[Pnews] Unlock Them Up!

[Prisoner News]

progressive.org <https://progressive.org/magazine/unlock-them-up-law/>


  Unlock Them Up!

Victoria Law - October 7, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

On July 4, Stacey Borden braved the rain for a picnic, driving forty 
minutes from her Boston home to Swampscott, Massachusetts. Dozens of 
others joined her, bringing blankets, lawn chairs, sandwiches, salad, 
soup, and cookies.

This was no ordinary picnic in a park. Instead, Borden and nearly forty 
other advocates were on the front lawn of Massachusetts Governor Charlie 
Baker’s house demanding that he grant clemency, or shorten the prison 
sentences, for more than a dozen women currently in the Massachusetts 
Correctional Institution-Framingham, the state’s only women’s prison.

They were also demanding something else: a state moratorium on 
constructing new jails and prisons, including a proposed 
<https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/04/01/massachusetts-new-womens-prison-opposition> 
new women’s prison.

Despite the weather, the picnickers stayed out for four hours. Some, 
like Borden, had served time in Framingham. Others had family members 
still locked inside the prison and feared for their loved ones’ health 
and safety in an environment where there was no space to social distance 
during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They brought a bullhorn and, in 
between bites, attendees addressed the crowd and, they hoped, the 
governor and his staff inside of the house.

“I let the governor know it was time to start reviewing clemencies,” 
Borden told the gathering. She noted that Baker, a Republican, has not 
commuted a single prison sentence 
<https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/05/27/massachusetts-coronacvirus-prisoners-commuted-sentence> 
during his two terms in office. “It’s time [for him] to sit down and 
review what’s happening with the women who are in these cages.”

Besides soup, sandwiches, and salads, the picnickers also brought a 
quilt bearing the names of eighteen women at Framingham who are seeking 
clemency. Some called in to the picnic from the prison; organizers 
connected their phones to the sound system and amplified their words.

One of those callers was Angela Jefferson 
<https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/clemency-for-angela-angie-jefferson>, 
who has served more than thirty years of a life sentence and had 
recently been denied clemency. When she was first sent to prison, she 
told the crowd, her children were only three and five years old. Among 
the picnickers was that former five-year-old Antoine Jefferson, now age 
thirty-five. He picked up the bullhorn and spoke about how his mother’s 
imprisonment has meant putting his entire life on hold as he waits—and 
fights—for her to come home.

“Massachusetts absolutely does not need a new prison,” Jefferson said. 
“Instead, the millions of dollars could be spent to better our 
community, especially the most crime-impacted corridor of Dorchester and 
Roxbury.”

The picnic was part of a kickoff campaign pushing for mass clemencies 
and a statewide moratorium on new jails and prisons. Under the banner 
cry of Building Up People Not Prisons 
<https://www.justiceashealing.org/building-up-people-not-prisons>, 
advocates are pushing for decarceration—reducing the numbers of people 
behind bars. They want solutions that don’t involve further 
criminalization and incarceration.

To this end, they’re advocating for S.2030 
<https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/S2030/Cosponsor>, a bill to pause 
the construction or expansion of jails and prisons in Massachusetts for 
the next five years. It even bars repairing existing correctional 
facilities “for the purposes of expanding the facility or increasing its 
bed capacity.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham incarcerates 
<https://www.mass.gov/doc/prison-population-trends-2020/download> an 
average of 193 women per day, at an annual cost of $162,260 per person. 
Opened in 1877, the prison has long been crumbling. It has also been the 
site of numerous abuses 
<https://digboston.com/inside-the-fight-to-document-the-horrors-at-americas-oldest-womens-prison/>, 
including inadequate health care, health and safety violations 
<https://www.mass.gov/doc/mci-framingham-june-17-2019/download>, staff 
violence 
<https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20190729/mci-framingham-guard-charged-with-assaulting-inmate>, 
and retaliation when women attempt to publicize any of these conditions.

