Abolition & Gender Justice with Courtney Hanson
California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) is a grassroots social justice organization, with members inside and outside prison. They challenge the insitutional violence imposed on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison industrial complex (PIC). CCWP demands the abolition of a prison system whose purpose is punishment, control and the warehousing of human beings, the majority of whom are people of color and poor.
Blue Heart’s Lindley Mease had the honor of speaking with Courtney Hanson, CCWP’s development and communications coordinator.
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley Mease: Can you start by sharing a little bit about you and how you ended up in this work? What are a few milestones of your journey that really stand out as important for bringing you to where you are today?
Courtney Hanson: My name is Courtney Hanson and I’m the Development and Communications Coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). I first became politicized in college around issues of public education. I grew up with my aunt incarcerated. She was a survivor who was criminalized and did about a decade in prison. She’s out now, but I honestly didn’t know how to think critically about that scenario until I personally experienced an arrest. That made me an abolitionist overnight and I recognized that we shouldn’t be caging people to deal with our societal ills. CCWP has really been holding down advocacy with and for people in California women’s prison since 1995. And I’ve been a part of that community for a very long time. I came on board as staff in the last few years.
Lindley: What are some of the cornerstones of your change or vision?
Courtney: Well, CCWP was founded as an inside-outside collaboration 25 years ago. It was really thought up and launched by incarcerated women who were fighting the deadly lack of health care inside the prisons, which remains an issue today. But the backbone of all of our programs is our visiting program. We have teams of people who go into both of our big women’s prison CIW (California Institution for Women) and CCWF (Central California Women’s Facility) regularly and build really deep relationships of trust, friendship, emotional support and also advocacy that’s really directed by the folks inside who are the experts on imprisonment and all the issues that come with it. With the pandemic, those visits have been suspended in person and we’ve continued doing that work through email, phone calls and letter writing. We have launched a new program called Writing Warriors to train new pen pals and to reach more people. So we’re in touch regularly with hundreds of people inside.
We do a lot of policy and legislation work toward deincarcertion and racial justice. We have a campaign called Drop LWOP that’s focused on ending extreme sentencing, such as life without parole. Drop LWOP, in short, is really to push this understanding that life without parole is a form of death sentencing. It’s not a viable, humane alternative to the death penalty. Telling somebody that no matter what you do, you will die in prison. The average age that we sentence somebody to LWOP in California is 19 years old.
I’m always really inspired by CCWP, we prioritize the leadership of formerly incarcerated people and that’s primarily who makes up our staff. But we have a huge community of volunteers that are so dedicated and just part of this vision.
We’ve seen some big waves happen. We’ve seen more people with LWOP come home than ever before. And the only way to do that is something called a commutation from the governor. But it’s working. It’s an uphill battle, but we’re making a dent.
Lindley: Zooming in a little bit more, can you share stories of the work in action or just bring more texture to what the visiting program is like?
Courtney: I would love to send you a video of someone we were able to help bring home at the height of covid. Just for having that visceral understanding of the impact of the work. The video is of Patricia Wright, a cancer patient who was serving life without parole. Her walking out of the prison gates into the arms of her family was just… how could I not wake up tomorrow and keep doing this work when you see those impacts?
The way that we’ve created this model of collective care is really based on those relationships that incarcerated people develop together, to look out for each other. We are constantly seeing people inside refer us to other people who are in really dire situations. Risking serious retaliation, like physical abuse or write-ups from guards to push them to give somebody medical attention. Seeing the courage, bravery and a level of resilience that people should not even be forced to have, keeps us going strong out here.
During the pandemic, we had a huge covid outbreak at CCWF. When we saw those numbers go down, we reclaimed those numbers going down as a result of the care that people showed each other inside. It had nothing to do with the administration and the total lack of health care. Instead how people looked out for each other in the worst of conditions.
Lindley: The work has multiple prongs, it’s individual transformation, collective community transformation, policy work. Can you talk about how your strategy inside and outside of prison is relevant to the ultimate work that you are doing?
Courtney: There’s two parts. I think CCWP historically has done a fantastic job of really pushing a systemic critique that we’re not just trying to make prisons better. We’re trying to bring people home. We’re trying to prevent people from going in. And at the same time, there are really urgent conditions, issues that need attention.
There was a suicide crisis at CIW that we had a campaign around stopping, we’ve passed legislation that eliminated medical co-pays. Those things make a real difference in people’s lives and they’re important. At the same time, the push always needs to be that this institution is not fit for human beings to begin with.
Throughout covid-19, we really had to triage. We need everybody to come home, and people are advocating for each other on the inside on who urgently needs to come home. Somebody with stage four cancer, we are triaging inside our membership. We launched a website called CareNotCages.com, where we’re fighting for individual clemency cases, but we’re making that part of a broader narrative. The motto of covid-19 became “free them all for public health”. We are doing that very individual advocacy because that’s part of building the movement with life without parole. We support individuals with their commutation applications while we’re advocating that every single person sentenced to LWOP should eventually have an opportunity to see the parole board. All 5,200 people across the board. So we’re trying everything all the time.
Lindley: We’ve partnered with other organizations that are working on explicitly dismantling the prison industrial complex or some version of that. Post the summer’s uprisings, there is more understanding of the police industrial complex and the plague of policing. Prison abolition can still be a hairy term for folks, can you share what that means to you?
