Gender and Incarceration in Washington
By Brooke Kaufman | Communications Specialist
Gail Brashear, Alyssa Knight, and Tiffany Williams were collectively sentenced to almost 100 years in Washington State prisons. After years of hard work and growth, each of them was granted early release and returned home to their communities. These women are daughters, mothers, partners, paralegals, students, temps, published authors, and mentors. They are also leaders in the fight to recognize the struggles of incarcerated women in Washington. Gail and Tiffany were released in 2019 and 2020 after petitioning the state’s Indeterminate Sentence Review Board to review sentences they had received as juveniles. Alyssa was granted clemency and released in 2021 after spending 18 years in prison. Each of them holds a unique perspective on how gender and identity shape a person’s experience within the justice system.
Gail Brashear: “I get my motivation by helping people with things I’ve gone through.”
Gail Brashear was just 15 years old when she was sentenced to 614 months (about 51 years) in prison. After 20 years, Gail petitioned the Washington State Indeterminate Sentence Review Board (ISRB) for early release under a statute allowing for the review of juvenile sentences. After being denied in 2017, Gail filed an appeal and was granted a new hearing. In 2019, she was released after serving over two decades in prison.
In the years that followed, Gail earned her B.A. from Evergreen State College and served as a legislative intern to Senator Jeannie Darneille. She is a current member of the Washington State Department of Corrections Lived Experience Advisory Team and the University of Puget Sound Critical Inquiry Collective Project. Gail works as a paralegal at the Tolin Law Firm in Seattle, where she supports clients seeking post-conviction relief. She is a frequent guest speaker and lecturer at events discussing early release and second look reforms.
Although Gail was not a client, she has spoken at various SCP events, most recently the 2023 Second Look Summit, about her experience as a woman in the criminal justice system. For many, her story — especially her fight — symbolizes the barriers to release faced by women in Washington prisons.
“A lot of the time, the people who have the power [to implement reforms], don’t get [to hear] female voices,” Gail said. “They tend to stereotype the idea of an individual who was incarcerated, but they don’t think about the women [in prisons], who usually have very different experiences getting involved with the system, serving time, and trying to get [released].”
When people talk about prisons and prison reform, they tend to focus on the male perspective. This could be because more men than women are incarcerated — the WA Department of Corrections currently operates ten men’s and two women’s institutions. Outside the comparison context, though, women’s numbers are on the rise; since 1980, the number of women in Washington prisons has increased by over 800%. And yet, the programming and reentry resources available to incarcerated women have not increased in kind.
“I think [it comes down to] the people who have always run DOC,” Gail said. “A lot of them come from a military background, or they’ve [worked for] DOC for so many years that it’s become this [isolated] think tank that’s pretty much male-dominated. If you have that male-dominated [echo chamber], you’re not really thinking about women.”
For Gail, it’s hardly inconceivable that men and women would experience prison differently from one another.
“There’s a difference in the way that men and women do time in prison because of pressures in the men’s prison that aren’t found in the women’s prison, and [also] the way women tend to be,” Gail said. “Women really tend to gravitate toward each other and build small families. You’re not alone; you know what I mean? It’s this natural desire to try to connect with each other.”
In a similar vein, the reasons for which people commit offenses and are sent to prison can derive from gender stereotypes and the way gender influences our lived experience.
“For a lot of women [who get sent to prison], it’s because of these isolated, traumatic events [that happened to them],” Gail said. “What’s interesting, and something that I’ve seen, is that society has this idea of what a woman is and who they’re supposed to be — the mother, the caretaker, or the nurturer. When women commit a crime, they’re more likely to be viewed as forever damaged and debilitated. For them to commit this crime, it shows how outside of the norm they are, so their sentence tends to be much harsher. It’s never just a crime, and [women are] never treated equally to men. There will always be varying degrees of separation because of gender.”
