On today's show, our guest is Bianca Tylek, Venezia Michalsen, and Jewu Richardson
Bianca Tylek
Founder & Executive Director, Worth Rises
Bianca is the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises, a national criminal justice organization working to dismantle the prison industry and end the exploitation of those it targets, namely Black and Brown people.
Bianca is one of the nation’s leading experts on and advocates against the prison industry. She led the first successful campaign in the country to make jail phone calls free, blocked a major merger in the prison telecom market, and denied prison profiteers millions of investment dollars. Every year, under her leadership, Worth Rises publishes the innovative research about the prison industry, including the nation’s largest dataset of corporate prison profiteers. In just three years, her work has cost the industry and its investors over a billion dollars, and saved communities tormented by incarceration millions.
Bianca is a Draper Richard Kaplan Entrepreneur and has previously been awarded fellowships by TED, Art For Justice, Equal Justice Works, Harvard University, Ford Foundation, Paul & Daisy Soros, and Education Pioneers. Before committing her career to justice, Bianca worked in financial services at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Bianca holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Dr. Venezia Michalsen is an American intersectional feminist criminologist whose work focuses on gender and imprisonment and reentry from incarceration.
Venezia received her B.A. in 1998 from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice (2007) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She was the Director of Analysis and Client Information Systems (ACIS) at the Women’s Prison Association until she began her career as an academic in the Justice Studies Department at Montclair State University (MSU) in 2008. She is currently an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at MSU.
Venezia interrogates the use of incarceration as a response to women’s survival strategies in the face of childhood and adult abuse. She also focuses on women’s experiences of re-entry to the community from prison and jail, and in particular on the role of children in women’s desistance from criminal behavior after incarceration. Her first book, Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry was published in 2019. She is under contract with the University of California Press for her second book.
Always an advocate for women who come in contact with the criminal justice system, Venezia’s more recent work has involved fighting for abolitionist policies in her home state of Connecticut. Venezia is the mother of a nine-year-old autistic boy, and her advocacy work for him and other children in special education has led to the formation of Special Education PTA in her town and she is working to increase police training on interactions with disabled people. In her free time, she loves to ride her bicycle, hike at Sleeping Giant State Park, and lift heavy weights.
Jewu Richardson -Co Director CT Bail Fund
BA Social Science - Albertus Magnus College New Haven CT
Social Justice Advocate and Lifetime Connecticut native who has used his personal experiences and the experiences of others involved with the criminal justice system
to promote advocacy efforts for people incarceration. One example of these initiatives are Resilience Behind the Walls: A 30 minute monthly radio show that amplifies the reality of what people on the inside and their families are experiencing.
He is also the Co creator of the 1st Annual Survivors Walk in CT, which highlights the intersections of systematic violence caused by criminal justice institutions and to celebrate the survivors of these traumas.
