Thank you to all who attended our 2012-2013 conference, it was a great success!
Human Rights Held Captive: Perspectives on the Justice System
Thursday, February 7th- Saturday, February 9th
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Conference Line-up:
Thursday, February 7th Rackham Amphitheater
Friday, February 8th
Saturday, February 9th Rackham Amphitheater
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-- Learn more about the speakers and film --
Film Screening: "The Invisible War" |
The Invisible War is directed by the academy award nominated Kirby Dick. It is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America's most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. The film paints a startling picture of the extent of the problem-today, a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. The Department of Defense estimates there were a staggering 19,000 violent sex crimes in the military in 2010. The Invisible War exposes the epidemic, breaking open one of the most under-reported stories of our generation, to the nation and the world. Visit the documentary's website here. |
Paul Butler
Paul Butler is a former prosecutor, a current law professor at Georgetown University, and author of “Let’s Get Free a Hip Hop Theory of Justice.” He graduated cum laude from Yale (B.A) and from Harvard (J.D). As a prosecutor, he specialized in public corruption and also worked as a Special Assistant U.S attorney in prosecuting gun and drug cases. In his book, he challenges the justice system with controversial ideas based on his experience as both a prosecutor and on the other side, as a falsely accused for a minor crime and arrested on his street. Butler has been an outspoken voice for the roles of African Americans in the American Justice System. He is a leading expert on criminal justice and comments regularly for CNN, NPR, and has been featured on Fox News network, ABC News, Good morning America, and 60 minutes. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.
Shane Bauer
Shane Bauer is a freelance photojournalist who focuses on contemporary issues in the Arab world. In July 2009, Bauer, along with Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd, accidentally crossed the unmarked Iranian border while hiking in Iraq's Kurdish region. The three were immediately taken into custody by Iranian security forces. Bauer was held hostage in Tehran’s Evin Prison on charges of espionage, and sentenced to eight years in prison by the Revolutionary Court. During his time in Evin, he spent four months in solitary confinement, a type of imprisonment in which detainees are kept from almost any form of human contact. After facing intense political pressure from the US and Iranian President Ahmadinejad, the Iranian judicial system released Bauer to the US in a $500,000 bail-for-freedom deal, 26 months after the group's arrest. Since returning to the US, Bauer has resumed his life as a journalist and has taken on the controversial issue of solitary confinement and has uncovered startling truths about the conditions in American prisons. After beginning an investigation into the Security Housing Unit of the Pelican Bay Prison System in California, Bauer found that solitary confinement conditions in the United States were often worse than those he had faced in Iran. In addition, he found that inmates were often put in solitary confinement indefinitely on charges lacking any concrete evidence. Shane Bauer continues to shed light on the misuse of solitary confinement, and the lack of judicial review, during this pivotal period in which our country is beginning to view this practice as a human rights issue.
Frannie Shepherd-Bates
Frannie Shepherd-Bates is Executive Artistic Director of Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company and facilitator of its Shakespeare in Prison program, which just celebrated its one year anniversary at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Frannie works as a director, educator, choreographer, designer and dialect/accent coach regularly in the Metro-Detroit area, but her work in the prison is definitely the most meaningful. For more information, please visit http://shakespeareinprisonmgt.wordpress.com/.
Jason Rios
Jason Rios is a Metro-Detroit area entrepreneur who recently started a full-service business consultancy, "New Media Integrations" to help businesses thrive and succeed in a volatile economy. He has a unique perspective on the MDOC and the judicial system, having been involved in prisoner advocacy issues, human rights, and legal reform for 16 years. Among other things, he has been a part of PCAP's Advisory Board, guest lectured at U of M, and spoken on various radio and televised panel discussions with politicians, MDOC officials, and affiliates about re-entry initiatives, prison reform, and rehabilitative issues. He also has personal experience with the justice system, having participated in gang activity and ending up imprisoned himself. His work is motivated by the idea that "there are good people in prison who have made a bad mistake but that doesn't make them a bad person". He wishes to be a voice for all of the incarcerated whose voices and stories are not heard.
Domestic (In)justice Panel
Dr. Sheryl Pimlott-Kubiak
Dr. Sheryl Pimlott-Kubiak is a professor at the Michigan State University School of Social Work. She specializes in intersections of mental health, substance abuse and criminal justice at individual and systems levels, women in the criminal justice system, cumulative trauma exposure and PTSD, and clinical and organizational processes associated with treatment. She has authored and co-authored countless publications and books on these topics.
Deborah LaBelle
Deborah LaBelle is an Ann Arbor-based lawyer who specializes in the First Amendment and civil rights. She won a huge victory in June 2012, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sentencing juveniles to life in prison is unconstitutional, and is currently organizing a campaign for the resentencing of all of Michigan’s juvenile lifers.
