They Fought Their Abusers. They Were Imprisoned for It.

In 2019, I began a large-scale reporting project: I sent out surveys to 10,000 people incarcerated in the United States in women’s prisons on murder or manslaughter charges. I was trying to understand the scale of “criminalized survival,” as it’s been termed: wherein a person—almost always a woman or girl—is arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for actions she took to protect herself or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. I received more than 1,000 replies. I found that at minimum, 3...