Okay, cool. So today's date is
September 26th, 2022. My name is Obden Mondésir. I am
collecting this oral history
for the Coalition for Women Prisoners Collection that we have at Barnard
College. And I am with Andrea
Williams,
and we are continuing the second part of this oral history interview
in which we will be reviewing some of the images
and documents that are a part of the collection
and seeing if there are any backstories or metadata that we should also add to
them. Yes. So
the first photo I wanted to share was a
2005 group photo of the Women in Prison Project staff,
which includes Andrea Williams, Stacey Thompson, and Tamar Kraft-Stolar.
Would you like to talk more about this photo?
And Jaya Vasandani, so the four of us.
Yes.
So this was taken -I love this photo-this was taken
in 2005 at the Correctional Association's Gala, which
was held down at, this location is at Chelsea Piers, in one of their
event spaces. And
we're one year into, I'm
one year in at the Correctional Association of New York because I joined in
2004. So did Jaya, who was on the right.
The Women in Prison project was Tamar,
and then Tamar's first hire was Stacey. So Tamar's in the middle in the black,
and Stacey is to the left of that in the picture as the
coordinator for the coalition.
And then Jaya and I were hired and we rounded out the Women in
Prison Project staff. And one
of our really dear coalition members and colleagues
and friends, Lorrayne Patterson,
liked to call us 'the dream team.' So I remember she sees this picture,
she says, "here's the dream team."
And so that's what this picture is,
we were there all together and it's just a
nice reminder. Tamar used to like, to-Tamar
really built the Women in Prison project.
So as a project she was happy to finally have a
team as opposed to just her. And then just
her and Stacey really trying to kind of do all the work that she
envisioned for the project.
At this point in time in the project's work,
we really were focused on the coalition advocacy and the leadership and building
the Reconnect, the leadership training. We had not yet
been put in charge of monitoring in the women's prisons, right.
That would soon come, Tamar would soon have us doing that,
but at this point, I don't think we were quite yet doing it.
I think that we were developing the tools that we needed to do that,
the surveys and things that we would need to go into the women's prisons.
But we were definitely answering letters and taking calls and stuff from people,
but we just hadn't done the monitoring to go in.
I don't think we were doing that in 2005,
but you can check with Tamar and Jaya on that.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then we'll move on to this next one,
which is-this is a 2005 photo of
yourself leading a Reconnect session.
Yeah. I don't think that the year of this photo was 2005 though,
but I can check. So this, yeah,
I think some of the photos may have been,
I don't know-I have to check on this-this in the photo, and it's,
I'm seeing two photos now. I'm seeing the previous one and this one.
So if I could just see the, yeah, table...
I recognize a number of the participants and I could go back to my list and
double-check the year, but this was one of the earlier years too.
And this was a reconnect session where one of the trainers did-we had two
community co-trainers there, Tracy Gardner,
who I'm still working with now, she is
the head of policy advocacy at the Legal Action Center
and would come in and do our training
on how the government works,
make sure that people understood that because so much of the
coalition's work was state legislative
advocacy.
So if you look at the board,
that paper pad and whiteboard, not whiteboard, but poster
paper, she's the person that's right in front of the poster paper.
And to her left, looking at it to the
left, is Antonietta Atienne,
who is a long-time advocate. She's retired now,
but at the time she was at Iris House as an
advocate and outreach worker.
Folks in the community know her as
Dreddy. And she was also in at this session and on that
day it happened to be her birthday.
So later on we brought in a cake to celebrate
Dreddy's birthday. But she was there too just talk about the advocacy.
She is somebody,
one of the reasons that we liked-that it was great to have Dreddy there is that
Dreddy was at Bedford when the ACE program
was developed. That was AIDS continuing-education
program,
a kind of vanguard program that helped educate
people inside
women inside about the importance of HIV and
AIDS education. This was developed by women in Bedford.
There's a book on it. A woman named Katrina Haslip was one
of those leaders, another, Linda Gang, Kathy Boudine,
who recently passed, a number of the long-termers at Bedford,
a woman named Rusty Miller-Hill, who's deceased as well. And many, many more.
