because it implies that transgender people are inherently dangerous when they’re not. And that unfair characterization of transgender women has more far-reaching effects. In essence, it has shut down and sidestepped substantive discussions of these policies lest participants get labeled transphobic.

I disagree that it’s transphobic to analyze whether these policies benefit inmates. The addition of transgender women to traditionally female facilities might not culminate in rape. Instead, the result might be recidivism and we need to decide if we can accept that effect.

People in prison develop relationships that can be sexual, romantic, business-related, or friendly. It’s impossible to cram thousands of people into one small space and prohibit connections between them. Not all of these relationships are illicit or illegal.

But many are. Sex will be had and whether it’s consensual or not depends on the unique circumstances of each situation and the laws in the state. While sexual contact between a prisoner and a staff member is always non-consenual under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, some states criminalize sexual contact between inmates. California criminalizes only sodomy between inmates. That’s an important distinction because much of the safety rhetoric surrounding the housing of transgender inmates depends on sexual activity between inmates being statutory sexual assault. It’s possible for two inmates in California to have sex with each other without committing rape.

And that’s the problem that, so far, remains unspoken: consensual sex in prisons is just as much of a problem as sexual violence. Consensual sex is still against the rules in all 50 states and subjects people to discipline. I’m highly critical of prison disciplinary systems, especially the enforcement of rules, but this one I support and my position has nothing to do with gender or sexuality. Rather, it has everything to do with my desire to see these women succeed.

Introducing a new population of prisoners, women who have male genitalia, adds a new — and quite frankly, for some, exciting — dimension to a prison subculture. Undoubtedly some women will seek sexual connection with an inmate with male genitalia; the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation bet on it when they started distributing condoms shortly after implementing a law that places transgender women in women’s prisons.

Women in prison who embrace that subculture are “less inclined to introspection and continue to involve themselves in relationships, drugs, and other distractions to divert their attention away from looking at their own behavior,” according to researchers who’ve examined relationships in prison.

If a person’s life has become so out of control that they’re incarcerated, then they need to focus all of their energy on taking that control back. Investing energy in romantic or sexual connections diverts attention away from that goal. This is standard advice for anyone in recovery from substance abuse. Even if a prisoner is innocent or her confinement owes itself to purely structural factors, that person still needs to learn how to navigate those unjust systems to protect herself. A ‘bae’ or a ‘boo’ makes those lessons much harder.

Inmates admit that these aren’t really prosocial connections. In a survey of women incarcerated at the federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, the most reported motivation attributed to prison sexual/romantic relationships is that they’re economic in nature. It’s essentially prostitution where the currency is ramen soup.

Watching women throw away opportunities to see their children in the visiting room or even their chances at parole was a constant for me while I was incarcerated. They’d develop a discipline history for behaviors related to seeing their girlfriends, activities that had nothing to do with sex, like being out of place or carrying benign contraband, and lose visiting privileges and their chances to sit before parole boards.

The system views women who do this much like the quote from Benjamin Franklin that said “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” — which, incidentally, doesn’t mean what most people assume it means. But the sentiment tracks to modern corrections; parole board members think that, if women are willing to endanger their liberty for fleeting romantic or sexual connections that may not be real, then they shouldn’t get either. Denied.

We have to grapple with whether effects on rehabilitation are acceptable byproducts of housing transgender prisoners by their gender identity. Incarcerated women should know better than to endanger reuniting with their families for a fling, but their decision-making skills can be suspect at times, hence their current predicament. I don’t think it’s fair to tempt them.

Of course, just because inmates are capable of consensual sex with each other doesn’t make sexual assault impossible. In Illinois, a cisgender female prisoner accused a transgender prisoner of sexual assault. The Department of Correction dismissed the complainant’s report, saying that the sexual contact was consensual; she’s now suing the state for being disbelieved. It bears noting that, in this situation, in a time when believing women has become paramount, authorities believed the woman with the penis.

But transgender inmates face sexual violence and harassment at rates 10 times higher than cisgender inmates when prisons house them according to their natal genitalia. Not only is it unconstitutional to confine people and not protect them from sexual harm but it’s also morally untenable to know that people face a risk of that type of violence and not stop it.

We may be forced to accept that transgender inmates’ rights to security will cost other inmates their liberty, long-term, because of compromised opportunities for rehabilitation. The question becomes more about why as a country we rely on a system that won’t protect both liberty and security, and less about where we should house transgender inmates.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.