By comparison, 10 percent of men under correctional supervision said they had been physically or sexually abused.

Women in the nation’s prisons and jails reported higher levels of abuse as children than women in the general population. More than a third of female state prison and jail inmates said that they had been abused as children, while 14 percent of male inmates reported abuse.

Amongst members of the general population, estimates of physical or sexual abuse as children range from 12-17 percent for females and 5-8 percent for males, according to the report.

Loss of freedom

Now, Jacobsen, a filmmaker and University of Michigan professor, serves as director of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project providing advocacy for battered-women prisoners. The project has 16 petitions for clemency, which can come in the form of a gubernatorial pardon, reprieve, commutation of sentence or remission of fine. The petitions are for women serving life sentences for murder who may have acted in self-defense against abusers or been forced to go along with their abuser’s actions.

The clemency project also supports the parole of more than 20 women in prison serving year-defined terms.

“I really understood what it was like to be living with an abuser and how desperate you felt, and how the structures in the state – police, courts and the law – don’t help women,” said Jacobsen, who has since divorced her abusive husband.

Of the 50,503 people in the state’s corrections facilities, 2,082 are women or about one in 2,464 Michigan women are behind bars.

There are more than 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S. — more than one in 100 adults. One in 746 women in the U.S. was behind bars as of June 30, 2006, according to report by the Pew Center on the States released this year on prisons and jails in the U.S.

Jacobsen said the effect of abuse on a woman’s state of mind needs to be considered.

“These women are the survivors, not the ones who, every five days, are murdered. They defended themselves and survived – for that they get punished, despite the fact that they had no help when they needed it,” Jacobsen said.

Doreen Washington, who served 20 years of a life sentence for first degree murder in Wayne County, was released through a clemency petition on July 15. She was the first woman released through the efforts of the project, which was started in 1991 by former inmate Susan Fair, Jacobsen said.

Washington, 67, was convicted in connection to the 1988 death of her husband, who was shot and killed by her 12-year-old foster son, who thought he was protecting her from her husband’s violent attacks. Though she was repeatedly hospitalized for her injuries, her medical doctor was not allowed to testify in her defense, according to the Clemency Project.

Up to 82 percent of abused women charged with killing their abusers are convicted or accept a guilty plea, according to the Clemency Project.

“The cases are not seen from the self-defense constructed by lawyers, but are based on male experience. They all think of the scenarios of two guys in a bar, relatively equal size and strength,” Jacobsen said.

“They’re unwilling to consider the scenario from a woman’s point of view. They have less upper body strength, not the strength to withstand that kind of battering, unless she picks up a weapon to equalize the situation. But if she picks up a weapon, she may shoot him, but she shoots herself too because her life is over.”

According to the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, since 1978, 104 women in 23 states who have been convicted of murder have received clemency.

Common thread

In 2005, the last time the Michigan State Police Criminal Justice Information Center released statistics on domestic violence, 104,742 offenses were reported to the Michigan Uniform Crime Report program. In nearly 75 percent of the cases, the offender was male.

Domestic violence, as defined by the Michigan State Police, is a pattern of learned behavior in which one person uses physical, sexual or emotional abuse to control another person.

Sheryl Kubiak, an MSU associate professor of social work, said her research through the university’s Violence Against Women Research and Outreach Initiative found a high correlation between substance abuse and prior trauma, including interpersonal trauma.

Interpersonal violence includes rape, molestation, childhood sexual or physical violence and domestic violence, she said.

A review of court records in Genesee County found that 90 percent of felony drug-convicted women were sentenced to community probation. However, due to mental health, substance abuse and trauma-related disorders, many women were failing probation and being sent to prison.

“Most interesting to me was that for the majority of these women, this was not an isolated incident, but one of many traumatic events experienced through their lives,” Kubiak said.

One of the issues looked at by the study was prisoners’ re-entry into the community. Kubiak said it demonstrated that women who had post-traumatic stress disorder were more likely to relapse after release than women without the disorder; men with the disorder were more likely to enter treatment after release than men without the disorder.

“When looking at the traumas identified by both — men were more likely to discuss their trauma as occurring after they entered prison and women discussed theirs as occurring prior to incarceration,” she said. “I interpret this as women often returning to situations that may include interpersonal violence.”

Another link

Merry Morash, an MSU criminal justice professor who specializes in women and crime, said physical attacks are just one way abusive partners hurt victims.

The role of domestic violence in crime and the courts is a complex relationship, she said. About 2/3 of women in prison are there because of a substance abuse problem, she said.

“Usually when people are using drugs heavily they don’t live in very nice places, like (they might live in) drug houses or they move in with people who are using drugs,” Morash said.

“They get connected with partners who are also using drugs and those relationships are heavily affected by domestic violence.”

If a woman commits a crime, drug-related or otherwise, Morash said the courts are focused on the law.

“The courts are trying to see if a woman technically broke a law, not why she broke it,” she said.

“They don’t care that she’s addicted to drugs and is with a man that’s addicted to drugs and he made her take the rap. That’s not a defense.”

Morash said the self-defense and murder situations, like those represented by the clemency project, do not account for a majority of abuse victims’ positions. In those instances, she said lawyers can be helpful in illustrating that their actions were done in self defense.

“Sometimes they were defending themselves, but it’s about applying the law at that point,” Morash said.

Progressive police departments make sure victims understand their rights, make referrals or consult with experts in domestic violence, she said.

Addressing the issue

Despite the belief that most domestic violence victims are poor, Telihia Dobson, a domestic violence advocate for Capital Area Response Effort, or CARE, said income levels of abuse victims isn’t a major determining characteristic.

“It’s a myth that lower-income women are more prone to domestic violence. It happens equally across all socioeconomic statuses,” she said.

East Lansing police Sgt. Scott Wriggelsworth said he couldn’t put a number on the amount of domestic assault cases involving alcohol or drugs, he said they account for a majority of the cases.

“When relationships go bad, people often turn to drugs and alcohol to medicate themselves,” he said. “(Domestic violence) can pretty much stem from any crime and lead to any crime.”

And there are many households that see repeat domestic assault calls, though in most cases the suspect goes to jail, Wriggelsworth said.

“There have been instances where you’re leaving a house, with maybe a man and a wife, and you know damn well that the next day somebody is going to get beat up,” Wriggelsworth said.

“But we have to abide by the laws and restrictions we have there. It’s a big problem and it’s not going away.”

Providing support

The abuse of women across the country is an epidemic that cuts across class barriers, Jacobsen said.

By working with the female inmates, she said she hopes to help the women whose lives have been wrecked by abuse.

“Once I went inside and met the women and heard their stories, especially those serving lifelong terms for murder, I was stunned and appalled to realize who were so-called murderers in women’s prisons,” Jacobsen said. “They acted in self defense against their abusers. Not only were they punished before going to prison, but now they’re in prison as well.”