Just days after Bresha Meadows killed her father, her mother, Brandi, appeared on a Fox affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio. “She is my hero,” she said sobbing. “I wasn’t strong enough to get out and she helped us all.”

According to multiple reports, including a petition for a protective order filed by Brandi in 2011, Bresha's father,  Jonathan, physically and verbally abused his family.

Brandi described her suffering in detail. “In the 17 years of our marriage, he has cut me, broke my ribs, fingers, the blood vessels in my hand, my mouth, blackened my eyes. I believe my nose was broken,” she wrote.

She went on to express concern for the safety of her children. “If he finds us, I am 100 percent sure he will kill me and the children … My life is like living in a box he created for me, and if I stepped out of that box, he’s there to put me back in that box.”

The couple reunited and lived together until Bresha, now 15, couldn't take anymore. She has been jailed since July awaiting trial for murder.

Bresha's case has attracted the attention of activists and organizers, and for the past week, they've organized a week of action. For Harriet spoke to organizer Mariame Kaba about the efforts to bring attention to the case.

I am interested in how you first became acquainted with the case of Bresha Meadows.
Sure. I learned about it, actually, through my friend, Kelly, who's a fellow organizer. Kelly is based out of Chicago. She sent the article to a group of us who have been doing work around supporting criminalized survivors of violence. This was back in early August of last year, and she said "this sounds like a really terrible case, and I'm wondering if this young girl has any good legal support. Is this something we might want to support?"

We basically got a small group of people together and started asking about what was happening locally and getting some more information about her case. From there, we formed a Free Bresha defense campaign.

Have you been in contact with her family? In the stuff that I've read about the case, there seems to be a split in the extended family, right?

Yes. The campaign has been in contact with Bresha's mother, Brandi Meadows, and, of course, her mother's supportive. We have, through her mother, connected with her aunt, Martina Latessa. So, yes, we're connected to the side of the family that's been supportive of Bresha. I think even the father's side of the family, who's been less supportive, has been talking about the fact that what they want to see for their niece is that she gets "help" for what they see as a mental health issue, which led to the situation.

Even though they have been saying publicly that their brother was not abusive, they still don't want any draconian action against their niece.
Could you describe the kind of conditions that Bresha is being held in right now?

She's being held at the Trumbull County Juvenile Detention Center in Warren, Ohio. Well, it's not actually in Warren, but it's close to Warren, which is where she's originally from. The juvenile detention center would be like most juvenile detention centers around the country. They are basically jails--holding places before young people are adjudicated for the crimes they're being accused of.

Most of those places are very spare places with very few programs and little to no real mental health support for the young people there. They're jails. I think a lot of times people think about juvenile jails and juvenile detention as mini getaways, or maybe some form of more lenient spaces. They're jails, so you're deprived of your freedom. I think that's most important.

It's very, very strict as to who can come and visit you, [and] how often you can get visits. You can't wear your own clothes, obviously, so you're wearing a uniform. It's deprivation, so she's been under suicide watch several times as she's been held in jail. That's to be expected. She was traumatized before she went in, and she remains traumatized as she's there.

She had a brief 30-day placement for evaluation at an outside mental health facility that her family had to pay for out-of-pocket. So we helped raise money so that they could actually afford it because they can't.

While she was at that particular mental health facility for a 30-day evaluation, she was doing much better in the sense that she got to see her family a lot more. She finally got to see her siblings after she hadn't been able to see them for six months when she was at the jail. They returned her a couple of weeks ago back to the Trumbull County Detention Center from that mental health base, so she's back in the area that was causing her so much anxiety and trauma in the first place again, after having a brief respite from that.

Bresha is 15 years old. There's a lot of talk right now about Kalief Browder and the kinds of traumas that he endured when he was at jailed at Riker's Island. I'm wondering about the concerns that you have, about not only Bresha Meadows, but children, generally, being jailed.

Yes, well you know one of the things that I think people don't pay enough attention to is the notion that jail makes people worse, right? Whatever it is that you had when you were going in is exacerbated when you're in those kinds of spaces. So, if Kalief had any sort of mental health issues before he went into jail, that was just exacerbated. If he didn't have any mental health issues, then he would by the time he left jail, right?

So those places are actually places that are very, very traumatic, incredibly violent spaces, for the most part. It's there for punishment, even though the fact is you're there waiting for trial. So it's punishing you prior to even having your case adjudicated. That should make everybody incensed and enraged.

