Because She’s Powerful: What This Country Asks Women to Carry Alone

I did not need a PDF to tell me this. I have lived enough of it, and covered enough of it through this platform, to have known the shape of it before I ever read the survey instrument. But there is a particular kind of vindication in watching a research team of 25 members of Essie Justice Group, working with 14 partner organizations, put a number on what women have been saying to each other in courthouse hallways and jail parking lots for decades. The number is not an abstraction. It is a family’s rent.

The Study Nobody Wanted to Fund

Because She’s Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones asked a question the field had mostly avoided: what does mass incarceration do to the women who are never charged, never convicted, and never sentenced, but who absorb the collateral cost of someone else’s case anyway. The answer, drawn from 41 survey questions and a dozen partner-led focus groups, is that incarceration functions as a direct pipeline into poverty, isolation, and declining health for the women left standing outside the walls.

The financial section of the report reads like an audit of a system designed to bleed the people it claims not to be punishing. Women absorb attorney’s fees, bail, court fees, phone calls, commissary deposits, and travel to visitation, often while simultaneously losing the income their loved one contributed. Thirty-two percent lost their household’s primary source of income outright. Forty-three percent were forced to work more hours, change jobs, or turn down an education to cover the gap. Sixty-four percent watched their household assets shrink. The report is explicit that this cumulative financial pressure produces housing instability on its own, independent of any other factor, in more than a third of the women surveyed.

I’m an Essie Sister. I Sit on the National Policy Subcommittee. Here’s What I’m Not Okay With.

I have spent this platform documenting judicial misconduct, prosecutorial overreach, and the procedural machinery that grinds Michigan families down one docket entry at a time. Essie is where I put the rest of it, the part that doesn’t fit neatly into a court file. As a member of the National Policy Subcommittee, I help shape the demands Essie brings to legislators, agencies, and the philanthropic funders who still treat women with incarcerated loved ones as a footnote to someone else’s reform agenda.

Here is my position, stated plainly, because I do not hedge on this platform and I am not going to start now. A country that cannot guarantee its people health care, food security, or stable housing has no standing to be surprised when the removal of a single income earner tips a household into crisis. None. We built a system that asks women, disproportionately Black women, to absorb the financial, emotional, and logistical fallout of incarceration with almost no public infrastructure to catch them, and then we act stunned when those same women organize, advocate, and, yes, get angry. Anger is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a policy failure that was entirely foreseeable and, based on decades of data, entirely ignored.

Desperation is not a personal failing either. It is what happens when the basic floor a functioning society is supposed to provide simply is not there. When food assistance is inadequate, when health care is tied to a job that just disappeared with the primary earner, when housing assistance waitlists run years long, the household absorbing an incarceration has nowhere left to fall but into homelessness. Essie’s own researchers put a number on it: 56% of women whose loved one was the primary income earner experienced housing insecurity or homelessness because of that incarceration. Fifty-six percent. That is not a family failing to cope. That is a country failing to build the infrastructure it claims to have.

The System Doesn’t Fail By Accident. It Fails By Design, Then Blames the Women Holding It Together.

This is the part that makes my forensic brain itch. Institutions rarely fail randomly. They fail in patterns, and patterns are traceable back to design choices someone made and someone else declined to fix. The pattern here is straightforward. Incarceration removes a person from a household. The household loses income, stability, and often its primary caregiver’s bandwidth. Public benefits are means-tested against a household structure that no longer exists in the form the paperwork assumes. Housing assistance is scarce and slow. Health coverage is frequently employer-tied and evaporates with the job that vanished. The woman left standing is expected to fill every one of those gaps personally, immediately, and without complaint, and when she cannot, the system diagnoses her as the problem rather than diagnosing itself.

Essie’s own program design is, in a sense, a rebuke of that failure. The organization runs an Immediate Needs Program specifically because public systems do not reliably cover housing, groceries, or monthly bills for members in crisis. Think about what that means. A national advocacy organization built by and for women with incarcerated loved ones had to construct its own emergency safety net because the government’s did not reach far enough or move fast enough to catch the people this data describes. That is not philanthropy filling a gap. That is philanthropy doing the government’s job because the government declined to do it.

The Demands Are Not a Pipe Dream. They Are Choices We Can Make Right Now.

The Demands at the end of Because She’s Powerful are not a wish list for some distant, more compassionate version of this country. They are not abstract theory, and they are not a pipe dream. They are concrete changes to policy, funding, and institutional practice that could be made right now and should be made right now. We already know what women with incarcerated loved ones need because they told us: keep families housed, protect their health, stop extracting money from households already pushed to the edge, invest in community-based support, and put the people carrying the consequences of incarceration in the rooms where decisions are made.

That is why Essie’s National Policy Agenda is central to this work. The Agenda connects what the study documented, what Essie Sisters know from living it, and what government must do in response. It gives the Demands a policy home and a path forward. It is not separate from the work of the National Policy Subcommittee; advancing that Agenda is at the heart of what the Subcommittee does. Our work is to carry the priorities shaped by women with incarcerated loved ones into the places where laws, budgets, and institutional practices are decided—and to insist that lived experience is treated as policy expertise.

The obstacle is not feasibility. It is political will. Every delay is a choice to preserve the conditions the study documented, and every claim that these Demands are too ambitious is an admission that maintaining the current harm feels easier than confronting it. I reject that calculation. As a member of the National Policy Subcommittee, I understand the scale of the challenge, and I am not afraid of it. I am ready to help advance Essie’s National Policy Agenda and do the work required to move these Demands off the final pages of a report and into policy, budgets, agency practice, and the daily lives of the women who should never have been forced to carry this country’s failures alone.

Join a Healing to Advocacy Cohort

If you are a woman or gender-expansive person with an incarcerated loved one, and you have been carrying this alone, I want you to hear this directly from me, not as journalism, as an invitation from a Sister. Essie’s Healing to Advocacy Program is free. Cohorts run nine weeks, meeting weekly for three hours, with 12 to 15 participants moving through the process together, facilitated by an Essie Sister who has already graduated the program herself. Essie removes the barriers that usually keep women from showing up for themselves: hot meals at every session, onsite childcare through the EssieKids program, and transportation support.

I have covered Essie’s Healing to Advocacy model on this platform before, and I will keep covering it, because the isolation this study measured is not a side effect of incarceration. It is one of its primary mechanisms. Breaking that isolation, in a room with eleven other women who understand exactly what you are carrying without you having to explain it, is not a support group. It is the first act of organizing.