Workshops

Presenter: Kate Drabinski

The logics of crime and punishment are so deeply embedded for most of us that it is hard to think of any alternatives. Carceral logics shape everything from the attendance and late policies on our syllabi to our responses to fear and harm. How do we learn to imagine otherwise? In this presentation Dr. Kate Drabinski will share strategies from her teaching about prisons, prison abolition, and social movements that build toward that horizon. She will also raise questions about how we might start building anti-carceral logics into our classes to nurture this work on a wider scale.

Bio: Dr. Kate Drabinski is Principal Lecturer of Gender, Women's, + Sexuality Studies and Director of the WILL+ Program at UMBC. Her teaching and research interests include transgender studies, histories and theories of social change, and intersectional histories in Baltimore City. She has been teaching and learning about abolition for a very long time, and she's still always learning new things.

Presenter: Glennor Shirley, Retired Prison Librarian

We will discuss the alarmingly high rate of incarceration in the United States and in Maryland, as well as racial discrimination resulting in incarceration. We’ll dive into how prison librarians encourage inmates to use their libraries in preparation for successful re-entry.

Bio:Born in Jamaica and immigrating to the United States in 1984, Glennor Shirley’s love of libraries knows no borders. After earning her MLIS from the University of Maryland, College Park, Glennor started working in public libraries. She took an evening job working with those who were arrested and housed before being transferred to prison, based on the degree of crime committed. Her works in prisons includes being the Coordinator of Correctional Education Libraries via the Maryland State Department of Education, where she was responsible for governance of all aspects of library services for 19 Maryland State prisons.

Presenter: Kevin Muhitch, UMBC Alum, Morgan, Angel & Associates, Research Associate

This talk examines community struggles against the expansion of Maryland’s prison system in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, it illustrates how an eclectic group of activists in Baltimore helped to make prison projects in the city untenable. While state actors pursued several sites in Baltimore, such as docking a “prison ship” in the Baltimore harbor, city residents successfully organized to prevent them from being built. By the 1980s, state officials resumed prison expansion efforts in rural Somerset County, where they found a political system more willing to accept the ramifications of mass incarceration. In tracing the politics of prison siting, this talk illustrates the contested ways urban activism, and the decisions of state actors, shaped the geography of mass incarceration.

Bio: Kevin Muhitch received his M.A. in history from UMBC in 2020, where his research examined mass incarceration in Maryland by tracing debates over prison siting in the late-twentieth century. He formerly served as a Research Fellow at the Sentencing Project, where he focused on voting rights, extreme sentencing, and racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system. He also worked as a Research Assistant on Dr. G. Derek Musgrove’s historical mapping project “Black Power in Washington, D.C.” Currently, he serves as a Research Associate at Morgan, Angel & Associates in Washington, D.C, where he primarily conducts historical research for litigation involving Superfund sites.

Presenter: Elaine MacDougall (Grad student)

During June of 2022, I took part in Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Training, which is a “National pedagogical project offering semester-long, college-level classes behind bars to groups of students” (Davis, 2011, p. 204). From its original model as a program for criminal justice majors, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program has evolved to include courses across many disciplines, including creative writing and literature courses. This program gives incarcerated students a connection to the outside world and an opportunity to have a voice in a system which historically has not listened. This talk will focus on things I learned from the training as I work towards designing my own curriculum for an empowering writing program and/or college level course geared towards the needs of incarcerated women.

Bio: Elaine MacDougall is a Lecturer in the English department, Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and Coordinator of the Writing Fellows Program at UMBC. She is currently working towards her doctoral degree in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program at UMBC. Elaine's current research interests include incarcerated women and identity, as well as anti-racist practices and linguistic justice in college writing centers. She also teaches and practices yoga and mindfulness.

Presenter: Yanet Amanuel, ACLU, Director of Public Policy

The discussion will focus on the intersection of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and police reform. I will explain how as more states begin to legalize marijuana in an effort to" end the war on drugs," what ends up happening is there are more racial disparities in arrests than prior to decriminalization and legalization. Mainly due to the failure to expand redress efforts to "violent offenses" and reform police practices (and the failure to achieve community control of policing). I will share examples of the work and legislation we are working on in Maryland to address these issues and the challenges we continue to face.

Bio: Yanet Amanuel is the director of public policy at the ACLU of Maryland. Yanet has served as public policy advocate and interim public policy director twice before becoming the director. Yanet Amanuel began her advocacy career as a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she received her B.A. in Sociology. She continued to pursue her passion for advocacy and organizing in several roles, including as Chief of Staff for a Prince George’s County delegate, Region 7 (Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia) Adult Representative on the NAACP National Youth Works Committee, Young Adult Chair of the Prince George’s County NAACP and as a Policy Advocate at Job Opportunities Task Force. Most recently, ACLU-MD Policy Advocate, Yanet co-led the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability and led the ACLU’s legislative advocacy efforts to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, reform the Maryland Public Information Act to allow public disclosure of police misconduct records, and remove the Governor from the parole process for Marylanders serving life with parole sentences.

