The second UM conference on Rethinking Mass Incarceration in the South ends April 16 at the Khayat Law Center after three days of sessions.
Sponsored by a host of University departments, offices and centers, the conference has targeted the South’s continuance to lead the nation in imprisonment rates. Conversations will entail issues and problems created, stemmed and sustained from the mass incarceration system.
Issues in this year’s dialogue will include racial bias, discriminatory sentencing, state violence, sexual abuse, medical neglect, privatization and post-release challenges.
Other sessions will focus on a range of topics from prison education and activism to strategies to prevent the system from treating juveniles as adults. The sessions begin 9 a.m. in the Khayat Law Center.
Friday’s sessions will begin at 1 p.m. and will include a discussion of topics such as literature and art inside prisons and implementing higher education in prisons across the South.The evening will end with the keynote speech “Black Lives Matter and the End of Mass Incarceration.”
According to a statement from the event sponsor, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, the conference goal is to share not only “knowledge, experiences and scholarship,” but also to “develop action plans aimed at radically transforming the South’s legal and incarceration systems.”
VOX Press is a 501 corporation and three arts organization based in Oxford. The Prison Writes Institute, a branch of VOX’s educational outreach program, will contribute Saturday by demonstrating its initiative and holding a panel called “Teaching Liberal Arts Classes in Mississippi Prisons.”
Louis Bourgeois is the founder and instructor for Prison Writes and executive director of VOX Press.
“I want people to learn first-hand the immediate and quite real impact our classes have had on the lives of our incarcerated students,” Bourgeois said.
Bourgeois hopes the initiative will be successful in promoting a healthier and more aware society. The panel Saturday will feature one of the program’s students who was recently released from the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl.
During the same session, at 5:30 p.m., American University’s Washington College of Law Professor Brenda V. Smith is giving the McClure Lecture entitled “Healing the Wounds of Mass Incarceration: Reflections, Strategies and the Way Forward.”
Smith is an expert on issues affecting women in prison, such as sexual abuse. She plans to discuss the collective wounds people suffer not in terms in history, but as a result of the lack of justice.
“When discussing the situations of mass incarceration, intolerance and poverty, Mississippi is a stand-in for all of the issues occurring across the nation,” Smith said. “In order to heal the wounds we are talking about both in Mississippi and in other parts of the country, we must name or diagnose the problem, accept its existence, claim responsibility, make amends and never forget.”