As a teenage girl entering a system built to violently repress, Gail says she struggled to adapt to the rigidity of her new environment. To her, the administration never implemented rules out of fairness or safety, but out of spite. Her rebellion led to most of her first 10 or 15 years of incarceration being spent in segregation. She often encountered prison staff who would label her has “hysterical” and unreasonable — stereotyping her as a woman who couldn’t control her emotions.
“They weren’t used to that [kind of resistance] at all, especially coming from a female,” Gail said. “They had never experienced, here in Washington, a female that pushed back on them in the way that I did. I do think that if I were in a men’s prison, some of the things that I spoke out against or the ways that I pushed back against DOC wouldn’t have led to me being penalized in quite the same way. When you have a female [in prison] who’s not complying or is asking [questions about certain policies], DOC pushes back and says you’re being dramatic and need to be punished.”
As time went on, Gail understood more about the institution — mainly, where there was room to grow and where there wasn’t. She and the other women banded together to fill programming gaps and advocate for greater access to education and reentry resources. In 2012, they created Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), a liberal arts college program for women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people inside Washington women’s prisons. FEPPS offers pathways to higher education through A.A. and B.A. degrees, connects students with peer support, and expands post-release job opportunities.
“When I first got [to prison], we had almost no programming, even for the few juveniles that were there,” Gail said. “That slowly started to change, and we went through this period sometime around 2007 when we had an amazing administration. They allowed us to create all kinds of new programs, and that's when we created FEPPS. We also got to do things like extensive mental health testing and training from psychiatrists for six months. They taught us how to do crisis intervention, how to handle detox issues, and manage confrontation and fighting. We created a peer support program where anytime people in different units were going into crisis or needed someone to talk to, they would call us, and it branched out into all these other cool programs that we were able to implement. DOC even went so far as to bring core training to a group of us, and we spent months learning how to develop a curriculum and different teaching styles. We were able to create our own programs and teach them without staff or volunteers. For a while, it was great. The women had access to programming [and other resources] that were impactful without it being limited by [their] sentence or things like that.”
Once a new administration stepped in, Gail says the attitude toward programming shifted, and DOC reinstated restrictions on who could access courses and the options for enrollment. Ultimately, DOC thought the women in Gail’s institution “had too much authority.” But what DOC considered insubordination was women taking the initiative to better themselves and prepare for reentry. Limits to programming don’t just go against the wishes of women inside; they actively prevent what most people in society believe those who are sent to prison should undergo — rehabilitation.
At Gail’s institution, there was a lack of relevant information on reentry and how to navigate life after decades in prison. After being released in 2019, Gail went to live with her parents in a rural community past Olympia. After decades of living in close quarters with women who, through the ups and downs, became family to each other, Gail felt incredibly isolated being on her own. For some time, she grappled with the feeling that her freedom meant other women had been left behind.
“Coming home is incredibly hard, knowing that there are individuals you’re close to that may never get a second chance or be able to come home,” Gail said. “I thought I would be super appreciative of my own space, silence, and not having to deal with people. But it started to take a toll on me, how isolated I felt. I was used to talking to people every day, mentoring the younger women, and being involved in programming. I go home, and I feel completely disconnected from everything. Even with my family, it’s hard to know somebody when you depend on two-hour visits every couple of months. This created a lot of anxiety in me because I didn’t know if I would be able to rebuild that connection [on the outside].”
Reuniting with her family was just one aspect of Gail’s reentry. To overcome the isolation, she needed to find people who shared common ground. Gail reached out to women who could offer “support and [who have a] mutual understanding of what it’s like trying to transition [back into society] after so many years.” Together, they could lament the fact that DOC reentry programs lack follow-through once a person is released; they could share job leads, resume advice, and tips for balancing childcare with work. Just as they had done on the inside, Gail and the women created a support network where their experiences as formerly incarcerated women were given the care and complexity they were owed.
