Oral history portfolio

Since 2015, i have been part of a collaborative history project exploring incarcerated people's fight to make their voices heard in Massachusetts government. Through extensive conversations with directly-impacted people, i learned that Massachusetts holds the distinction of being the most recent state to take away the right to vote from a group of people on the basis of felony convictions, having amended its State Constitution in 2000 to bar people incarcerated on felony convictions from voting after a group of prisoners founded a political action committee (the Massachusetts Prisoners Association Political Action Committee). Since then, there have been multiple bills filed to repeal this amendment, community signature collection efforts to bring the question back to the ballot, and state and national reports on the impact disenfranchisement has wrought. The movement continues to support eligible incarcerated voters in exercising their right to vote and disenfranchised incarcerated voters in restoring their right and ability to participate in government.

Background

I came to this work through Derrick Washington (incarcerated at MCI-Norfolk prison) and the Emancipation Initiative, a community group dedicated to ending Life Without Parole sentences and restoring Universal Prisoner Suffrage. i now organize with Democracy Behind Bars Coalition Massachusetts, another community group dedicated to amplifying incarcerated people’s voices in government and fighting systemic racism. I have come to learn everything i know through the generous support of currently and formerly incarcerated organizers and allies, who shared their contributions, reflections, and regrets with the hope of one day changing this system of imposed civil death.

Oral history

Over the course of 2016-2019, I collaborated with currently and formerly incarcerated people and advocates who led these movements in MA in order to document their history. In 2019, we released the Timeline of Incarcerated People’s Right to Vote in Massachusetts, a timeline based on primary source documents and interviews that begins to tell this story, focused mainly on the 1997-2001 period. Immersed in the history, I then followed up by conducting a series of oral history interview with formerly incarcerated people who had participated in these efforts, and in 2018, I released part 1 of an audio documentary in fulfillment of my Columbia University’s Oral History Masters program thesis.

Combining clips from original oral history interviews conducted with activists who played pivotal roles in the fight for incarcerated people's power; written history collected from local and national newspaper archives; and an intellectual framework co-created with incarcerated collaborators, “Ballots Over Bars: The Fight for a Voice” is an attempt to document incarcerated people's ongoing fight for the right to vote in Massachusetts and across the world, and to particularly highlight prisoners’ capacity to be Organizers, and agents of change in their own right.

Audio Documentary

Listen to the 7-track audio documentary embedded from Soundcloud, and read along with the downloadable PDF Companion Transcript attached.