Ashley Messier, Executive Director of the Women’s Justice and Freedom Initiative, shares her experience with incarceration, trafficking, and addiction, and reveals how she became an abolitionist and what that means. She leads this group discussion on how to achieve thriving communities while recognizing the ongoing marginalization of women and the continued use of punishment in the criminal legal system.
About Ashley Messier
Ashley Messier of Jericho, Vermont is the Executive Director of the Women’s Justice and Freedom Initiative. WJFI supports and advocates for women, girls, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people impacted by systems of oppression and is expressly committed to prison abolition. Messier’s years of community organizing and advocacy—and her direct experience with the criminal legal system—inform her passionate and powerful approach to advocacy and abolition. She spent time previously incarcerated at the only women’s facility in Vermont, Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility (CRCF).
Underwriter: Anne Commire Fund for Women in the Humanities
Image by Luke Harold
Statewide Underwriters
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