The women developed that program and it's a program that continues today. There,
it expanded to also be in the men's prisons,
and it's used as a model for the kind of
prevention education inside in the prison setting.
And there was also a program developed called ACE Out,
which would happen in the community.
So elements of that same program to kind of continue the prevention education
and peer advocacy on the outside.
So it's likely in this picture that we were talking about,
how the government works and how that AIDS advocacy is an example of that.
Tamar's in the picture.
And another person,
Jacquie Velez who would go on-she is now, in her own right,
a bonafide community organizer and activist in Massachusetts.
So that's this picture. And this was at the old Correctional Association site.
So the Correctional Association for many years-the Correctional Association was
founded in 1844 and received a legislative mandate in
1846 to do prison monitoring. And we met,
when I joined the Correctional Association.
We were in its original building on 15th Street. And so that's this brownstone,
that's the conference room in this brownstone. That's what we were meeting.
Okay. And then
when do they eventually move?
Well, we sold the-the board sold the building.
I can't exactly remember what year that was,
but it was well into-I had been
at the Correctional Association for a while.
And then they wanted to sell the building and create an endowment.
So the building was sold, and that's how we ended up uptown in Harlem.
And then I think we were up there for at least five or more years. So
my memory on the exact year that the building was sold is escaping me,
but it's something that can easily be checked.
I can check. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, your memory in regards to the photos is quite impressive,
just because, like,
I have looked at personal photos and I probably can only remember two to three
things.
Oh, yeah, yeah, No, I'm gonna remember.
.
, yeah.
Okay. So, yeah,
we'll move to the third image and then there's a document that I wanted to s
hare.
Okay.
Yeah. So there is this one. So this one should be from 2018,
and it's a photo of you facilitating a CWP general meeting on strategy.
Yeah. So at this point, um, we
are at,
in Lower Manhattan in 22 Cortland Street.
And
so we made this move from the Harlem office.
This is the Correctional Association,
made this move from the Harlem office to Cortland Street.
This is gonna be a couple of years
at the Harlem office.
We were under the leadership of Sophia Elijah,
who was its executive director.
And so then she moved on and we had an interim
executive director, a person named Carlton Mitchell.
And the organization at that point was going through some restructuring and
some downsizing.
And so we moved from the Harlem office to 22 Cortland.
So this is in the conference room. We shared a space with Seed Co.,
um, another human services organization. And in this conference room,
we were working at this time with a consultant
at Groundswell, a woman named Lisa Castellanos,
on some strategic planning questions for the coalition,
trying to see if we could kind of assess where we were,
see if we wanted to do kind of a reset.
So if you look at the questions on the paper,
like 'what's the strategic gap that the CWP is uniquely equipped to fill?'
and those kinds of things, like,
those are the questions that we were grappling with. The consultant,
Lisa Castellanos was there,
and there were other members of the coalition who were there.
So that's what this photo is about, or that's what was happening here.
Hmm. Okay, Cool.
Yeah, the information from this-this is one of the
planning sessions. Eventually,
the information that we gathered in this session and other strategic planning
sessions will get pulled into and be used and
culminate in the work and our decision to sunset the coalition, actually.
So this is the early part of this impact assessment-what
later became, like, impact assessment work. But we were just,
we were starting to grapple with the questions like,
do we need to pivot? How are we doing?
What are we doing?
What's this moment in 2018 mean for us?
Where's the coalition going? That, all that kind of stuff.
That's the start of this.
All right, cool. Thank you for that description. And with that,
I'm going to move over
to...
The-this is the report.
Yeah, this is the report.
Yeah. So this is the report. It's
an internal report to the NoVo Foundation,
that presented
the views of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated
women on the repurposing of the Bayview
Correctional Facility, which is in lower Manhattan.
