The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Families for Justice as Healing, Black and Pink Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Bail Fund are led by formerly incarcerated people and people with incarcerated loved ones and we love our communities. We share a vision for a Commonwealth where all families live freely in dignity, safety, and wellbeing. As experts and from research, we assert that incarceration only causes harm and trauma while solving none of the problems our families face. Along with our incarcerated loved ones, we are reimagining a world that responds with care and support to crisis. We are building what different looks like and freeing people along the way.
As we organize to create something different, poor and working class communities of color continue to struggle with mental illness, addiction, untreated trauma, homelessness, and hunger. The criminal legal and child welfare systems are an extension of slavery, uphold structural racism, separate families, and cause generational trauma. Instead of guaranteed housing, food access, treatment, healthcare and other basic resources, the only meaningful investment in Black & Brown communities for generations has been policing, surveillance, prosecutors, prisons, electronic monitoring shackles, probation officers, and parole officers. Everyday these same police, prosecutors, and prisons fail to prevent and address harm.
Living through these conditions has developed our values and vision in a way that compels us to act swiftly when Black women are met with punishment instead of support. We united as a coalition to post bail for Marie Merisier who is deserving of what we all are deserving of - compassion, support and adequate resources. The overtly punitive $100k bail that was imposed on Marie meant her urgent mental health and healthcare needs would go unmet. Our worries were affirmed when she was being deprived of basic hygienic necessities. We have a constitutional right to post bail and we do so to protect people from the catastrophe of pre-trial detention which increases chances of conviction, longer sentences and prevents access to the support needed to fight one’s case. We do believe in individual and community accountability which the community has a shared responsibility in addressing, not prisons. This is long-term work. We are committed to encircling Marie and other Black women with the resources they need to not only survive but heal and thrive.
We won’t be silent as the state continues to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate Black women who are battling to survive poverty, trauma, and mental illness. We do not accept the tragic outcomes this system produces as the only possibility for us. We will fight for clemency, to end the construction of new women's prisons, to end pre-trial detention and bring as many of our people home as possible. We have been shackled and lived on prison bunks. We have survived violence and our loved ones have too. So we know to not turn our backs on each other and instead, we lean in and bring the change we know is possible.
As we organize to create something different, poor and working class communities of color continue to struggle with mental illness, addiction, untreated trauma, homelessness, and hunger. The criminal legal and child welfare systems are an extension of slavery, uphold structural racism, separate families, and cause generational trauma. Instead of guaranteed housing, food access, treatment, healthcare and other basic resources, the only meaningful investment in Black & Brown communities for generations has been policing, surveillance, prosecutors, prisons, electronic monitoring shackles, probation officers, and parole officers. Everyday these same police, prosecutors, and prisons fail to prevent and address harm.
Living through these conditions has developed our values and vision in a way that compels us to act swiftly when Black women are met with punishment instead of support. We united as a coalition to post bail for Marie Merisier who is deserving of what we all are deserving of - compassion, support and adequate resources. The overtly punitive $100k bail that was imposed on Marie meant her urgent mental health and healthcare needs would go unmet. Our worries were affirmed when she was being deprived of basic hygienic necessities. We have a constitutional right to post bail and we do so to protect people from the catastrophe of pre-trial detention which increases chances of conviction, longer sentences and prevents access to the support needed to fight one’s case. We do believe in individual and community accountability which the community has a shared responsibility in addressing, not prisons. This is long-term work. We are committed to encircling Marie and other Black women with the resources they need to not only survive but heal and thrive.
We won’t be silent as the state continues to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate Black women who are battling to survive poverty, trauma, and mental illness. We do not accept the tragic outcomes this system produces as the only possibility for us. We will fight for clemency, to end the construction of new women's prisons, to end pre-trial detention and bring as many of our people home as possible. We have been shackled and lived on prison bunks. We have survived violence and our loved ones have too. So we know to not turn our backs on each other and instead, we lean in and bring the change we know is possible.