I spend a lot of my time, most of the work that I do with my organization, Project Nia, is focused on addressing and ending youth incarceration of all sorts. We really understand that all empirical evidence suggests that locking children up is a bad thing. There's not a study that says "this is good." You can't find one, so we should stop doing it.

In the case of Bresha in particular, when you are a victim of domestic violence, and you end up in these kinds of circumstances, it's incredibly retriggering and re-traumatizing. In the case of girls, particularly, who find themselves in the system, overwhelmingly they come from families where family violence existed. 84% of the time. They come from situations where they were, themselves, sexually violated and abused. When you go into jail, whatever sexual abuse experience you had is heightened in jail, where you have to strip search and you have to change in front of a lot of other people. In some cases, you're actually attacked by staff members.

A lot of the research that has been done over the years suggests that guards are the people who actually sexually traumatize girls and young women when they're locked up. So, that's not a good place to be, and we really need to abolish pre-trial detention and abolish youth incarceration altogether.

The pushback you get from people who don't understand the idea of prison abolition, is "well what do you do with people who commit crimes? What do you do with people who might be a danger to society? Even children." If we eliminate pre-trial incarceration, what do we replace it with?

For me, the question is not "what do we replace a bad thing with?" My point is always that you get rid of the bad thing, no matter what it is. Then you work on creating alternatives to actually achieve what it is, that you're trying to do.

For me as an abolitionist, I don't believe in punishment as being something that actually addresses the issues or the root cause of the issues that we're trying to address. As Angela Davis has said many times, prisons and jails are meant to disappear people and also disappear problems.

What I always say to folks is, most people in the world who are locked up are not,"rapists and murderers." So, if you want to start there, start with freeing all the people who aren't those things. You would decarcerate a whole bunch of people, and that would be a good thing.

Then, I think as an abolitionist, I always talk about the fact that abolition isn't advocating the opening of the doors of every prison and jail and just letting people out. Abolition is about making sure that we are addressing the conditions that make it necessary for us to have those hell-holes in the first place. If you work on those kinds of things, we'll be living in a different kind of world. We'll have different questions, and we'll address what to do with people who cause harm under a different context that will maybe be a non-punitive one and that will allow us to think about how we deal with that stuff.

So my answer is always, I'm not going to really engage in that, "what do we do with the bad people?" question. Because that's actually a question that needs a collective response that we build together. But, for me, it's not even about that.

I would certainly say that if in the case of people like Bresha, they don't deserve to be in jail, period. So, that's not even a question.
I'm wondering if feel like Bresha being a teenage black girl has any influence or impact on the kind of mobilization that has occurred around her case? 

That's a great question.  I saw many years ago an article or a post that said "somebody got ... A woman was killed and no one showed up" or something like that, to commemorate that loss.
Somebody else wrote a piece that said "actually, that's super offensive." The idea that no one showed up is actually a complete misreading of what happened. There were people there, and the fact that you don't acknowledge that is actually a form of erasure that should be avoided, right?

So, I actually think that in the case of Bresha, Black lives matter when we make them matter. So, I just believe in the importance of stressing that for black women and girls. It's always been other black women and girls mostly who have stepped up to support, push, make sure that they're seen and understood and not made invisible, and that continues to be the case.

We have a very multiracial group of people who have come together to press, but it's women of color dominated. That's just always been the case.

Now, I think we've done a pretty good job of making sure that her story stays in the press and in the media, and people have been surprisingly open to holding teachings in their communities and donating money. The family has raised over $100,000 for Bresha's expenses and other things. We have raised several thousand dollars for the mother when she lost her job, in order to tide them over over the holidays. So people have been pretty receptive, and I think the truth of the matter is, the Say Her Name mobilizations and Black Lives Matter, and other mobilizations and organizing that has happened over the last few years has paved the road to get people paying more attention to the lives of Black girls and young women, at least on the public side.

So that's a long way of saying, that, yes, I think Black girls and women don't get as much focus on our fight and the issues that we face. That's just true. At the same time, I'm seeing some change around that, and I'm seeing that in the case of Bresha, and I saw that happening with Marissa Alexander, a case that I was also involved in.

So yeah, that's what I would say.

