In late 2023, Dena Hernandez returned to her room inside the women’s prison in Chowchilla, Calif., and spotted a packet in the mail. It contained a letter saying the Los Angeles district attorney was looking for incarcerated women who might be eligible for shortened sentences. “Your case,” the letter read, “has been identified for initial review.”
Ms. Hernandez was in shock. She was 13 years into a 28-year prison sentence for carjacking. Hours away from her family, she had received just one visit. There were no lawyers puzzling over her case or community groups pleading for clemency.
“Is this real?” Ms. Hernandez asked her roommate.
The letter was from an organization called For the People. It said there was a law in California allowing prosecutors to revisit old sentences that are “no longer in the interest of justice.” After going into effect in California in 2019, the law passed in four more states, part of a wave of criminal justice reform efforts washing over the United States.
But of all of the people who had come home under these resentencing laws, very few were women. Ms. Hernandez’s case was about to become part of an effort in California to change that.
Ms. Hernandez, 33, is stocky with square shoulders and a geometric tattoo etched into the side of her neck. Just above her right wrist is the shadow of another tattoo she removed. It once read “El Monte,” the name of the Southern California town where she grew up and the street gang that defined her childhood.
One of nine children, Ms. Hernandez was raised by her mother, who had a drug and alcohol addiction, and an abusive stepfather. By her teenage years, the gang had become her refuge, and she was spending nights drinking and getting high in a public park. She was first arrested at 14, for stealing another girl’s phone.
One night in August 2010, when Ms. Hernandez was 18, she and two others beat a man, robbed him of a digital camera and about $50, and drove away with his car before ditching it. Her accomplices were never caught, but her “El Monte” tattoo helped the police identify Ms. Hernandez the next day.
Removing that tattoo was just one of the ways Ms. Hernandez shed ties to her old life while in prison. She passed the G.E.D. and was pursuing a business degree. She turned to her faith and volunteered for a group that helped angry, traumatized girls, as she once was. But she never had any notions of early release, until this packet. She signed a waiver handing over access to her prison records and prayed.
The packet landed at the sunny Oakland offices of For the People, a nonprofit founded in 2019 by a former San Francisco prosecutor, Hillary Blout.
Like Ms. Hernandez, Ms. Blout grew up in a neighborhood overrun by drugs and violence. The only child of a financially struggling single mother, she barely graduated from high school. She soon found herself occasionally shuttling a guy she was dating between drug deals.
But one night when she was 19, that same guy was murdered. “That was my huge wake-up call,” Ms. Blout, now 50, said.
She doubled down on schoolwork, earned a law degree and worked as a prosecutor under Kamala Harris, then the San Francisco district attorney. Ms. Blout hoped to change the justice system from within, but a daily onslaught of cases ground her idealism down to a binary: She was there to represent victims, she believed, not defendants.
By the time Ms. Blout left the District Attorney’s Office in 2013, bipartisan demand to shrink the ballooning U.S. prison population was mounting. Yet prosecutors — who all had old cases with needlessly long sentences weighing on their consciences — were being sidelined from discussions about proposed reforms. Ms. Blout began consulting with district attorneys throughout California to see whether they would support a law that allowed them more discretion in resentencing. In early 2018, she drafted a bill enabling prosecutors to refer cases to the court for lesser sentences purely “in the interest of justice.”
Some reactions were skeptical. Ms. Blout encountered rooms full of crossed arms and questions about recidivism, resources, public perception and the potential impact on victims. But even conservative district attorneys were persuaded by the bill’s efforts to ensure that both prosecutors’ and victims’ voices would count. “Many victims are forgiving and generous once they’re given some agency in the decision,” said Summer Stephan, the San Diego district attorney. A Republican turned independent, she is also president of the National District Attorneys Association.
The bill sailed through the legislature without opposition. When it was signed in September 2018, it became the nation’s first prosecutor-initiated resentencing law.
Ms. Blout founded For the People to help implement the law and, eventually, to push other states to adopt it, too. Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Minnesota all followed suit. By 2023, according to For the People’s count, roughly 1,000 people had been resentenced. But a trend had emerged: Only a handful were women.
Men, who account for more than 90 percent of the United States’ incarcerated population, inevitably made up a vast majority of cases. But some criteria that prosecutors were using to identify candidates for resentencing had the unintentional effect of excluding women. In some California counties, prosecutors screened out anyone convicted of violent offenses, regardless of the circumstances. But Ms. Blout found that women convicted of violent offenses often play subordinate roles in crimes perpetrated by men. Those men are frequently their abusers. In some cases, their victims are those abusers.
The criteria left little room for these nuances, and overlooked other societal harms. Women are disproportionately unsafe in prison; while they make up just 7 percent of the federal and state prison population, they account for more than one quarter of victims of sexual abuse by prison staff. Just last year, a women’s prison in Dublin, Calif., nicknamed the “rape club,” was shut down for its rampant culture of sexual violence.
