'Free Her Rally' Draws Crowd to National Mall by Glynn A. Hill

June 23, 2014

Free Her Rally organizer, Andrea James, addresses the crowd at Saturday's rally on the National Mall. PHOTO: Glynn A. Hill/TriceEdneyWire.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com)—Gray clouds and occasional drizzle didn’t stop more than 200 people from gathering on the National Mall Saturday to protest and demand an end to the alarming incarceration rate of women - disparately African-American.

Some came from as far as New Haven, Conn. for the rally, which featured speakers, singers, and a spoken word performance aimed at continuing to raise awareness of criminal justice disparities.

“Our focus is on the women and bringing them home,” said Andrea James, executive director of Families for Justice as Healing, a Boston, Mass.-based criminal justice reform group. She was also the organizer of the Free Her Rally. “It’s important to help the rest of the country understand how very wrong this slippery slope we’ve gone down is in terms of incarcerating women, particularly those who are African-American; and the impact it’s had on our children and our communities,” she said.

There are currently more than 200,000 women in prison or jail in the United States. That figure represents an increase of over 800 percent in the past three decades according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Of those women in state prisons, more than half have been sentenced for drug or property crimes, which are non-violent offenses. In 2005, just 35 percent of women in prison were convicted of violent offenses, according to the BJS.

The rate of incarceration for African-American women has declined over the last 15 years, dropping 30.7 percent between 2000 and 2009. Yet, they are still imprisoned at nearly three times the rate of White women and have a higher incarceration rate than Hispanic women, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group, pressing for reform.

Most of the speakers had friends and relatives who had been incarcerated or were imprisoned at some point themselves. They spoke about their personal experiences with a criminal justice system that they feel punishes communities just as much as individuals. For them, when mothers go behind bars, there are wide-ranging repercussions that intimately affect those around them.

“It’s destroying our communities,” said Patricia Allard, an attorney from New York who spoke at the rally.

“When you take a mother away from her child for a non-violent offense, you are essentially sentencing the child as well,” she said. “People talk about harm reduction around drug use. Instead I’d like to talk about reducing the harm that the prison industrial complex does to families.”

In 2007, approximately 65,600 women in federal and state custody reported being the mothers of 147,400 minor children, according to a BJS special report. It said that 77 percent of incarcerated mothers reported providing most of the daily care for their children before incarceration. Eleven percent of incarcerated mothers reported that their children were being placed in foster care, compared to only two percent of fathers.

For advocates, this is also an issue of human rights.

“These are women who couldn’t even attend their own child’s funeral,” said Dorothy Johnson Speight, the founder and executive director of Mothers in Charge, which works toward violence prevention, education and intervention for youth, young adults, families and community organizations.

Speight says events like the Free Her Rally are important for raising awareness to ultimately bring about change.

If the change in lifestyle isn’t evident when incarcerated women are sentenced, it becomes clear after they are released.

Women face significant obstacles in effectively reentering society and providing for themselves and their children as they find themselves restricted from governmental assistance programs. Some states even impose bans on people with certain convictions working in certain industries such as nursing, child care, and home health care.

In light of this, there has been some progress on incarceration disparities.

The 2010 Fair Sentencing Act narrowed the disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses. In 2013, President Obama granted clemency to 21 individuals (eight commutations and thirteen pardons).

Despite those successes, advocates are looking for more. They say that the passage of the Smarter Sentencing Act would help, but more must be done to heal the cultural scars that harsh or unfair sentences have done to communities.

James is the final speaker. When she is done talking, the crowd bursts out with chants of “Free Her! Free Her!”

James says this is only the beginning and that the next step is building off of their momentum.

“We’re working hard to get commutation for the women we support,” she said. “We’ve been around the country twice with the Free Her Rally, coming together and coalition-building. We want to push the legislation from state to state to make change, and ultimately bring the women in the federal system home too.”