Officially, June 21 is the longest day of the year. This year, thousands of people spent the first day of summer at a rally in Washington, D.C., highlighting the growing number of women in prison.
Andrea James, a former lawyer and mother of a 12-year-old daughter and 5-month-old son, spent two years at a federal prison for wire fraud. While incarcerated at Danbury, she organized a group of women called Families for Justice as Healing.
Melinda Tuhus, a reporter for the radio newsmagazine Between the Lines, had an opportunity to interview James about the rally, which was called “Free Her.”
The rally “points to the faster rate of incarceration of women over men, although men still make up the vast majority of the 2.5 million Americans in prison,” Tuhus said.
When Tuhus asked James to explain the reasons for the rally, she said, “The three reasons we’re convening on the Washington Mall on the 21st, the first one as I’ve mentioned, is to raise awareness of the increase in incarceration of women in the U.S., the impact on our children and our communities.
“The second reason is to encourage President Obama to commute the sentences of women serving nonviolent drug offenses in the federal system, which is something that the Justice Department on April 23 finally came out and said they are willing to do, not just for women, but for people in the federal system serving nonviolent drug sentences and other sentences,” James said.
Finally, “The third reason why we’re coming is a two-part reason in terms of legislation that’s pending right now. One is the Smarter Sentencing Act. We’re coming to raise support and to ask the folks who show up and folks in general across the country to call in, call your Congress people in support of the Smarter Sentencing Act,” James continued. In addition, she wants the public to support the Barber amendment.
In her conversation with Tuhus, James explained, “The Barber amendment will restore federal parole; we lost federal parole when they introduced mandatory minimum to the federal system, and we also lost federal good time when they introduced mandatory minimums.”
Tuhus reported, “More women than men have suffered either physical or sexual abuse before being jailed, and they suffer higher rates of mental illness while incarcerated, where very few receive adequate mental health care.” Decade-long sentences mean women in prison may never have children.
James, who served as the coordinator of the rally, organized the event to recognize the women she left behind. Tuhus reported, “The demands of the rally include an end to voter disenfranchisement for people with felony convictions, asking President Obama to commute the sentences of women and men in the federal system who have applied for such status.”
“We started the organization (Families for Justice as Healing) as incarcerated women to use our voices to really paint a more accurate portrait of who is incarcerated,” James said. “Who are these women and what kind of impact their incarceration has on their children and on the communities they come from.”
Over the last 25 years, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of women incarcerated in the U.S. The number of African-American women has increased by 800 percent. These are “extraordinarily alarming” statistics, and “it’s mostly related to the War on Drugs, “James said.
During the interview, James told Tuhus about a book, Justice as Healing, given to her by an American Indian woman that really made an impression on her. A prosecutor in Canada who wrote the book spoke about the native way of addressing issues that we refer to as criminal justice issues in the U.S.
“Start with who that person is, who they belong to, where they came from, who their family is, what tribe they came out of, and really putting the offense that the person committed off the table and just begin to work with the person, reminding them about the value and how important they are and the impact they’ve had on the lives of other people, and really beginning a process of justice as healing,” she explained.
“Healing is what we need to do to help people. Prison doesn’t provide for that in any way. It’s not a place to expect people to begin to heal. Prisons are extraordinarily dehumanizing places,” James said.
