Gender & Sex Discrimination

Our Work

Incarcerated Women

The Women's Law Project has worked on a variety of projects to improve conditions for female prisoners in Pennsylvania, starting with Beehler v. Jeffes in the mid-1980s, which dramatically altered the way women are incarcerated in the state. The class action law suit contested unconstitutional and unsafe physical conditions and sex discrimination at Pennsylvania’s Correctional Institution at Muncy and resulted in creation of a legal assistance clinic and a child-mother visitation center as well as drug and alcohol, vocational, college and medical programs at the prison. Attorneys from Dickerson Law School and the American Civil Liberties Foundation were co-counsel on the case.

Activities and Accomplishments:

Litigation

In the summer of 2005, the WLP, in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, Kairys, Rudovsky, Epstein & Messing LLP, and Gloria Gilman, Esq., waged an effort to fight the undiagnosed and untreated spread of a drug-resistant staph infection commonly known as MRSA, or Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, in Philadelphia prisons that disproportionately affected women. We filed the complaint in June 2005 and settled shortly thereafter.

Impact on Public Policy

During 2010, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed the Healthy Birth for Incarcerated Women Act, which banned the shackling of pregnant inmates during labor. WLP was part of the coalition that worked to pass this legislation.
Ongoing participation in the Working Group to Enhance Services for Incarcerated Women (convened by the Pennsylvania Prison Society)