Part of the Series

The Road to Abolition

Susan Kigula spent 10 years on death row in Uganda, where a murder conviction carried a mandatory death penalty. Undeterred by the threat of execution, Kigula buried her misery in legal books and mobilized a team of lawyers that eventually included current British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Kigula went on to file an appeal on behalf of 417 people incarcerated on death row in Uganda, and her effort saved her own life and the lives of 416 others.

Today Kigula is free and a member of the leadership of the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women (INFIW). The network is the product of years of grassroots organizing across the globe — efforts that culminated in a 2023 convening in Bogota, Colombia, where 60 women from 17 countries met to share strategies on halting the massive population increase in women’s prisons and jails around the world.

The 2023 convening sought to implement an international declaration created in 2021, which proclaimed that “now is the time to invest in initiatives led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and girls and their families, addressing stigma and discrimination, and reducing the damage of centuries of purely punitive penal policies that have negatively impacted millions of people, including those deprived of liberty, their families and communities.” In the years after the declaration was issued, members of the INFIW had built local, national and regional organizations to magnify their political power and consolidate under the banner of abolition.

The renowned activist and former political prisoner Angela Davis addressed the Bogotá gathering via video, reminding those in attendance they were “the vanguard of social justice movement precisely because … [they recognized] that given the interconnected economic, political, and social structures that characterize our times, it is incumbent on us to develop strategies of social justice that are also global in scope.”

The advent of the INFIW emerged from a simple realization: The voices and presence of formerly incarcerated women were missing from major international policy spaces like the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS). In 2015, Andrea James of the U.S.-based National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls (The National Council) stepped into that void, taking part in forums at the OAS and the UN and successfully putting women’s incarceration on regional and international agendas.

From there, momentum grew. Working with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), The National Council began building cross-border connections, traveling first to México in 2017 to join a workshop with an emerging network of formerly incarcerated women. They followed with visits to Brazil, Argentina, and a return to México to lay the groundwork for the first regional workshop in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2019, titled “Women Resisting: Bringing Down the Bars.”

That historic gathering, organized by Corporación Humanas, Mujeres Libres, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), and The National Council brought together directly impacted women from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, México, and the United States. The attendees, speaking three languages, crafted a powerful final statement. Among the participants was the late Kathy Boudin, the co-founder of Columbia’s Center for Justice and an advisory committee member of the INFIW, who underscored the need for restorative justice approaches that move beyond punishment.

INFIW quickly looked beyond the Americas to build relationships in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

At the 2023 Bogota gathering, the network also finalized their structure, constituting a democratic decision-making body that is currently a 15-member advisory committee of people from five continents. A unified force emerged that focused on movement building, advocacy and campaigns, changing narratives, economic empowerment, education and training, and self-care, with a mission to transform pain into collective power.

Amid the global rise in women’s incarceration, which has outpaced that of men, INFIW members opted to consolidate their power to challenge and resist the carceral juggernaut. Their determination to take this action was fortified by the absence of the political will to implement the Bangkok Rules, a potentially transformative set of guidelines officially known as the “Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders,” which was passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010.

The Network’s Historical Roots

The historical roots of the organizations in the network extended deep into the 20th century, as far back as the 1992 founding of Sisters Inside in Australia. Like many of the INFIW member organizations, Sisters Inside arose from the experience of one person who had been through the system and realized that change would only come when those directly impacted stepped to the front.

In Australia that person was Debbie Kilroy, who had been through a cycle of domestic violence, poverty, and incarceration until her close friend was murdered in the Boggo Road Gaol in Queensland. That killing prompted Kilroy to reflect on the conditions that led to this tragedy. When she looked around the prison, she saw women repeatedly traumatized by poverty, racism, domestic violence, and police abuse. In response, Kilroy and several Aboriginal women in the prison began Sisters Inside.

Over the past three decades Sisters Inside has grown a presence across Australia, visiting women in all prisons including remote rural prisons, initiating mounting critiques of abuse by prison guards and carving pathways to success for women when they do get out.

“We share our knowledge, especially regarding the intersectionality of colonialism, racial capitalism, and the oppression that Indigenous women and girls are confronted with daily.”

Kilroy herself is a prime example of such personal transformation. After the murder of her close friend, she changed course, completing a degree in social work, then going on to defy the odds and become one of the first formerly incarcerated women to attend and finish law school. She has now been a practicing attorney for nearly two decades. Her clients are primarily women inside prisons and those who have been released. In the course of that work, she connected with Angela Davis, and built a partnership that became an important influence on the International Network.

