A panel at Heartland Community College hosted advocates from the Illinois Prison Project to speak on women’s experiences in the criminal justice system.
“Redemption, Resilience, & Reclamation: The Lives of Women in the Criminal Justice System” was simultaneously a celebration of the resilience that pulls women through such experiences and a critique of a system often more interested in retribution than rehabilitation.
The panel of three advocates attending for the Illinois Prison Project (IPP) spoke to the disparity in resources for reentry between men and women. Najei Webster said fewer women being in prison doesn’t justify letting them slip through the cracks.
“It’s so scarce. Even though there aren’t as many of us in there, we’re moms. We create life. If you’re telling me that’s not enough to make you want to protect and nurture, even though we made a mistake,” Webster said. “And some of us didn’t. That’s the reality, some of us did not do anything wrong. And just understand the way they will treat us, they don’t think about it, they’re trained to treat us like animals.”
Panelist Beria Hampton emphasized the importance of public awareness of the issue of mass incarceration after the main discussion.
“Even though it may not directly affect you, indirectly it may, or directly affect somebody else you know,” Hampton said. “So you have to realize the interconnectedness of these issues, so we can bring them (advocates) together, and that is why the public is, here, responsible.”
Hampton said she sees informing on multiple avenues of justice like access to housing access and environmental justice in addition to criminal justice reform as important for bringing advocates together to seek change.
According to Hampton, financial incentive is a powerful force in making the carceral system resistant to that change, from prisoners being used as near-free labor to funding prisons based on population.
“When we look at the construct (mass incarceration), you look at it as still being a business. And how do you keep your business booming? By keeping the same people always returning or making them stay. Because for each person that’s incarcerated, there’s so much money for the person who builds those systems.”
The IPP's stated mission is to fight systemic factors that put and keep people in prison unnecessarily, including racism, long sentences, and a lack of parole or review opportunities.