David M. Shapiro
David M. Shapiro joined the MacArthur Justice Center in 2012 and represents clients seeking redress for injuries caused by the criminal justice system. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern, he was a staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, where his litigation and advocacy work focused on immigration detention, privatized incarceration, access to information about jails and prisons, and prisoners’ First Amendment rights. Before joining the ACLU, he worked as an associate at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, focusing on First Amendment cases, and as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. David also studied Russian literature in Moscow as a Fulbright Scholar.
Examples of cases Shapiro has litigated include Prison Legal News v. DeWitt, No. 2:10-cv-2594 (D.S.C. 2012), where plaintiffs obtained what is believed to be the largest monetary settlement in U.S. history in a case involving censorship by a correctional facility; Benkahla v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, No. 2:09-cv-00025 (S.D. Ind. 2009), the first major litigation to challenge the creation of Communication Management Units, a new type of unit designed to radically restrict the communications of federal prisoners allegedly connected to terrorism; and Berger v. City of Seattle, 569 F.3d 1029 (9th Cir. 2009), in which the en banc court struck down speech restrictions imposed on street performers in the Seattle Center.
Examples of cases Shapiro has litigated include Prison Legal News v. DeWitt, No. 2:10-cv-2594 (D.S.C. 2012), where plaintiffs obtained what is believed to be the largest monetary settlement in U.S. history in a case involving censorship by a correctional facility; Benkahla v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, No. 2:09-cv-00025 (S.D. Ind. 2009), the first major litigation to challenge the creation of Communication Management Units, a new type of unit designed to radically restrict the communications of federal prisoners allegedly connected to terrorism; and Berger v. City of Seattle, 569 F.3d 1029 (9th Cir. 2009), in which the en banc court struck down speech restrictions imposed on street performers in the Seattle Center.
Dr. Heather Thompson
Dr. Heather Thompson currently teaches history at Temple University, having received her bachelors and masters in history from the University of Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University. Dr. Thompson is writing the first comprehensive history of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its legacy for Pantheon Books. While completing this history, Thompson has received several research fellowships and awards including the Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute. She is also the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press: 2001) and has published an edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Prentice Hall, 2009), as well as chapters on crime, punishment, and prison activism during the 1960s and 1970s in several edited collections. Thompson has also written numerous scholarly as well as popular articles on the current crisis of mass incarceration, including two which have won Best Article prizes, and she has also been published by the New York Times. Thompson co-edits a manuscript series for UNC Press, Justice, Power, and Politics and is the sole editor of the series, American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century published by Routledge. She has also consulted on several documentary films and was recently named to a National Academy of Sciences panel to study the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the United States. The two-year, $1.5 million project is sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine D MacArthur Foundation.
Roots of Engagement: UM Faculty Panel
Professor Paul Draus
Paul Draus is Director of Public Administration, Director of Public Policy, and Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research relates to urban post-industrial community, health and medicine, poverty and inequality, racial and spatial segregation, and the war on drugs. Draus teaches a class entitled "Ghettos & Prisons: Dynamics of Stigma and Segregation in Society” as part of Temple University's Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.
Professor Frank Vandervort
Frank Vandervort is a clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan. His areas of interest include juvenile justice and child welfare. In 2009, he, along with fellow professor Kimberly Thomas, founded the juvenile justice clinic, which allows law school students to represent minors charged with violations of criminal law and status offenses in the courtroom. Professor Vandervort has served as a legal consultant to the University Of Michigan School Of Social Work’s Family Assessment Clinic and in 2010; he was elected to the board of directors of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.
Professor William "Buzz"Alexander
Buzz Alexander is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and founder and member of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Since 1990 he has been a member of the Sisters Within Theater Troupe at the Florence Crane, Western Wayne, and Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facilities, which recently completed its 32nd play; between 1993 and 2000 he was a member of the Western Wayne Players at the Western Wayne Correctional Facility; and between 2001 and 2007 he was a member of the Poet’s Corner at the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility. Since 1996 he has co-curated seventeen Annual Exhibitions of Art by Michigan Prisoners. Two of his courses teach students how to facilitate workshops in the arts in urban high schools and Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons, and another course trains students to work one-on-one with incarcerated youth, helping them create professional portfolios of their art and writing; recently students have begun working with incarcerated adults as well. He has received the University of Michigan Regents’ Award for Distinguished Public Service, and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award, and in 2005 received the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement and Support of Education National Professor of the Year Award. In 2010 he was given an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard College. These awards are for the work he initiated and for the work of incarcerated youth and adults and urban youth, in collaboration with University of Michigan students.
Since 1990 these youth and adults have entered creative spaces that did not exist before and created powerful original work, including 604 original plays in over twenty-three years. His book, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?; Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project, published the University of Michigan Press in 2010 has won the University of Michigan Press Book Award.
Since 1990 these youth and adults have entered creative spaces that did not exist before and created powerful original work, including 604 original plays in over twenty-three years. His book, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?; Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project, published the University of Michigan Press in 2010 has won the University of Michigan Press Book Award.
