Boston Globe reports “In the summer of 2010, the women at Danbury federal prison in Connecticut analyzed their plight. They pored over “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book on mass incarceration, and tuned into reports on their transistor radios about the for-profit prison industry. They created timelines of the lobbying and laws that led to a massive spike in the rate of Black people being incarcerated over the last three decades. They were building on the work of generations of women organizing behind bars.
Then, they vowed to end the incarceration of women and girls across the country, creating an organization called Families for Justice as Healing. And they decided to make New England ground zero. It was a logical place to begin the daunting task, since New England states have some of the lowest rates of women’s incarceration in the country.”