What does 10 years of healing, community, and power make possible for women with incarcerated loved ones? We ended the month of June with our Spring 2024 Healing to Advocacy graduations in Los Angeles and Oakland. Our graduation ceremonies are not only a celebration of Read More The post 10 years and 475 members later… appeared first on Essie Justice ..read more

This Black Mama’s Bail Out season, Essie Sisters and staff successfully secured the freedom of two Black mamas just in time for the Mother’s Day holiday! On Friday, May 10, led by our Campaign Team Lead TK, we arrived at West County Detention Facility in the Bay Area and handed over two checks totaling $405,000 to bail out Ms. L and Ms. T. It took us 6 hours from the moment we approached the desk to post bail until the heartwarming reunion of both Ms. L and Ms. T with their loved ones. “The incarceration of Black mothers we bail out is not just a failure of society’s care infrastructure, it ..read more

Essie Justice Group’s community is heartbroken by the loss of Hope Wood and Peggy Moore, founders and principals at Hope Action Change. Our hearts ache for all who loved Hope and Peggy — especially members of their family, who Hope would describe with such detail and fondness that they became core to the profound wisdom Hope shared with us daily. For the past five years, Essie’s community of members and staff worked extensively with Hope and Peggy. Their relationship with Essie Justice Group defied typical consultancy. From designing and managing hiring processes to making important introduc ..read more

Dear Friends, We recently got a phone call from one of our public defender contacts. She told us that right now a Black mother is incarcerated in California simply because she cannot afford bail, and her 9-year-old daughter is saving her allowance money to bail her out.  After visiting her in jail yesterday, we’ve been raising money to bail her out before Mother’s Day. We have a team of women with incarcerated loved ones who stand ready to bring her home this week. But we need your help.  Will you give a Mother’s Day gift of freedom to this Black mama and her daughter? We have $35,0 ..read more

Essie Sister, Jo Kreiter, is a nationally recognized choreographer and site artist. She has spent 28 years building coalitions with women marginalized by race, class, gender, and workplace inequities. We had the opportunity to talk with Jo about the “why” behind her powerful short film The Wait Room, her interview process for the project, and what she wishes people knew about women with incarcerated loved ones. What were the types of experiences that you had, or heard from other women with incarcerated loved ones, that inspired your short film, The Wait Room? I conceived the project when I le ..read more

For the first two years of [Cassandra] Butler’s brother’s current sentence, he was in Walla Walla, and the drive to visit him took about two hours. When her brother was transferred to Clallam Bay around 2010, Butler’s journey grew to eight and a half hours each direction. Now, Butler lives in Puyallup and her brother has since been moved across the state to Coyote Ridge Corrections Center, still over 200 miles, or three and a half hours, away. The long distance requires Butler to get a hotel for the entire weekend so she can visit on consecutive days and make the most of the long drive. In a ..read more

“We can build a path to freedom, not just for ourselves and for our families, but for ourselves as a people against all these systems that need to go. And that’s what we’ve been up to. Fifty cohorts later we’re still standing right here.” — Gina Clayton-Johnson, Essie Founder & Executive Director During our Fall 2023 Healing to Advocacy Graduation season we celebrated our 50th cohort since launching our Healing to Advocacy Program in 2014! And if there’s one thing that never fails to come out of Essie’s Graduation Season, it’s the confirmation that there is love, unity, and power i ..read more

Written by Gina Clayton-Johnson, originally published by The Grio. Mass incarceration is family separation “on repeat,” creating mass isolation and loneliness. And Black women, who often have incarcerated family members, are an unrecognized casualty of those isolating effects. I first met Tyshion when she came to Essie Justice Group in 2019, right before the pandemic. Like many of us, Tyshion had loved ones who were incarcerated. Through our Healing to Advocacy program, she was beginning to understand just how deeply isolated she felt and what true community felt like. And ..read more

“We can build a path to freedom, not just for ourselves and for our families, but for ourselves as a people against all these systems that need to go. And that’s what we’ve been up to. Fifty cohorts later we’re still standing right here.” — Gina Clayton-Johnson, Essie Founder & Executive Director During our Fall 2023 Healing to Advocacy Graduation season we celebrated our 50th cohort since launching our Healing to Advocacy Program in 2014! And if there’s one thing that never fails to come out of Essie’s Graduation Season, it’s the confirmation that there is love, unity, and power in Sist ..read more

Transformative safety is possible when we follow the leadership of Black women.  History is clear that we cannot achieve genuine safety and liberation for all people until we abandon policing, prisons, and punitivity. As Black people continue to experience violence at the hands of police and disproportionately higher rates of incarceration, and as our communities face mounting attacks against our bodily autonomy, lawmakers must prioritize the safety of our communities. Essie Justice Group supports Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo) in her reintroduction of the People’s Response Act — a movem ..read more