The Essie Justice Group is an organization of women with incarcerated loved ones taking on the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration. Our award-winning Healing to Advocacy Model brings women together to heal, build collective power, and drive social change. We are building a membership of fierce advocates for race and gender justice — including Black and Latinx women, formerly and currently incarcerated women,

The history of prisons and criminal punishment is the history of some of the most brutal mechanisms of social control. It is also the history of the criminalization of poverty and the exploitation of the labor of people who were often just trying to survive. Although imprisonment is included as a punishment in the oldest existing law code—the Code of Ur-Nammu from ancient Mesopotamia—it is only mentioned once, whereas most punishments were either death or material or financia