Gail’s original release plan was to work as a Braille transcriber for groups like the Kentucky School for the Blind and the American Printing House for the Blind. But competition for these already limited roles increased during the pandemic, so Gail enrolled at Evergreen Community College to finish her B.A. degree. In her second quarter, she became a legislative intern for Senator Jeannie Darneille, and from that point on, “everything changed, and doors started opening.”
She’s always had a passion for research, especially within the law and justice sphere. Her current job as a paralegal with the Tolin Firm in Seattle allows Gail to apply her lived experience to her career goal of helping others seek relief from the criminal justice system. Gail finds purpose in talking with clients applying for early release about “their anxieties and the issues they’re struggling with.” In many ways, her job is an extension of the support network she contributed to while incarcerated, discovered on the outside, and has now brought to others.
“I always wanted to stay somehow connected [to this work],” Gail said. “That’s where I’ve learned I get my motivation, is helping people overcome the [circumstances] I’ve gone through. I absolutely love the work that I do.”
Alyssa Knight: “The struggle is for all of us.”
In 2004, Alyssa Knight was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison. After 18 years, Alyssa’s application for clemency was granted, and she was released. She was represented by SCP volunteer attorneys Richard Monroe, Mika Kurose Rothman, and Jon Zulauf, the former legal director for SCP.
While at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), Alyssa helped found Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), a liberal arts college program for women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people. After graduating from the FEPPS program in 2016, Alyssa began co-teaching English classes with professors and mentoring other students. At the time, she worked multiple jobs, including as a computer-aided drafter, craft room clerk, reader for students with disabilities, and dog trainer and groomer with the Prison Pet Partnership. Alyssa also served as a member of the FEPPS advisory board, institutional facilitator, tier representative, counselor on parenting from a distance, and instructor for nonviolent communication and self-empowerment classes.
Following her release in March 2021, Alyssa began working as a dog groomer. She also took on roles as a panelist and podcast guest on topics related to the reentry needs of formerly incarcerated people. While preparing for her hearing, Jon encouraged Alyssa to apply to the University of Washington. To no one’s surprise, she was accepted, and in 2021, she enrolled in the school’s Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies program. Her current research examines the explicit and implicit implementation of gender through Department of Corrections policies. This interest developed at WCCW, where she witnessed the “lexicon around gender start to shift.”
“I had taken an introduction to gender class, and I was like, this is my shit. If I’m going to school this is what I would study,” Alyssa said.
It was around this time that Alyssa’s long-term partner transitioned. This experience opened her eyes to broader questions surrounding gender, such as, “What do people need to know to be supportive of people who are transitioning, who are nonbinary, or who push against our ideas of gender norms?”
“[My research] looks at the ways that [DOC] frames gender in their overall vision and proposals for prison operations,” Alyssa said. “I am interested in the creation of the category ‘woman’ in the carceral space and, historically, how that has morphed over time while remaining an axis of control over bodies.”
This spring, Alyssa is interning with the Disability Rights of Washington, visiting prisons across the state to facilitate civic engagement training and compare overall climates and access to programming between men’s and women’s prisons. She seeks to understand the impact of binaries and gender-segregated prisons on gender-nonconforming people. This concern is what drove her to co-found Beyond Bars and Binaries, a gender education program that offers financial and other forms of aid to transgender people released from prison. Within WCCW, the program hosts a support group for transgender and nonbinary incarcerated people.
At WCCW, Alyssa joined The Women’s Village, which aims to expand access to programming, resources, and reentry services inside the prisons. The Village, as it’s known by members, connected WCCW with nearby professors who could assist with educational programming. Women like Alyssa worked to generate program funding, find colleges that were willing to provide accreditation, and secure teachers and classrooms for programming to be held in.
“[The organization] started when a group of women who were all thriving in prison despite long sentences and little resources worked together with one of the mental health providers to think through how they might share their skills of resiliency and overall strength with others,” Alyssa said. “This, in large part, was because the needs of incarcerated people were not being met by DOC, and we wanted to create a mutual aid network to serve our own population.”
