WOMEN ORGANIZING FOR JUSTICE AND OPPORTUNITY
Black women represent 30 percent of all incarcerated women in the United States, although they represent less than 7 percent of the country’s population.
By 2012, A New Way of Life had leased two more houses in South Los Angeles, bringing our total to five homes, where some seventy-five women and more than twenty children lived. Even though we’d expanded, I wanted to maintain a strong, personal presence in all the houses. “This is not a rest home,” I instructed the women. “Each day, you need to be moving your life forward.” The women never hesitated to comment that I ran a tight ship.
More than being responsible for just themselves, each woman was encouraged to participate in whatever was going on in the homes and with the organization, whether that was rallying for policy changes or helping to promote our first annual film festival of criminal justice–related documentaries. My goal was for the women to be engaged—for the betterment of themselves and their community. Most of these women, like myself, had been talked into a plea deal and into giving up their constitutional rights. They then spent years with all rights legally stripped from them. But going back, long before they ever went before a judge, most had little power over their lives; most were victims. It was time for them to understand that they had a voice, and the importance of using it.
But when I harped about what was possible to achieve, the women often said things like, “But that’s for people like you, Ms. Burton.”
“People like you,” I corrected. “I’m just like you.”
Many of our women had post-incarceration syndrome. I’d experienced it, where I’d been so conditioned to feel shame and to believe I was a bad person who didn’t deserve a better life. For a long, long time, I believed I was insignificant. Now, I marched around the houses telling the women, over and over, Your life matters.
I tried to get them to see it wasn’t just about landing in prison, it was a long road that had led them there. “Did you grow up having adequate shelter and enough food?” I asked. “Did you always feel safe? Did you have a sense of security in your family? In your life? As you got older, did you have access to therapy? To a drug treatment program?” Rarely did I hear anyone answer yes. “When you were a little girl, did you have swimming lessons or ballet class? Were you exposed to the arts, encouraged to be a part of team sports? Did you have access to a tutor if you needed help in school?” Again, all no.
Without exposure to things, how was someone supposed to realize her talents, strengths, and what was possible to achieve? These shouldn’t be activities reserved for people of privilege, schools should provide these too. But in so many urban communities, classrooms were overcrowded, with inadequate teaching tools and shabby materials. These schools tended to operate from a place of punishment—just like the criminal justice system.
“We don’t come into the world lying and cheating and stealing,” I reminded the women. “No child says she wants to grow up to be an addict. So, what happened? When did you learn destructive methods of escape? That’s the root I want to yank at. What happened to shape you, to compel you to make the decisions you did, to make you feel powerless, to make you feel desperate, to make you feel hopeless? We have to acknowledge there’s a difference between who you are and the environment you were in. And that, now, you can be the designer of your own destiny. You can create your own community of support and love and hope.”
As I worked to empower the women, I felt a familiar desperation envelop me—this was extremely important work, but it was, still, one by one. Just like Saúl had taught me with advocacy and movement building, I needed to bring this to the next level and onto a bigger stage.
After I happened upon an introduction to Susan Tucker, the program director for Open Society Foundation’s Soros Justice Fellowship, she traveled from New York to see A New Way of Life and encouraged me to apply for the fellowship. As I wrote my proposal, I set about designing a six-month intensive program called Women Organizing for Justice, which would be the culmination of everything I’d learned and experienced, and a way of formalizing all the lessons I’d been individually imparting to the women. The proposed program would cover six areas:
• Prison systems and conditioning: learning about power structure, exploitation of prison labor, “a return to slavery,” and the relationship between private industry and prison-related unions
• Community organizing and civic engagement: identifying issues, developing engagement campaigns, organizing conferences and training, doing voter registration, learning how to work with the media
• Studying movements: women’s suffrage, civil rights, LGBT, farmworker and labor rights
• Teaching women how to tell their story: training in public speaking, marketing yourself and your ideas, how to facilitate meetings
• Government and political structure: how government operates, bureaucracy and obstacles to creating change, how to push legislation through
• Health and wellness: nutrition and self-care on a budget
I received a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2006, and the first annual Women Organizing for Justice program was launched. Women filled out applications to participate—the exact opposite of any other application, the only requirements were the ability to attend biweekly meetings and having been formerly incarcerated. Our inaugural class was twenty-five women, and every year since, we’ve inducted another couple dozen women into the fold.
