Women and Incarceration: The Need for an Intersectional Lens in Criminal Legal Reform

The United States incarcerates a larger share of its population than any other country in the world, and although men receive much more attention in carceral reform efforts, the growth in the incarceration rate of women is higher than that of men. In this talk, Aaron Gottlieb discusses the impacts of criminal legal reform in the intersections between gender and race/ethnicity and underscore the importance of gathering better data to end the mass incarceration of women.

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Aaron Gottlieb, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a faculty affiliate of the Jane Addams Center for Social Policy and Research. His research is motivated by the idea that our criminal legal system is far too punitive. As such, his scholarship examines the causes and consequences of criminal legal involvement, as well as the impact of policy and practice changes that would reduce the punitiveness of the criminal legal system. In addition to being published in a wide range of academic journals, Aaron’s research has been cited in a number of media outlets, including the New York Times and the Atlantic. In the community, Aaron is active in working towards police accountability through his work on Chicago’s Police Use of Force Work Group and the Empowering Communities for Public Safety Ordinance.