After conducting a literature review and consulting with directly impacted women, gender- diverse people, and system stakeholders, the authors arrived at two key learnings.
First, the pretrial process rarely provides anyone—especially Black and Brown women and gender-diverse people—the opportunity to share their stories and unique circumstances or to advocate for their needs. Second, the system does a poor job of explaining the pretrial process to people and acts as if each person experiences the process in the same way. In response to these learnings, we formulated a model of “participatory pretrial” to address the urgent need for more equitable, just, and family-strengthening decisions for women and gender-diverse people pre-conviction.
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