Red states & Blue states. Black Lives Matter & The Koch Brothers. Divergent actors meet opposing interests with seemingly little common bonds.
So goes the rare consensus on the need for reform of our nation’s broken criminal justice system and the crisis of mass incarceration.
Above the clamoring calls for change, Gwen McKinney joined with Los Angeles-based collaborator Susan Burton author and founder of A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project to break the silence and create space for women’s voices.
Deciding that the dialogue couldn’t net real change unless women, the fastest growing ranks of incarcerated people, entered the discourse, they launched a bold multimedia storytelling initiative JustUS Voices (rebranded as Testif-i)
Women behind bars – described by one formerly incarcerated woman as “the second class citizens of the non-citizen class” – are mostly invisible in the public discourse around mass incarceration. Their absence has translated into policies that are equally silent on solutions that respond to their needs before, during and following imprisonment. That premise gave life to our project which was a marriage between the innovations of reentry with leadership development and communications strategies and tools promoting authentic voices.
The McKinney team quickly moved to showcase and package the narratives of formerly incarcerated women recruited by Burton and A New Way of Life’s far-reaching network. Within a six-month span, McKinney conducted presentation training for storytellers, produced a rich repository of stories, video vignettes, images and resources, built a web portal to house them along with No Wrong Answers blog by and about formerly incarcerated women and those closest to them.
The first cohort of storytellers revealed tales of tragedy and triumph; the video montage shows the trials and traumas women experienced through the criminal justice system—and the victories they forged.