[Hamp-law] Eqbal Ahmad Lecture and Panel Nov. 1 and 2

[Jennifer Hamilton]

Submitted by: Joanna L Cronin

Please attend the 15th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture on:

Thursday, November 1 at 4:00 PM
Robert Crown Center
Featuring: Michelle Alexander

This year the lecture is entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  We are thrilled to host Michelle Alexander, a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar who currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.

Following Michelle Alexander's lecture, and inspired by her work, on Friday November 2 the Eqbal Ahmad Initiative has organized a panel of local prison activists to inform our communities of work that is ongoing and ways to get involved.

Friday, November 2 from 10:30 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
Franklin Patterson Hall, West Lecture Hall
Hampshire College

Panelists include:

Lois Ahrens: What's happening in Massachusetts? Longer Sentences, More Prisons and Many Fewer Alternatives

Dan Keefe: School to Prison Pipeline

Bliss Requa Trautz: Secure Communities and Immigrant Detention

Edward Cage: Justice for Charles

Marianne Bullock and Casey Shanahan: Prison Birth Project

Speakers Bios:

In 2000, Lois Ahrens started the Real Cost of Prisons Project, a national organization that brings together activists, artists, policy researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to work together to end the US prison nation. See: www.realcostofprisons.org

Edward Cage grew up in Springfield where his mom was a tireless advocate for public housing tenants, leading him to become a natural organizer. When his nephew Charles Wilhite was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, Edward became a fierce advocate for his nephew's innocence, founding and sustaining with family, friends, and community members a grassroots campaign called Justice for Charles.

Dan Keefe is a community organizer at Out Now, a LGBT youth organization in Springfield. He is currently working on a few campaigns challenging the Prison Industrial Complex, including one to kick the police out of the Springfield public schools.

Bliss Requa-Trautz is the immigration and criminalization organizer at the Alliance to Develop Power (ADP) in Springfield. Fighting SComm is an important part of her recent organizing work and vision for immigrant justice in Western Massachusetts and the state.

Marianne Bullock is co founder of the Prison Birth Project where she provides full spectrum doula care. Previously she worked with the Brazilian Workers Center and Jericho movement to free political prisoners in the US. She is an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith.

Casey Shanahan is a Hampshire student who became a doula as a result of working with the Prison Birth Project.