Andrea James is the founder of Families for Justice as Healing and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. For many years she was a criminal defense attorney working in the Boston area with low-income and disenfranchised clients. Then in 2009 she found herself in federal prison serving a two-year sentence, after which she wrote the book, Upper Bunkies Unite: and Other Thoughts on the Politics of Mass Incarceration.
She speaks to us about her first-hand experience of the humanitarian abuses, loss of human potential, trauma, and irreparable damage to families and communities caused by the the current system of incarceration — and she talks about paths toward substantive change.