You and your organization are organizing a week of mobilization around Bresha Meadow's case. Could you talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, we've had two previous weeks of action. One in April around a hearing, and then one in January around a hearing, and this is the third week of action that's happening this month in April, starting Monday the 10th, going through the 17th. Initially, we were coinciding it with her next hearing date, which was supposed to be on April 17th. That has now moved to May 8th, but we decided to keep the week of action, both because it's Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and we wanted to make sure to raise up the fact that criminalization itself is sexual violence. We want that message to be understood--that it's state enactment of gendered violence.

So, we really want to raise those point and make that known. We want people to keep Bresha in the forefront of their minds. We want them to make sure they understand and get ready for May, which is a very big month, with her pre-trial hearing on May 8th, and then her trial's supposed to start on May 22nd. We really want to push for people to go to Ohio on May 8th for that hearing, and also for the trial.

We're basically going to use this week to do what we've been doing, which is make sure to educate people. We have a curriculum I wrote that people can download and use in their communities. It teaches people a little bit about Bresha and her case, and puts it into historical context. It talks about domestic violence and its impact. Then, we also have a postering thing that people can do. There's a poster online that they can download and they can post those all up in their communities, take pictures of it, show it, and share it with us so that we have those photos and can share them on social media with people.

We're inviting people to do poetry circles. We've put up a couple of examples of guides of poetry that focus on gender-based violence that people can use to have conversations in their communities.

Really what Bresha's family has wanted has been to make sure that it's not just about Bresha, but about all the Breshas that are out there. Lots of young girls and women and gender nonconforming people are victimized by violence and sometimes have to use violence in order to protect and defend their lives.

Visit FreeBresha.com to learn more about how you can help Bresha Meadows.

by Hanâ Zait, Legal Advocate and Intern at Justice Now

Nine years after the California Department of Corrections lost control of their health care system to a federal oversight body due to inhumane conditions caused by overcrowding, moves to reduce the prison population and regain control of prison healthcare are not impacting women’s prisons in the same way that they are men’s prisons.

The “cruel and unusual punishment” of the system that illegally sterilized people in women’s prisons continues to cause significant pain and suffering for people behind these walls. Substandard living conditions are made worse by measures to address overcrowding that do not return people in women’s prisons to their communities.

Justice Now surveyed people at Central California Women's Facility and California Institution for Women, the two women’s prisons in California, regarding the effects of the grotesque levels of overcrowding they were faced with. Surveys, with names removed, from both 2014 and 2015 indicate that overcrowding in California's women's prisons has exacerbated longstanding issues, making already inhumane living conditions even worse. More than half of those surveyed described experiencing some level of difficulty accessing healthcare.

Additionally, in the surveys many people noted that stress levels had increased and tempers were shorter as a result of the substandard living conditions. Over 80 percent of people said that they “have witnessed and/or experienced more violence within the prison,” yet what’s more alarming is that two thirds said that they “have witnessed an increased number of deaths, suicides, or attempted suicides.”

Many people also report reduced access to things like educational classes and self-help groups. Hakim Anderson, serving a 15-life sentence at Central California Women's Facility  noted, “the waiting list [for educational and vocational programs] could be 2 to 3 years long, and these are things that we [lifers] are required to take.” They added that the college waiting list is worse, saying, “there's like 400 or 500 people on the list and that [wait] can be close to three years.” Hakim said that the waiting list is so long that they might get a date for parole before getting into college classes again.



Another issue people brought up in the surveys was the difficulty in accessing sanitary supplies such as toilet paper, pads, tampons, and hand soap, which increases health risks. In order to get pads and tampons in prison, people have to request them from the guards, and they are often asked to provide proof of their period to receive menstrual supplies (e.g. by showing the guard a used tampon or pad). Tracy Jones, a member of Justice Now who has been recently released from Central California Women's Facility explained, this is “degrading, sexist, and downright disrespectful,” because “I shouldn’t have to ask you to give me something that I need that the state is giving you money to buy for me that should just be given to me.”

Historically, this has not been a resource issue, but rather a way to continue to dehumanize people. Forcing people in prisons to justify their need for pads and tampons is indicative of the way our society perceives people in prisons. It is this devaluing of people in prison that allows the living conditions in women’s prisons to continue to be so abysmal, which also has serious consequences on the wellbeing of those in women’s prisons. Overcrowding at both women’s prisons has impeded mental health care access to the point that in 2014, California Institution for Women’s suicide rate was 7.6 times the suicide rate for all people in prison in California and 12.7 times the national suicide rate for women in prison. When people are treated as less than human, it inevitably impacts their mental health.

