Please see below for a new event available for interested students! The information below will also be available via the Common Read website at www.umass.edu/studentlife/commonread .
“Real Women. Real Voices: The Movement of Formerly Incarcerated Women to End Mass Incarceration”
Andrea James, Executive Director of Families for Justice as Healing
Nov. 3, 6:30 p.m. Campus Center 162
Andrea James has worked within the criminal justice system for more than 25 years, including as a criminal defense attorney, when she provided zealous representation for families within her community of Roxbury, Massachusetts. In 2009, she was sentenced to a 24-month federal prison sentence, part of which she served at the federal prison camp for women in Danbury, Connecticut. Even after a lifetime of work seeking justice on behalf of disenfranchised people, she was stunned by what she encountered upon entering the prison system as an incarcerated person. Since her release, Andrea James has mobilized to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and their children through the organization Families for Justice as Healing, a criminal justice reform organization advocating for community wellness initiatives to replace the war on drugs and incarceration. Through this work, she is fulfilling the promise she made to the women who remain in prison—to speak their truth, advocate for an end to the war on drugs, and support a shift toward community wellness.
STPEC is proud to sponsor Andrea James’s visit to UMass as part of our effort to support UMass programming on prison reform and prison abolition. Ms. James will also be visiting STPEC’s First-Year Faculty Seminar “The Prison-Industrial Complex and Prison Abolitionism,” co-taught by STPEC director Sigrid Schmalzer and STPEC student Emily Shepard, and organized in conjunction with the 2014 UMass Common Read, Orange Is the New Black.