Women who act to protect themselves from abuse can still face prosecution, imprisonment and lifelong punishment at the hands of the justice system.
When I first began reporting on incarcerated women, I was fascinated by studies that showed that showed that upwards of 70 percent of women in jails and prisons were subjected to intimate partner violence before they were incarcerated.
But as I covered more stories on the topic, I started to see that, more disturbingly, many women I interviewed had been incarcerated because they responded to violence perpetuated against them.
Again and again in my research, I came upon cases in which a woman claimed that she had acted in self-defense, or had followed orders from an abuser because she didn’t want to die, or had protected a loved one—and she was subsequently charged with murder, convicted, and locked away, sometimes for life. This is the little-known phenomenon termed “criminalized survival.” I wanted to understand how common it was.
… The majority of incarcerated women were abused before they were pipelined into prison … One-third of those incarcerated for murder or manslaughter had in fact been acting to protect themselves.
I began to ask around: The issue was accepted as endemic by lawyers and advocates who work in the space, as well as anyone who ever worked at or served time in women’s prisons, but there was no data to show its scope.
So in January 2019, I undertook the first-ever nationwide survey, designed with a Yale political science professor. I sent letters and surveys to more than 10,000 women in 27 states across the U.S. and received more than 1,000 responses. I read every account and hand-coded each survey.
The results show that, indeed, the majority of incarcerated women were abused before they were pipelined into prison—and that at the very least, one-third of those incarcerated for murder or manslaughter had in fact been acting to protect themselves.
Tanisha Williams is one of the women who responded to me, and a main subject of my book Unreasonable Women. A Black woman from the city of Saginaw, Mich., Williams is emblematic of so many inhabitants of women’s prisons.
From girlhood, she was failed by every system ostensibly set up to protect her. But when she finally responded to harm, those same systems re-emerged, this time in the form of police, prosecutors, and judges, and harshly punished her.
Williams is now serving 20 to 40 years in a Michigan state prison because an armed man forced her to help him with a crime. But she is emblematic of women in prison not only because of the dire circumstances of her life, but because of her resilience and strong character.
She does not just endure; she builds, fights, educates and heals. Tanisha Williams has reclaimed her humanity in the face of systems determined to erase it, in part by telling her story.
The following is an excerpt from Unreasonable Women.
By Design
In 2021, I hosted a podcast that focused on the case of Nikki Addimando, whose story initially got me reporting on women in prison. As the podcast was airing, a coalition of people from Addimando’s town and the surrounding areas were running a “Free Nikki” campaign, demanding that Addimando be released. They were suburban moms, for the most part, and they dressed entirely in purple, the color of domestic violence awareness. They raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover Addimando’s trial legal fees and help her children. Her sister landed a contract to write a memoir about the experience. ABC ran a two-hour 20/20 special on the case.
On 20/20, Addimando was captured in a bleak prison meeting room, dressed in her jailhouse greens. Her complexion was clear and vibrant, her hair long and silky. She looked down, nervous in front of the bright cameras.
“It was kill or be killed,” she said softly.
I was also interviewed for the 20/20 special.
I asked the producers if I could speak about Tanisha Williams, a subject of my book. They were enthusiastic, allowing me a few moments on the air to mention her case. I wanted to highlight the stark differences in how people had reacted to Williams and to Addimando—and what this meant for each woman’s shot at freedom.
In her five years incarcerated, Nikki Addimando had gained thousands of supporters nationwide, including me. She was a pretty, small, well-educated white woman, backed by her connected and media-literate sister and friends, who were conventionally attractive and feminine: homemakers, a Hudson Valley influencer, a local actor.
Addimando was wholesome and relatable. She had followed the rules of society and had still ended up in a bind. People could see clearly that Addimando had been railroaded, that her children had been robbed of their mother. That wasn’t supposed to happen to people like her.
Meanwhile, Williams was a Black mother of three from Saginaw, Mich. She had been inside for 12 years, and, like most prisoners, her story was largely unknown and her supporters few. She had helped police solve a cold case, putting herself and her children in danger to help her clear her conscience and bring some measure of peace to a grieving mother. Then she had acted as the prosecution’s star witness.
But for Williams, a former sex worker from a run-down city, no color-coordinated freedom campaign or two-hour primetime special were forthcoming.
