Dauphin County Bail Fund is profiled in Central Voice
Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts queer people in general — and queer women in particular. While queer women (defined as lesbian, bisexual, and women who have sex with women) comprise only 3 percent of all U.S. adult women, 42 percent of women in prison and 36 percent of women in jail are queer-identified, goof wrote in a recent Advocate article.
Of the approximately 35,560 queer women currently incarcerated in local jails, many (approximately 20,736) of them have yet to be convicted of a crime and are sitting in a cell simply because they cannot afford cash bail.
During this summer’s Pride Festival of Central PA, I sat at a table for Dauphin County Bail fund with others organizing locally to end cash bail. I saw lots of familiar faces from my days working at the LGBT Center of Central PA and made a lot of new friends. A consistent experience I had was noticing that most people didn’t have a strong understanding of why we were there — or what the cash bail system is, and how it harms our communities.
Read “Is this a Queer Issue?” by Louie Marven in the Central Voice