Part of the problem is that we continue to shove people into women’s prisons at an alarming rate. From 1932 till 2003 (approximately 71 years), there were approximately 99,999 admissions into women’s prisons in California. From 2004 to 2012, a period of eight years, California’s women’s prisons had approximately 65, 091 admissions. This drastic increase in the number of people entering California’s women’s prisons highlights a crisis we have yet to address.

In order to address these issues it is necessary to tackle them from multiple points. First, the state needs to invest more money and resources into addressing the entry points for incarceration. This includes examining arrest rates and understanding causes of arrest, thereby allowing us to find ways to reduce the number of people entering prisons. A major part of preventing incarceration is investing money into things that strengthen our communities, such as education and healthcare.

One solution that could have reaching impacts for women and mothers is repealing the Maximum Family Grant to CalWORKS recipients. CalWORKS is a welfare program that gives monetary aid and other services to eligible families in the state. The grant was introduced in the 1990’s as a way to punish and discourage poor women from having children by denying them additional aide and food stamps, often forcing parents into tough circumstances and criminalized choices simply to feed their families. Another solution is to examine and take action against the school to prison pipeline, which maintains the prison-industrial complex through the criminalization and punishment of Black children from young ages, as shown by multiple studies.

Second, we need more sustainable sentence reforms and decarceration strategies in order to reduce the number of people in prisons and to bring people back home to their communities. One example is SB 219, a law Justice Now co-sponsored that would expand the existing alternative custody program, which allows people to go home from prison early. These policies should not only be for those with non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses (also known as “non/non/nons”). Doing so results in a sense of hopelessness and worthlessness for those who are left out and not considered for release as a result of being continually ignored and excluded in policy changes, despite the fact that people with serious or violent offenses "return to prison at a lower rate than [people] with a non-serious/non-violent offense."

Finally, we need more programs like our fellowship program that support people coming home from prisons so that they have the resources and community support they need to stay home and out of prison. Justice Now’s fellowship program breaks down employment barriers faced by people recently released from women’s prisons by providing a paid position without paying attention to their conviction. By combining these tactics and by working directly with people in prison we can continue to work together towards sustainable strategies for decarceration and for preventing incarceration.

Photo: Shutterstock

Hanâ is a student in her final year at UCSC majoring in Community Studies and Sociology. She has been an intern with Justice Now in Oakland since May 2015, where she has worked to amplify the voices of people inside women’s prisons. Justice Now partners with people in women's prisons and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons. We center the lived experience of people directly impacted by the prison system and support the leadership of activists and organizers inside and recently released from women’s prisons. Our work includes direct legal services, medical advocacy, peer education, and policy and media campaigns.

by Jodie Geddes

The first time I visited Rikers Island I was shook. I feared the bars of the facility more than I did the sound of gunshots ringing out at the crack of dawn. I heard the metal gates close behind me and watched the guards smile at each other while proceeding to shuffle us through the detectors. I was reminded of high school. I stopped wearing a belt in the ninth grade. I didn't appreciate the hassle of stripping myself in the middle of the hallway. Always feeling like a suspect. There is something dry in the way they stare at you. The women asked me if I came to see a significant other and I responded with a cold smirk. I was afraid to make friends with identification number holders, baby mothers and a possible girlfriend. The guards spoke about the fistfights that sometimes colored the old and chipping paint of the waiting room.

It was Christmas. I woke up early that morning to beat the regulars. I hoped the same correction officers were there, like in previous visits. I was wearing a dress and wasn't ready to be violated. I always felt silenced in the presence of such authority. I knew what the system required of me and yet each time the guard asked me to grab between my bra and pull my pants away from my body I grew anxious, with fear in each step. I wondered what his face would look like. I knew that we would later be divided by more than visiting hours. He walked from behind the door, looked at me with joy and I wanted to cry. My best friend didn’t prepare me for this. He didn’t prepare me for the tears. He only prepared me for the bus ride. The commute. Not the reality. For some of us this is the norm.



His voice shook like an unintentional whisper. The booth didn't have a phone like you see in movies, he yelled when speaking to me. I placed my ear against the divider. I couldn't listen and look at him at the same time. Sometimes I would respond “yes” and nod my head so that he wouldn't have to repeat himself. I heard the screams of family members yelling at loved ones, the pain in their voices. I saw the weight reflected in their eyes as theirs cut with mines. I wondered when this friendship would become too heavy to bear.