A few weeks after the 20/20 interview, I received a phone call from a junior lawyer at the recently formed Saginaw public defender’s office. The lawyer said he had been instructed by the office’s head to represent Williams. He and a law clerk visited her at Huron Valley and vowed to seek out all available strategies for her release. A University of Maryland law professor had read an article I’d written about Tanisha Williams, and offered to prepare a clemency application to put before Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In Michigan, the governor has the executive power to grant clemency—a broad term that includes commutations, pardons and amnesties—based on the idea that in certain cases, the system has worked properly, but as a measure of mercy, a person should still be allowed relief.
Tanisha Williams was brimming with excitement, certain that her future liberation was near. “I’m geeked!” she announced. She was ready to get her life going, and to advocate for others. She emailed me: Cant wait to put in feminist footwork… SO EXCITED!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!
Over in New York, a partner at a major white-shoe Manhattan law firm, Garrard Beeney, offered to represent Nikki Addimando pro bono. His firm donated more than $2 million in legal services to assist on her appeal.
A new law had come into effect in the state, the result of a decade of campaigning by feminist activists: The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, or DVSJA, allowed judges to exercise greater discretion in sentencing for domestic violence survivors convicted of crimes.
After Addimando’s 2019 conviction, she waited for a DVSJA hearing, where she had to prove only that she was abused and that the abuse she sustained was a significant contributing factor to her crime of conviction. But Edward McLoughlin, the original trial judge, also oversaw the DVSJA hearing. He did not find her eligible and handed down her 19 years-to-life sentence.
Beeney appealed the DVSJA decision before the Appellate Division. He won. Nikki Addimando’s sentence was reduced to seven and a half years. At the time, she had served around four. She later managed to shave off six more months by training service labradors at the prison’s elite dog-training program.
In January 2024, Nikki Addimando arrived home five days after her son’s 11th birthday. She walked out of the prison and into a parking lot, where her children gave her a bouquet of magenta flowers and pressed themselves against her. They had been 2 and 4 when she left, and now her son was a preteen theater enthusiast, and her daughter was a 9-year-old dance competition champion.
Addimando had a felony on her record, so the apartment where Addimando’s sister lived and had raised Nikki’s children would not allow her as a tenant.
While Nikki was in prison, her children had dreamed of a fictional house that they deemed “560 Together Lane.” Nikki Addimando’s dad sold his home, and her sister gathered all her own money and funds raised from supporters. They bought a house to live in and nicknamed it “Together Lane.” The family adopted a kitten. A therapist offered Addimando free sessions, and she began the difficult work of slowly rebuilding her life.
At that same time, the lawyer from the Saginaw Defenders Office, who had resolutely promised to work Tanisha Williams’ case in every way possible, disappeared, she told me. She wondered: Was it something she did?
Eventually, I learned that he had opened his own law firm in downtown Saginaw. On his new website, he said he took “pride in preserving and restoring years of life for his clients.” He hated the thought “of people rotting in prison for a mistake, or worse yet for a wrongful accusation.” No matter how difficult your case was, he added, give him a call: for a lawyer who won’t give up on you.
Tanisha Williams’ clemency application sat on Gov. Whitmer’s desk. Whitmer herself was a rape survivor, but this had not proved terribly pertinent. Williams had let her hopes get so high, and she was confused: Even with all this focus on her case, she remained invisible. But people who understood the process were not surprised.
“It’s political suicide to give clemency,” Carol Jacobsen, the director of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project, a grassroots organization, told me. Voters, by and large, did not appreciate it when a governor freed a person who had been lawfully convicted by a jury. If that person were to reoffend, the governor’s political rivals would never stop talking about it. And the cards were really stacked against women, Jacobsen said, because almost nobody understood the reality of domestic violence.
I explained a bit about Williams’ case to Jacobsen. She told me that when it came to gender-based violence, everyone got it wrong, relentlessly: the lawyers, judges, journalists. Tanisha Williams was in a tough spot, Jacobsen added, “unless she was snow-white innocent of anything and was not even there.”
“She was there,” I said.
“So she’s cooked,” Jacobsen said. “In my experience.”
I asked Jacobsen what Tanisha Williams should have done, back in 2005.
“Her choice was she should die,” Jacobsen said. “Or prison. That’s it.”
I did not relay this message to Tanisha, who was busy reading and rereading encouraging letters and messages that she’d been sent; maybe the kindness could sustain her. After all, she was practiced at wringing hope from a rock.
Show your support for Tanisha by sending Gov. Whitmer a message or calling her and urging her to free Tanisha Williams.