Together, we attended L.A. County Board of Supervisors meetings, and we even provided testimony when the AB 109 legislation was introduced. We traveled to Sacramento for the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Quest for Democracy, and lobbied for legislation to end the disparity in sentencing for possession of crack versus powered cocaine. We also took an annual retreat, somewhere outside of L.A.
For the class of 2015, we gathered at a resort in Palm Desert. But we weren’t there to vacation; we had a weekend of learning.
We started off with a video walking the class through the history of systematic discrimination in the United States: from slave laws, to Jim Crow, to real estate redlines that kept neighborhoods white, to opium drug laws that targeted Chinese immigrants, to how Mexicans were unfairly affected by marijuana laws, and how laws around crack cocaine disproportionately punished African Americans.
“How do you feel after watching this?” I asked.
“Keep minorities in oppression,” someone called out.
“You’ve been in a broken world,” I said. “But you think it’s you. Now, you’re willing to show up here and face this. That, alone, is courageous.”
“My parents came from Alabama to California to make it better for me,” Charsleen, a woman with dark skin and a head full of curls offered up. “But we lived in the projects, infested by gangs. We had food stamps, and I wouldn’t want to go to the store, it was humiliating. Where I live now is just one notch above where I came from. Me and my dog walk every morning, and when I see graffiti, I get my neighbors together and we paint over it. We got a speed bump put on our street. But, my neighbors, the mom, dad, and the oldest child, got to go to work. Even the college I go to now in my neighborhood has a retention rate of 12 percent.”
“I went through the foster system,” another woman said. “When I was eighteen, I went into transitional housing. A social worker told me, ‘Don’t get too comfortable here.’ I didn’t get what she was saying. My housing was only a couple hundred a month, and I thought, why would I ever leave? But then, I felt like I got trapped there.”
I knew what she meant. I’d seen so many people strung along by welfare or Social Security checks, caught between fear and trying to change their lives. “Be thoughtful about what you’re doing,” I said. “Don’t be frivolous with your resources, but be creative, be responsive. Recognize that whatever happened in your life, that was your experience, but it’s not who you are. You can separate from that experience and understand your importance and what you have to give to the world. Hey, we’re stronger and better because of our problems.”
“How do you stay encouraged, Ms. Burton?” someone asked.
“Call a friend,” I said. “Speak out.”
We discussed the Black Lives Matter movement and activist and professor Angela Davis, regarded as one of the most outspoken advocates of prison reform and prisoner’s rights. After spending sixteen months in prison before being acquitted on wrongful charges, she popularized the term prison-industrial complex to describe the explosion of the prison population and the profit-driven—and extremely lucrative—industry that sprang up around building and supplying prisons with goods and services. The term also came to stand for the misguided belief that locking up people who were drug addicted, mentally ill, or homeless would solve all our problems.
We did an exercise where I placed signs around the room with four roles: Helper, Advocate, Organizer, and Rebel. “I can see points in my life when I’ve played all these roles,” I explained. “I started A New Way of Life as a helper, thinking if women just have a place to go, everything will be all right. Then I realized there needed to be more, and I started advocating. Then I thought, it’s gonna take more of us to make some real change, so I became an organizer. And at my core, I’m a rebel.”
Sticky dots were passed around, and I instructed the women to place dots next to how they saw themselves. After everyone had stuck their dots, the vast majority were congregated on Helper.
“I had to step up at a young age and help my mother and my grandmother,” one woman explained.
