- Victoria A. Brownworth
Inside the Prison Walls
December 22, 2021 Philadelphia Gay News

This is part two of a series on LGBTQ people in prison. Unless otherwise noted, names have been altered to protect the privacy of formerly incarcerated persons.
Evie Litwok’s mother was a Holocaust survivor. While Litwok was doing time in two different federal prisons in West Virginia and Florida — including 42 days in solitary confinement — she frequently thought about the parallels to mass incarceration in America. And as her mother had been a witness to the Shoah, Litwok is now a witness to mass incarceration.
In an interview with PGN, Litwok explained that she had spent 20 years in the criminal justice system, which she calls the “criminal punishment system.” That details the time of her first being charged in 1997 to her being jailed and released after her conviction was overturned, tried on another count and jailed again, being released in 2014, and finishing her probation in 2017.
One of the most disturbing statistics on women in prison is that so many women who are incarcerated are not even convicted. According to the Sentencing Project, “a quarter of women who are behind bars have not yet had a trial. Moreover, 60% of women in jails under local control have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial.”
State and federal agencies pay local jails to house an additional 12,500 women. For example, ICE and the U.S. Marshals, which have fewer dedicated facilities for their detainees, contract with local jails to hold about 5,600 women. So, the number of women physically held in jails is even higher. From 2016 to 2017, the number of women in jail on a given day grew by more than five percent.
Litwok believes strongly that there has to be a coalescing of formerly incarcerated people in the U.S. to end the staggering numbers of people in prisons and jails in the country.
Litwok was succinct: “The formerly incarcerated must lead the revolution [against mass incarceration]. Change comes from changing people’s minds. If the 70 or 80 million people who have been in prison would come out…”
But they can’t come out. Once someone leaves jail or prison in the U.S., their entire motivation in most cases is to bury that past and keep anyone from discovering it. Getting a job — even getting a place to live — as a formerly incarcerated person in the U.S. is a constant struggle. That struggle is so difficult that the situation most people are in when they leave jail or prison means they will often be forced back into actions that can put them back in prison, like sex work or theft.
That struggle is endemic among women and LGBTQ people who have been incarcerated, which is why Litwok, who had spent years as a lesbian activist prior to going to prison, continued her activism on release.
