About the Contributors

Patricia Allard is a lawyer by training and a Black feminist activist and policy analyst in practice. As Associate Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, Pat's research and advocacy efforts focus on the impact of criminal justice policy on low-income women and women of color. She is currently developing a collaborative research-advocacy project, documenting the impact of current child welfare policies on incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers and their children. Pat is the author of "Claiming Our Rights: Challenging Post-Conviction Penalties Through an International Human Rights Framework," in Civil Penalties, Social Consequences. Pat is also the author of Life Sentence: Denying Welfare Benefits to Women Convicted of Drug Offenses, and co-author of Racing the Police: Race, Police Brutality and International Human Rights in the United States of America, and Regaining the Vote: An Assessment of Activity Relating to Felony Disenfranchisement Laws. Pat is a graduate of Queen's University Law School (1996) and received her MA in Criminology from the Center of Criminology at the University of Toronto (1999).

Kai Lumumba Barrow writes, "Born at the tail end of the fifties and raised in Chicago by activist parents, I cannot recall a time when I was not politically engaged. The culture of resistance, protest politics and institution-building by people of color, women and queer people in the 1960s and 70s have had a tremendous influence on my life/work. Often, the organizing of these periods was collectivist, geared toward living the politics of fundamental social change. I approach organizing as collaborative process and prefer a facilitated approach. I aim to help people recognize their own leadership abilities, urging them to resolve their own problems. Most of my work has been in the criminal justice arena. In the late 1970s I began organizing around the issues of political prisoners in the United States and have been a member of several organizations and coalitions that focus on prisons and policing. I come to the field as a prison abolitionist and am presently the Northeast Regional Coordinator of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization that fights to end the prison industrial complex."

Janet Baus, Dan Hunt and Reid Williams' documentary work has broadcast on PBS, national and local, The Learning Channel and hereTV! Their work has screened at festivals all over the U.S. and abroad, winning awards in Barcelona, Los Angeles, Chicago, Connecticut and New England to name a few. Collectively they've won an Angel Award, National Association of Multicultural Educations Media Award, an Aurora Award, The Gracie Allen Award, the Bronze Apple Award and a Golden Eagle (on projects like After Stonewall, Dangerous Living and Oliver Button is a STAR).

Ava Berkofsky is a photographer and cinematographer. Her work is informed by backgrounds in fine art, photography and documentary film. Across mediums, an exploration of personal and societal vulnerability emerges in her work, often through collaboration with her subjects as well as other artists. Of primary concerns in all of her work is making visible the invisible structures and forces of society that define, categorize and often erase us. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she earned her B.F.A. as a Silias H. Rhodes Merit Scholar. She has also been awarded grants from the Brian Weil Memorial Society, the Puffin Foundation and the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, among others. Past works have included documentary projects in video, photography, and sound. These works have been seen and heard at such New York venues as the Walter Reade Gallery at Lincoln Center, the Marcus Ritter Gallery, PS 122, University Settlement, and has been featured on the cover of the New York weekly The Village Voice.

Angela Y. Davis is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era. In 1969 she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trial in recent history. A massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign led to her acquittal in 1972. Harnessing the momentum of that campaign, she co-founded the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, which continues its work today. Professor Davis's long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, and currently is working on a comparative study of women's imprisonment in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Cuba. Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Angela Davis is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; and The Angela Y. Davis Reader.

Michelle Fine is Professor of Social/Personality Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1990. Her research focuses on urban high schools and, more recently, women in prison. Her books include: Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class and Gender with Urban Youth (with Lois Weis, Teachers College Press, 2000); Speedbumps: A Student Friendly Guide to Qualitative Research (with Lois Weis, Teachers College Press, 2000); The Unknown City: Poor and Working Class Young Adults in Urban America (with Lois Weis, Beacon Press, 1998); Off-White: Society, Culture and Race (with Linda Powell, Lois Weis and Mun Wong, Routledge, 1996); Becoming Gentlemen: Race and Gender Politics in Law School (with Lani Guinier and Jane Balin, Beacon Press, 1996) andFraming Dropouts (SUNY Press, 1991).

Madeleine Gavin has edited numerous documentaries and features including Jordan Melamed's upcoming IFC Films Release, Manic, the Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance in 1997, Sunday, and the award-winning Inside Out. Her upcoming project is on sexuality and women over the age of 60. Judith Katz has written several nonfiction books, including The Working Actor, but has also spent much of her time covering theatre and looking for new talent for companies like Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, and Universal. Though this is his first film, Gary Sunshine's plays have been seen on a variety of theatres around the U.S. and have been published in a series of books including The Best American Short Plays of 2001, Perfect Ten, and Monologues for Men By Men.

Tamar Goelman lives in Brooklyn and currently works for the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, a documentary film festival at the American Museum of Natural History. She received her M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2002. She is preparing to take her interest in media arts and education to the classroom as one of the New York City Teaching Fellows.

