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<h1 class="reader-title">Unlock Them Up!</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Victoria Law - October 7,
2021<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They were also demanding something else: a state
moratorium on constructing new jails and prisons,
including a <a
href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/04/01/massachusetts-new-womens-prison-opposition"
target="_blank">proposed</a> new women’s prison.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/05/27/massachusetts-coronacvirus-prisoners-commuted-sentence"
target="_blank">single prison sentence</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One of those callers was <a
href="https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/clemency-for-angela-angie-jefferson"
target="_blank">Angela Jefferson</a>, 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. </p>
<p>“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.” </p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.justiceashealing.org/building-up-people-not-prisons"
target="_blank">Building Up People Not Prisons</a>,
advocates are pushing for decarceration—reducing the
numbers of people behind bars. They want solutions that
don’t involve further criminalization and incarceration.</p>
<p>To this end, they’re advocating for <a
href="https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/S2030/Cosponsor"
target="_blank">S.2030</a>, 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.”</p>
<hr>
<p>The Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham <a
href="https://www.mass.gov/doc/prison-population-trends-2020/download"
target="_blank">incarcerates</a> 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 <a
href="https://digboston.com/inside-the-fight-to-document-the-horrors-at-americas-oldest-womens-prison/"
target="_blank">numerous abuses</a>, including
inadequate health care, <a
href="https://www.mass.gov/doc/mci-framingham-june-17-2019/download"
target="_blank">health and safety violations</a>,
staff <a
href="https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20190729/mci-framingham-guard-charged-with-assaulting-inmate"
target="_blank">violence</a>, and retaliation when
women attempt to publicize any of these conditions.</p>
<p>In 2016, Framingham closed several housing units after
finding high levels of PCBs—<a
href="https://www.epa.gov/pcbs/learn-about-polychlorinated-biphenyls-pcbs"
target="_blank">carcinogenic chemicals</a> that have
been <a
href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/pcbs.html"
target="_blank">banned</a> 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.</p>
<p>Nearly two years ago, Massachusetts corrections
officials <a
href="https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/12/state-considers-closing-mci-framingham-prison-by-2024.html"
target="_blank">proposed</a> closing Framingham and
building a new women’s prison. They’ve encountered
fierce opposition from advocates, including formerly
incarcerated women like Borden and <a
href="https://www.justiceashealing.org/freeher"
target="_blank">Families for Justice as Healing</a>,
which seeks to end female incarceration throughout
Massachusetts.</p>
<p>“We’re in agreement with this prison being closed down,
but not enough to build a new site,” Borden tells <em>The
Progressive</em>. “Not with the low population that we
have of women incarcerated in Massachusetts.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>James grew up in Roxbury, a predominantly Black part of
Boston where the median household income is <a
href="https://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/Roxbury_Planning_District_Profile_tcm3-12996.pdf"
target="_blank">less than $31,000</a> and the
incarceration rate is <a
href="https://massinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/The-Geography-of-Incarceration.pdf"
target="_blank">double that</a> 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, <a
href="https://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/04/untold-real-life-story-behind-prison-orange-new-black/"
target="_blank">co-founded</a> Families for Justice as
Healing while in a federal prison in Danbury,
Connecticut.)</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In <a
href="https://www.mass.gov/decision/brangan-v-commonwealth"
target="_blank"><em>Brangan v. Commonwealth</em></a>
(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 <a
href="https://willbrownsberger.com/criminal-justice-reform-conference-report/#section207"
target="_blank">consider</a> a person’s role as a
caretaker of dependent children.</p>
<p>By 2019, Massachusetts had the <a
href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/25/vera-institute-massachusetts-prison-population"
target="_blank">nation’s lowest</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.mass.gov/doc/weekly-inmate-count-7262021/download"
target="_blank">6,570 state prisoners</a>. Of those,
164 are imprisoned at Framingham.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.newbeginningsreentryservices.org/"
target="_blank">New Beginnings Reentry Services</a> to
provide housing, counseling, higher education, and other
support services for women released from
prison—services, she says, that prison does not provide.</p>
<hr>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.mass.gov/doc/minutes-of-the-1010th-meeting/download"
target="_blank">claims made</a> by the state’s
Designer Selection Board that prisons can be
rehabilitative, conducive to women’s mental and physical
health, and “trauma-informed.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Advocates derailed the process twice, not only
pressuring architectural firms not to bid on the
multimillion- dollar job but also <a
href="https://digboston.com/mass-keeps-trying-to-build-a-new-womens-prison-outside-of-public-view/"
target="_blank">filing complaints</a> about the lack
of transparency in the state contract process. In June
2021, the state <a
href="https://digboston.com/follow-up-mass-is-still-ignoring-public-input-and-trying-to-build-a-new-womens-prison/"
target="_blank">contracted</a> 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 <a
href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e127cb1b10e31ed45b20f4/t/602165c4369e35517dacae6e/1612801477731/The+Curriculum+Week+1+-+Reading+Assignment.pdf"
target="_blank">designed</a> more than 275
correctional facilities.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4183170408407351&id=236324173092014&__tn__=-R"
target="_blank">weekly protests</a> outside the firm’s
Boston office, handing out fliers and talking to
passersby about HDR’s role in perpetuating mass
incarceration. They also <a
href="https://twitter.com/NoCopsNoMasters/status/1424117210021249028?s=20"
target="_blank">bombarded</a> HDR’s social media
accounts with demands to not build the new women’s
prison. In response, the company, which is <a
href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ym4z/a-company-that-designs-jails-is-spying-on-activists-who-oppose-them"
target="_blank">also reported</a> to have been spying
on activists opposed to their construction efforts, <a
href="https://twitter.com/HDRarchitecture"
target="_blank">locked</a> its Twitter account.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To bring more attention and support for the bill,
advocates have held a <a
href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSWQKNZx-GTJl7Kggn3vETv-RUaUZ_urSp_LwIHeUASDnQDv_Qw6TtXb9z7WAoRBX-hsvp4_7MBBw9N/pub"
target="_blank">weeklong march in September</a>
beginning in Springfield, stopping in several cities
(including Framingham) before ending in Boston.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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<div id="bottompageinfos">
<div>
<h3><a
href="https://progressive.org/topics/victoria-law/"
rel="author">Victoria Law</a></h3>
<p>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.”</p>
<time datetime="2021-10-07T10:51:41.249711"></time></div>
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