So what was happening at this time is that
Bayview Correctional Facility had been,
this was one of the medium-security-or minimum-security
prisons for women located in lower Manhattan-I think it's around 11th
Street and12th Avenue or something like that. And
it got flooded during Hurricane Sandy and the women
who were housed there were moved to
other of the prisons, principally,
probably Taconic correctional facility 'cause that's a medium and closer by. So
it was sitting empty.
And the Novo Foundation was working with the
state to try to have the building repurposed to be
a global
women's building that focused on
women and kind of healing from trauma and
interpersonal violence.
And so this was,
we were approached by NoVo to get the perspective
of directly-impacted women, women who are incarcerated,
women who were previously incarcerated, involved in advocacy.
And so it's a
project that I was involved in.
Tamar asked me if I was interested in helping with the information
gathering piece. And I was the point person on that.
And so there were two pieces that we did in gathering information.
One is I did a series,
maybe three,
focus groups with the women who were
really involved in the coalition where they had a leadership role as
a co-chair or chair of a committee,
or they were active on one of the coalition's committees.
So those groups I pulled together in focus groups.
And then I did a series of key informant interviews also with some
women leaders from the coalition as well,
who also had leadership roles in the community in other ways.
And then the third piece, so it was focus groups, key informant interviews,
and then the third piece was a survey that we sent
inside through our privileged mail status,
so that people could volunteer inside to answer the survey and return the
survey. And we got a good response rate. We got about 300 surveys back, I think.
And so women would weigh in that way.
And I took all that information and it culminated in this report.
So this is the cover of the report and,
"Valued Because We are Women," the
title came from,
you know, for me, when I work on projects,
I always-the words of the women are always so powerful.
So somewhere among one of the interviews or focus groups,
somebody said this,
'cause that's where usually I look to kind of pull the title for things.
And certainly in the inside cover
of the report,
you're gonna see a quote and definitely that's a quote from one of the women as
well. So that's what this is.
If you scroll down some, here it is, right?
"A warm, loving, caring,
helping experience where girls and women can go and feel safe and want it and
try to do better themselves and feel great doing it and educate themselves for
a better world," right.
So this is what a woman in Albion who returned
her survey said. So,
all through it you're gonna see the thoughts and the perspectives and
the vision of all of the women that I talked to in the
different ways that I explained. So that's what this is. And this was
a document for NoVo to use 'cause at that time what they were doing is they were
gathering information.
They wanted to make sure that they got the perspectives and the ideas and
the vision of women who were incarcerated and home from incarceration in
leadership roles. They used this in their process.
They had a series of town hall meetings, many-at that time,
they were very ambitious.
They were trying to talk to like 400 women from various walks of life to
get information on like,
what should this women's building be about and look like?
And I know moving forward, Anisah was on one
of the advisory groups for this along with some other people who
were also part of the coalition. And
in one of their early kind of town hall discussion groups,
they pulled excerpts from the report
and used those to help as,
I guess as a tool or a way to spark discussion in the town hall.
So they were able to take information from this report and then they pulled it
into the bigger community
town hall discussions that they were having, which I thought was great,
because the women's ideas and words, you know,
they're behind the wall so they couldn't participate in person,
but their ideas and their words were definitely part of our process that they
were doing in the beginning.
And when you say Anisah, Anisa's full name is Anisah Sabur?
Anisa Subur-Mumin.
Yes. Mm-hmm. . Okay, cool. And,
let me
stop the share. And, right,
so the next document I wanted to share was the "Prison Within Prison:
Voices of Women Held In Isolated Confinement in New York." And this is the
document from 2020.
Yes. So
this report-the genesis of this
report comes from a more global kind of request
from
the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement:
CAIC, c-a-i-c,
which is a group that still exists.
It was formed to fight to end the use of solitary confinement in
the New York State prisons and jails.
It finally had a win;
it was a 10 year campaign for ending the use
of solitary in the prisons. And so now it's in an implementation stage,
but not in the jails yet. And so the campaign continues in, like,
the New York City jail system, there's a bill,
actually,
last week that this New York City Council reintroduced to try
to end the use of solitary confinements in the jail systems, for example,
like at Rikers Island.
