The following article appeared in Truthout on June 26, 2014. Reentry Central's managing editor Beatrice Codianni was one of the women interviewed for the article by Victoria Law.
FreeHer: Formerly Incarcerated Women Demand an End to Mass Incarceration
Thursday, 26 June 2014
By Victoria Law, Truthout | Report
On June 21, 2014, formerly incarcerated women, family members and advocates gathered in Washington, DC for the FreeHer rally to draw attention to the mass incarceration of women and to demand their freedom.
Dorothy Gaines, who received executive clemency from President Clinton, traveled from Alabama to Washington, DC, to speak at the Free Her rally. (Photo: Victoria Law)"This was the year I was due to be released," said Dorothy Gaines on a drizzly Saturday afternoon in Washington, DC. In 1995, Gaines was sentenced to 19 years in prison. She was placed on a plane and flown from Alabama, where she had lived with her three children, to Connecticut where she entered the federal women's prison at Danbury. "I'd never flown before," she told Truthout. "My first flight was with US marshals on Delta."
Gaines refused to accept either the distance from her children or the length of her sentence. She fought to be moved to a federal prison closer to her children while simultaneously fighting her case. She succeeded in both; two years after she began her sentence, she was moved to the federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. Three years after that, in 2000, she received executive clemency from then-President Clinton and was released from prison.
Read more
|
|
|
|
