n 1989 only 80 West Virginia women were sentenced to prison, but by 2019 the state had so many women prisoners that 206 of them were serving their sentence in jails.
The 677.5% increase in women prisoners in the state between 1989 and 2016 was one of the findings of a faculty-led and student-reported project called Women Beyond Bars.
In fall 2018, classes at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media started looking into the mass incarceration of women in the state, Professor Mary Kay McFarland Fuller said.
Those numbers aren’t just statics though.
“So, we began to talk to women,” McFarland Fuller said.
The project has culminated in an exhibit at WVU’s downtown library.
The exhibit features portraits of women who shared their stories — and a QR code to watch each woman tell her story on womenbeyondbars.com.
A lot of the women experienced great trauma, such as domestic violence, domestic abuse or sexual assault, in their lives, said Patrick Orsagos, a WVU graduate student who participated in the project.
Many of the women also struggled with substance abuse.
“I saw how closely substance abuse and incarceration were linked,” Orsagos said. “Especially in West Virginia. That was probably the most startling thing to me. That you know, most likely you don’t have one without the other.”
Difficulty reintegrating into the world is a common theme among the women who spoke in the project. Orsagos said no one he spoke to denied deserving their punishments — they just wanted to be treated with dignity.
“I hope that people see that there’s so many more things about a person than a mistake that they made,” Orsagos said.
He said the justice system should focus on reform rather than punishment.
He added mass incarceration affects everyone.
“Every West Virginian is paying for this outrageous number of people incarcerated,” Orsagos said.
