“For a minute, I’m like, ‘You know that person you’re dancing next to, smiling with, that’s your correctional officer?’” said Porter, a research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, who was on hand to witness a family engagement day at Vera and the MILPA Collective’s two Restoring Promise units in South Carolina a few years ago. The Restorin ...

The 13th Amendment may have outlawed the enslavement of Black people, but the United States continues to devise new ways to uphold the racist hierarchies that slavery was founded on and to restrict the freedom of the descendants of enslaved people. Today, we see alarming echoes of the Reconstruction Era, when unjust laws prevented emancipated ensl ...

Series: Women's Voices