Courtney: We have a newsletter that circulates widely inside and has content from people inside prisons. We did a whole issue reflecting on the history of our movement and what defunding against white supremacy really meant. We sometimes imagine incarceration and policing from being so much more separate than they really are. We’re all guilty of that in our movements. But police brutality exists on the inside, and that’s what people are living under day in and day out. If police do what they do in broad daylight, imagine what they do behind closed doors. Also in our analysis we always weave in a look at gender and sexuality, and the specific violence that transgender and gender nonconforming folks inside faced at the hands of of police.
That’s another thing I can send you in a follow up, The Fire Inside issue. Whether people are ready to say defund or abolition, I think this summer meant we were no longer looking at cosmetic reform. Again, we don’t just want a more therapeutic prison. We want to stop relying on that system altogether.
Lindley: Maybe you can connect the dots between the specific programs, the policies and why folks on the inside have identified those as the priorities. Also, where do you exist in movement ecosystems for prison abolition?
CH: Totally. I’m glad you brought that up, because we work in a lot of coalitions and we really believe in that model. We have a few long standing relationships I can point to. But for instance, our campaign to End Life Without Parole (LWOP) grew directly out of a storytelling project called A Living Chance. It was a priority of people inside who are thinking about who is always left out, many of them for the first time speaking about what it is like to be incarcerated. We kept seeing people with life without parole get marginalized in so many different ways. No one is really tackling extreme sentencing in the way that it needs to be tackled. When you lift from the bottom, and you’re trying to decriminalize, you will lift everybody up with that.
And as far as partnerships, we are an active member of CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide coalition. We were a big part of No New Jails SF, the jail fight in San Francisco. We’re big in that anti jail work in L.A. as well. We do a lot of work around reproductive justice and right now we’re pushing for reparations for survivors of forced sterilizations and women’s prisons which was happening up until 2010.
Lindley: Can you share more about the reparations work?
Courtney: Yeah, there’s this broader grassroots campaign surrounding it that’s working on both the narrative and storytelling from people who have experienced sterilization. Between 2006 and 2010, at least 144 people were forcibly sterilized without their consent or knowledge. We are developing some know your rights materials to go inside to help empower people to be aware of this history and how they can fight back. In California, women’s prisons were demanding reparations, compensation and also notification, because there are a lot of people who had this experience and they’re not even aware of it. It’s ridiculous that we even have to tell them this is the right thing to do. If you listen to the direct quotes from the main doctor who was performing these, I mean, it’s based in a totally racist eugenics logic. Like, the society is better off without these unwanted kids and are a drain on resources. I mean, it was just horrific. Shameful.
There is a film recently that came out that we supported called, Belly of the Beast. Mary J. Blige wrote a song for it and is up for an award, so there is national momentum around that. If you’re listening Mary J. Blige, thank you. That’s one of our core kind of campaigns right now.
Lindley: How do you think about political power in your work? In terms of building the political power of women prisoners- what does that mean to you all?
Courtney: CCWP is kind of a humble organization. I think CCWP in 1995 was really a pioneer. Thanks to the women inside who courageously started this idea that people who are most directly impacted by an issue are going to be the best equipped to figure out how to solve it. And that’s pretty widely understood now. That of course, you should do that. In 1995, I don’t think that’s what the typical nonprofit was doing. And so we’ve led throughout our history, with that principle that people currently incarcerated and their loved ones should be in leadership roles and our movement ultimately is going to take all of us coming together.
Lindley: What are the ways that you’ve seen people show up in solidarity with your movements that really work and have been really supportive? And then what are the ways that have really not worked?
Courtney: CCWP is very much a non-hierarchical grassroots organization. Over the summer there was such a massive influx of interest and people wanting to volunteer. And so finding creative and sustainable ways to build that capacity quickly to plug those people in, to be frank, is challenging. But through things like writing warriors is a great example, we regularly have orientations to grow it. The orientation process is extremely thorough and intentional, and the program is overseen by formerly incarcerated mentors who are stipend of course, for their work. It really trains people, it’s not just any old pen pal program, but how to do this type of advocacy and lead with that principle that people inside should be directing the work and that we have a lot to learn from the type of movement building that happens in there. CCWP has a really community based culture and really strong values that I think draws people in. You can feel it in the room. With the pandemic, we’ve been able to have people from all over the state. I think we’re all learning for accessibility purposes that maybe we’ll always have a zoom option, but we’ve really grown through this period.
Lindley: Anything else you would want to add about your work?
CH: Gosh, we are just involved in so many facets of the work. We’re deeply involved in coalition work to stop ICE transfers and the criminalization of immigrant communities and have some incredible people, like Asian Prisoners Support Committee leading that work and a piece of legislation called The Vision Act. This year, we’re pushing for The Racial Justice Act for all. We passed RJ 1 last year, which allows people to legally challenge racial bias and discrimination in the court system that plays out in their cases. And so this year, we’re hoping to make that retroactive so it goes backward and not just forward.
Lindley: That’s amazing! Thank you for doing what you’re doing. It’s been an honor.
Courtney: Thank you for your support!
