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June 28, 2002
"Cynthia Chandler and Cassandra Shaylor of Justice Now"
An interview with Cynthia Chandler and Cassandra Shaylor of Justice Now, and 2001 Leadership for a Changing World awardees. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 12 pm EST on Friday, June 28. You may ask a question in advance by clicking on the "Submit a Question" button. Due to time constraints, not all questions will be answered. You may need to refresh your screen during the interview to read the most recent responses.
read background Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks. Today's guests are Cynthia Chandler and Cassandra Shaylor, Co-Directors of Justice Now.
Cynthia and Cassandra, can you give us a little background on yourselves and tell us how you got involved in this work?
Cynthia Chandler
We both often joke that our work is a calling. But more seriously, I cannot imagine not working toward social change--confronting injustices. From an early age I was aware of social inequities and the importance and strength in challenging them. I’ve had a lot of strong women in my life that encouraged me to question authority and strive against the status quo. That attitude has informed everything I’ve done, from activism to going to law school and becoming a lawyer.
Cassandra: My first exposure to prison issues was as a law student intern with the Women in Prison Project at the National Women’s Law Center. That experience had a profound impact on me; once I found out what was going on inside prisons in this country, it was impossible for me to imagine turning away from that work to do something else. I believe that result is precisely why prisons are maintained as closed institutions in this society – I think the transformation that happened in me would happen to many other people if they only knew what devastation we are wreaking by locking up so many people. As a white person who had grown up in a small town in the South, I had seen the impact of structural inequalities -- particularly those based on race -- all of my life. But it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I was able to find a way to struggle against those injustices in a way that I believed could have an impact.
Kensington Maryland
I was incarcerated for 3 years and have spent the last year working to reclaim my life. I am committed to in working in the area of re-entry programs for women as well as developing programs for the children of incarcerated parents in my area as there are none. Typically, in every discussion being held currently in this state, the voice that is missing from the table is "mine" (the voice of the offender) - who better to know my needs than me and who better to know what obstacles I am facing but me. My question is quite simply, how do I get invited to the table?
Cassandra Shaylor
I think that you're identifying a really important and often neglected issue. Given how much emphasis is put on higher education and professional degrees, it's no wonder prisoners are not invited to the table.
Cynthia: I think this is a problem, you know, beyond just the prisoner rights movement. I think it's a problem among many movements that are attempting to affect social change and that all too often people fail to look to people who really know the issues the best to get the answers and then the solutions they come up with are fundamentally flawed, and I believe that's one of the reasons we're in the incredibly desperate situation we are today. We're imprisoning more and more people. So I want to commend you for your courage and strength and for your solutions to this problem and I want to encourage former prisoners and their families to demand that service organizations and political groups and other organizations in their area include prisoners in their work.
Given that you mention that in your area there aren't existing organizations for reentry and programs for kids with imprisoned parents that there are resources in other areas of the country that you could look to for ideas and support, and Justice Now being one, for example.
Weymouth, MA
How do you involve the women you are serving in the decision-making process? How do you ensure that their voices are heard?
Cassandra Shaylor
Because we recognize the importance of having the people who are most impacted by the system directing our work, we are in constant communication with the women we work with and for. We visit with prisoners at least every other week, and our work is influenced especially by women prisoners whom we have supported as peer organizers and who serve on our Community Board. These organizers reflect our project’s constituency: all are women of color, mothers, and living with life-threatening illnesses. Through visits, phone calls, and correspondence, we work with them on a consistent basis, developing our programs, implementing strategies and training interns. They participate in board meetings, discussing agenda items and commenting on issues that emerge. They are our connection to other women, identifying women who need legal assistance or health information and funneling information between us. As leaders inside the prison, they teach and support other women to become leaders themselves.
Portland, OR
Please provide any insight you might have to the current reports of increasing violence by women and girls. How should we respond as a society?
Cassandra Shaylor
First of all, I would challenge the increasing emphasis on violence among girls and women. In fact, girls in juvenile hall are locked up for truancy and promiscuity and things that boys aren't locked for based on gender. The vast majority of women are locked up for drug-related and economic behaviors that have been criminalized. So I actually dispute the notion that women are increasingly violent.
Cynthia: And then another part of the issue that you bring up is how do we respond to violence generally. We think that it's very important to challenge the idea of prisons as s solution to violence. Instead we see prisons as a form of state-sanctioned violence which targets specifically poor people of color. So we're interested in developing alternative solutions to violence that work to strengthen communities and provide real justice and safety and that don't further destroy entire communities, particularly communities of color.
