“locked together / in this small hated space”: Recognizing and Addressing Intimate Partner Violence Between Incarcerated Women

Intimate partner violence between incarcerated women has been largely invisible in legal scholarship and advocacy work. This Note attempts to assess the incidence and quality of intimate partner violence between incarcerated women from the incomplete and occasionally biased available data and then examines potential methods for reducing such violence. Considering several of the legal strategies that address intimate partner violence, this Note concludes that while facilitating women’s escape from their abusive partners and civil protection orders may be effective strategies for intervening in violence between incarcerated women, mandatory reporting structures and no-drop prosecution policies are ill-suited to the prison context.