On July 4, Stacey Borden braved the rain for a picnic, driving forty minutes from her Boston home to Swampscott, Massachusetts. Dozens of others joined her, bringing blankets, lawn chairs, sandwiches, salad, soup, and cookies.
This was no ordinary picnic in a park. Instead, Borden and nearly forty other advocates were on the front lawn of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s house demanding that he grant clemency, or shorten the prison sentences, for more than a dozen women currently in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham, the state’s only women’s prison.