“I remember my aunt getting so high and knocked out in the bathroom, and I’d have to clean her up before my cousins saw,” another said.
“At two years old, I saw my father beating my mother, and I grabbed a knife and pointed it at his dick,” a woman described. “I had to protect my younger sister. I was protecting her from the time my mother was pregnant. Helping was necessary in order to keep peace in the house.”
“Admire your distinct attributes and characteristics,” I said. “And grow toward who you’re going to become. Know how beautiful, wonderful, smart, strong, and courageous you are, in and of yourself. Each one of us, right now.”
I brought Saúl Sarabia before the group to give his Organizing 101 talk, what had first inspired me all those years ago. “What can we use to get people in the door? To make them interested in activism and realize it’s important to have a collective voice?” he began. “Our job is to be effective at communicating that we have something deeper to offer. Sometimes, this means we must alter our language, and that’s tough. But you have to be able to articulate your point. In certain neighborhoods, for me to talk like I went to law school can push people away. But when I go to city hall, talking like a lawyer certainly helps.
“Take, for example, some of the best recruiters: gangs. I remember when gangs came into my neighborhood to move cocaine, they were recruiting thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds, saying, ‘I can get you those tennis shoes you want.’ They knew what mattered to the people they were trying to recruit.” The women nodded, some, all too knowingly, having been gang members themselves.
“Let’s look at A New Way of Life’s legal clinic, where we do nine hundred expungements a year,” Saúl continued. “If we ask people there if they’re interested in joining our movement, nine out of ten are going to say, ‘No thanks, I just came here to get my record clean.’ That’s okay, we don’t need all nine hundred people, we need ninety. With each group, it’s about finding that one person who really wants to be involved. When we do find someone who seems interested, we always end with, ‘Can I count on you to be there?’ A lot of organizations, when they’re trying to recruit, they just want the bodies but have no intention of handing over the microphone. They see themselves as the experts, not you. We, on the other hand, believe that the people most directly affected by a problem will have the best solutions, because they lived it. This isn’t just about A New Way of Life, it’s about all of us. It’s about building a national movement. There’s around 100 million people in America with criminal histories. If we had just a tenth of those people in our movement, this would be a completely different country.”
The Women Organizing for Justice program spanned six months and, at the end, we held a graduation ceremony. “But we don’t graduate from leading,” I said, standing before the women in a conference room at the administrative office of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. “We just lead deeper, with skill, knowledge, and confidence. Over the past year, we have come together to learn, to cry with each other, to laugh with each other, to share intimate moments, and to support one another. I know you all are going on with your lives. You’re working. Some of you are in school. You’re moms. We give what we can give. It’s all appreciated, and it all counts. Thank you for your dedication.”
I introduced Vonya Quarles, who’d been in the Women Organizing for Justice class of 2011. “I’m a third-generation convicted felon,” Vonya began as she stood before the group. “I spent years in my addiction, and blamed a lot of things for it. I was paroled in 1990, got a job, and thought I could distance myself from my past. I was able to hide out, but I lived in fear that my job would find out about my record and boot me. For so long I thought I was supposed to be sent to prison because I had a behavioral problem. It was through this program that I realized the answer wasn’t to feel shame, but to look at the bigger issues.”
I’d witnessed Vonya being awakened to a part of herself she didn’t know existed. She founded a nonprofit, called Starting Over, in Riverside, California, to help people with transitional housing. And then she enrolled in law school, even though she was told she’d probably never be able to practice law. She even managed, during this time, to found the Riverside chapter of All of Us or None.
One of the chapter’s first endeavors was to deliver voter registration forms to Riverside’s five county jails. But when Vonya went to collect the completed forms, there were only five, and they were all marked Republican. Out of four thousand inmates in a largely Latino city, this seemed odd. She requested that All of Us or None be allowed to enter the jails to conduct voter registration, but the sheriff’s office delayed responding until near the voter registration deadline, and then rejected the request. Vonya called me. “I think we have a legal issue here.”
