Mercury News: Resentencing effort works with California DAs to reunite incarcerated mothers with their families sooner
Five years after state law empowered prosecutors to recommend the early release of people who have substantially rehabilitated in prison, an architect of the landmark reform saw something starkly missing: women prisoners were a tiny fraction of those set free.
“We see this across every industry. We’re underrepresented,” said Hillary Blout, executive director of the nonprofit For the People, and a former San Francisco prosecutor. “It was clear to us that there needed to be a concerted effort to actually target and focus on cases involving women.”
She concedes men will always represent the vast majority of people who benefit from prosecutor-initiated resentencing, which was instituted in 2019. That’s just simple math: Men make up 95% of California’s prison population.
But Blout says she was still jarred by how few women were represented: By her group’s estimate, they accounted for barely 1 percent of the approximately 600 people who have been resentenced under the law.