Yet women — especially those convicted of violent crimes — are less likely than men to reoffend. Also, more than half of women in prison are mothers to young children, many of them single mothers, whose children later face far greater risk of incarceration. To Ms. Blout, protecting public safety meant accounting for that risk.
In late 2023, For the People began work on an initiative dedicated to taking a closer look at women’s cases. Prosecutors in six California counties, including Los Angeles, soon agreed to join it.
For the People began reaching out to women in prisons all over the state. Its legal team sifted through the piles of applications they got back and made referrals to prosecutors in each county. Ms. Hernandez’s file immediately stuck out to the staff.
By today’s standards, her sentence looked brutal. Though she had been 18 at the time of the carjacking, the court counted the earlier juvenile robbery charge as her first strike, doubling her sentence from nine to 18 years, with an extra 10 tacked on for gang affiliation. Her traumatic upbringing didn’t appear to factor into her sentencing.
In their applications to For the People, each woman had to answer questions about her life. In a series of handwritten letters, Ms. Hernandez described growing up as a “shy and scared” child whose stepfather made her stand against a wall overnight and beat her with a belt or hanger if she fell asleep. She wrote that she developed a “hard persona” and became a bully who took whatever she wanted by force.
But over her years in prison, she wrote, that hard facade melted away. She had gotten a job and facilitated group therapy. In the decade prior, she hadn’t committed a single rule violation. She wrote that she “deserved to come to prison” and regretted any trauma she caused her victim. “I will continue to carry this shame and regret every day of my life,” she wrote.
Along with Ms. Hernandez’s statements were dozens of letters of support. A prison employee called her “a strong asset anywhere she plants her feet.” Her mother, sisters and friends from prison registered their support, too. “If she isn’t ready to be released into society,” wrote one fellow inmate, “then no one is.” Reading their words was the first time Ms. Hernandez believed she might soon have a chance at freedom. “It was just like: Oh shoot, they see it,” she said.
Ms. Blout and her team presented Ms. Hernandez’s case and others’ to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s resentencing unit. The victim in Ms. Hernandez’s case never replied to the district attorney’s outreach; with no objection to her case, the office filed a petition with the court in February 2024 asking for Ms. Hernandez’s sentence to be reduced to 10 years with parole — nearly four years less than she had already served.
It took minutes for the judge to agree to those terms the day Ms. Hernandez appeared for her resentencing hearing over videoconference in April 2024. The room began to clear before Ms. Hernandez even realized it was over and her freedom had been secured.
One week later, her older sister, her mother and several members of For the People’s staff arrived at the prison in Chowchilla to take Ms. Hernandez home. It was the first time she had seen her mother in person since she was sentenced more than 13 years earlier.
Ms. Hernandez was the first person to be released as part of For the People’s women’s initiative. Another two have followed. More than 100 cases are still under review.
But the effort has already led to a substantial increase in the number of women’s cases landing on prosecutors’ desks and has prompted some counties to rethink their approach to resentencing writ large. “Some of the same nuance we were missing that applied to women also applies to other people,” David Angel, assistant district attorney of Santa Clara County, said.
This spring, Utah became the first Republican-led state to enable prosecutors to recommend revisiting old sentences. But a majority of women’s cases reviewed in California have not qualified for immediate resentencing.
“This is a high-risk project for a D.A.,” Ms. Stephan said. “So far it’s been a successful effort because we’re very careful.” In San Diego, about 20 percent of the people released under prosecutor-initiated resentencing overall have new criminal complaints, well below the average recidivism rate in California, where 39 percent of people receive new convictions within three years of release.
Political transitions have also complicated progress. In November, Los Angeles’ progressive district attorney, George Gascón, lost his re-election bid to Nathan Hochman, who promised to rid Los Angeles of his predecessor’s “pro-criminal policies,” amid a nationwide backlash to progressive prosecution. The transition stalled cases For the People believed were already greenlit, but Mr. Hochman said his office remained committed to the women’s initiative and planned to proceed with resentencing.
Ms. Hernandez recently moved into her own studio apartment after spending a year in a re-entry home. She is currently awaiting discharge from parole and works at a nearby detoxification program, where she leads group therapy and meditation sessions.
Since her resentencing, Ms. Hernandez has had a lot to process. In the months leading up to her release, her sister died of a heart attack. Shortly after, her brother was found dead of a suspected overdose. In late January, she was worrying over another brother who had been hospitalized in the midst of a mental health crisis. She has had to distance herself from friends and family back in El Monte who she says are “still stuck in their ways.” But, Ms. Hernandez said, “I’d rather have this than anything in prison. These are life’s problems. This is what we fight for.”
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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