TESTIMONY IN OPPOSITION TO BILL H.

1434
HEARING BEFORE THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
APRIL 24, 2014
Dear Members of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary:
Thank you for this opportunity to submit oral and written testimony
regarding Bill H. 1434, an Act relative to the establishment of a
womens pretrial facility in Middlesex County.
I am the Executive Director and Founder of Families for Justice as
Healing. We are a criminal justice reform, legislative advocacy
organization and we advocate for community wellness alternatives to
incarceration. Our members are formerly incarcerated women and we
advocate on behalf of women. As an organization, Families for Justice
as Healing is a member of the Massachusetts Pretrial Working Group
and other state and federal criminal justice reform coalitions. We stand
opposed to Bill H. 1434.
As a criminal justice professional, a former criminal defense attorney
and a formerly incarcerated woman, I have experience in the criminal
justice system, including prisons, from a unique, comprehensive
perspective. My testimony today is shaped by all of those experiences,
but mostly comes from a place of first-hand knowledge about being an
incarcerated woman and mother.
I oppose the building or expansion of jails in the Commonwealth,
particularly for pretrial women, because due to the overwhelmingly
exhaustive and dehumanizing culture of the prison environment, prison
will never be a place where people truly can begin to address their
needs and begin to heal and advance their lives. Prison is surely not a
place where people who have yet to be convicted of anything should
be held unnecessarily simply because they cannot afford bail. We
should not be building more prisons to warehouse people who are too
poor to get out.
70% of incarcerated women were the primary caregivers of their
children prior to their incarceration. We should do all that we can to
assure that women in need of help, and their children, receive that
help together and we provide them resources within their own
communities.

There are now successful models of community wellness alternatives

that are replacing prisons as holding places for people in need of
trauma based treatment, mental health counseling, treatment for
addiction, housing assistance, and with the challenges related to
generational poverty. Programs like GreenHope in Harlem New York
and the Womens Prison Associations Justice Home Project. Right here
in Massachusetts we have places like On the Rise in Cambridge that
provides a safe place and an array of resources and services for
women in need of help while meeting women where they are in terms
of their individual needs. One reason these community-based
alternatives are successful is that instead of separating people from
their own communities, they work with women so they can build
supportive social networks and create healthy, productive lives within
the communities in which they live. A healthy social network is critical
for women and children to thrive. Removing people from communities
and keeping them locked away destabilizes individuals, families and
entire communities.
I want to share with you something I never would have understood
from all of my years as a criminal justice professional, had I not been
an incarcerated woman. There are two things that hang in the air at a
womens prison. Fear and deep sadness caused by the separation of
mothers from their children. Separating mothers from children is
something that should be avoided in all cases, if at all possible.
Someday in our Commonwealths future we will look back on this
period of misguided criminal justice policy and the push to build more
jails and
jaillike facilities, while many states are trending toward smarter, more
effective solutions, and we will regret our failure to change sooner.
In closing, I implore this Committee to research and implement
community wellness alternatives instead of building more jails or jaillike facilities. There is a great deal of evidence that proves the
successes and cost effectiveness of community wellness alternatives
rather than costly and harmful incarceration. It is fiscally irresponsible
to tax payers for there to be new jail building legislation for women and
men being held pretrial, prior to our legislators fully exploring and
implementing pretrial community based wellness alternatives. For
these reasons we stand opposed to Bill H. 1434.
Thank you.
Andrea James

Families for Justice as Healing, 197A Humboldt Avenue, Boston, MA

02121
(617) 749-3129, www.justiceashealing.org