He was moved upstate.

There were no long lines this time. I didn’t look over my shoulder for the baby mothers and girlfriends. The space resembled an oversized daycare with all-inclusive games and vending machines. I didn't have much money but wanted to do everything I could to support his family. I swiped my debit card while watching his feet sway back and forth over a line. Inmates aren’t allowed to hold money. I stacked up burgers and boneless chicken wings, Swedish fish and a root bear. He asked me if I was eating. I didn’t. Later I caved and bought a Snapple. I didn’t look at the prices. I knew what this could do to my conscience.

In Race Matters, Cornel West discusses the legacy of white supremacy within a multiracial democracy. He points to the divide between black communities and the larger construction of being American. West also highlights some of the harms caused by this division. In his words:

The new inclusion of people of color within the professional slices of American society occurred alongside the expansion of unaccountable corporate power in the economy and government and the unleashing of arbitrary police power in poor communities of color, especially black, brown, and red. The result is black-middle class achievements that constitute black progress alongside devastated black working and poor communities that yield unprecedented increases in prison populations and overlooked victims of police abuse.

The language of democracy implies that each person has equal opportunity and access to resources, while overlooking the economic, political, and social climate of their experiences. Successful black professionals are symbols of black progress, thus, we as an American society become numb to the realities of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.

The system of identity and respectability politics does not strip itself clean from the prison industrial complex. Black men, women and their families are constantly policed by the health care, housing, and school system. There is a process of monitoring behavior to maintain the status quo; in some way an alternate reality is created with remnants of the outside world.


Count was almost over.

I walked into the room and was seated facing a clock. I watched the minutes pass by. My back was turned towards the door. I looked up periodically to see if he was coming. It would be the first time our bodies collided in almost four years. I hadn’t felt his arms wrap around my torso, smelled his essence. It was like meeting someone for the first time. We hesitated at first, I’m sure no one could tell.

Before families leave they return any items that teeter over the weight limit for packages. We asked a few questions regarding contrabands and they tell us its better to order from some book. Better for who? I think to myself. I’m hesitant about expecting much from our justice system. We share memories during the ride home and discuss a present without bars. This is what hope looks like, there’s no other option. I dread going to see him. My body empties itself. He fills me up with everything he can give.

We left without him.

This journey has never been about finding gold at the end of the rainbow, ringing the cracked bell or even the taxidermic butterfly. I didn’t anticipate the unfolding that would take place. I wanted him to remember the primary colors of the rainbow. He made a way for me to see more. Inhale deep after the rain. I want him to beat the wave, surf.

Photo: Shutterstock

Jodie Geddes is a master’s student studying restorative justice. She is also a poet and dabbles in film.

When I was 13, I was arrested and sentenced to 90 days in a youth detention center (otherwise known as a YDC).

When I first arrived “up the road,” I hesitated when my turn came to undress, squat, and cough because I was menstruating and there was a male guard in the room. He wasn’t looking, but he was still there. Finally, a woman guard told me, “Come on, girl, I ain’t got all day.” That was the day I realized I was no one special, and it took about a decade to regain the little self-respect I had before that incident.

While detained, I surprisingly enjoyed going to the dentist. I had braces, so saying a band popped would get me an appointment onsite within two days. I valued my time in the dentist’s chair because he separated my character from my circumstances, and talked with me versus at me. In everyday life, it isn’t typical for black girls to be supported or esteemed, but this is especially true within the juvenile justice system.


One day, I asked him, “You think girls who come here get the help they need?”

I explained how a lot of the girls had real problems back at home and I wondered how being sent there was helping them. I kept it vague, fearing details would summon too many questions—including names. It took a while for him to answer, but he finally came around and suggested that I just worry about myself because some people will never learn—they’re set on their excuses.

I couldn’t look at him the same after that. I even started judging him for falling for my put-on. As a “delinquent,” you get used to being pigeonholed, but I was pretty good at climbing out of boxes. When I first met the dentist, for example, I changed his mind about me by simply asking which colleges he graduated from and sharing that I planned to go to Georgia Tech to be a computer software engineer. I didn’t really want to; it just sounded impressive.