This network came to include resources such as transitional housing information, GED tutoring, computer courses, resume writing workshops, and leadership training, among other opportunities.
“Funding for programs in the women's prison was [and continues to be] much smaller than what is allotted for the men's institutions, [and that’s] simply due to the numbers,” Alyssa said. “As a result, we had to create programming and reentry opportunities for ourselves. Before FEPPS was formed, a common goal we all shared was the desire to earn a degree. We began hosting meetings with interested professors through The Village to advocate for [an improved education] program. I was part of the brainstorming sessions that grew into Critical Inquiry, where we analyzed texts to think through power dynamics and larger philosophical questions that would come into play as we built a higher education program within the prison. The Village continues to amass informational resources and is slowly opening back up for other services [after the COVID-19 pandemic].”
As she continues her advocacy for people inside and who are being released from prison, Alyssa considers how identity stratifies the experience of incarceration and, more critically, a person’s ability to be considered for early release. While everyone in prison “has their freedom encroached upon” and experiences dehumanizing treatment, not everyone has equal access to the resources and opportunities that give rise to a second chance.
“Prison was prison. It sucks and it’s inhumane,” Alyssa said. “The struggle is for all of us. It’s not just the men who have it hard. It’s a strain on everyone.”
Alyssa feels hopeful when people like Eugene Youngblood, a fellow SCP client who was released through clemency, acknowledge the struggles of incarcerated women.
“Every time I see Eugene, he’s always like, ‘I just need you to know that I see you; I’m acknowledging you. We all kind of sugarcoated [the struggles of women in prison] and brushed your struggle aside, saying that you had it good or you had it easy,’” Alyssa said. “He didn’t realize that we were in prison, too, and that prison, universally, is fucking inhumane. The men look at it and say their prisons are rougher [than ours]. But prison is prison to me. [Women’s prisons] are just as rough. We wear the same uniforms and are subject to the same rules. All of us had our freedom encroached upon. None of us were making decisions about what food we had or what policies were implemented. In many ways, the women especially had to carve out programming for themselves and were reliant on volunteers coming into the prison. When it came to funding, the state looked at the numbers, and in the women’s prison, there are fewer people, which means less funding.”
While prison is an environment that harms and molds people in a similar fashion, how a person experiences incarceration depends on their identity. The same goes for reentry and the resources a person will have access to once they’ve returned to the community. Alyssa’s partner released before she did and had trouble finding housing as a transgender man (DOC-approved housing is typically gender-segregated). Once again, Alyssa saw how gender and other identity factors could intensify the already challenging process of reentry.
“You constantly have all these layers where you’re being judged,” Alyssa said. “What’s your crime? What’s your gender? How do you identify? Do you have a family? Do you have an advocate? For people who don’t have an advocate [or are less vocal about their needs], they struggle with reentry because there aren’t enough meaningful or accessible resources. All the connections I made during my reentry; I think I would have been too timid to make those had I not taken the initial step of asking for help. What does that look like? Asking people to support you, knowing how you feel about yourself, and knowing that [how you feel about yourself] isn’t necessarily reflected by other people and how they see you.”
Understanding the differences and complexities within each person’s struggle is the first step to achieving justice. Gender is just one of the many identity factors that drive carceral policies, practices, and injustices. Alyssa understands this because she experienced it firsthand at WCCW. Now, she has taken that experience and used it to create opportunities for women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people, both inside and outside prisons. As long as it takes, she’ll continue fighting for the fair treatment and consideration of people who are or were formerly incarcerated. It doesn’t escape her that not too long ago, that person she was fighting for was her.
“There are a lot of extraordinary people [at WCCW],” Alyssa said. “People who are living just like I was that are resourceful, resilient, and have good support networks who just need a chance. I definitely think we see that with women. I don’t see Black or Brown women getting clemency, and that is a larger systemic issue.”
Tiffany Williams: “There’s always a chance, even when things seem impossible.”
It was surreal. That’s how Tiffany Williams describes the feeling of being released from prison after 21 years.
