Hey everybody, thanks for joining the Clouded Compass Podcast. I'm Laurie, your host, social worker of 20 years. Today, I'm going to talk about the criminal justice system and the women in prison. At the time of this recording, it is Martin Luther King Day. And I'm not sure how much you know about that person, but he risked incredibly great things, to share his message with us. And I think his message is relevant to all of us. So it isn't just a black person's holiday, it's a holiday, inviting us to pause and and look at, you know, are we getting the results we want, and can we do better? We can do better. And here's how.

So yesterday, I went to a rally at the Huron Valley Women's Correctional Facility, I always get that name wrong. And I have been wanting to work with women in prison for a long time, I'm involved briefly on the outskirts with a project called the Compassionate Prisoners Project. And I learned about that through Gabor Mate's work and they go in and they do trauma informed classes that are healing for the for the prisoners. And that's a wonderful thing, I want to be involved in that. So I've been looking for ways to be involved with women in prison.

And the other reason I wanted to be involved with women in prison is because I don't know who knows this about me, but I could very well have been there at any point in my life, had one circumstance been different, mostly the color of my skin, my socioeconomic status, my social location, my skills, or lack thereof, etc, and so on. There are very many reasons that I could just as easily have been behind those bars. I'm grateful that I'm not, but that does not make me a better person. I'm gonna say that again, because I know what some people say. Because I'm not in jail doesn't mean that I've done life any better.

It means that I had resources, and I had support. And I had direction. And I had somebody showing me the way on how to do things differently. But you know, many women in prison are in prison for protecting themselves. And we don't talk about that. We don't talk about these women in domestic violence situations with complex intergenerational trauma behind them, not to mention environmental degradation and dehumanization. Say they're in a domestic violence situation, and they pull a gun on a guy to protect themselves. And then there's 30 to 40 years. Not only that, not only are you then punished for protecting yourself, you are thrown into a system and given a number and thrown away behind closed doors.

And if you're a woman, you have children, you have families, you have communities. And when you take a woman out of their community, you take the community out of the woman and the community. I really have no interest in where you stand on the prison justice system, the criminal justice system, whether people deserve to be in there or not. I'd rather talk about how this results and how we can do better. Regardless, I mean, if you think people need to be locked up, that's fine. Come to me with why. And then also, give me the evidence to your point of view, and if you disagree with me, I will demand that you just disagree with me in a respectful manner, instead of just saying you're full of shit, and you're wrong, and you know, you don't know anything, you know, kind of mean terms that we're taught to say to somebody when we don't agree with them.

So it's okay that we disagree, but I'm going to talk about the value that we are losing out on. So women behind bars are raising families from behind bars, believe it or not, they get out with a felony which impacts the job abilities they have with really not a lot of support because they've been isolated on purpose for many years. And believing that they are broken and not able to be repaired. And because of the experience they've gone through and because of the torture, the the the human rights violations happening inside of these places. They're coming out and believe that they're worth less and with less val