Youth justice can never be achieved if the reason we don't send kids to prison is because we need the prison beds for their moms. #mepolitics
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Between 2011 and 2016, the number of justice-involved Maine women jumped 43 percent. It mirrors national statistics that show that women--especially women of color--have been swept up in the war on drugs at an astonishingly high rate.
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It may be tempting to think: Let's save on building new facilities and get those pesky ACLU folks off our backs about closing Long Creek. But it ignores one of our central premises: we need to spend money on kids, just not prison for kids.
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If we move women into Long Creek, then the money that we could spend in community-based care for kids disappears so that we can keep women incarcerated.
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Maine's crisis re: women's incarceration means we should be looking at why we're incarcerating so many women, not blindly accepting the dramatic numbers and finding more room in our prisons to put them.
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A recent study showed: 1/3 of incarcerated women identify as lesbian or bi, and lesbian and bi women get longer sentences than hetero women. Black women are vastly overrepresented. Poor women too. We should be looking at these issues.
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Instead of finding more beds, DOC could be putting pressure on police, judges and prosecutors to stem the flow. But it's easier to grab headlines that you *might* stop incarcerating kids than to look at why we're in this mess in the first place.
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