Cassandra: There is this tendency in the current political climate to focus on and pathologize individuals as opposed to looking at systems of violence and state violence. And we think that's where we really need to be putting our focus.
Colorado Springs, CO
How have you been able to galvanice the community to be more aware and take action on issues that are some of the root causes of imprisonment, such as school reform, poverty and affirmative action?
Cassandra Shaylor
That's a point that we try to make in all of our work all the time, that there are these deep connections between systems that typically or historically have been seen outside of or separate from prisons, that are the places that we really need to be doing a lot of our grass-roots work. We're interestd in building a world without prisons and we don't take that position lightly. We see that in order to realize that world without prisons we have to focus on improving schools, improving health care, ending poverty, fighting hunger and homelessness, that those are the root causes of imprisonment, that we have to simultaneously work to change those institutions at the same time as we're developing alternatives to imprisonment.
Milwaukee, WI
What impact has welfare reform had on the female incarceration rate?
Cynthia Chandler
Welfare reform is just one part of a war on poor people that has led to the mass imprisonment of women of color throughout the country. All too often it is becoming it has become normalized for prisons to be a catch-all solution to basic social needs such as homelessness, hunger, and medical neglect resulting from poverty.
Cassandra: Welfare "deform" is another example of the way in which politicians conistently divert resources that could benefit the community into criminalizing conduct that's a direct response to abject poverty and locking people up instead.
Los Angeles, CA
Have any gender issues arisen in the community or in prisons because you are a woman-led team?
Cassandra Shaylor
The marginalization of women in prison, both within the prisoner rights community and the wider public, creates a constant challenge for us. Despite the fact that women are the fastest growing population in prison, they remain relatively invisible, and the limited representations of women prisoners in news media and popular culture tend to be exploitative and highly inaccurate. Related to that is the fact that it is often difficult for us to interrupt the assumption that “prisoner” always means “male prisoner” and to challenge the tendency of people to ignore the reality of and the importance of what is happening to women inside as well as men.
And of course we know that the work that has built social movements throughout history has often been work done by women, many of whom were marginalized while men get the bulk of the credit. Most people know a lot about Martin Luther King but very little about Ella Baker for example. I think we certainly continue to see that in the work that goes on today; men get tremendous financial support, media attention, and are consulted with and identified as “the leaders” in social movements, while the women are behind the scenes doing the work.
New York
What do you think the differences are in running a program such as yours in a woman's facility as compared to a men's facility?
Do you believe men and women respond differently to this type of programming?
Cassandra Shaylor
The first thing is that we don't run any program out of a facility, that we specifically work in an adversarial relationship to the prison system. Our work more broadly challenges the prison industrial complex and, therefore, benefits men and women. Both men and women in prison and their families face extreme depravation and devastation through imprisonment. We focus on women prisoners in particular because of their further marginalization due to the fact that they are women in a sexist society.
Bronx, New York
I agree that our society places to much emphasis on prisons as a way of punshing individuals for various crimes or so-called crimes. But could you please discuss the alternative solutions to prisons that are being developed?
Cynthia Chandler
We've been interviewing women prisoners to get their ideas on this specific topic because of their experience being survivors of both interpersonal and state violence and they are particularly suited to come up with much needed alternatives.
Cassandra: In talking to those women, when we've asked them what it was they were looking for from the police to respond to a situation of violence in their lives, what it usually comes down to was that people were looking for safety and accountability from the person who harmed them. And we think it's very important to recognize that accountability and punishment are very different things, and we need to develop ways for people to be accountable to each other when violent things happen in their communities without removing those people and creating more violence through prison.
Cynthia: The solutions the women we work with have come up with include finding ways where people can give back to both the people they've hurt and their communities through service or through financial aid. But overall their solutions have been about preserving and stregnthening communities rather than fragmenting them by pulling people out and putting them in prison.
Middlebury, VT
I'm interested in how you work together as a team. How are your roles divided?
Cassandra Shaylor
On a daily basis, we work together collaboratively as Co-Directors of Justice Now, taking equal responsibility for day-to-day project operations and programmatic and administrative decisions. Our division of labor is fluid—both of us truly are involved equally in all layers of the organization and our work – which means we spend a lot of time talking with each other about what needs to be done and how to approach the work. We don’t have rigid divides in terms of roles; we base those decisions mostly on which of us has time to take on which tasks.
Also, while the two of us were nominated as a leadership team, it is extremely important for us to acknowledge that we understand our leadership team to include activist women prisoners with whom we work closely. Women in prison direct our programmatic work and guide our campaign strategies, and current and former prisoners serve on our community and national advisory boards.
