on July the 15th 2010 a Philadelphia
Court sentenced a young Puerto Rican
woman named Cynthia Alvarado to life in
prison without the possibility of parole
at the time
Cynthia was a young mother two small
daughters working to make ends meet
and she had no significant criminal
history to speak of and before I tell
you the story of this case there's a
fact that I want you to keep at the
forefront of your mind throughout the
duration of this talk and that fact is
this everyone involved in this case from
the police to the prosecutors the
witnesses the judge and even the jury
agreed that Cynthia Alvarado did not
commit a murder and did not intend to
commit a murder that being said this is
a homicide case and the victim's name is
Marta Martinez and one afternoon in
October of 2008 Marta was shot and
killed in a neighborhood park that park
is located in a section of North
Philadelphia that the locals refer to as
the badlands so called because of the
prevalence of violence and drug-related
crime but we could also call it the
badlands because of its lack of economic
opportunity and infrastructure because
of the prevalence of police harassment
and brutality and because of the lack of
even basic city services shootings in
that Park are not uncommon and then as
now that Park is an open-air drug market
something else you should know the
person who shot and killed Marta
Martinez is Oscar Alvarado
Cynthia's younger cousin and in 2008
Oscar Alvarado was a troubled young man
with a history of substance abuse and
violence as both a victim and a
perpetrator and prison and poverty Oscar
was driven to the park that day by
Cynthia she wanted him to buy her xanax
it was a prescription drug that she
became addicted to following a car
accident
that left her with a shattered pelvis
and killed the driver who was her cousin
and Oscar's older brother I can't tell
you with any certainty what happened
inside that Park eyewitness accounts are
contradictory and compromised and
forensics is almost non-existent its
Philadelphia I can say that within
moments of entering the park gunshots
rang out and people scattered and Oscar
ran towards Cynthia's car firing his gun
back into the park as he did so one of
those bullets struck and killed Marta
Martinez Oscar didn't intend to kill
Marta he didn't know Marta and in fact
it's not till many hours later that
Oscar and Cynthia learned that someone
had been struck and killed that day we
might say that Marta was simply in the
wrong place at the wrong time so how
does Cynthia Alvarado end up with a life
sentence for murder something that she
had no involvement in the same sentence
in fact that Oscar received when she
wasn't a participant in a shooting we
might say of Cynthia what we said of
Marta that she was in the wrong place at
the wrong time
while Marta is the victim of impersonal
street violence
Cynthia is the victim of something that
I'm going to refer to as state violence
state violence includes dramatic
exercises of government power like war
and the death penalty and incarceration
but it also includes seemingly more
mundane acts like the power to stop and
to frisk and to arrest in recent years
the black lives matter movement has
focused our nation's attention on
everyday police encounters with
civilians poignant ly demonstrating that
even in routine encounters police
possess the power of life and death and
that all too often they abuse this power
when they interact with people of color
the black lives matter movement
has also raised our awareness about some
of the ways that state violence is
gendered for example in 2015
officer Daniel holtzclaw of the Oklahoma
City Police Department was convicted of
multiple counts of rape and sexual
battery after he targeted vulnerable
african-american women and girls and
threatened them with arrest and jail
time in order to sexually assault and
subsequently silence them one victim
testified that when her boyfriend told
her to report the rape to police she
said but he is the police when police
officers and prison staff and other
state agents engaged in rape and sexual
assault and sexual harassment of women
and girls in custody it is an abuse of
power that exists at one end of a
spectrum of gendered state violence but
there's a few other things on this
spectrum when police arrest and jail
trafficked women and girls for the
crimes of their traffickers it is
gendered state violence when police
ignore violence against women by for
example systematically failing to test
rape kits and not responding to distress
calls it is gendered state violence and
when police prosecute and incarcerate
domestic violence victims for engaging
in self-defense
it is gendered state violence but
there's one other thing too when police
and prosecutors leverage women's
vulnerability and by vulnerability I'm
referring to women's status as the
caregivers to small children
women's vulnerability to men's violence
women's vulnerability to poverty and to
homelessness and to prosecution when
police and prosecutors leverage those
things to knowingly extract false and
misleading statements fabricated
testimony unfounded guilty pleas and
bogus convictions it's gendered state
violence I call each of these things the
hash tag me to moments within the
criminal justice system now the me2
movement
was founded in 2006 by the civil rights
