March is Women's History Month
by RISE DEI Committee
At RISE, we celebrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and celebrate Women’s History Month during the month of March. Women’s History Month was founded by the National Women’s History Project and was publicly recognized and put into presidential proclamation in 1987.
There are so many amazing and prominent women throughout history to be celebrated and at RISE we are lucky enough to work with some of the smartest and most resilient women. While March is aimed to celebrate women, we must also recognize the struggles the women we work with can face during their lifetime and during their incarceration.
The rate of growth for female imprisonment has been twice as high as that of men since 1980.
In 2019, the imprisonment rate for African American women was over 1.7 times the rate of imprisonment for white women Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women, which has continued to increase more each year.
Nebraska had the highest incarceration rate for girls as of 2017.
At least half of the women incarcerated in Nebraska have diagnosed mental illness, compared to one fourth of Nebraska men who are incarcerated.
80% of women in U.S. prisons suffered severe violence as girls, and 75% were abused by an intimate partner when they were adults.
For more on this information, visit The Sentencing Project or the ACLU Nebraska Women in Prison Report.
“I have been incarcerated for 6 years. I have learned this: that I don’t ever want to be where I am today, but honestly I don’t ever want to leave because I am scared of failure - what everyone will think of me. What if I come back? What if I can’t make it out there? My mom is coming to get me, but what if I’m not what she remembers? What if my kids don’t know me anymore? My fear is that in the end, I won’t be all that my family needs.”
- RISE Graduate, Nebraska Correctional Center For Women - Cohort 4
