The staff of Women With a Vision will be leading a panel discussion at the upcoming conference on mass incarceration in the South, to be held at the University of Mississippi from April 13-15, 2014.
From the Rethinking Mass Incarceration in the South conference website:

As a region, the South is comprised of two states that continue to imprison the most persons per capita in the U.S.: Louisiana and Mississippi. Responding to rising rates of incarceration and recidivism in the South, the U.S.’s ongoing position as world leader in imprisonment, and the resultant need for productive regional and national conversations about mass incarceration, The University of Mississippi will host its first “Rethinking Mass Incarceration in the South” conference on April 13-15, 2014.  In addition to sharing knowledge, experiences, and scholarship, we hope to develop action plans aimed at radically transforming the South’s legal and incarceration systems, including the launching of a prison-to-college program at Mississippi State Penitentiary/Parchman Farm.

WWAV’s panel, entitled “Community Organizing is a Reentry Program: How Formerly Incarcerated Women are Decarcerating Their Communities in the Prison Capital of the World“, will be from 1:00-2:30pm on Tuesday, April 15th.
Here’s what WWAV will be talking about:

Criminalization has become an epidemic in Louisiana. One of the greatest obstacles we face in rethinking mass incarceration in the South is the often-unnamed assumption that incarceration is a men’s problem. In this panel, we go straight to the intersection of gender and incarceration to reflect not only the centrality of the penal state in producing and enforcing societal gender norms, but also on the strategies that formerly incarcerated cis and trans* women are using to change policy, decarcerate their communities and pave the way for others coming home. To appreciate their work, we begin our inquiry not in the prisons that would hold them captive, but in spaces of creativity and political organization that they have built. Guided by lessons learned from Women With A Vision’s twenty-two year history, most recently through the NO Justice Project, we explore concrete examples of how New Orleans’ so-called convicts and fallen women are working to create the world they want to live in. With them, we argue that “community organizing is a reentry program,” and we refract this slogan through the public health frameworks, human rights discourses and southern liberation histories they are drawing on to realize an end to mass incarceration.

We look forward to seeing you in Mississippi!