The University of California Sentencing Project (UC Sentencing Project) mobilizes interdisciplinary and multi-genre modes of research and dissemination to address the needs of people who have faced long-term sentences in California’s prisons designated for women.

Working closely with our founding community partner, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), and people currently incarcerated in California prisons designated for women, the UC Sentencing Project aims to (1) identify and disrupt the narratives that legitimize long-term incarceration; (2) identify and amplify how people, particularly women and transgender people, and people of color, critically analyze and challenge the impacts of longer sentences on themselves, their families, and their communities during and beyond their incarceration; and (3) highlight the patterns of racialized and gendered disparity in long-term sentencing and its effects. 

We do this by producing life histories and thematic exposés of long-term sentencing to circulate as videos, podcasts, and poetry and other expressive culture as well as humanistic and social science reports and scholarship based on qualitative interviews and focus groups, quantitative data collection, and surveys. Our audience is the broader public as well as scholars, policymakers, legislators, district attorneys, judges, community-based organizations, and currently incarcerated individuals navigating their ongoing criminalization.

Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons

For questions about the project, please contact UCSP Project Coordinator Ayesha Waraich ucsentencingproject@women.ucla.edu.