A Visit to FMWCC: Seeing, Listening, and Committing to Our Sisters Inside
A few weeks ago, members of our Return Strong team visited the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center (FMWCC). We went, as we always do, to listen — to see, to bear witness, and to better understand the realities our members are living through.
What we heard and saw there shook us, not because we are new to witnessing injustice, but because it reminded us of how deeply humanity is tested — and yet persists — inside those walls.
Women’s Incarceration: A Different Reality
For a long time, we operated with the assumption that when we made progress — whether through policy change, oversight wins, or accountability campaigns — those victories extended to everyone in Nevada’s prisons. We believed that our work on solitary confinement, visitation rights, and medical neglect would equally benefit both men and women.
But sharing space with the women at FMWCC, listening to their stories, we realized something painful and undeniable: the experience of incarceration for women is profoundly different.
Women face distinct forms of harm — some systemic, some intimate, and many hidden. They are mothers, daughters, sisters, survivors. They navigate layers of trauma, neglect, and corruption that are often minimized or ignored altogether. What we saw at FMWCC made clear that the systems meant to provide safety and rehabilitation too often weaponize power and strip dignity instead.
The corruption the women described — the fear, the manipulation, the sense that their complaints and pain are invisible — speaks to a system that preys on silence. And yet, despite that silence, they still find ways to speak, to create, to resist, and to hope. That is what we carry with us.
Our Obligation as Women
Return Strong was founded by women. Our team, our volunteers, and our community are predominantly women — women who have survived, who have loved people through incarceration, who have fought systems built to break us down.
That means something. It means that we have an obligation — not just as advocates, but as women — to ensure that our sisters inside are seen, heard, and represented in ways that honor their humanity.
We cannot fight for prison reform without recognizing that women’s experiences demand their own space, attention, and care. The patterns of corruption and cruelty at FMWCC are not the same as those at men’s prisons, and our approach must reflect that truth.
This work requires intentionality and commitment — not a checkbox or an afterthought, but a conscious effort to listen to women, to uplift their voices, and to center them in every decision we make moving forward.
Our Shared Humanity
When you look a woman in the eyes who has survived the impossible and still chooses hope — you cannot walk away unchanged.
What we witnessed at FMWCC reminded us that humanity doesn’t disappear in prison; it endures. It adapts. It resists. The women we met are artists, thinkers, caretakers, and truth-tellers. They are not “inmates” or “numbers.” They are people. And as long as they remain unseen by the system that confines them, we have work to do.
As an organization built on the belief that redemption and restoration are possible, we recommit ourselves to ensuring that the women inside Nevada’s prisons are not forgotten in our advocacy. Their stories, their suffering, and their strength belong at the center of our fight.
Moving Forward Together
This visit has changed us. It will change how we organize, how we advocate, and how we build the movement for a world without cages.
To the women at FMWCC — thank you for your courage, your trust, and your truth. To our members and supporters — stand with us as we begin the hard but necessary work of confronting the unique injustices faced by incarcerated women in Nevada.
We promise to listen.
We promise to act.
And we promise that your voices will not be silenced.
In solidarity and hope,
Jodi Hocking