“We share our knowledge, especially regarding the intersectionality of colonialism, racial capitalism, and the oppression that Indigenous women and girls are confronted with daily,” Kilroy told Truthout. “Our liberation is inherently bound together as we fight for a collective future free from the prison industrial complex.” For Kilroy and her organization, asserting the leading role of Aboriginal women in Sisters Inside has been paramount. “We’ve been able to connect with Aboriginal communities across the globe, learning from their struggles and aspirations.”

After nine years in prison, Claudia Cardona landed a job at Corporación Humanas to work on the topic of women, drugs, and prison. “I was charged with using my freedom to fight for that of others. Having been on the inside, I knew this would have to be a collective struggle, so I started by calling other formerly incarcerated women who were struggling to put their lives back together,” she said. This meant teaching women “that this is about having strength and to be able to fight against the system because the system is wrong.”

Cardona focused on making people understand that when we are imprisoning a woman, it is not only the woman who loses her freedom — it also impacts her family. “By affecting the family you affect and impact the community in general.” She led the formation of an organization in her community called Mujeres Libres (Free Women) which leads major policy campaigns.

In 2022, Mujeres Libres pressured the Colombian government to pass the Menstrual Health in Prison Act, which guaranteed free menstrual materials to incarcerated people. The following year the government issued Decree 2292, which allowed some convicted women to receive a public service sentence in place of prison. Cardona catapulted from Mujeres Libres to the National Commission for Monitoring the Unconstitutional State of Affairs in Penitentiary and Prison Matters, a coalition of civil society organizations that researches human rights violations in the prison system and brings its findings before Colombia’s Constitutional Court.

Like Kilroy, Cardona’s work brought international connections, largely with other women from Latin America such as México’s Betty Maldonado. After completing her prison term, Maldonado became a leader of Mujeres Unidas por la Libertad (Women United for Freedom), also a member of INFIW.

“What we don’t want is for a criminal record to become a life sentence,” she told Truthout. The work of Mujeres Unidas por la Libertad extends deep into the personal lives of their members. “We get women who are pregnant and we take them to the hospital so they can give birth. We have women that have been sexually abused … we also see some homeless women, women that don’t have anywhere to go. They live on the street. So we’re researchers to see where women who used to be in prison were and we are able to take them to a shelter, find help for them.”

A major problem for people in women’s prisons in México is pre-trial delays. According to Maldonado, people can wait years in jail before their case even gets to court. They essentially disappear inside the system. In one renowned instance, Daniel García and Reyes Alpízar spent 17 years awaiting trial. That is why Maldonado stresses the effort her members put into their work. “We work Monday to Sunday,” she told Truthout. Like Cardona, Maldonado believes the progress of formerly incarcerated women is tied to a fight for “human rights of women, lesbians, nonbinary, Indigenous, migrants.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Susan Kigula had been busy fighting her case and building connections with women across the continent. Kigula fought her way out from under her legalized death threat, getting her sentence reduced to 20 years.

By the time of her release Kigula had finished a law degree and was ready to take on the death penalty again. While she built an international profile in her death penalty work she started the Sunny African Children’s Center, which provides housing and education for children of women incarcerated in Uganda.

She shared her vision of the International Network with Truthout: “My hope [is] to engage in global partnerships. The network might aim to forge partnerships with governments, with NGOs, with corporate entities, with other civil societies to tackle global challenges and inspire more systematic changes.”

Kigula also views the network as a future reservoir of resources to “help formerly incarcerated women rebuild their lives and integrate back into society…once the network moves to a global recognition status and drives change,” then she believes “it’ll promote more social justice, human rights, and community empowerment.”

Priorities of the Network

While all network members share a deep commitment to women inside and those released from prison, the strength of the INFIW lies in the diversity of political perspectives and experiences that each member brings. These varying visions are not a source of division but of richness, allowing the network to weave together different ideas into a collective vision and a shared pathway forward.

For example, INFIW leaders from Brazil bring an additional political component to the organization. Coming from a very politicized society with a developed working-class movement, Ana Tonini, who was incarcerated for 13 years, calls for the Network to develop a critique of capitalism and to consider Marxism as a political framework. She and fellow Brazilian Patricia Mendes told Truthout that they both query the use of “women” in the title of the network, since they know that many of the members identify as trans and nonbinary.