He didn’t know that a few days prior to my visit with him, I was on lockdown for fighting. Again. I had a pretty bad temper, and it had played a big role in my being sent to the YDC. When two girls showed up at my doorstep strapped with belts, I didn’t call the police. I went outside and stabbed one of them. That’s how the prosecutor explained why my case didn’t qualify as self-defense.

I don’t remember what the fight was about that landed me in a 24-hour lockdown, but I recall the girl I fought with screaming and kicking at her door all night. The next day, a guard called herself punishing us by making us watch her eat McDonald’s. That was another level of lowness, and I’d seen correctional officers behave in some pretty jacked up ways, like taking their bad day out on us or being too aggressive when they had to get physical with us.

All guards weren’t trifling though. We weren’t allowed to call them outside of their formal titles, but if we had been, there were a few of them I know we would’ve referred to as Auntie and Maw-Maw. Even when they were upset or disappointed, it was still obvious that they cared. Some guards even read my stories, which I began writing as a way to pass time.

I changed a few proper nouns to disguise my life as fiction. The popularity of my writing began when one friend read and liked a story. Then, the other girls began reading my work, and then eventually guards too. It was like journaling out loud. Confessing. The need to be heard and understood was one of our common denominators, as some of the girls started writing their own stories. Others would ask me to write for them in exchange for snacks and cornrows.

While munching on potato chips and getting my hair parted and plaited into works of art, I realized how much we had in common. For some time, I felt that I was better than the other girls. I figured having specific goals, big dreams, and having been to Disney World a few times situated me a little higher up. I assumed being black and female, which most of us were—and maybe having a crush on Usher—was all we had in common.

If I had to guess, I’d say at least 80% of the young women detained in my YDC were black. This may seem like a high percentage, but it’s the norm. Today, girls are the fastest growing group in YDCs. Black girls are twenty percent more likely to be detained than white girls and three times more likely to be referred to court. White girls might get into the same kind of trouble that we do, but they’re treated much differently.

Because storytelling so awesomely makes you dig deeper, I realized more with each story how similar we all were in terms of our vulnerability. Most of us had been sexually assaulted, and just as many were runaways. In fact, many of the girls were serving time in the detention center for running away from home. Some had been raped by family members, a few were physically abused at home, and others would rather shack up with a pimp than be in an overcrowded house with no food or lights. I too had a habit of running away to get what I was missing at home and to relieve some of the pressure of expectations.

That was another common thread: We were all muted in some capacity. Always expected to think or behave a certain way, but never accepted for who we were. Once I realized that, my eyes opened to just how flawed the system really is. I would cringe when the counselor would act like joining extracurricular activities at school would solve our problems, or that sharing how we felt with our guardians would lessen our emotional burden.

No one was taking the time to resolve or respond to the root causes of our issues. Even in the facility, our only resources for support were the counselor, who was as overworked and underpaid as a court-appointed attorney, and a chaplain, an old white man whose only shared experience with us was probably speaking English.

Alice Walker once wrote that the most important question in the world asks why the child is crying. If my 90 days taught me nothing else, I learned why black girls cry. I also learned that wiping those tears ain’t exactly a priority for the justice system, which is structured to pull girls in, rather than to use available “off-ramps” to divert them to more appropriate interventions.

Too often, these off-ramps aren’t even available. Because the system isn’t equipped to provide the help needed, putting girls away is seen as the “answer” as a means of protecting them. It’s a temporary solution with long-term consequences of added emotional trauma. In most cases, being detained in a juvenile facility once clears from your criminal history after you turn 18. Any more than that and you’re stuck with a record… and the limited opportunities that go along with it.

Eight years after my release, I was hired as a communications operator for the city I lived in, serving as a liaison between the police and the public. Whenever an officer radioed in that he had a runaway or a girl who was put out of her home, my job was to call group homes to see who had room. If none, then I had to call a YDC. Many times, I felt like I was calling for the younger version of myself, letting them know that a 13-year-old black female was en route.

This isn’t just my story or their story. And it isn’t just happening in my city, but in all cities across the country.


Remember Shakara, the 16-year-old from Spring Valley High who refused to put her phone away or leave class, and was then violently attacked by the school resource officer? Even after the video circulated, the officer was fired, and the fact that she’s in foster care was released, she still faces up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

Remember 16-year-old Kaylan Ward, who was found dismembered on the side of I-10 in New Orleans? In so many words, her mom expressed that she was a troublemaker too. Could juvenile detention have saved her life? It makes me wonder how many background stories go untold and unhealed. How many incidents weren’t filmed, or how many were filmed but didn’t go viral?

