The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”
These avenues have contributed to shocking rates of incarceration for women: Between 1978 and 2015, the number of women in state prisons has grown by 834 percent. The overwhelming majority are primary caregivers. When a woman goes to prison, the downstream effects can be staggering: children might enter foster care, itself often a traumatic system. Aging parents might be put into subpar facilities, or have to find alternative care and housing. All too often, the cost of such upheaval results in a cycle of crime, incarceration, addiction, poverty and broken families.
Courts have long struggled with how to respond. The question is: Can we create a system of justice that looks wholly different from what most of us imagine when it comes to crime and punishment, while still demanding accountability from perpetrators? What if court were a place that afforded someone the opportunity for a complete reset, with entryways to jobs, housing, education? What if instead of punishing people who’ve been broken many times over, we helped to heal them?
In downtown Honolulu, Judge Trish Morikawa sits behind her dais in a black robe as a defendant recounts her recent gender-reveal party. The woman has been on probation for more than a decade after a two-year stint in jail. She is one of roughly 30 women to appear before Judge Morikawa at an all-women’s court called Mohala Wahine or “blossoming woman.” Begun as a pilot program through a law enacted in 2022, the court was made permanent by the legislature last summer and is the first of its kind in the country.
Legislators and researchers saw how rising rates of incarceration for women correlated with lower levels of education and unstable work histories. Native Hawaiian women were disproportionately incarcerated; indeed, they are the majority of the defendants in Women’s Court. From its inception, the court had two goals: to decrease Hawaii’s swelling female prison population and to address the systemic failings that landed these women before a judge in the first place.
Judge Morikawa asks the woman about her upcoming baby shower and seems genuinely invested in the answer. “We’re getting a boy,” the woman says. She tells the judge she wants to honor her partner’s father through the baby’s name. I realize two things in this moment: first, that I’ve been waiting for some kind of judicial lecture in which the judge reminds the woman of the seriousness of her crimes or the stakes of returning to prison or some such. And second, that this lecture will never come.
Whereas most courtrooms are places of high anxiety and ritualistic decorum, Judge Morikawa runs hers with a rare amiability and familiarity. She will often engage spectators from the gallery — family members or friends of defendants — in chatty conversations. Some discussions are so friendly they could practically be happening over brunch, except that defendants (“clients” in this court) are flanked by a courtroom guard and a public defender. The camaraderie, the almost familial connection, is all by design.
Mohala Wahine is not simply flipping the script on the criminal justice system by emphasizing rehabilitation over retribution. Many court programs do that; such programs are often called problem-solving courts. They may specialize in drug treatment, mental health or domestic violence; yet without addressing holistically the causes of addiction, broken families or trauma, they tend to have marginal success rates.
Mohala Wahine is more ambitious. It’s redefining our fundamental ideas of punishment and justice. Our judicial system was created intentionally to be authoritarian, with the judge an arbiter of justice meting out necessary sanctions. But by looking at the context in which crime happens, Women’s Court is acknowledging not only what external factors might have led to the crime in the first place, but what can be addressed through a model in which support, rather than punishment, is the foundation. In my view, a system that rebuilds rather than deprives a life is uniquely feminist.
Courts are event-based, meaning they generally consider one single moment in the life of a defendant. Mohala Wahine is interested in context, in the whole narrative: what led to the event, the cascade of mitigating factors, and what will lead — in every possible understanding of the word — out of it. Women’s Court does not dispense with accountability, but it seeks out the ways that systems may have failed these women. Then one by one, it tries to address those failings.
Each woman goes through a program targeted to her needs, but it generally includes addiction treatment, education (high school equivalency and vocational training programs, and also topics like sociology and gender studies), emotional regulation, parenting, healing and self-care, life skills, hula (a deep and important cultural touchstone in Hawaii) and how to navigate any number of support systems she’ll need for the future. Perhaps most meaningful, the court may also help a woman regain custody of a child once she graduates. The primary idea is to keep women out of prison, but also to keep families and communities together, and help defendants create a vision and goals for their future.
Teal Takayama, the public defender assigned to the court, tells Judge Morikawa that her client, the pregnant woman, is moving to Phase 3 of the women’s court program today: maintenance. Her court-appointed therapist helped her apply for Section 8 housing, so she’ll be in a stable residence soon. Phase 3 means her client has done the hardest work. If all goes as planned, she’ll graduate in six months. She’ll still be attending classes and therapy, and checking in with her probation officer, but Phase 3 is about onboarding her into the rest of her life.
The American criminal justice system is notoriously plagued with racial and gender bias, crippling caseloads and asymmetrical justice. Tough-on-crime policies have often led to a revolving door of incarceration, a system in which success or failure is charted largely by recidivism rates.
Mohala Wahine stands out for its holistic approach. There are the big needs of drug treatment, domestic abuse education, schooling, job training, and counseling, but the court also helps with navigating tasks like obtaining driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, free mobile phones and housing. As a result, probation officers for Women’s Court have far fewer clients in their caseloads than do their counterparts elsewhere — around 30 each, rather than 200.