Birmingham, AL
How do you bring together groups from different backgrounds (i.e. law students, prisoners and their families, etc.) to cooperate on such a polarizing issue?
Cassandra Shaylor
We just do it. It's not as hard as one would think to bring people from those diverse communities together. The real barrier is that people seem to think that those communities can't work side by side, but in reality they can work very effectively together. In our office we are very clear that everyone who comes in the door learn the same skills and are involved in working on the same projects. There's no hierarchy here based on education and experience. Given that we've created that kind of environment we find that people respect each other's differences and skills and experiences and learn a lot from each other as a result.
New York, New York
Whether you look at community-based organization's, or regional or national organization's whose mission is to address, in some way or other, problems of social or economic discrimination, how important is it that these organizations be led by groups/individuals (racial/ethnic) most impacted by the problems?
Can we really have a lasting movement that addresses systemic problems if we do not employ an explicit strategy to ensure the growth of minority leadership of organizations tackling social or economic problems?
Cassandra Shaylor
It's vitally important that those movements be led by the people who are most impacted which is why in our work we place so much emphasis on leadership of the women prisoners we work with. Given what we know about the history of social movements, the movements that have made major transformations in this country have been organized by and supported by the people who were most affected by the issues that were being challenged.
In the anti-prison movement it's clear that the people who know the problems the best and can develop the strategies to respond the best are the people who are the most impacted by the system.
San Juan Capistrano, CA
How can I be informed about, and contribute to, efforts to empower women in prison?
Cynthia Chandler
We want to encourage you to get involved locally in efforts against the prison industrial complex. One way to find out groups near you is to go to the Web site for the Prison Activist Resource Center which is at www.prisonactivist.org.
Cassandra: We think it's incredbily important for people on the outside of prisons to get informed about what's going on inside and get involved and to support the activism of women prisoners. And so we commend you for your interest and encourage everyone to get involved in some way or another.
La Plata, MD
What are the benefits and challenges of sharing leadership responsibilities?
Cassandra Shaylor
From a purely practical perspective, one person alone could not do the work necessary to implement the vision of Justice Now. And as we mentioned, we do complement each other significantly in terms of our skills and experiences, and having someone to bounce strategies and ideas off of helps tremendously in developing both the long-term vision and the day-to-day direction of the work. More importantly, while working closely with prisoners is logistically difficult due to their isolation, our collaborative work with prisoners is essential to realizing our political vision. If we truly believe that the people most impacted by systems of oppression are the folks who need to be in leadership positions to develop strategies and build movement, we need to be committed to that process in our day-to-day work no matter how challenging it is.
Leadership for a Changing World
Your work is extremely challenging on many levels. Navigating complex legal, political and social systems for a population that few care about must be incredibly difficult. How do you personally sustain yourselves and your staff to prevent burnout?
Cynthia Chandler
We work consciously to put positive twists on losses in order to re-motivate ourselves. For example, last August we experienced the loss of a phenomenal prisoner activist named Charisse Shumate. Charisse had worked with us for years and was a board member of Justice Now. We were fighting for her compassionate release and had gained the support of the Department of Corrections, the Board of Prison Terms, numerous legislators and even corrections officials, but it all hinged finally on the decision of California Governor Gray Davis. He sat on the petition, refused to take action, and Charisse died in prison. Her death was devastating to our entire community. In response, together with Art and Revolution, a San Francisco-based cultural collective, we built a 15-foot-tall woman prisoner puppet modeled after Charisse that takes to the streets at rallies and demonstrations to raise awareness about the prison system. It was essential to find a way to strengthen our activism in Charisse’s honor, and she lives on in our work every day.
Cassandra: I think it is incredibly important for us to develop and hold on to a long-term vision of the kind of world we want to live in. At Justice Now our vision of that world is one that no longer locks people up in prisons, and we really do believe that it is possible to build such a world, starting now. In fact, we are currently launching a new “Building a World Without Prisons” campaign, the goals of which are to expose the local and global impact of the prison industrial complex, bring to the forefront the experiences of women prisoners, promote tangible alternatives to imprisonment, and shift the popular understanding of prisons as an acceptable solution to social problems. Though that work won’t be accomplished overnight, working on a campaign that is as large as this one keeps us from getting overwhelmed by the everyday suffering and pain that is created and sustained by the current prison system. We know that another world is possible, and we see our work as one part of making that world a reality.
Leadership for a Changing World
Unfortunately that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for participating in Leadership Talks. For more information on Justice Now, contact:
Justice Now
1322 Webster Street
Suite 210
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: (510) 839-7654
Email: cshaylor@earthlink.net
Email: wplan@pacbell.net
Cassandra Shaylor
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