Presenter: Lawrence Grandpre, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Director of Research

2021 had the highest rate of death by overdose in American history, with over 100,000 Americans dead. In opposition to the "Just Say No" ideology of the 80's and 90's - harm reduction rejects abstinence-only dogma and promotes "any positive change" toward more healthy and more controlled substance use. Yet in the Black community, which has faced decades of addiction struggle - some have raised issues with harm reduction apparently "libertarian" and "permissive" attitude toward drug use. This talk focuses on the role of the war on drug/ drug criminalization in Maryland in hollowing out the capacity of communities to support healthy functioning. Specifically, this talk will discuss how patterns of drug war incarceration hinder the production of social capital in targeted communities necessary to build institutions. This is why community-centered reparations are an essential component to drug decriminalization.

Bio: Lawrence Grandpre is Director of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. His focuses include drug policy, criminal justice, police accountability, and community-based economic/educational development. He is the co-author of “The Black Book” and his work has been featured in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun, Time Magazine and Black Agenda Report. He is also the co-host of the In Search of Black Power Podcast.

Presenter: Michael Casiano, UMBC

In this talk, Mike Casiano will provide an overview of how policing shaped urban governance in Baltimore during the post-Civil War Era. Specifically, he will focus on the institutions that emerged, including the City Jail, various police bureaus, and reform groups, to discuss how nineteenth century investments in reframing local governance resulted in the bureaucratized structures of the twentieth century that continue to define city functions. He will also foreground the various archival sources he has used to narrate this history from the perspective of everyday people's lived experiences.

Bio: Mike Casiano is an assistant professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Public Humanities Minor. He is completing his book manuscript, which is entitled Let Us Alone: Race and Police Power in Baltimore, 1857-1929. This talk draws on the book's key sources and arguments.

Presenter: Betsy Fox Tolentino, Deputy Secretary/ Community Operations/ Department of Juvenile

Over the past decade many strategies have been implemented resulting in more than an 80% reduction in juvenile incarceration. Participants will explore how alternatives to detention, agency policies and practices, the COVID19 pandemic, and Maryland’s newest juvenile justice reform laws impact how young people experience our state juvenile justice system. Moreover, the presentation will focus on applying a race equity lens to reform, advocacy and essential partnerships to increase system fairness and effectiveness.

Bio: A graduate of Southern Oregon University and Widener University School of Law, Tolentino's career has focused extensively on criminal and juvenile justice advocacy, and policy development aimed at improving and building systems to meet the diverse needs of our communities. Tolentino's experience includes representing and advocating for criminal defendants and children in Maryland's foster care and juvenile justice systems before trial courts, the Maryland General Assembly, and system stakeholders. Betsy most recently served as the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services’ Deputy Secretary of Community Operations where she focused on: changing the way young people, families, and stakeholders experience justice system interventions; mitigating racial disparities and developing a fair and equitable approach to reform; and empowering opportunities for shared innovation with partners to become a catalyst for change. In addition to her current role as the Managing Director of the Roca Impact Institute, Betsy volunteers with community based organizations, serves on the Mentor MD/DC Board of Directors, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Presenter: Nathaniel R. Balis, Director Juvenile Justice Strategy Group, The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Over the last quarter century, America’s juvenile justice system has changed in profound ways. While politicians in the 1990s fretted about the since-debunked myth of the “juvenile super-predator” and responded with harsher laws for kids in virtually every state in the country, youth crime had already started its steady and sometimes sharp decline. Prior to the pandemic, youth arrests and youth confinement had plummeted, all while research offered practitioners and policymakers a wealth of information about the adolescent brain and what works in supporting young people, and yet racial disparities only got worse, with Black youth bearing the brunt of the system’s punitive practices. In the early months of the pandemic, youth confinement dropped much further, hinting at a more permanent shift in the size and scope of the juvenile justice system, but that has changed swiftly over the last year, and racial disparities are much worse today than they were prior to Covid-19 and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. So it begs the question going forward: can we achieve a much-needed new normal in youth justice or are we backsliding to the old status quo?

Bio: Nate Balis is the director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He leads the JDAI® network of juvenile justice practitioners in 40 states and over 300 counties that is working to build a better and more equitable youth justice system. Through his leadership, the Foundation has launched several youth justice projects and initiatives, including transforming juvenile probation, ending the youth prison model and JDAIconnect, an online community that accelerates youth justice reform across and beyond the JDAI network through peer-to-peer learning, training and resources. Maryland’s governor appointed Nate to the state’s Juvenile Justice Reform Council for a two-year term in 2019. Prior to his time at Casey, he was research manager for Washington, D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. A native of Maryland, Nate earned a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College.