In a sense, the assistance built around each woman’s case provides basic tools that many of us get from our parents or our teachers for navigating the world. How would you begin to look for your birth certificate if you grew up in foster care? Would you think to schedule an annual physical? What if you hadn’t finished high school? Or learned to write a résumé? Or ever calculated a budget? Many women haven’t been able to regularly see a dentist or gynecologist.
And then on top of that, let’s say some low-level misdemeanor keeps you from going to work, so you lose your job, and then you have no money for bus fare so you don’t make it to court and a warrant goes out for your arrest, and once you’re arrested, child protective services take your kids. It’s a scene that plays out across the country every day, and it does little more than calcify offenders inside the criminal justice system.
It also builds the intergenerational trauma and abandonment that plug up all of our systems today — drug treatment, child welfare, incarceration, courts and probation — and mostly it just means that people will require even more programming and support and money for the next generation of people who will inevitably be caught in this cycle.
There is only one category of criminal offense that is ineligible for Women’s Court: Class A felonies, crimes such as homicide, first degree robbery and kidnapping. Which means, unlike most problem-solving courts, it does not shy away from felonies or violence or higher-level offenses. And success is counted in a variety of ways beyond just recidivism — in reunited families and educational achievements, in steady employment and stable housing, in emotional regulation and sobriety.
One morning, I talk with Judge Morikawa in her office: There are piles of colorful leis, a box of Narcan, a pillow bearing a photo of her family. When she’s not at Women’s Court on Wednesdays, she has the regular caseload and types of hearings that any judge has. She tells me that to help the women who appear before her in women’s court, she had to learn all sorts of things: like how to apply for Section 8 housing and where to get free bus passes. How to navigate financial aid at the community college, who were the available therapists in town.
She wants her court to be flexible in meeting the needs of the clients. I watched her confront, in her amiable way, a new defendant who confessed to relapsing and feared being sent to jail. “The biggest thing is, don’t be scared,” the judge told her. “Show up. We get nervous when people don’t show up. That’s my whole lecture for you, is just show up.”
Later, I meet with Tana Kekina-Cabaniero, the prosecutor, and Ms. Takayama together. It occurs to me only partway through the interview how strange it is, to have these two sitting next to each other, devoid of the adversarial nature of their respective positions. “We’re not a litigious court,” Ms. Takayama says. When a referral comes in, the two of them meet with the judge and probation officer and decide on whether the candidate is a good fit for the program. Defendants who successfully complete the program may be eligible to get their convictions expunged or finish their probation terms early.
Women’s court also saves the state significant money. The cost to incarcerate someone in Hawaii is $253 per day. Conservatively, that’s more than $2.7 million a year for just 30 women. Women’s court, to be clear, doesn’t function just on the basis of its annual $705,000 budget; it has multiple community partners, each of which has its own costs, particularly for drug treatment and housing. But there are savings downstream in keeping families together, and in offering stability to children so they don’t wind up in foster care or as defendants in court themselves someday. As a potential model, Mohala Wahine is almost certainly more effective than a hyper-retributive system in which we take broken people, break them further and then send them right back to where they were broken in the first place.
A judge named Mark Browning first came up with the idea for Women’s Court. When he began his judicial career in family court, he witnessed how poverty, drugs and trauma all seemed to lead to a judge’s bench. But he also knew how systems created to help — like shelters or subsidized housing — broke down and were resistant to change. “If you stay in that narrow lane just being a judge and making decisions, well, you’re not going to be making a difference systemically,” he told me.
Browning had watched an all-girls court, begun in 2004 in Hawaii, grapple with a disproportionate uptick in the number of girls who were landing in the system because of truancy, drugs or trauma related to sexual assaults and trafficking — the same factors he’d see repeated for women. Browning believed that the success of Girls Court — Hawaii would eventually announce that there were zero girls in detention — pointed to a model that would also work for women. He went to Linda Ichiyama, a state representative, who immediately agreed to co-sponsor a bill creating funds for Mohala Wahine in the legislature.
One sunny Sunday afternoon, I go to Makapu’u Beach on the eastern side of Honolulu to meet Veronica, who was one of the first clients accepted to women’s court. She’s spent the summer camping here with her two adult sons and a host of others whom she calls her family. Veronica, like everyone I meet in Hawaii, greets me with a bear hug. She has piercings in her tongue and above her chin, and dark hair pulled back into a loose bun.
There are large shade tents set up across a sprawling area of beach, with chairs and hammocks underneath, and nearly every accouterment you’d need in an actual kitchen. A set of shelves holds pots and pans, spatulas, dozens of eggs, cooking oil, snacks. Veronica simmers an enormous pot of corn chowder on a burner for her family and anyone else who wanders in. Several people snorkel in a shallow pool of water between the rocks. “Jail saved my life,” she tells me, “but women’s court saved my soul.”