But when-and so now we were at 22 Cortland,
that's where the Correctional Association wasat that time of this report we were
working on. And an advocate for CAIC, an organizer for CAIC,
Victor Pate,
would always ask us in the Coalition for Women-those of us in the Coalition
for Women Prisoners-could you help us find some women with
experience
with solitary confinement inside to be a part
of the Speaker's Bureau that they would have.
They had a Speaker's bureau where they would regularly have people
who knew what it was like to be in solitary talk to the public about that
experience.
And then they also wanted to increase the number of women who were just involved
in the CAIC campaign generally. And it was a bit of a challenge.
We did have women-Anisah was definitely one that was involved.
We had some women who would share their lived experiences at the Speaker's
Bureau. But at one point I said,
"Okay, listen, we, I think that we can do a
report on lived experiences because I knew that women
who were in Reconnect and part of the coalition as leaders,
we could get those stories from them." And so-and I had,
this is not-this is one of a number of kind of reports
or either like booklet projects where
I would have a process working
with women to share their lived experience and put it out there in the form
either of a book with resources or a report that could be used as an advocacy
tool. So that was the purpose of this.
We wanted to create an advocacy tool that specifically
had women's experiences in solitary,
whether it was in the prisons or at Rikers Island,
so that CAIC could use it as part of the advocacy when they went
to educate elected officials about why we needed to end the use of solitary.
And the process that we-I used for this is
I identified about 25-I asked for volunteers,
and I got about 25 women who said,
"I'll share my story." I knew from my work with the women and from our
monitoring, kind of the different-not
just the ways that solitary was used inside,
people are also often put in what's called the box.
There's also a process called 'keep lock,' where you're not put in
the box like a cell by yourself,
but you're held in isolation in your dorm area and your
privileges are restricted.
I also knew that there were ways that
being in solitary affected the ability of women to see their
children, contact their family,
or if they had mental health issues or if they had addiction issues,
how that would affect their health and their wellbeing.
So I did a series for those who volunteered to share.
I did a series of interviews with them and
pulled that information together into-that was the basis
of the stories that were shared in this document. In addition,
I worked with a-he calls himself a graphic
activist. He's an artist and graphic artist, Troy Lambert. And we had done,
again, work on a number of projects at the CA.
We worked with him- he helped us to develop the logo using
a process with Reconnect participants, My Sister's Keeper,
the reentry booklet. We did a housing booklet.
So Troy was somebody as an artist that we had already
worked with. So I engaged him again,
we asked for a small group of volunteers and we got a few people to work with
us. And we did some collage work with
Troy. We did
a creative process where we talked about just how can
we convey visually what it means for women
when they're in solitary confinement, and how can we convey that image-wise?
And so we shared that information.
We created images, and what you see here,
the images are the result of that. So if you can go to the beginning,
one
of the things that women who were involved in the image-making process
talked about-stop on this image- is that how solitary is so isolating
and it reduces you, right.
And so that's what you see in this image here. It's like you're in
prison within prison is what one of the people who were interviewed said, right.
And then, so this image represents that,
like, just the ways that it shrinks a person.
The other thing that women talked about is that
when women were in solitary, they would cry a lot.
You would hear them crying, you would hear them moaning,
just this very audible kind of
experience of women in isolation.
And so if you move to some of the other images,
you'll see tears. So stop on this image.
So these words were what a number
of women would say is how solitary makes you feel, you know,
humiliated and small and withdrawn and and a
disorienting kind of feeling because when you were taken,
even whether it was 10 days or longer, you come out,
you were away from the community, right. You were away from people.
People talked about not even remembering, like I lost track of the days.
I lost track of my sensibility,
the way that I can keep track of my things, my life in prison life.
And then because you didn't know what was happening,
you were afraid and you were isolated.
You didn't know whether something was gonna happen to you while you were in
solitary because you're locked away from people.
So that's what some of these words represent,
and the stories are there in the report.