Rebecca Haimowitz received her MFA in Filmmaking from Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts, where she was awarded Faculty Honors. She is currently co-directing a feature documentary on American couples hiring surrogate mothers in India. The film tells the personal stories of couples and individuals struggling to become parents, while examining the commodification of reproduction and the role of the global economy. Her professional experience includes directing, producing and editing projects ranging from commercial work, industrial and promotional videos and music videos. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Chino Hardin, Youth Organizer at the Prison Moratorium Project, joined PMP as an intern in the summer of 2001, and came on to PMP's full-time staff as a Youth Organizer in February 2002. Chino brings personal experience with the New York City juvenile justice system to her organizing work. Chino has appeared in Off Our Backs!, Village Voice, Caribbean Life and numerous other community-based publications.

Carol Jacobsen is an award-winning social documentary artist whose works in video and photography address human and civil rights issues of women's criminalization and censorship. Her art work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at Lincoln Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre de Cultural Contemporanea, Barcelona; Kunstforum, Bonn; Brussels International Film Festival, Belgium; Temple Gallery, Rome; Photography Biennial, Wanganui, New Zealand; Human Rights Watch, Beijing, China, and in many grassroots venues. She has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paul Robeson Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Center for New Television, Women in Film Foundation, Art Matters, Prostitutes of New York, No More Nice Girls, New York, and others. Her published articles on art, feminism and politics have appeared in Art in America, Exposure, New York Law Review, Social Text, Lower East Side Journal and other publications. She is currently an Associate Professor of art and women's studies at the University of Michigan, and is represented in New York by Denise Bibro Fine Art. She serves as Coordinator of the Michigan Women's Clemency Project, advocating for the human rights of women prisoners and seeking freedom for women wrongly incarcerated, and her works have been sponsored by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, COYOTE, Women's Prison Association of New York, the American Civil Liberties Association and other nonprofit organizations.

Kathryn R. Kent is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Duke, 2003), as well as numerous articles, one of which, like a chapter in her book, deals specifically with queerness and its relation to the dominant values of the Girl Scouts. She is currently at work on two book-length projects, one on modern lesbian writing and one on sexuality and nationality in the contemporary Girl Scout movement.

Alex Lee is an attorney and the founder and director of the TGI Justice Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending human rights abuses against transgender, gender variant and intersex people in prisons and jails. He is a transgender man of Chinese & Taiwanese descent, and currently lives in San Francisco with his partner.

Vivian Nixon became a member of the College and Community Fellowship, a re-entry program for formerly incarcerated people in New York City, in 2001. From 2003 until recently, she served as the Executive Director of that program. In that capacity, she oversaw the Project, providing direction with regard to its various activities, including academic support, leadership development, and advocacy. She took leave of the directorship upon receipt of the prestigious Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship awarded by the Open Society Institute. Her primary work as a Soros Fellow is to provide social justice education to religious leaders of the First Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In addition to her work as a Soros fellow, she serves on numerous boards and committees including the Center for Leadership Education After Reentry (CLEAR) at the City University of New York Graduate Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is a frequent public speaker, panelist, moderator, and preacher. She recently published a chapter titled "A Christian Response to Incarceration: Unbind them!" in the anthology Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right From the Heart of the Gospel.

Sister Helen Prejean is a tireless activist working toward the worldwide abolition of capital punishment, and, most famously, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S. Since its publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking has been transformed into an acclaimed film starring Susan Sarandon, as well as an opera at the San Francisco Opera Company. Sister Prejean's best-selling story continues to capture the imaginations not only of filmmakers and composers, but of activists who recognize the need to overturn a corrupt, class-biased death penalty and to reform the judicial system. An advocate for prisoners' lives and rights, Sister Helen has also founded a support group for murder victims' families and is an honorary member of Murder Victims for Reconciliation. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times and is the honorary chairperson of Moratorium 2000 (www.moratorium2000.org), a group gathering signatures for a global moratorium of the death penalty.

Andrea Ritchie is a progressive lesbian feminist of African Caribbean descent who has worked in the women's movement in the U.S. and Canada over the past 15 years as an advocate, policy analyst, and researcher. She is currently a member of the National Collective of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Her research and organizing focuses on police brutality and misconduct as experienced by women and LGBT people of color. She recently worked as a research consultant and co-author for Amnesty International's Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against LGBT People in the US. She also served as a researcher and co-author for Caught in the Net, a report on women and the "war on drugs" published by the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Break the Chains, as well as Behind the Kitchen Door: Pervasive Inequality in New York's Thriving Restaurant Industry published by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York. She graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 2002 and currently works with Remy Kharbanda as RFR (Research for Revolution), a research partnership that supports integration of participatory research into community based organizing.

