Righting Carceral Feminism’s Wrongs in a #MeToo Era (NYC)

More than two decades later, it has left many women in less affluent and marginalized communities even more vulnerable to violence. Since many communities of color are already overpoliced, victims are often reluctant to call the police for fear of being met with trauma and criminalization.

The Open Society Foundations have a history of supporting transformative systems of justice. Transformative justice is a community-based process where individuals are able to address and repair the harm on their own terms, and to define what justice looks like to them. In many ways, the #MeToo movement is beginning to address the wrongs of carceral feminism through a more democratized process of addressing injustice. Join us during the week of International Women’s Day for a discussion with activists and authors to identify potential opportunities and pitfalls in the search for justice for victims in a #MeToo era.

Speakers

·         asha bandele is a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance and an award-winning journalist and author of five books, including The Prisoner’s Wife and When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, about and written collaboratively with Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Khan Cullors.

·         Victoria Law is a freelance journalist focusing on women’s criminalization and incarceration, and the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

·         Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, and a cofounder of numerous organizations including the Chicago Freedom School, Love and Protect, and most recently Survived & Punished.

·         Erin Cloud is a supervising attorney and team leader at the Bronx Defenders.

·         Denise Tomasini-Joshi (moderator) is acting co-director of Open Society Women’s Rights Program, and division director of the Open Society Public Health Program.

Audio and video clips from previous events:

Keynote Panel: Women, Incarceration and Carceral Feminism

Missed the amazing panel about women, incarceration and carceral feminism? You can watch here.

While the vast majority of incarcerated people in the US are men, the rate of growth for women’s imprisonment has outpaced men by more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2014 and trans women have one of the highest rates of incarceration of any group. As a result, there are 8 times as many women–many of whom are mothers–incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails as there were in 1980.

Moreover, women of color, especially black women, are disproportionately incarcerated–at even greater disproportion than among men. Women, and in particular trans women and all women of color, continue to be subjected to high rates of violence, whether intimate partner violence, sexual violence, or transphobic violence, which can also lead to their incarceration.

This panel of local and national activists and scholars will discuss what this increasing rate of incarceration means for women, children, and families, including how to address violence against women in the age of mass incarceration.

Undocumented Architecture: Prisons, Migrant Justice & Counter-Narratives of Resistance

https://www.facebook.com/events/153375358428781/

Watch me on Democracy Now! talking about historic release of 6,000 federal drug war prisoners–and the impending deportation facing one-third: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/4/with_historic_release_of_drug_offenders

Race & the Criminal Justice System: Political Prisoners, Resistance & Mass Incarceration

If you missed the discussion between Dan Berger (author of Captive Nation), Bryan Stevenson (founder and director of Equal Justice Initiative) and me about race, the criminal justice system, mass incarceration and resistance as part of the Black Freedom Studies at the NYPL’s Schomburg Center, you can see it here: http://t.co/8PGG4WEzJV