But you'll see a lot of the images have women crying in tears because that was
one of the universal kind of overwhelming things that women talked about-is that
they really just had a lot of emotions and solitary-and
me crying, just trying to cope.
We also wanted to make sure because in
prison you have a range of ages,
but we wanted to make sure that older women were represented because the women
would talk about, just in general,
kind of because of the way that mass criminalization works,
that a lot of the women who were coming to prison were tending to get younger.
I heard that in my early years in Reconnect.
So they're getting younger and younger,
yet you do have a lot of women in prison who were older,
who have been there for a while. In Reconnect,
once women got home and they were interested in advocacy,
the the age range would go from like 35 to maybe
55 or 60. I could have women in that age range.
It was not unusual for me to have women in their fifties and sixties
who were home and then wanting to know their rights and trying to, you know,
get their lives back on the track that they want them.
So we wanted to make sure that we had an image that also kind of represented
older women. So that's what this image is about.
And then if you move forward some more,
one of the women in the group, in her collage,
she made a fist with different colors and words,
and we used her collage image to make sure that was represented in the report
at the end around taking action. We
used that to create this image.
And you'll see in some of the other pictures-this report again,
was used as an advocacy tool. So we had it,
we can make it available to people and
elected officials. It's on as part of the resources on the CAIC website.
So it's there to be used.
Anisah and other women would use some of the images as background on their
Zoom. So, you know,
during the pandemic when we couldn't-there's two things. One
is we created big posters of these images so that when we
were going to Albany and-CAIC had a replica cell that they would set up-that
we would have the posters from this report.
There were two-also with the cell so that we could also talk about the impact of
women, right, being held in the cell.
We also would give this-we had some elected officials who were interested in
women's issues,
who wanted to know specifically about women so that we had a report that we
could put in their hands. So
that is the way that the report was used in
the fight to get the law passed to end the use of
solitary confinement in the prisons. By the time
the pandemic came around, and we were talking about-and
we were online,
Anisah would use some of the images as her Zoom background.
So it was great to kind of have this, because it was just multi-purpose,
she could use it. And that's exactly what we wanted. It's an advocacy tool,
so you could take it. One other thing we did is
that we would use it for presentations. So Anisah and two other advocates
used the
images as a backdrop.
When they went to talk to a Unitarian church,
one of the members of the CAIC campaign was a leader in the Unitarian church.
And so they went out to, I think it's Long Island,
where the church was located and used the images
kind of in the way that you're scrolling through with me to tell their story
to talk about the campaign and why it was important for them to support and
contact their elected official about supporting the bill. And,
you know, the images could be there as they're talking.
So there's some pictures in the archives of that that you'll
see, the use of the images and the big posters with the replica cell,
and then also as the backdrop as women would do public speaking.
Yeah, I remember when we went to visit
Anisah to pick up Anisah's collection that, like,
that poster was one of the things that...
Yeah.
We took along with us.
Yeah.
Okay.
So early on we had,
it was a forest green T-shirt that had Reconnect on the back and it has the
words "who I will be" on the back.
And that came about when
we were down at 15th Street,
the Correctional Association had an artist in-residence, Kathy Engel,
who also had another artist partner at the time, Tiye
Giraud. And we,
they were working with a group of women from Reconnect on
a performance piece that ended up being performed at HBO.
So you'll see in the Archives that there's a group picture,
and in it is Susan Taylor and Bob and the WIPP staff
and a bunch of women who were in a performance.
And then Tiye and Kathy are there,
and at maybe even Eve Ensler is in that group
photo. So that's from the performance at the HBO space.
And the women wrote that performance. So,
I also gave you the script that ended up being developed. So,
Kathy and Tiye worked with the women in a process
to kind of gather the information and put it together
in a script for the performance piece.
And then they decided to combine that,
see the stage, they're sitting on stools on stage,
and they're each reading from the content.
And Tiye is the music accompaniment,
and it was a WIPP fundraiser that
was performed at HBO. And so from that,
Stacey was also having some of the women start to meet together
in an alumni group, right.
