Crime and Justice News
Former prosecutor Valena Beety believes that women are “overcriminalized” in the United States. Beety, now a law professor at Arizona State University, calls herself a “carceral feminist.”
She told a symposium on overcriminalization at the university last week that she became a prosecutor “so that I could incarcerate perpetrators of violence, and I thought that would stop cycles of violence … It wasn’t until I actually got the job of being a prosecutor that I realized that wasn’t what what I was doing in that job.”
Later, Beety became an “innocence litigator … advocating for people who had been wrongfully convicted.” Her book, “Manifesting Justice: Wrongfully Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights,” was published last year.