activist tirana Burke and it went viral
in 2017 following a tweet from the
actress Alyssa Milano when Burke founded
hashtag me too she was interested in
raising awareness about the prevalence
of rape and sexual assault and sexual
harassment particularly as it's
experienced by women and girls of color
in the intervening years me too has gone
international moving across the lines of
race ethnicity and class and religion
and geography the movement has
demonstrated the ways that rape and
sexual assault and sexual harassment
deepen and reinforce gender inequality
and gender discrimination in employment
education and cultural settings and the
me2 movement has also touched on the
criminal justice system feminist
activists and scholars have promit eyes
the ways that courts and law enforcement
deal with the victims of human
trafficking and the victims of domestic
violence and sexual assault but we still
have work to do specifically we need to
investigate the ways that punitive
police and prosecutorial practices are
amplified by gender inequality and
racism and women's vulnerability to
violence and to poverty in other words
we need a me-too reckoning with respect
to mass incarceration now I'm gonna come
back to that concept of mass
incarceration in just a minute but I
want to bring us back to that day in the
park
Oscar comes running back to Cynthia's
car waving his gun and screaming
pull-off pull-off
so she does of course she does she grew
up in that neighborhood
she knows what gunfire sounds like and
she knows not to hang around when she
hears it hours later when police turn up
at Cynthia's apartment to take her an
Oscar into custody the statement that
she makes in the back of that patrol car
is the same statement that she makes to
homicide detectives during an
interrogation that lasts well into the
next morning and that statement is this
I didn't have anything to do
with what happened during the hours that
Cynthia Alvarado spent handcuffed to a
chair in an interrogation room her
status went from being a witness to a
shooting to an accomplice to murder and
that shift from witness to accomplice is
a product of poverty and gender
inequality and racism and gendered state
violence
Cynthia told the detectives in the room
that day exactly what she knew in fact
one of those detectives testified at
trial that she was cooperative and
compliant the problem is is that what
Cynthia gave them isn't what they wanted
and what they wanted was a first-degree
murder case against Oscar and so they
leverage their coercive power as police
officers and as men to capitalize on the
distinct ways that gender inequality and
motherhood and poverty rendered her
uniquely vulnerable imagine a boxing
match where one of the boxers is chained
to a chair in the center of the ring
defenseless round one after spending
hours in police custody and in that
interrogation room
Cynthia pleads with homicide detectives
to allow her to return home to her
daughters ages 1 and 8 who as far as she
knows have been left without a caregiver
detectives refuse they tell her if she
wants to see her daughter's again if she
wants to maintain custody of her
children she will sign a statement that
they have crafted reflecting their
version of events that day in the park
the problem is their statement isn't
consistent with her own recollections
she refuses this exchange is repeated
multiple times throughout that evening
round two Cynthia is left alone in that
interrogation room with one of those
detectives for just about two hours and
during that time he leers at her and he
comments on her appearance and her body
and he brushes up against her and he
references her employment as a dancer in
a gentlemen's club and finally he makes
a quid pro quo demand sexual favors and
in exchange he'll try to help her out
she refuses this exchange is repeated
multiple times until the second
detective returns to the room
he's just conducted a search of her
apartment and he's found Oscars gun
Round three armed with the gun homicide
detectives threatened to arrest Cynthia
for first-degree murder
something that in the short-term will
destroy her financially causing her to
lose her job and her home and of course
in the long term it threatens to destroy
her life and her family and the lives of
her daughter's she refuses to sign a
statement she has no choice but to
refuse to sign that statement is to risk
the very real possibility of retaliation
by Oscar as well as to undermine and and
divide the loyalties of her extended
family round for the detective who
propositioned her tries another tactic
give him a name in an open homicide she
refuses she has no choice but to refuse
not only does she not have information
about any other unsolved murders in the
city but to name someone risks the very
real possibility of retaliatory street
violence round five actually I'm gonna
retire the metaphor because it's not
working anymore
unlike a boxing match there is no
referee in a homicide interrogation and
Cynthia Alvarado had no one in her
corner that night after spending hours
chained to a chair without food
or a bathroom break being sexually
degraded and humiliated being threatened
with the loss of her children and her
freedom
Cynthia begins to bend she tries to
negotiate with detectives she says I
will sign the statement with your
version but I cannot name Oscar in