On the other hand, Haitian representatives to the INFIW, Cassandra Altinor and Lynette Peregrina, prioritize a different approach. Largely because a nexus of crises, natural disasters and centuries of underdevelopment have ravaged their neighborhoods. They lean more toward fundraising to provide assistance to women who have come out of prison and are struggling with necessities.

A common thread through the network is addressing the narrative about women who have been incarcerated and often further criminalized by family and community members. Altinor said that she was “obliged to move to another area because the people in my former community … considered us formerly incarcerated women as criminals. They do not talk to us,” said Altinor. “People were always saying that we’re bad people, we’re criminals. That’s the most difficult part for me,” Altinor recounted. “The state, the government doesn’t help us at all.”

Akosua Akuffo of Zambia echoes Altinor’s views. Akuffo spent years battling substances. But on her last prison bid, she transformed and began to analyze her position in society and the community. “I think this is high time that people understand that we’re women, we are mothers, we are children, we are sisters, we are aunts, and we deserve a second chance to build our lives. We deserve to go back into society and earn money to feed our children. Otherwise, what are you encouraging us to do? You’re encouraging us to go back. So we need to speak up to end the stigma and ensure that future generations do not have to go through what we have gone through.”

Not surprisingly, changing the narrative about incarcerated women is one of the five major goals of the INFIW. As Akuffo sees it, “I feel like right now we have at least been included to the table, but more can be done to change policy reform … more can be done to amplify our voices and really change the narrative of formerly incarcerated people,” Akuffo said. “And this is where we see the network going, talking about it and saying that people who go to prison are human beings.”

Dawn Harrington, a formerly incarcerated woman from the U.S., came to a similar conclusion. She realized when she met people who had been incarcerated in women’s prisons in other countries that “there were significant similarities between us no matter where we were … the more we connected the more [we realized] we can actually build solidarity together.” Ireland’s Paula Kearney agreed. She saw the network as a guard against that isolation because … “a lot of us are living in our own little bubbles and tend to stay quite local … our research has really shown that there are a lot of similarities across all of our paths,” she said. “A lot of times we don’t realize that that’s not just in our little circles because we tend to look at what’s going on in our own countries.”

“We deserve a second chance to build our lives. We deserve to go back into society and earn money to feed our children.”

Being from the United States, Harrington found the work of the network made her deeply aware of the imperialist policies and practices “from the U.S. that were being exported.” Harrington comes from Nashville, Tennessee, which was the birthplace of the first private prison company, known originally as Corrections Corporation of America. (In 2016 they changed their name to CoreCivic.)

As private prisons came under fire in the U.S. and began to reduce their profile, Harrington discovered through the network that internationally these corporations are expanding. And today, they are experiencing a boomerang-like resurgence, with stocks rising in response to the growth of immigration crackdown and detention. This reality underscores the urgent need for global solidarity across movements and intersections: Our struggles are interconnected, and an injury to one is an injury to all.

Ending Incarceration of Women Around the World

For Harrington, the 2023 gathering in Bogotá was “like pouring fuel on the fire that was about to happen.” While developing the declaration and its structure was essential, Harrington recognized a beautiful challenge in internal debates, ultimately guiding the adoption as a principle, to “unapologetically commit to end the incarceration of women and girls, period.” In the words of Toni Tulloch, a Jamaican woman who spent 16.5 years in U.S. prisons and was subsequently deported, and now serves as the international organizer for the INFIW, “we’re gonna have to change the whole structure of how incarceration for women is dealt with and just basically find the keys that it takes to unlock the door to stop this madness.”

While women’s prisons make up a small percentage of the world’s incarcerated population, the people coming out of these prisons have moved front and center in politicizing issues of incarceration. According to Debbie Kilroy, “it’s about bringing everybody on a journey to end the incarceration of women and girls, whether it’s intellectually within our hearts or in our practice with our hands.” Kilroy said she talks a lot about how “head, heart, and hands have to be connected … Because if we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t have an intellectual analysis of what’s happening with the prison industrial complex or racial capitalism. But if our bellies are full and our hearts are warm because we’re somewhere safe, we can actually start to strategically think about what we can do.… But it’s about having those three parts of us as human beings connected to be able to do the work to move forward.”

For the members of INFIW that pathway forward includes international solidarity. With its global reach and leadership of directly impacted people, the INFIW has created a model that can reshape our notions of liberation and undermine any and all efforts to extend the boundaries of empire and the carceral state everywhere that it exists around the world. Toni Tulloch projected this vision into the network’s future: “We’re going to continue to demolish the system. We’re going little by little. We’re going to … tear down this structure because it’s necessary.”