And we decided to have some t-shirts made
for the group,
and they decided to have a line from
that performance piece, Who I Will Be,
which I think is the title of the piece on the back of those t-shirts.
So that's the story behind the first T-shirt. Okay.
So then later on down the line, when we're at,
in the Harlem office space,
this was a more practical kind of reason. By that time,
you'll notice,
like I gave you a big notebook with all the information that women would get
from the community trainers and stuff like that.
That was kind of the big bible or encyclopedia that women would end up having.
And they didn't have anything to carry it in, right?
So they started to say like, "we love having a notebook.
It has all our information in it and stuff,
but it's heavy and we need something to carry it in." I said, "Okay,
so let me see about getting some tote bags." And I
was swimming at one of the pools in the New York City Parks and Recreation,
and the lifeguard was a guy that had a side business called
Pigs and Blankets that did hats and t-shirts and stuff.
So we were talking back and forth and I said, "Oh,
do you think you can do some for me, for my,
for program that I have?" And he said yeah. So
I gave him the logo and he put it on,
We had purple tote bags, and then we got,
he had these peach colored t-shirts and he put the logo on that and we all
thought they looked good.
So all the T-shirts got handed out and we had tote bags to give to each class
cycle for Reconnects that they could have something to carry the bags in.
So that's that. And I'll share one other story. This goes back
our logo
and brochure and application,
we worked on that at 15th Street with Troy.
That was the first time that I engaged Troy and another friend
of mine who's communication specialist called Vivian. Her name is Vivian Todini.
We worked on the images and the content to create the logo and the brochure,
redesign our application and all of that. So, um,
we worked with about five women in a series of sessions where
again, it was about sharing ideas, like,
what do you think a logo should look like?
What should be a tagline in a brochure?
What should we say in a brochure to people, pulling
all that together.
And one thing that I love about the brochure is the back page of the brochure
has all these affirmations that's straight from the women.
That's straight from the women. There's
no editing or anything like that. That's all their words. So,
um,
in the beginning we had a business card where people could write in their name,
had a logo, it could write in their name. So when they're doing advocacy,
they could hand out a business card. Um, we had the brochure,
we had the application, and Stacey would go,
when we'd do presentations and outreach,
we had a nice brochure and application that we could give to people to hand
in that had a very strong image. And so,
you know, the, the program had a brand early on that they
created.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah.
And in regards to the
HBO or the fundraiser that was held at HBO,
that was a story that was discussed when we shared that image with Anisah.
Yeah, yeah. Cause she was in it. Anisah's
2005 and that was that class. A number
of the women who were in that were from the 2005 class.
Yeah, and
I imagine there isn't a recording of that?
No, I don't know because I mean,
Kathy Engel would be one to see if there's a recording,
and then
Tamar or Jaya would know of the contact at HBO
to see if there was a recording of it,
and it would be nice if there was. But I just don't know. Eve
Ensler spoke, another woman whose name I'm not gonna remember,
but she was a comedian and she's also a minister, she spoke,
and then the women did the performance. It was nice, you know,
folks in the coalition came in support. So you'll see a lot of the,
there's a number of pictures at the
cocktail hour after that have pictures of folks in the coalition,
kind of mingling, who had attended the event, but yeah.
Yep.
So fond memories of that for the folks who were in it.
One person who's in it is not alive anymore.
But other folks have gone on, Anisah,
you know, Anisah is knee deep in advocacy.
Another one of those folks is an executive director at another advocacy
organization. And I'm about to do some work with
another of those folks. We're gonna do
some advocacy training in a hospital setting for
people who take medication-assisted treatment. So,
you know,
it's just great to be able to-a lot of the folks in Reconnect and in the
coalition have gone on to do just amazing things.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that must be a nice feeling of like,
starting with these people and then like they're at this point where they're.
To just be able to continue to work together. Yeah, Yeah.
For sure. I hear that.
Yep.
Cool.