https://www.nationalcouncil.us/ The 5th annual FreeHer conference brought together formerly incarcerated women and directly affected people. Activists, advocates, experts, policymakers, and supporters from across the country came to connect and share ideas and resources to work collectively toward ending the incarceration of women and girls and creating systems to empower themselves…

I had the opportunity to go to the New York state capitol in Albany three times in March with Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) to urge lawmakers not to sign onto Governor Hochul’s plan to push back bail reform. It is appalling that she wants to implement the passage…

New $10 Million Women’s Re-entry Center Opens in Maine» After three years of parole supervision, New York State finally discharged me. As a free woman, my excitement brewed for my first visit to  Maine. Cheryl Wilkins and Yolanda-Peterkin Johnson accompanied me. We wanted to connect with the women in our…

On October 13, 2021, several organizations came together to protest closing the death camp; closing this death chamber has been a long-standing issue for advocates of criminal justice reform and abolitionists throughout New York State for decades. The crumbling infrastructure, the infestation of rodents,  inhumane living conditions, the onset of…

  With the pandemic’s devastating effects on the prison communities and the world, this year has been tough on all of us. August 12th, 2021, was a day criminal justice advocates set aside to remember the life of Valerie Gaiter, my co-defendant. Val never received the proper medical evaluation and…

As an advisory board member of Donna Hylton’s A Little Piece of Light, I was invited to attend the organization’s trip to touch base with their California partners. A Little Piece of Light is a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower and facilitate healing for women, girls, and gender-fluid…

(Reposted from vday.org) Donna Hylton is a Jamaican-American author and criminal justice activist. She founded, A Little Piece of Light, the non-profit, which bears the same name as her book, both created out of her lived experience of 27 years of incarceration. Ms. Hylton pulled off a fantastic event in…

According to the Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700%, rising from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 222,455 in 2019.1 Though many more men are in prison than women, the rate of growth for female imprisonment has been twice as high as that…

The pandemic hit hard and restricted our travels, so I have not had the opportunity to travel and report on criminal justice reform issues since early 2020. This was my first time visiting Washington D.C. and I was proud to be doing it in a capacity to advocate for incarcerated…

Most women don’t think twice about where they are going to acquire menstrual products, yet that is not the case for incarcerated women in prison, jails, detention centers and women’s shelters across the United States. Incarcerated individuals and other people in the criminal justice system often have to resort to begging…