The 15-foot walls that surround the Herat Women’s Prison are common to government properties in Afghani­stan, as is the corrugated-metal gate, which is guarded by security personnel day and night. The concertina wire that encircles the walls gives the compound a cagelike feeling, but the barriers are meant to keep intruders from getting in as much as they are intended to keep inmates from getting out.

One hundred nineteen inmates and their 32 children live behind the robin’s-egg blue walls of the prison, located in the northeast sector of Herat city in western Afghanistan, just off the main road. First opened in the 1990s, before the Taliban took power, the facility is now run by the provincial government with some support from local nongovernmental organizations. At least half the women in Afghan prisons have been charged with so-called moral crimes like drug use, running away from home and sex outside of marriage — including in the case of rape, evidence of which may be uncovered through forced virginity tests. Despite pressure from Western governments and human rights groups to change these laws, such offenses continue to be recognized as serious crimes under Afghani­stan’s Constitution.

In Herat Women’s Prison, as many as 20 women have been charged with and in some cases found guilty of murdering their husbands. Many have similar stories: As teenage girls, their families forced them into marriages with much older men who were known criminals, insurgents, drug addicts or all of the above. The girls were subjected to physical and verbal abuse with no access to money, no legal protection and no means of initiating divorce proceedings. There is little legal consequence for violence against women — in a country where nearly 90 percent of them will experience some form of domestic abuse in their lifetime, according to a 2008 study by the United States Institute of Peace.