What We Know Book Launch: Solutions From Our Experiences in the Justice System
June 23, 2020
- 1:30 PM
Virtual
For far too long, the conversation around criminal justice, policing, and prisons has relied on the insights of experts, politicians, and academics, leaving out those who have experienced incarceration themselves. What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System is a step in addressing this disparity, and calls on policymakers to listen to the voices of those who have lived through the system, who know it first-hand.
When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over three hundred currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience.
In this event, hosted by the Center for American Progress, and in partnership with PEN America and Art for Justice, What We Know editors Vivian Nixon and Daryl Atkinson will speak with chapter authors DeAnna Hoskins, C.T. Mexica, Khalil Cumberbatch, and Arthur Longworth, with an introduction by Caits Meissner of PEN America about their experiences in the carceral system and their solutions for how we might transform it.
The Reverend Vivian Nixon is executive director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF), a New York–based organization committed to removing barriers to higher education for women with criminal-record histories and their families, and the co-author (with Daryl Atkinson) of What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System (The New Press).
Attorney Daryl Atkinson was the inaugural Second Chance Fellow for the U.S. Department of Justice, and is now the co-director of Forward Justice, a law, policy, and strategy center in Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the United States. He is the co-author (with Vivian Nixon) of What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System (The New Press).
C.T. Mexica has a doctorate in Comparative Literature (Theory and Criticism) from the University of Washington. He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation. C.T.’s research is centered on the literature of crime, confessions, and confinement and on the social theory of tragedy, transformation, and transition. C.T. is currently working on a literary memoir on intergenerational incarcerations and the demimonde of bonded males in the US. He is a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow.
Arthur Longworth is a contributing writer with The Marshall Project, a 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 6-time PEN America Prison Writing Award winner and a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow. He has written for Medium, VICE News and Yes! Magazine. His work has been presented onstage by renowned literary figures Francine Prose, Junot Diaz and rapper/poet Talib Kweli. And he is the author of Zek: An American Prison Story (Gabalfa Press, 2016). However, Arthur didn’t always write. He grew up in the foster care system. That is to say, Washington State raised him in its archipelago of infamous boys’ homes, including one the Seattle Time’s dubbed a “house of horrors.” The State turned him out onto the streets at 16 years old without an education, job training, or money. He has a Life Without Parole sentence and has been incarcerated for 35 years.
Khalil A. Cumberbatch currently serves Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice. He previously served as Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, a reentry organization whose goal is to build people and not prisons; as well as Manager of Trainings at JustLeadershipUSA, a national non-profit dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by year 2030. He is also a lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work. In December 2014, after being held for five months in immigration detention, Khalil was one of two recipients to receive an Executive Pardon from NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo to prevent his deportation from the United States.
DeAnna R. Hoskins is President & CEO of JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA). DeAnna is a nationally recognized leader and a formerly incarcerated person with experience as an advocate and policy expert at the local, state, and federal level. Prior to joining JLUSA as its President and CEO, DeAnna served as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice, managing the Second Chance Act portfolio and serving as Deputy Director of the Federal Inter-Agency Reentry Council. Before that, she served as a county Director of Reentry in her home state of Ohio. DeAnna has always worked alongside advocates who have been impacted by incarceration, and knows that setting bold goals and investing in the leadership of directly impacted people is a necessary component of impactful, values-driven reform.