“It took a long time for me to realize that, yes, this is happening,” Tiffany said, speaking over the phone from her home in Vancouver. “Mentally and consciously, I was working on [processing] it. Part of me thought, this isn’t real, is it? I couldn’t believe I was getting out after doing 21 years. For the first few months, even the first year, I still felt like it wasn’t real. It took a minute for me to accept that this is my reality because I [had spent such] a long time in prison.”
In those 21 years, Tiffany went from being a juvenile to an adult, spending more time incarcerated than she had been alive. As a teenager, she was sentenced to 28 years for first-degree murder. Her youthfulness at the time of the offense made her eligible to petition the Washington State Indeterminate Sentence Review Board (ISRB) for early release at the 20-year mark in late 2019. She contacted the Seattle Clemency Project for help with her case and was soon matched with Mary Williams and Susan Sieh Raffman, volunteer attorneys from Microsoft.
“It was hard talking about things from my past, but it had to be done,” Tiffany said. “[My attorneys] were very helpful. I was glad I had somebody representing me instead of just doing it myself.”
Together, Tiffany and her attorneys worked on drafting a petition that reflected the growth she had undergone during her incarceration — not just the physical years that had passed, but how she had used them to become someone new. It was tough at times, navigating the barriers to communication the pandemic posed, but Tiffany had a supportive counselor and her family by her side. Her mother, especially, was adamant about helping prepare Tiffany for her release and wrote a letter in support of her daughter returning home.
And return, she did. After a year of preparing, Tiffany went before the ISRB and was granted release. Only 45 days later, she was out.
“I was ok with [not having much of a transition period],” Tiffany said. “I didn’t want a whole bunch of changes leading up to me getting out; I just wanted to have that one big change. Change is harder for me than it is for some people.”
For the first two years, Tiffany lived with her mother, working at a computer job with her stepsister to save up for her own place. She applied to a few schools and was accepted into programs, but ultimately decided to postpone her goal of studying entomology until classes were entirely in-person again.
“It’s definitely been a ride,” Tiffany said. “Some things have turned out how I wanted, and some things haven’t.”
After some time, Tiffany had saved up enough to move into an apartment and began working full-time as a temp for Powers Paper Company. She’s slowly expanding her circle to include coworkers and friends she knew from before her incarceration. Tiffany, though, is someone who keeps to herself. Outside of work, she goes to the mall, plays Pokémon Go, and spends time with her boyfriend and family. Life is quiet and predictable — exactly what she needs. After so many years away from home, Tiffany is focusing on reconnecting and enjoying life’s little moments, letting things come, then letting them go.
“Even if it seems impossible, you never know when something will happen,” Tiffany said, offering advice to people who are seeking early release. “Honestly, I didn’t believe that after all the years I [spent in prison], I would end up being released early; that was not something I ever thought would happen. There’s always a chance, even when things seem impossible. It doesn’t hurt to try. It may be hard if you fail, but it’s worth trying to see if you succeed.”
Following her release, Tiffany fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a published author. Under the pen name Teloch Rit, she released a book of poetry and short stories written during her incarceration. Even through the phone, it was clear she was beaming with pride.
“[‘Shadows of a Sapphire Rose’] is 20 years' worth of poetry and stories,” Tiffany said. “When I got out, I thought, shot in the dark, I’ll see if I can get this published. I Googled publishers, and the very first one I picked, I wrote to them and told them what I wanted to do. They wrote me back and ended up being the publisher that I went with. They’re the oldest publisher in the world. I didn’t even know that; they’re like 100 years old. My books are available online and in bookstores. I’m interested in writing more in the future and doing stuff with art, too.”
In all that she does, Tiffany is calm and driven, appreciative of how her life has changed in previously unfeasible ways. During her sentence, time stretched on until change seemed impossible, and yet, Tiffany took a chance on a process that promised something new. Through hope and perseverance, she set herself free.