In 2016, Framingham closed several housing units after finding high 
levels of PCBs—carcinogenic chemicals 
<https://www.epa.gov/pcbs/learn-about-polychlorinated-biphenyls-pcbs> that 
have been banned <https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/pcbs.html> in the 
United States since 1979. Prison officials moved the women into the 
remaining housing units, making them more cramped. They also transferred 
nearly 200 women to the South Bay House of Corrections, one of two jails 
in Suffolk County.

Nearly two years ago, Massachusetts corrections officials proposed 
<https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/12/state-considers-closing-mci-framingham-prison-by-2024.html> 
closing Framingham and building a new women’s prison. They’ve 
encountered fierce opposition from advocates, including formerly 
incarcerated women like Borden and Families for Justice as Healing 
<https://www.justiceashealing.org/freeher>, which seeks to end female 
incarceration throughout Massachusetts.

“We’re in agreement with this prison being closed down, but not enough 
to build a new site,” Borden tells /The Progressive/. “Not with the low 
population that we have of women incarcerated in Massachusetts.”

Sashi James of Families for Justice as Healing argues for redirecting 
the millions earmarked for the new prison toward creating and bolstering 
resources that address poverty, violence, and other systemic issues in 
underfunded communities, preventing imprisonment altogether.

James grew up in Roxbury, a predominantly Black part of Boston where the 
median household income is less than $31,000 
<https://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/Roxbury_Planning_District_Profile_tcm3-12996.pdf> 
and the incarceration rate is double that 
<https://massinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/The-Geography-of-Incarceration.pdf> 
of the rest of the city. Her father was imprisoned until she was twelve 
years old; during her first year in college, her mother was sentenced to 
two years in prison. (Her mother, Andrea, co-founded 
<https://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/04/untold-real-life-story-behind-prison-orange-new-black/> 
Families for Justice as Healing while in a federal prison in Danbury, 
Connecticut.)

These early experiences, James says, left her “brainwashed into thinking 
everyone goes to prison.” Throughout her childhood, she would often 
think: “OK, maybe I’ll go next.” It wasn’t until her mother’s release 
that she understood that imprisonment was not a normal rite of passage. 
“I’m not gonna go to prison,” James, now a mother herself, insists. “And 
neither is my daughter.”

James notes that lawmakers, in planning to build a new prison, are 
thinking not about decarceration but continued criminalization and 
incarceration, even as prison populations have decreased in recent years 
for a number of reasons.

In /Brangan v. Commonwealth/ 
<https://www.mass.gov/decision/brangan-v-commonwealth> (2017), the 
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that, when setting bail, a 
judge must consider a defendant’s financial resources and not set bail 
higher than the defendant can afford without a stated reason. The 
decision was codified as part of a larger criminal justice legislative 
package in 2018, which also allowed sentencing judges to consider 
<https://willbrownsberger.com/criminal-justice-reform-conference-report/#section207> 
a person’s role as a caretaker of dependent children.

By 2019, Massachusetts had the nation’s lowest 
<https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/25/vera-institute-massachusetts-prison-population> 
incarceration rate with 8,692 people, or twenty-six people per 100,000, 
in prison. By late July, that number had dropped even further to 6,570 
state prisoners 
<https://www.mass.gov/doc/weekly-inmate-count-7262021/download>. Of 
those, 164 are imprisoned at Framingham.

“The number of women currently imprisoned in Massachusetts is so low 
that they could literally be set free and the allocated funds for this 
new prison could be used to educate, house, train, support, and 
reimagine a pilot program where the community is strong enough to 
welcome these women home,” said Antoine Jefferson.

“If we have such a low population [of imprisoned women], why do we even 
need a new prison?” Borden asks. “Can’t we find other solutions, like 
supportive services in the community?”

