In the last decade, scholarship on race and mass incarceration in the United States has grown exponentially and largely in tandem with the country’s bloated prison population—a group that now numbers over two million. Emergent scholarship especially has called attention to the alarming and disproportionate increase in the number of black men and boys in the criminal justice system.
The National Council was founded in 2010 by a group of women incarcerated in federal prison in Danbury, CT. Many of us are mothers, the organization works to end the criminal legal system's forced separation of women and girls from their communities and loved ones through hyper-local organizing, public awareness education, movement lawyering, and the national #FreeHer Campaign
Written by incarcerated women, these incredibly personal, surprisingly honest letters shed light on their lives, their crimes - and the mitigating circumstances.
After Maryam Henderson-Uloho was convicted of obstruction of justice, she was sentenced to 25 years in a Louisiana prison. Ultimately, she served 13 years—more than half of that time in solitary confinement. When she was released, she felt dehumanized. “You see, in prison, you’re broken—mentally, emotionally, and physically,” says Henderson-Uloho in the short documentary Sister Hearts. “I didn’t know what to do. I was alone. I was scared. I had no one.” An ex-felon, Henderson-Uloho was unable to open a bank account or a credit card. She couldn’t rent an apartment. Nobody would employ her. “I had to go inside myself and find something good about me,” she says. “I felt like trash … I needed help.”
Envisioned as a site of intellectual collaboration across disciplines, the Black Feminist Theory Project aims to enhance the visibility and accessibility of black feminist discourse on campus, in the archives, and beyond.
Provides access to books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities from colonial times to the-present.
Women and Social Movements in the United States brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities. The resource, which examines perspectives on women's social movements from Colonial times to the-present, was developed by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar of the State University of New York at Binghamton in an internationally-renown website of the same name.