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.
(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.
Contact
For questions about the project, please contact UCSP Project
Coordinator Ayesha Waraich ucsentencingproject@women.ucla.edu.
Freedom Collective Zine
Volume 1: The inaugural volume of the UCSP Zine asks a profound and urgent question: What does it mean to freely express oneself while not being a free member of society?
For the women in the Spring 2024 Writing Group at CIW, poetry became more than just an art form—it was a means of survival, connection, and resistance. In their own words:
“To us, writing poetry means telling the whole truth that would be too ugly to speak: the blood and guts on the walls, not the beautiful mask you wear day to day.”
Volume 2: The Fall 2024 volume of the UCSP Zine. This volume reflects the healing and transformative impact of creative writing. Through poetry, workshop participants found an outlet for processing trauma, expressing buried emotions, and reclaiming their voices. Their writing spans love, politics, grief, and joy—offering raw, honest, and often beautiful insights into their lived experiences. The workshop became a space of freedom and unity, where women could explore their inner lives without judgment, push past personal boundaries, and grow as writers and as a community.
Reports & Articles
Article: “Disrupting the Abuse-Prison Nexus: The Gendered Violence of Prosecution and Abolitionist Feminist Approaches to Social Care Work”
Report: Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons
“Maximizing Time, Maximizing Punishment: The Lived Experience of Long-Term Sentences in California Women’s Prisons” is based on the inaugural study of the University of California Sentencing Project (UCSP). In partnership with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), the UCSP grew out of a demand by people incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW) for research that examines the under-studied conditions and lived ramifications of long-term sentences. In December of 2019, the UCSP launched its first research effort with twenty-two collaborators who had served or faced a long-term sentence in California’s prisons designated for women.