exchange you must let me go home to my
children and the detectives agree and
she signs and then they immediately
arrest her as an accomplice to murder
Cynthia Alvarado never returned home
many months later a jury finds her
guilty of something called accomplice
liability which what I would need in a
brand-new Ted to fully explain and hey I
mean you know you could make a
suggestion at the end but suffice it to
say this that accomplice liability hooks
you on to the crime of your co-defendant
so that when that same jury found Oscar
Alvarado guilty of second-degree murder
they in effect found Cynthia Alvarado
guilty of second-degree murder and the
mandatory sentence is the same life in
prison without the possibility of parole
so to answer the question that I opposed
in the beginning of this talk how does a
young mother working to make ends meet
wind up with a life sentence in prison
for a shooting she had no part of the
answer is in the context of poverty and
racial inequality her sentence has a lot
more to do with gender inequality and
gendered state violence and it does her
actions that day and I'm not suggesting
that she's without blame she is guilty
of participating in a drug transaction
she is not guilty of participating in
murder and charging her with that is
retaliation and it's abuse of power and
it's gendered state violence but this
isn't just about Cynthia Alvarado
it's about tens of thousands of women
who are currently incarcerated in our
nation's prison system
so I want to return us now to that
concept I raised earlier about mass
incarceration consider this in 1980
there were a grand total of 12,000 women
in our nation's prison system and three
decades later in 2010 there were about a
hundred and twelve thousand women for
those of you who struggle with math that
would be a hundred thousand increase and
if we add in the number of women who
were incarcerated in jail were at well
over 200 thousand that increase is
historically and globally unprecedented
in fact the u.s. locks up more women
than any other nation on earth and as a
social scientist who studies these
issues I can assure you that that
increase isn't because a hundred
thousand women decided to go on a crime
spree in fact the massive increase in
the size of the women's prison
population is a microcosm of an
overcrowding crisis that has plagued our
nation's prison system for well over
three decades an overcrowding crisis
that was so obvious and so urgent that
by the end of the 1990s social
scientists gave it a name mass
incarceration and what we now know is
mass incarceration is a product
primarily of punitive crime policies and
mandatory sentences these had the effect
of sending more people to prison for a
broader array of crimes forever longer
periods of time at its peak the US
prison system reached a population of
1.7 million American adults in 2009 one
year later in 2010 the same year in fact
that Cynthia Alvarado receives her life
sentence the prison population posts the
decline in fact it is the first decline
in the US prison population since 1972
about that every year from 1972 through
2009 the prison population in this
country increased the reason that it
decreased in 2010 was largely the result
of bipartisan efforts to implement
criminal justice reform policies and
practices that were designed to reduce
our nation's use of incarceration as a
quick fix to much more complicated
social problems like poverty and
substance abuse after decades of prison
building and billions of tax dollars
spent on locking people up for longer
periods of time with devastating social
political and economic consequences
Americans got just a little bit smarter
about crime and punishment fast forward
from 2010 until today Cynthia Alvarado
is in the 12th year of her life sentence
and the number of people in prison has
continued to decline
actually let me correct myself the
number of men in prison and jail has
continued to decline
the number of women in prison and jail
has continued to increase in fact
women's rate of incarceration has
outpaced that of men and women's rate of
incarceration has increased even during
the period that criminal justice reforms
have been implemented how can that be
how can it possibly be that criminal
justice reforms designed both to reduce
the number of people who are currently
in prison by finding ways to get them
out as well as to reduce the use of
prison as a sentence for criminal
conviction how are these things not
benefiting women after all women's
crimes are consistently less serious and
less violent than men's if anyone would
be the primary beneficiary of criminal
justice reform efforts it should be
women but it's not the reason that it's
not is because gender inequality
particularly
in the context of poverty and racial
inequality renders women uniquely
vulnerable to the abuses and the
excesses of mass incarceration and
punitive crime policies it is not
criminal justice reform if we leave
women and girls behind we will not solve
the injustice of mass incarceration
without finding ways to eliminate those
practices that give rise to gendered
state violence and so what we need to do
is not only prioritize the needs of
women and girls but demand that our
criminal justice system respect women
and girls constitutional rights and
recognize their fundamental humanity
thank you