AJFO Conference

AJFO cohosts a biennial conference focused exclusively on women and girls in the criminal justice system.

AJFO is one of the the only professional conferences focused exclusively on women and girls involved with the criminal justice system.  Participants represent a diverse array of practitioners, state administrators, program directors, women with lived experience, advocates, researchers, and program developers, and experts in reentry, incarceration, juvenile justice, trauma and gender.  Past conferences have drawn approximately 600 professionals from federal, state and local correctional systems, as well as treatment providers and researchers from the United States, Canada and other countries.

Because of the gender and cultural differences of women and girls, many working in the field strongly believed that there needed to be an international and ongoing discourse. Issues that tend to be particularly unique to women and girls involved in the criminal justice system include stigmas for mothers and women,  children and child care, financial stability and income, prostitution and human trafficking,  domestic violence or intimate partner violence, trauma and different pathways to criminal behavior. Learning about women, and girls is particularly important because early information, research, and design related to incarceration, prison,  and reentry into the community was originally developed with men in mind.