Deborah Peterson Small wants you to know that she is a native New Yorker. Ms. Small's political education and social activism began early. Soon after graduating high school she went to work for a national youth voter registration organization and organized the first state-wide voter registration campaign on the campuses of the State University of New York. She went on to work as an apprentice to Bayard Rustin at the A. Philip Randolph Institute and participated in an exchange program that took her on an extended trip to Israel and the occupied territories. After a year as an outreach worker for a community based organization in Buffalo, she returned to New York with her infant son and entered the City College of New York as a student in the alternative legal education program started by the late civil rights attorney Haywood Burns, graduating magna cum laude in 1983. She went on from there to Harvard University as a joint degree student in law and public policy. After several years as a corporate attorney working in the private sector, she found her way back to her true passion—public interest work. She served as Chief of Staff to a member of the New York State Assembly representing one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City and immersed herself in the issues that had initially propelled her towards a legal career. A few years later she became Legislative Director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, in that capacity she lobbied the state legislature on behalf of the poor, disenfranchised and incarcerated. It was during this period that she became an ardent advocate for drug policy reform as she became increasingly aware of the ways that the "war on drugs" impacted most of the issues she addressed as a lobbyist. Because of her commitment to promoting drug policy reform, she left the NYCLU to become Director of Public Policy & Community Outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance. Over the past eight years Ms. Small has been at the forefront of the national movement seeking to change our nation's failed drug policies. She helped bring public attention and legal support to the victims of the Tulia drug sting and prosecutions; she worked tirelessly to promote reform of New York's infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws and helped organize community support for ballot initiatives requiring treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. Ms. Small is a nationally recognized leader in the drug policy reform movement and has been a major catalyst in engaging communities of color and their leaders to address the negative impacts of the war on drugs in their communities. Two years ago, she founded a new organization entitled Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs. The mission of Break the Chains is to help build a movement in communities of color in support of drug policy reform with the goal of replacing our failed drug polices with alternatives based on science, compassion, public health and human rights.

Ellen Spiro has created many inventive documentaries, including Diana's Hair Ego, Greetings From Out Here, Roam Sweet Home, Atomic Ed & the Black Hole and Troop 15OO. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Fellowship and others. Her work has won numerous awards and shown in museums including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum Biennial, and 6 times at the Museum of Modern Art. Her films have been broadcast worldwide on PBS, HBO, BBC, and CBC (Canada) and NHK (Japan).

Julia Sudbury is Mary S. Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, and former Canada Research Chair in Social Justice, Equity and Diversity at the University of Toronto. She is author of Other Kinds of Dreams; Black Women's Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (Routledge 1998), editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex (Routledge 2006) and has published numerous articles on women of color activism, globalization and the prison-industrial complex. For the past two decades, Julia has been involved in women of color and prison abolitionist movements in the U.S., Canada and the UK. She is a founder member of Critical Resistance, the Prison Justice Action Committee (Toronto) and the Arizona Prison Moratorium Coalition.

María Elena Torre is an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. Committed to participatory action research in schools, prisons and communities, she is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison, and has been published in Urban Girls, Revisited (NYU Press, 2007), Handbook of Action Research (Sage, 2007), Beyond Silenced Voices (Teachers College Press, 2005), Qualitative Research in Psychology: Expanding Perspectives in Methodology and Design (American Psychological Association, 2003), and in journals such as Teachers College Record, the Journal of Social Issues, Feminism and Psychology, and the Journal of Critical Psychology. She has served as a consultant for New York City and State governments, community groups and colleges interested in establishing college-in-prison programs in facilities such as San Quentin and Sing-Sing.

Ije Ude is a member of Sista II Sista, a collective of working-class young and adult Black and Latina women building together to model a society based on love and liberation. SIIS is committed to fighting for justice and creating alternatives to systems by making social, cultural and political change. Ije is a also a collective member of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national organization committed to building a revolutionary women of color movement. She is a lead trainer and leadership team member with Generation Five and supports their work to create transformative approaches to dealing with child sexual abuse that do not rely on the state. Ije is also involved in other projects in New York City that are creating alternative spaces for women of color and other marginalized communities such as the Pachamama Childcare Cooperative, the Community Birthing Project and Harm Free Zones. Ije is also an eclectic Taurus and lover of life, justice, music and other beautiful things.

Kay Whitlock, recently retired as the National Representative for LGBT Issues for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), is the author of an AFSC Justice Visions series of publications addressing the meaning of justice in a society based upon violence, exclusion, and abuses of human rights. These include In a Time of Broken Bones, which challenges penalty enhancement hate crimes laws as a progressive response to hate violence and Corrupting Justice: A Primer for LGBT Communities on Racism, Violence, Human Degradation & the Prison Industrial Complex, and others. Nationally known for her work in building bridges between LGBT justice struggles and other movements for peace, human rights, social justice, and economic security, Kay travels widely throughout the United States, speaking and facilitating workshops. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous periodicals and publications. She currently works closely with Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) on a variety of issues, including abolition of the prison industrial complex.

Rebecca Young is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College, and is a longtime peace and social justice activist. In the 1980s, she ran street outreach programs for street-based drug users and sex workers in the Washington, DC area and conducted AIDS education in jails and prisons in the DC area. Her ethnographic research on lesbian and bisexual women drug users in New York and Boston was used in the 2006 Amnesty International Report, "Stonewalled—Still demanding respect: Police abuse and misconduct against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the USA." From 2003-2004, Beck was a board member of Sister Outsider, a leadership development, jobs, and youth justice organization run by and for young women of color in Brooklyn. She is an active supporter of Drop the Rock, a program to repeal the harsh and ineffective Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York State.

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