Instead of solely pointing the finger, community accountability is an important factor in how we protect and bring up our girls. Speaking up for their justice in our prayers, polls, and protests is an option. Creating safe spaces for them to be heard is another, and so is supporting the platforms that already exist to serve this purpose.

If our young black girls are not free, then you aren’t either. Auntie Audre taught us that.
Photo: From the photo essay, "Life Inside a Juvenile Detention Center for Girls" by Mike Fritz / PBS News Hour

Trelani Michelle was the little girl beneath the covers with a flashlight and a journal. Now, she embraces the power of personal writing as a rich resource for understanding and expressing herself in the world. Visit her website at SoFundamental.com.

by Jaimee A. Swift

The term “post-racial” became a common fixture in American society with the election of President Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American president. Though President Obama’s election was thought to represent a milestone in race-relations, the idealism of race-transcendence has become an ingrained fallacy in the minds of many. With this mindset, some representatives of the American political spectrum believe race-hostilities are less blatant and a kind-of, sort-of socio-economic and political playing field has been provided to the historically disenfranchised and perpetually marginalized.

by Anna Gibson

According to a recent article in the New Yorker, Kalief Browder’s mother was sitting in her living room last Saturday at around 12:30pm when she heard a loud thump on the side of the house. She had no idea where the sound came from, until she saw the body of her son hanging from a second story window outside their home.

by Marena Bridges


When I entered the cell block, dragging my mattress behind me, my new cell mate offered me the bottom bunk and made space for my meager belongings. A few days later, as we chatted over a card game, she declared, “You don’t seem like a criminal.” I chuckled and gave a halfhearted shrug, but her words never left me.

by Raisa Habersham


What’s not to love about Cookie Lyon, the hood matriarch at the center of FOX’s hit show, Empire?

Played by Taraji P. Henson, Cookie is street-smart, fierce, and unapologetic, while still managing to be a sympathetic and vulnerable character. Everything about Cookie is bold—from the way she dresses to her quick-witted snaps at Lucious (Terrence Howard), her ex-husband and semi-nemesis, who built the successful Empire Entertainment using initial investment money she provided by dealing drugs. It is her drug dealing that landed her in prison and kept her away from her three sons.

by Raisa Habersham

Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, writes ever so poignantly on the inconveniences being black and woman can have: “There are all kinds of infuriating reminders of my place in the world—random people questioning me in the parking lot as if it is unfathomable that I’m a faculty member, the persistence of lawmakers trying to legislate the female body, street harassment, strangers wanting to touch my hair.”

by Michelle Talbert

Last week, the Federal Detention Center in Miami held its first “Father-Daughter Dance” for inmates who are nearing release, in an effort to aid re-entry into society and reconnect with family members. I couldn’t bring myself to read about the story at first, because I knew when I read it I would cry. I had this same hesitation when my friend and For Harrier sister-writer, Diana Veiga penned this amazing amazing ode to her daddy, speaking of her father’s presence and conscious decision to be a strong figure in her life.

By Julie K. Brown and Mary Ellen Klas for The Miami Herald


Latandra Ellington had weathered some of Lowell Correctional Institution’s harshest and most primitive realities, and was just seven months shy of freedom — and being reunited with her four young children.

But on Sept. 21, Ellington wrote a chilling letter to her aunt telling her she feared she wouldn’t make it out alive. One of the officers at the prison — she identified him as “Sgt. Q” — had threatened to beat and kill her, she wrote.

by Aviva Stahl

It was Gay Pride weekend in New York City, but the event’s celebratory spirit was absent from Michelle Scott’s tidy second-floor apartment on a leafy street near Brooklyn College. Her child, Carey Smith, is a transgender woman currently locked up in solitary confinement in Upstate Correctional Facility, a men’s supermax prison located in the Adirondacks.

Women make up seven-percent of the total incarcerated population(largely for drug-related offenses); however thirty-percent of incarcerated women are Black. Similarly to our male counterparts, Black women are three times as likely to be incarcerated than White women.

Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander has been committed to sharing her findings about the explosion of the prison population since the release of her bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Here is an excerpt of an interview she gave PBS' Frontline back in 2013.