Prison, she explains, does nothing to push people toward accountability 
or transformation, nor does it provide therapy to address underlying 
trauma. In 2016, six years after leaving prison, Borden founded New 
Beginnings Reentry Services 
<https://www.newbeginningsreentryservices.org/> to provide housing, 
counseling, higher education, and other support services for women 
released from prison—services, she says, that prison does not provide.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In late 2019, when Massachusetts correctional officials began seeking 
bids to renovate existing buildings and build a new women’s prison, 
formerly incarcerated advocates met with architects who might bid on the 
contract. They challenged claims made 
<https://www.mass.gov/doc/minutes-of-the-1010th-meeting/download> by the 
state’s Designer Selection Board that prisons can be rehabilitative, 
conducive to women’s mental and physical health, and “trauma-informed.”

At these meetings, Borden recalled, she and other women told architects 
about their own prison experiences. They described not only the pain of 
being separated from their children and other family members, but also 
such brutal prison practices as strapping prisoners to a chair, 
straitjacket-style, if they were believed to be at risk of self-harm. In 
prison, Borden says, an act as normal as crying could lead to hours 
strapped in the dreaded chair. As she puts it, “There’s no such thing as 
‘trauma-informed’ in a prison.”

Advocates derailed the process twice, not only pressuring architectural 
firms not to bid on the multimillion- dollar job but also filing 
complaints 
<https://digboston.com/mass-keeps-trying-to-build-a-new-womens-prison-outside-of-public-view/> 
about the lack of transparency in the state contract process. In June 
2021, the state contracted 
<https://digboston.com/follow-up-mass-is-still-ignoring-public-input-and-trying-to-build-a-new-womens-prison/> 
with HDR Architecture, awarding the firm $550,000 for the study and 
design of a women’s correctional center. According to Worth Rises, an 
organization tracking corporations that profit from incarceration, HDR 
Architecture has designed 
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e127cb1b10e31ed45b20f4/t/602165c4369e35517dacae6e/1612801477731/The+Curriculum+Week+1+-+Reading+Assignment.pdf> 
more than 275 correctional facilities.

Advocates with Families for Justice as Healing asked to meet with HDR’s 
architects to discuss their concerns about building a new prison. When 
they received no response, they organized weekly protests 
<https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4183170408407351&id=236324173092014&__tn__=-R> 
outside the firm’s Boston office, handing out fliers and talking to 
passersby about HDR’s role in perpetuating mass incarceration. They also 
bombarded 
<https://twitter.com/NoCopsNoMasters/status/1424117210021249028?s=20> 
HDR’s social media accounts with demands to not build the new women’s 
prison. In response, the company, which is also reported 
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ym4z/a-company-that-designs-jails-is-spying-on-activists-who-oppose-them> 
to have been spying on activists opposed to their construction efforts, 
locked <https://twitter.com/HDRarchitecture> its Twitter account.

The Building Up People Not Prisons campaign seeks an end to all new 
jails or prisons in Massachusetts. Campaign member Katy Naples-Mitchell, 
an attorney at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and 
Justice at Harvard Law School, says any new prison would be out of step 
with the state’s decreasing incarceration. That’s where S.2030 comes in, 
allowing legislators to rein in costly prison building and expansion and 
refocus energies and funds on preventive and reentry initiatives.

During the online Senate hearing in July, more than seventy people 
waited hours to offer live testimony in support of the bill. Others, 
like Borden who was attending a parole hearing for a woman at Framingham 
that afternoon, sent written testimony.

To bring more attention and support for the bill, advocates have held a 
weeklong march in September 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSWQKNZx-GTJl7Kggn3vETv-RUaUZ_urSp_LwIHeUASDnQDv_Qw6TtXb9z7WAoRBX-hsvp4_7MBBw9N/pub> 
beginning in Springfield, stopping in several cities (including 
Framingham) before ending in Boston.

“The moratorium will give us a chance to build up what we need” in the 
communities, says James, “and show people we don’t need prisons and jails.”


      Victoria Law <https://progressive.org/topics/victoria-law/>

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist covering issues of incarceration 
and co-author of “Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of 
Popular Reforms.”

-- 
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