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Reimagine California’s women’s prisons to prioritize health and wellness. With a plethora of Community-Based Organization (CBO)-led programs in women’s prisons, California has an unparalleled opportunity to optimize healing, education, and empowerment during incarceration. This should occur through the establishment of a dedicated Health and Wellness Center at each prison. The Center should deliver comprehensive, gender-responsive, trauma-informed and meaningful health and wellness services through a structured, personalized, and collaborative learning model.
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Develop dynamic, individualized rehabilitation plans that address individuals’ needs and strengths. Residents’ needs and strengths vary significantly based on a multitude of factors, including life experiences, personal characteristics, time since arrival, and sentence. These needs should be identified via gender-responsive and trauma-informed tools and used to inform individualized rehabilitation plans that reflect changing needs over time. All programming that CDCR coordinates and/or delivers should be responsive to incarcerated individuals’ needs, strengths, and goals.
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Optimize the timeliness, accessibility and reliability of programs. Programming must be accessible, consistently delivered, and seamlessly integrated into daily life. To accomplish this, CDCR should remove punitive barriers to participation, improve collaboration with CBOs, and implement streamlined and centralized operations.
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Improve programming access, quality, relevance and funding processes. Programming must be responsive to individuals’ needs. Incarcerated individuals should be involved in determining what programs are offered. There should be regular evaluation and prioritization of evidence-based and gender-responsive programs, improved waitlist management, and transparent and equitable funding processes to sustain high-quality programs.
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Ensure that programs are deployed in a safe environment that supports health and wellness. Programs must be delivered in a space where people feel physically and emotionally safe. California should create conditions supporting the health, wellness, and empowerment of people incarcerated in its women’s prisons.
