Families

[rinue]

I captioned a Tulane-hosted panel and gender, race, and incarceration on CSPAN, and it's worth watching the whole thing at their free video library. I was particularly moved by two things Susan Burton (of A New Way of Life Reentry Project) said:

to be pulled out of your community in chains and put in the back of a car which is a cage for transportation, and then to be put into another cage to be held there until the court process sanctions you to become a slave again, and woken up at 5:00, 4:00, 3:00 in the morning, stripped of your clothing, chained on a chain, brought out in the early morning, put on a bus, driven to some place that, you know, that you have no clue of where you are going and pulled off of that bus, cage, put into another bullpen, cage, stripped again, having to have every piece and part of your body looked at with flashlights and all the rest, and to be pushed out into a sort of compound where you are working for five cents, eight cents, 16 cents, and the executive job is $1 an hour, that is slavery in America. That is what prison is.

I haven't seen 12 Years a Slave. I didn't want to see it before I got here and you talked about it. Since you saw it, I had this other experience that is slavery. The 13th amendment says, as long as I'm under the auspices of being convicted of a crime, the crime being possession of a drug that medicated the grief after law enforcement killed my baby and never ever said, I'm sorry, never acknowledged it -- I had to go through a lot of healing to even operate to be here today, forgiving the accident, but then also forgiving their never acknowledging the fact that this little black boy was killed by a white man with a badge patrolling my community.

and

that question and statement makes me think about Flozelle Woodmore.
She was a woman who was sentenced to seven years to life for protecting her son.
She shot an abusive boyfriend. He died. She was incarcerated. The son was about two years old at the time. She went to prison for seven years to life, spent 20 years in prison, was found suitable for parole seven times, and the governor rescinded it seven times, and finally, she was released.

She was released, and she came to work at a new way of life. Her son, when she was released, was serving a life sentence himself. She stayed working at a new way of life for six years. She should have been discharged from parole at five years. One of her biggest wishes was to vote in the 2012 primary elections. She died of a stroke. She never got to vote. She was working on getting her son out of prison. She never got to see her son because she was on parole. The parole kept her a year longer.

We registered her. They were supposed to discharge her. She never, ever got to vote. She had a lot of things sort of on her bucket list, but voting was one of them that she had never, ever got to exercise.