by Alissa Marie Moore, LSPC Re-Entry Coordinator
In October, historian Elizabeth Hinton, founder of the Yale Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety (YIIPS), along with YIIPS Executive Director Yaseen Eldick, the Challenging Discrimination in the Law Project’s (CDLP) Elizabeth Ross and Elsa Lora, and LSPC’s Dr. Tanisha Cannon, as well as myself, Alissa Moore, traveled to CCWF to meet with residents Jennifer Fletcher, Crystal St. Mary, Adanna Ibe, and Leny P. Galafate, to discuss the formation of a Carceral Studies Journalism Guild chapter empowering residents to center their lived experiences as women in confinement.
“Its critical that women – particularly those imprisoned in California, where sexual abuse, unnecessary medical sterilizations, and feminine hygiene product denials have been time-honored hallmarks of the dehumanizing logic of the bodily container system – be able to publish in uncensored forums unencumbered by the censorship that infects institutional prison media,” says Ghostwrite Mike, founder of the CSJG who helped organize the visit with YIIPS. “These women need to be seen and heard, in an unfiltered fashion.”
Via phone after the visit, Hinton described being “inspired by the opportunity to finally meet and build with these CSJG contributors. I only wish we had more time to be in community with them;” while Cannon committed to “continuing to support the CSJG’s mission to collaborate with YIIPS, and synergize with AOUON, in order to amplify these crucial perspectives.”
For Ross, the visit affirmed “the urgent need for academics to activate in service of those behind the wall, and to listen when they tell us what they need.” Lora reflected on their conversation about the “intellectual and creative journeys that led them to journalism,” as the highlight of the morning, hoping to be able to “continue working together to being their brilliant ideas to life.”
The praxis of critical resistance—abolition—is indebted to feminist radical philosophy. The intellectual and organizing traditions that have shaped the very struggle and movement to challenge prison’s role in society require feminine thinkers, observers, and writers – like those now enlisted in the CSJG at CCWF.
Read more about the CCWF chapter of the CSJG at https://davisvanguard.org/witness.
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