She was still a law student, so I connected her with Josh and another staff attorney, CT Turney, who’d also got her start with us as a UCLA Law intern, and they got to work. In 2012, a victorious ruling came down in Riverside All of Us or None v. Riverside County Sheriffs. The sheriffs were ordered to comply with providing voter registration forms to everyone in jail, to change the jails’ requirements for voter registration, and to include the updated voter procedure in each jail guide.
Vonya completed law school after four years of night classes. But, to be allowed to take the bar exam, she had to meet the “good moral character” requirement, which her conviction record threatened. She labored over her application before deciding to reveal everything, explaining how, in the two decades since she’d been incarcerated, she had become a different person. Months passed and, hearing nothing from the California state bar, she feared the worst. At last, she received a notice that she was approved to sit for the bar. In 2013, she passed.
“I challenge you to not let your activism end here,” Vonya concluded to the graduating class. “Take what you’ve learned, partner with other people. Walk out into the community and say, ‘I’m a part of this too.’”
Vonya wasn’t the only woman from the program who’d been inspired to create her own nonprofit. Lisa James first came to A New Way of Life as a resident. She had a soft, tender presence, though I saw a hint of restlessness that she knew greater things awaited. But she hadn’t always been that way and had spent several years on the streets before winding up in prison over a gun charge. While Lisa was incarcerated, her mom stepped in to care for Lisa’s three sons, aged seventeen, five, and three. After her release, Lisa regained custody of her boys—but was served by the county with a bill for back payment of child support for $32,000. The minute she managed to find a job, her wages were garnished, with 25 percent automatically going to the county. And she was in for another surprise: because her debt was in arrears, the total amount she owed ballooned to an unbelievable $40,000. She felt like she was being pushed underwater. A single mom providing for three sons was virtually impossible with a minimum-wage job in the first place—let alone with a quarter taken off the top and no end to debt in sight.
The debt followed her every step: there it was when she tried to rent an apartment and renew her driver’s license and apply for a higher-paying job that required a background check. She tried to seek help, and went through the process of declaring hardship, at which point her monthly payments were adjusted to what the county called “affordable,” though it was hardly affordable and did nothing to stop the arrears from mounting. She applied for a compromise of arrears, but was denied. In the periods when she couldn’t find work, even her unemployment benefits were garnished. It made no sense: she desperately needed to support her children in the present but couldn’t get out from under inflated past child support. For nine years, she paid toward the debt. After a stretch of having consistent employment at Walmart, she again applied for a compromise of arrears. This time, she was approved. At last, with her balance adjusted, she could make her final payments and be rid of the biggest burden of her life.
In the midst of all this, Lisa volunteered at All of Us or None and, when we had the budget, I hired her to work on the Ban the Box campaign. She also attended L.A. City College and earned a certificate in drug and alcohol counseling. She eventually was inspired to start her own nonprofit, Women in Transition, in Long Beach, California, to provide life skills education, help with navigating and getting off welfare, and assistance with housing for homeless women. Her sons, too, were doing well. Her oldest had graduated from Southwest College and was a barber, her middle son was going into the navy, and her youngest was in high school.
To conclude our graduation ceremony, I called the women up to receive certificates from the State of California Senate and the County of Los Angeles, each inscribed with their names. When Charsleen, who’d since become our volunteer legal clinic coordinator, received her certificates, she stood in front of the class, beaming. “I had no idea what leadership actually was or what it could do for a person,” she announced. “I was an ex-con. I know Ms. Burton doesn’t like that word, but ex means something—that you no longer exist. Everybody expected me to fail. I was a chronic drug addict.” Her hands fluttered to her face. “I lost my teeth, lost my complexion. But, with leadership training, I began to listen, and I began to say, teach me what you know, let me learn the meaning of those words. I learned how to stand up for myself and speak for myself, which I’d never done before.”