We go for a drive along the shoreline past a playground where she used to take her kids when they were little, and past the correctional facility that once imprisoned her, to a cafe where she introduces me to the glory of poke nachos. She tells me how women’s court helped because it didn’t judge her for all the mistakes she’d made, and was invested in her life. She works now in a residential treatment center. When the season for beach camping is over, she plans to move in with her brother. “It’s a lot better camping on the beach than living on it,” she says with a laugh.
Both of Veronica’s parents had been addicts, she tells me. She was assaulted several times. Then her father drove into a telephone pole when he was high, and a transformer fell into the car, and it burst into flames. She marks his death as the moment her life really derailed, when beer and pot turned into meth, when cycles of homelessness, addiction and abuse became her everyday. She was 18 years old.
On Christmas morning in 2019, Veronica assaulted a neighbor after she said she heard the woman threaten her 13-year-old daughter. Veronica remembers a gash in the woman’s head, and a lot of blood. At a bench trial, Veronica’s charges were reduced from attempted murder to felony assault, which came with a five-to-10-year prison sentence. Because she had no record, the judge was lenient, giving her just four years of probation. She also had to apologize to her neighbor, pay all the woman’s medical bills, do random drug testing and take anger management classes.
Veronica, her three kids and the neighbor were all living in a homeless shelter at the time. Over the next four years, Veronica’s situation deteriorated. Child protective services took her daughter. Both her sons, who were older, moved in with Veronica’s siblings. Twice she blew off probation appointments and was rearrested, doing two yearlong stints in jail. Her life was spiraling. “How do you go to somebody and say, ‘I need help because I’m an addict,’ and not be judged about it?” she asked me.
So she walked to the top of a mountain and jumped, intending to end her life. She blacked out. And when she woke up, she was surprised to find herself still alive. Her whole body ached. “By the grace of God, I wasn’t dead.” It was the spring of 2022. Six months later, her attorney recommended her for women’s court.
After that, Veronica moved from prison to a drug treatment facility. She spent eight months there, getting sober. At women’s court, she learned about generational trauma and began connecting the dots of her own experience, seeing how being a victim of abuse dictated many of her bad decisions. She learned about emotional abuse, codependency and domestic violence. She understood for the first time that she was not a bad person; she was a person who’d had bad things done to her.
The court helped her get documents she would need in her new life — a Social Security card, proof of insurance, a record of a TB test. She learned time management, budgeting and emotional regulation. Every month, she appeared in court and charted her progress. She had to pay restitution, and court fees and fines. She learned hula. (Each graduating class has its own performance choreographed by Saifoloi Aganon, the probation administrator, who also happens to be a hula practitioner.) Weekly classes helped her discover Hawaiian traditions and a more spiritual side of herself, and as she put it, how “every part of you is connected to something in the world.”
For the first time she began sharing stories from her life, meeting others who’d endured some of the same things she had. She learned how to talk about herself, how to trust other people, how to forgive herself, how to set healthy boundaries. She learned to trust God. She cultivated faith.
Mohala Wahine is not a perfect system. It’s too new, with too few graduates to really gauge success rates critically at this early juncture. But such an approach — to tackle every problem all at once — is so wildly audacious, it’s hard not to hope for it, a program that brings out our better angels. The investments in people like Veronica are real and palpable not just in the systems of court and probation, but to the women themselves, who have mostly never had anyone believe they could achieve much at all.
This is the possibility I see with women’s court. Abandoning all the incremental, punitive programs we’ve tried for decades and offering one clean sweep. Because sobriety and education and a full belly and a bed create hope, and hope begets opportunity, and opportunity is the key to a future. People who can imagine their futures have stakes in maintaining safety and stability not only in their own lives but also in the lives of everyone around them.
Ms. Takayama’s client is one such example. She is the last speaker the day she graduates. Commencement takes place in the Supreme Court room, the most beautiful of all the courts, with a wall made of native Hawaiian koa wood and a large dais behind the graduates. They wear flower headbands, leis of orchids.
She recounts days when she didn’t know when she’d shower again, or wear clean clothes, nights she didn’t know where she’d sleep. How she never felt safe in her body. She pledges to her newborn son to show up for him in ways no one ever had for her.
It is incredibly moving. I’ve seen so many women cycle repeatedly through the criminal justice system, until it becomes just another kind of entrapment, holding women to unrealistic expectations. Forcing them to a probation check-in when they don’t have bus money or child care and maybe live on the other side of a whole island.
Mohala Wahine might not have the only, or even the best, answer. But for Veronica, who has her daughter back and living with her, it ended — for now and she believes forever — that awful cycle that she could not escape on her own. And it brought her family back to her. Maybe this is the best possible measure of success: the lives we manage to reconstruct in any given family rather than all those we shatter.
Rachel Louise Snyder (@RLSWrites) is a professor of creative writing and journalism at American University. She is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” and “Women We Buried, Women We Burned.”
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