Lessons in Resistance, Activism, and Solidarity: Incarcerated Women and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners

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Abstract: In 2000, Charisse Shumate, a co-founding member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and other incarcerated women in California gathered at a senate hearing to give testimony on medical and living conditions in prison. Incarcerated women's narratives demonstrate the key role that their critical agency played in their advocacy for a humane prison system. The narratives also illustrate women's resolve to use their voices to speak up. Women's experiences of incarceration have long been silenced and this was part of the collective experience shared at the senate hearing. The collaborative work to document the hearings as well as women's prison experiences and activism reflects an important response to women's invisibility in dominant discourses of prisons and imprisonment and the marginalization that incarcerated women experience in the broader anti-carceral movement. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a coalition-building organization founded by women on both sides of the razor wire, is an abolitionist feminist organization founded in San Francisco, California in 1995. CCWP practices a specific brand of activism that prioritizes and supports the voices, leadership, and creativity of women and transgender people incarcerated in women's prisons.