Photo courtesy of the Women’s Community Justice Association. Here, the nonprofit’s Executive Director Sharon White-Harrigan leads a Beyond Rosie’s rally to advocate for closing Rikers’ women’s jail.
In spring 2014, a proposal landed on then-Program Officer for Human Justice Shawn Morehead’s desk for a campaign to close the country’s most notorious jail complex—Rikers Island. The request came from a new nonprofit, JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA), which aimed to cut the U.S. prison population in half by 2030. It would do this by training formerly incarcerated leaders and involving them in advocacy campaigns.
“It wasn’t the first proposal we’d gotten to close Rikers, but it was the first one that came from an organization led by people who had been in prison themselves and were able to use that experience to inform their advocacy–that is what tipped the scales.” said Morehead, now The Trust’s vice president for grants.
After meeting with local formerly incarcerated nonprofit leaders to get their input on reimagining The Trust’s human justice grantmaking strategy, Morehead made the grant to JLUSA. It was the first of nine years’ worth of Trust grants to nonprofits pressing for the humane treatment of people in city jails, including through closing Rikers.
On January 19, 2024, a Rikers corrections officer found Manuel Luna unresponsive in his cell. Luna, age 30, became the 54th person to die in custody on Rikers Island since 2020. Like 90% of the 6,200 people incarcerated on Rikers, Luna was a detainee, awaiting trial and presumed innocent.
Many factors conspire to make Rikers dangerous for the people imprisoned there: It’s physically isolated and hard to reach for families, attorneys, and service providers. Violence and abuse are rampant and pervasive, and the city subjects those held in custody to unsanitary living conditions, inadequate medical care, and a dangerous—sometimes even deadly—lack of oversight and accountability.
After the initial grant to JLUSA, The Trust continued to fund advocacy to close the jail through nonprofits that included the Freedom Agenda and Women’s Community Justice Association, both part of the Campaign to Close Rikers, a movement led by people directly impacted by the city’s jails. In 2019, thanks in part to advocacy from Trust grantees, the New York City Council approved an $8 billion plan to close Rikers and build four borough-based jails by 2027, and to reduce the city’s overall jail population to 3,300.
While the plan lost ground in 2023 with lukewarm support from the mayor, The Trust continues to fund advocacy led by people with justice involvement. For example, a recent two-year Trust grant to the Women’s Community Justice Association supported its Beyond Rosie’s Campaign, which aims to close Rikers’ women’s jail, the Rose M. Singer Center, or “Rosie’s.”
Women held at Rosie’s face the same inhumane conditions found throughout Rikers, and reports of sexual violence are more than double the national average for correctional facilities. In fact, more than 700 women recently came forward with lawsuits under the Adult Survivors Act alleging that corrections officers sexually assaulted them at Rosie’s.
Most of the women at Rosie’s are mothers, and many are the sole or primary caretakers of young children. At least three-quarters of the women incarcerated there are survivors of sexual or domestic violence, and two-thirds have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
“When women are incarcerated, they’re separated from their children and their families, they’re not being heard, and they’re facing issues like trauma, abuse—all the things that women go through more than anyone else,” said Rev. Sharon White-Harrigan, the Association’s executive director, who has worked for more than 30 years in the justice reform movement and is herself a survivor of incarceration.
“The Beyond Rosie’s Campaign is important because women have been constantly left out of the conversation or mentioned as an afterthought. In addition to our advocacy, Beyond Rosie’s shows women and gender nonconforming folks that there is life beyond incarceration and detention,” said White-Harrigan.
Women’s Community Justice Association staff visit Rosie’s every week to run support groups. They also provide leadership training for justice-involved women and gender-expansive people, who then participate in rallies and other campaign efforts. The Association advocates for the placement of borough-based centers closer to women’s communities and families. Staffed largely by nonprofits, these centers would provide services like parenting classes, job training, and mental health supports, as alternatives to incarceration, which White-Harrigan argues perpetuates cycles of trauma and harm.
“Closing Rikers, among other steps towards decarceration, will work if we stop overpolicing and invest in the community—and if we allow the community to help the community,” she said. “If you remove politics from it, what you have is people who really care about people, and about what is happening. We just want to do what’s best for our people, and we’re tired of the same injustices and the same systemic trajectory.”
Peter Panapento
peter@turn-two.co
(202) 531-3886
Courtney Biggs
cbi@nyct-cfi.org
(212) 889-3963
Peter Panapento
peter@turn-two.co
(202) 531-3886
Courtney Biggs
cbi@nyct-cfi.org
(212) 889-3963