Can California change a dark culture at Chowchilla women’s prison?

At the same time, women’s prisons often lack the mental health services and rehabilitative programming to help address deep trauma, said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Prisons and jails, when they were built, were not built at all with women in mind,” Welch said.

When women do commit violent offenses, researchers have found the episodes often are tied to self-defense or coercion by an abusive partner. “Sometimes women describe it as something just snapped, and they couldn’t take it anymore. And they acted out as their only means of protection,” Welch said.