“We can’t just be compassionate, we have to recognize who the experts are and let them lead, let them create the programs, let them create the policies, and support them and join with them in doing it.”
Sharon White-Harrigan
Executive Director, Women’s Community Justice Association
Our Mission
WJP works in deep partnership to advance the leadership and build the power of cis and trans women who are currently and formerly incarcerated to transform the criminal legal system and create a just and loving world.
What We Do
We organize to advance the leadership and build the power of cis and trans women who are currently and formerly incarcerated.
We provide strategic consulting and transformative support for our partners who are leading efforts to transform the criminal legal system.
We engage in advocacy and public education to support concrete criminal legal reforms that are in service of larger transformation.
We develop educational materials that expose the devastating impact of mass incarceration on cis and trans women.
How We Do It
WJP’s guiding principle is that women who are currently and formerly incarcerated are experts and have the right to be and should be leaders in transforming the criminal legal system and society.
We ground our partnerships in love and trust, and we intentionally and continually readjust our work to be guided by and responsive to our partners’ evolving vision.
We believe that how we organize is as important as what we organize for, and that we should honor the process as much as any specific objective that process is trying to achieve.
We hold relationships, healing, transformation, and community as central to our work, not as secondary or coincidental outcomes of that work.
We center the leadership of cis and trans women on the frontlines of marginalized communities, we use a racial and gender justice lens, and we anchor our work in a feminism that is unabashed and intersectional, honoring the Black feminists who developed and continue to advance this concept.