Co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Lawyers Association, the Dartmouth Legal Studies Faculty Group, and Women’s,Gender and Sexuality Studies Program

Lecture Description:

Although the prison and jail population in the U.S. has begun to decline, the number of girls, women and gender nonconforming people detained in federal and state prisons across the country has increased. A significant percentage of them have been prosecuted for violent offenses. Often, their charged conduct is directly connected to domestic, sexual, or systemic violence they have experienced, yet their cases have escaped public scrutiny. Our communities have been slow to respond to the specific pathways, policing practices, and prosecutorial decisions that contribute to the criminalization and mass incarceration of survivors of violence.

The talk by Mariame Kaba will probe the ways in which our laws and legal systems center on harmful constructs of race and gender that are especially damaging for survivors of violence and women of color. In doing so, the conversation will challenge the notion that the criminal legal system is the right site for anti-violence work and will underscore the fact that communities can address violence outside of the carceral state.

Speaker Bio:

Mariame Kaba is a community organizer, educator, curator, and prison abolitionist based in New York City. Spanning over 30 years, her work has focused on transformative justice, dismantling the prison industrial complex, ending the criminalization and incarceration of survivors of sexual and domestic violence, and youth development.

Mariame is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect and most recently Survived & Punished. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence.