Madison Verner: My first question is, how did receiving your bachelor’s degree while incarcerated impact your perspective on American studies and/or women’s studies?

Michelle Daniel Jones: I was able to go to school while incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison because the state of Indiana funded higher education after pell grants were removed, actually after funding for federal pell grants were removed in the ‘90s. So when I came in in the late ‘90s, they did that in the early ‘90s, when I came in the late ‘90s, because of the state’s, uh, commitment to higher ed for incarcerated people, I still had the opportunity to go to school. I would have typically not been permitted had the state not agreed to fund it. And at the facility that I was at, the educational pursuits, everything revolved around that. You worked a full-time job like you would in the world, and then the education department transformed in the evening to a center for higher ed. So how did it transform me? I think that a lot of people who are involved in the criminal legal system feel like what is happening to them is very individualized and very singular. Getting access to a higher education taught me that there were systems and structures in place that raised the probability for someone like me to become incarcerated, particularly a young, poor Black woman living in crisis as I was in the home that I was in, right? So that was empowering, very, very important information. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone going into something that I had felt I was singularly alone in a lot of ways.

Verner: In that vein, when you do research now, how does that experience impact the way you view the people that you are researching?

Jones: I made very much an intentional point when I decided to do my research on the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women and study survival strategies. That I first went down and met with the women with no agenda but to disclose my background and the why of doing that research. And then when I came back, I was in December, and when I came back in February, I met up with them again before I even opened up… turned on a recorder or anything. And I said, you know, very intentional about this work, very intentional about raising your voices and centering your stories. And from that, they suggested other women that I should interview. I think it made me feel comfortable in creating a level playing ground where they knew they had to learn about me in order for me to get information from them. It doesn’t completely eliminate the power dynamic, but what it does is it helps even some of the playing field, and also offers a shortcut to a lot of the minutia of incarceration or the stories of incarceration that a lot of people feel like when they’re talking to people who’ve not been impacted by it, they have to walk through. For me, we didn’t have to go through all of that and we could get to more meatier subjects and meatier sharing amongst the both of us. In fact, there was so much sharing of lived experience in my interviews, it was kind of hard to cut my transcripts up because I would be in conversation with the ladies sharing my story while they’re sharing their story. And I was like, why did I do this? Well, the afterwork of trying to clean up a transcript is a small price to pay for creating meaningful contact and meaningful relationship.

Verner: That makes a lot of sense because it’s hard for people in those vulnerable positions to feel comfortable opening up. And I imagine you being vulnerable allows them to feel so much safer with you.

Jones: Absolutely. And because I was talking about survival strategies, I bought my photos, I brought pictures, I brought evidence, I brought ephemera from my time of incarceration to demonstrate that I wasn’t speaking from a place of lack of knowledge or skill; that I was speaking from a place of understanding, but was also open enough to seek their understanding. So it’s about a very kind of… in a lot of ways, it’s much more democratic than some ways in which we do interviewing today, or the way in which we’re taught to do it, which is largely extractive, right? We’re just going to take from you and we’re not going to give. And I just kind of blow that up because it doesn’t serve me with my own positionality as a former incarcerated person and people reaching out to interview and engage me. So I’m not going to replicate those systems with other people. Right.

Verner: Right, that makes sense, and now that we’ve talked about the Julia Tutwiler thing, I think I’ll go into one of my questions about that, if that’s all right. Can you discuss your dissertation on Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women? Why are stories of incarcerated women an important part of American women’s history?

Jones: Well, largely because the stories are not told. And some of the excuses is that, you know, there are more men typically incarcerated in prison. But while incarceration, some of the dynamics of incarcerating women and men are the same, there are fundamental differences and ways and strategies of survival are also fundamentally different. So that was the point of my research, was to discover what were some of the survival strategies through an art and aesthetic lens that incarcerated women were deploying in order to survive, and in some cases even thrive in their incarceration in what is arguably the worst prison for women in the United States. At the time in which I went down to Tutwiler, they were still under federal investigation. And this was one of many over several decades of this prison’s history where the federal government had to intervene regarding the conditions of confinement that the women were living under. Everything from physical, forced, you know, physical actually hitting women with fists to sneaking women out at night to get abortions to all sorts of illegal drug transactions, happening every day. Certainly, when I was there, to a person, each interviewee said that somewhere between 85 and 95% of everyone in the prison was high on any given day.

And in a prison that was supposed to be under a reset, another federal investigation in which to minimize some of the harm and reduce the harm that had happened, and is happening to the women there. But yet that was still going on. So how are women seeking, how are women figuring out how to survive under those particular conditions? Is there an art and aesthetic lens? And then if it’s not, are there social and cultural practices in which they are doing and deploying amongst themselves to survive that environment, from everything from fictive kin relationships to bartering, trading, to selling of services. Um, I had an opportunity to kind of take a deep dive into that because I knew that in my own personal life that I don’t think I would’ve survived my incarceration to the level that I did had I not had an art and a creative outlet that was allowed to thrive in that environment. I ran a liturgical praise dance group for 19 years behind the wall. So that meant that I, as facilitator, as choreographer, as curator of music, maker of costumes, I had a space to put some of my frustration and angst and feelings of injustice. I had places to deposit those feelings into so that I wasn’t destroyed mentally and emotionally during 20 years of incarceration.

Verner: In your dissertation, what were some of the arts that the people at Julia Tutwiler were using to cope, or what were other survival strategies outside of the arts if there was any?

Jones: Oh my gosh, there were so many. So many, obviously, which I found kind of creative across the board. A lot of ladies learned to crochet, and a lot of ladies learned to do hair and do makeup and make makeup and things of that nature. But they were supported largely by the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project, which had been in the facilities for over 20 years at that point. And we’re raising the artistic skill level in creative writing, poetry, essay writing. They were bringing in drawing, painting, water color courses, etc. So they were bringing in the skill level, the skills to actually help these ladies really level up in their personal skills. But it also created a natural tension in the facility, because the ladies desired supplies to make their items, either to send home to family and friends, to their children, but also to survive in an environment that had only two paid positions, departments, in the entire facility. So, when you have just a factory job, an unlimited amount of women who can do that job, and a canteen job that only a limited amount of women can do, how are they going to pay for their food and clothing and hygiene items? So, key to their survival was the way in which their artistic skills and talent fostered and supported their economic survival in an environment where they had no legitimate ways of making what this department correction considered legitimate ways of making money. Now, I consider everything they did legitimate. Because they were under an oppressed and repressive regime that expected them to suffer without their basic needs being met. And they rebelled against that artistically, creatively. And that’s powerful, to me.

Verner: It’s quite beautiful and powerful. I love how you were discussing how it’s not just an emotional outlet, it’s actually just economic, it’s being able to find a talent that you can utilize to be able to survive in both capacities.

Jones: Then there’s this added piece, through the interviews, that I didn’t have in my original proposal that I ended up writing up afterwards, was this idea of this radical community of care, and the creative and artistic and aesthetic practices allowed them to care for one another in particular ways. And of course I had experienced that while I was incarcerated, but they were much… it became, through the interviews, something that I didn’t write about in the proposal, but was clearly coming through. I mean, the ways in which they would craft the cards for one another, make floral bouquets out of paper for one another, to one of the elders, they made a makeshift bookcase out of cardboard, and they would change the things that she could see, because she was elderly and getting older and not as mobile. And so they made, you know, they did paper hats and high-heeled shoes and creative paper dolls to give her something to see in this environment which she’s aging and ill in, right? So this radical community of care really stuck out to me as this very powerful survival strategy, that until they started to talk about, I hadn’t named it. I hadn’t picked it up. I was mostly thinking of survival and strategies for survival, and a mental and an emotional survival, but it’s what they do for one another that was also pretty powerful, which was also illegal, right? So, it’s, I’m going to do these things even though these things are not allowed, because I care for you.

Verner: Right, right. And going further than that within your own experience, you said that you did theater, you did dance, and I imagine that that was also a community… less of like, I’m physically giving you something, but more literally, we are spending time with each other, creating art, and this is a way we can emotionally create kin, create family, in this repressive environment, right?

Jones: That’s right, that’s right. And that became even more important to them during COVID, right? A lot of us, a lot of folks were locked down a lot. And so the life in the housing unit and how they could, you know, create studies, create stories, make puppets and tell stories and make things for one another, and create and craft… you really see it, right? And so that’s the more powerful side of the radical community of care, but in the socioeconomic side, there’s a mix of it, right? Because in the radical community of care, I’m not going to charge what something is actually worth. My skills and talents… I’m going to charge a little bit less because I know that you have less. But I know you need this, and maybe you want to send this to your daughter, or to your mom, or you need it for yourself, I know you need it. I’m not going to charge what I know it’s worth, right? I saw a lot of that, I saw a lot of that.

Verner: It’s almost showing you care, by being like, I know you can’t afford this, and I want you to be happy, so I’m willing to give you, for maybe a little bit less, or for your whatever… yeah, that’s beautiful. Okay, I guess I can ask another question, but I love that, that’s a beautiful story, also a beautiful way of examining incarceration because I think incarceration, it’s so easy to find just terrible portions of it, and we can talk about it all the time, but it’s beautiful to study the, like, how people are fighting against it.

Jones: Absolutely. But typically what happens in the study of incarceration is through the availability of archival research that tells a story from the administrators and the prison officials in charge, right? The ephemera of the carceral experience, of the incarcerated, is not preserved for the historical record, right? And so generally, maybe you’ll catch a little in a prison newspaper that’s been archived or something like that. So it’s particularly valuable when you can be on the inside and empower them to speak out to you. And not in the one-off, here’s a short little article or something like that, but meaningfully through their processes of their entire… their thought processes of their entire period of their incarceration. I was very intentional with that, because I had studied containment and confinement for my exams, and I did not want to do another project that looked at the carceral state from the outside.

Verner: It’s also difficult because… and I don’t know if you have experienced differently… I did my studies in Massachusetts, so the DOC in Massachusetts is a little intense, I don’t know… 

Jones: Well, Alabama is real intense.

Verner: I can imagine. I don’t want to assume, but it was interesting, also, to be able to have difficulty to access, because if they know you are reporting negative aspects of the facility, it’s difficult to even get in, to be able to talk to these women, so I imagine that was a big inhibitor to be able to even do these interviews.

Jones: Exactly. Well, but I think it’s all about building relationships. A researcher might try to make those cold calls, or get those cold things, but I received an introduction to the DOC counterparts through the college program that had a 20-year relationship with the Department of Correction. So, in a lot of ways, that eased my way in. I don’t think that I would’ve gotten access like that prior to that at all. Had I probably gone the cold call route and trying to work from the outside in, I think… that’s why I say relationships are critical to that type of… to get to that type of access. To be able to bring in my recorder, to be able to bring in my iPad, to be able to take notes and capture interviews, and spend the time with the ladies that I did. Because I just didn’t come into the interview, I got to sit in the classes, and I got to observe the classroom experience, and I got to come and see some of their yoga stuff, some of the extracurricular things that they do in the facility. I got to tour the facility, tour the intake building, and tour the honor dorm, and really see the place. And not just during the daytime, but also in the evening. But, I think I got that access because of the organization that introduced me to the Department of Correction. And, this may or may not be true, I suspect that being a woman of color in an environment where everyone is largely people of color, from staff all the way down, aided that in some kind of way. I don’t know for sure. It is my gut feeling that, yeah, I’m a black woman coming all the way from New York University to research your facility. That might have mattered.

Verner: A lot of that makes sense, and I’m glad that you were able to have that connection. It does make me feel a little sad because there are probably plenty of untold stories that are just like, you have no connection to a university to be able to talk to these. But I’m glad you were able to, and people were able to be so open. But yeah, it’s a double-edged sword, I guess.

Jones: It is, it definitely is. Because, I mean, carceral spaces are cordoned off, and secretive places intentionally, ??? goes into that a great deal. But that cordoned off is intentional for people to have something to measure themselves against, to say, at least I am not like that. I am not those people, I am not like them. And so, it’s not relevant at all to the outside what their quality of life is on the inside. That’s not relevant. Only if it becomes so egregious that, you know, class actions have to be filed. But on a day-to-day basis, most of the population is not concerned about the quality of life of people who have been judged and cordoned off and tucked away in far upstate, in far rural county prisons. That’s not at the top of their mind, right?

Verner: This is a little tangential, but there are some incarcerated students, or previously incarcerated students at Tufts, which is where I go to university. And a lot of them do food injustice work. And that’s, like, one of those things that’s a daily practice, but people don’t care about that because they’re, like, that’s not abuse. But it’s like, this affects my physical and mental health… the lack of access to food, or the poor food that we do access.

Jones: I was… when I came home, of course I went to the doctor’s and got a full make-up. I was vitamin-nutrient deficient by an alarming scale. It took me several years to get back up in good levels, a couple years actually. Because I was a vegetarian in a prison that didn’t prioritize that kind of diet. So, yeah, the experience… it’s real life. And I sought to center their voices, but I had to contextualize what their resistance or acquiescence, because sometimes that was part of the conversation, or their survival strategies look like within the historical context of these facilities over time. Because it’s one thing to say you understand what someone’s going through in 2026. It’s another thing to understand it contextually, and the historical landscape of a people and the ways in which they have thought about black and brown people, uneducated black and brown people, people who are suffering from drug addiction, women who they believe don’t fit a moral and social code, and can be fallen and ruined under the… you know. And how ideas have stood disposability, really, from the very beginning, shape the quality of life that happens inside the facility. So it is its own animal in a lot of ways, based on the historical and cultural context of a place. Because I’ve studied our state, the state of Indiana, and Alabama was woefully, woefully… you would think they wouldn’t be that different, but they were woefully different in a lot of different ways. But yet in some ways, because there were federal investigations, there much more articles happened about them, and more people came to Alabama historically over time to try to fix… so they had early access to higher education, to vocational programming, experimental programs to help the youth, that had never happened in Indiana. So the contrast is there, but it’s very interesting. I think the deep dive to understand the current prison, you have to understand the history that they’re coming out of.

Verner: Yeah, and because, as you were saying, because every state is so different… 

Jones: Every state is so different.

Verner: And controlled by the state government, and then you just get a completely… even, like, states next to each other can have a completely different… 

Jones: Illinois and Indiana are night and day in certain aspects. In certain aspects, they’re night and day. And I’ve been in both men and women’s facilities in Illinois.

Verner: I will ask another question. I’m sorry, I love talking to you, you’re amazing, but I should probably get into more of your research. We talked a little bit about your art, and stuff, so I think we can go into that a little bit. And I was going to ask, how does your art express women’s experience in the carceral state in a way that cannot be done through scholarly work? Or if it could be done through scholarly work, how does your art expand on that?

Jones: Are you talking about my personal artwork? Or are you talking about the history project, are you talking about the dissertation?

Verner: I read that you did theater, I also saw some of your physical art that you have done. And it seems, at least it seemed like it was very related to your scholarly work.

Jones: Okay, some of it, some of it. But yes. Let me say this. My mother is known, she’s an abstract painter, neoexpressionist, and first person in our immediate family to get a bachelor’s degree, from the Herron school of art. And she painted her emotions. And I have a tendency to use my artistic expression to release emotion, to release pent-up feelings about… I’m not as abstract as she is. She’s a largely abstract painter. But I do paint to, kind of, like, release some of the pent-up energy that I have about certain issues that are going on. Especially if I feel I can’t write about them, or the writing cannot capture it enough for me. So, a perfect example is that the history project is a written project, right, it’s a book. But as we got to looking more at the individuals, the characters in the book are based on historical figures. And looking more at their lives as individuals, I felt like that there… and my co-author, Anastasia ??? felt the same way, that there is a… there is a heaviness, there is a soap opera feel, there is a drama, there is a tragedy feel to this historical record. And the more we talked about it, the more we felt like, there must be a way to distill some of this into an artistic practice, and we decided to write a play, because… for several reasons. It was a way in which to reclaim the voices of the lost, of the women who had been abused, and misused in this space. But also, to write a more victorious end for one of our main characters in the book. But also, for us to kind of, reimagine if certain things… to reimagine the story where a woman won. Where women would win. And because we were often dealing with conditions, particularly with women at that time period, who were dealing with situations where they did not win. At the turn of the Civil War, you know, they could not own property. They were being married off legally by the age of twelve and thirteen years old, you know. These are women who are displaced after the Civil War because husbands, fathers, granddads, male property owners lost… died and lost property, right? And so, empowering them in that moment, in that storyline was important for us, it was healing for us. And so in my own artistic practice, I do really feel like it’s doing some healing work, some salve on the wound. And also offering a different way in which to engage with the historical text, with the historical text in regard to the book, but when on my own personal arc, it’s just another way to engage with my own emotions about frustrating things in my life, which are several.

Verner: That actually makes a lot of sense. That was what I was thinking, was, you know, obviously you want to research, you want to be able to expose these stories, but sometimes these stories just feel like you’re… you’re flattening, almost, real people into characters on a page. And in some ways, theater and art and any other types of artistic expression can make it feel much more three-dimensional.

Jones: That’s right, that’s right. That’s exactly right. And round them out, and put their… maybe some of their edits, their excerpts from transcripts into play, into conversation in real time. I think that was super important, and we got a chance to produce the play a couple of times. I really do hope we can do more with it. And I’m also… I’m certainly open to other artistic avenues to engage with this work. A short film, long form, you know, I’m open to a lot. You know, any of those ways in which to kind of tell these stories. And even with the artistic project, I came out with a dissertation. I would love to see maybe a curated exhibition across the states, like we did with the Mourning Our Losses exhibition, because that was super important for me, is to talk… to bring out of the… out of prison the survival strategies that men and women deployed in order to make it through COVID. Of 18, 19 hours of sitting on their bed, no visits, no programming, food delivered to the units. How are you surviving these months? And it went on for months. Months and months and months, right? Bring that out, because while the rest of the world was devastated by COVID, and couldn’t go get the body of the family member who died while in a hospital, it was even heavier for family members of incarcerated people. Because not only did you not get that last phone call, you didn’t get that video visit. You didn’t get that visit, you didn’t get anything. The person was alive, and then the person was not. And that was it for you. It was it. That was it for your family member. And I wanted to tell people that story. Yeah.

Verner: Yeah. I hadn’t actually thought about that, but yeah, it’s isolation within isolation, separation from everyone.

Jones: So compounded. People have no idea.

Verner: Right.

Jones: Anyway, I digress. Go ahead.

Verner: I mean, that’s the point! I would love to hear your digressions. Okay, so since you mentioned your book, can you discuss how… I assume you’re talking about Who Would Believe a Prisoner, Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920? Can you discuss how those women’s experiences within that book, what were some of the most impactful stories? If you were taking an AP U.S. Women’s History course, what would you say, people need to know this story?

Jones: There’s so many. I think one of the most powerful ones, it’s of course, about the Magdalene laundries. Stories of young girls and young women who have not committed a crime, often sentenced for life to live inside of these Magdalene laundries. I have a picture from the Magdalene laundry in Buffalo, New York, and it looks like a regular house on the street except for the high walls to the left and the right of it. And the razor wire crawling over the top of it and over every window, right? This was a prison, in every sense of the word. And women were sentenced to these places if they had children out of wedlock, if they were considered too sassy or rude, or too fast, or the mother died and the father didn’t want to care for the daughter. They were considered too pretty, considered a burden to society. Let us dispose of this human being inside these walls, because they have either broken moral, social, religious roles, right, they’re no longer pious, they’re fallen and ruined, by the standards of that day. And so, we must remove them. But what’s most kind of, insidious, about that is that, particularly for the women who—young teenage girls and young women who had children out of wedlock—the state, particularly in England and Ireland, were selling the children to families in the U.S. who could not have children. And that’s the seedy underbelly of these Magdalene laundries that nobody wants to talk about. Except for, until a very powerful film starring Judi Dench came out, called Philomena, which tells the story of her long trek to try to find her legitimate child, her one child that she had while, you know, thinking she was in love, and this man took advantage of her youth. And she spent most of her young and early adult life in this Magdalene laundry.

These stories are very important because in the state of Indiana, we consider in our research the Magdalene laundries to be the first private prisons in the United States, because women could be sentenced there from county courts for everything from all the issues that I talked to you about, but also from prostitution and other issues, right? So those stories are important because no history book on the state of Indiana or anywhere will you find stories of these lost women who lived and died in Magdalene laundries. The other aspect is, I think, in Jeffersonville, Indiana, the first public prison for women in the United States, right, is the reformatory. But prior to that, women were sentenced to the co-ed facility inside Jeffersonville Prison. And what’s most insidious about that is that the guards and the wardens sexually abused those women. Some of the women had children from these guards and folks while incarcerated. While incarcerated. And so, it helps us understand… this historical contexts helps us understand when today an African officer, a native African officer, I think he was from Nigeria, in a women’s prison recently was convicted of rape of a woman. And that thread through time, and everyone vouching for him and saying he would never do these things, but it’s actually really happening.

The power dynamic in those spaces puts our sexual reproduction, our sexual rights to our body in danger and at risk. And we need to understand that. That if you’re going to incarcerate women, first of all, you need to find other ways to deal with women in crises than incarcerating them. Poverty, drug addiction, no economic viability for a safe home living and all these things, right? Women are doing things to survive and are living in crisis, and incarceration is largely the result from that. Find other ways to deal and help the women in crisis than shoving them into prisons. But that is the original narrative story about why women’s prisons exist at all. And we tell that story in the book, and say that’s why it’s important. Because the very… when they chose to make the very first prison for women in the United States, they chose to replicate a lot of those condemnatory and shaming and very individualistic orientations about why women end up in the criminal legal system. And no systemic or structural analysis about why women are ending up in the criminal legal system, right? If they had done that, then maybe what we could consider a women’s prison would look differently than it does today. And women would actually be getting more help to come out of crisis, right, than to remain in crisis and then compound the crisis by the tragedy, the violations, the secretiveness, the cordoning off that happens inside the prison. And then the trauma of the consequences of their criminal conviction once they come out. We compound, we compound, we compound, right? So, that’s why this writing and history is important.

Verner: Yes, because it wasn’t founded in order to stop women from committing crimes, it was actually because they were treating women as… they were making sex or whatever a crime.

Jones: And only the women were responsible for that. So, if you were a married man, and you had sex with a sex worker, she was wrong, you weren’t. The man wasn’t. Historically, is the case. So, nobody condemned the men. They never lost their jobs or their positions, or were required to pay these women’s legal fees or offer them opportunities to go to another town to set up their lives. There was no restitution, there was no repair for women who were sex workers. There was no condemnation for the men that purchased their wares, right? So, the Duchess of Stringtown, we lifted her up because she was a madam, a brothel owner of a large hotel, and she didn’t… she’s not known for gross abuse of the women, but she would take in the fallen women of the day. Women who were like one of the characters, one of the real historical figures that we found. She was hustled by a man who promised to marry her, because she had an inheritance. And then, when he got the inheritance because he’s going to plan for their wedding, he abandoned her. Okay, so what does a woman who’s not allowed to own property, who is a young woman, how is she to live? Where is she to go? Her parents are deceased, that’s why she got an inheritance. One of the only places she could go was the brothel. And we tell the story about how she used that moment in the brothel to gain her power, to recognize the power of her body and her mind. Reclaim it as a positive after he violated it in the negative. And I’ll be honest with you, I personally don’t have a problem with sex work, if it is your choice. 

Verner: I agree. But that’s personal opinion, obviously.

Jones: If it is your choice… and we tell the story, the duchess gave her her choice. You can say, here, do some sex work, or you can go. But you have the choice. Unlike sex trafficking ventures ran largely by men like Jeffrey Epstein, and the like. Or others, where women are convicted… there’s some sinister ones out there where law enforcement are in cahoots with municipal judges who make deals to traffic people, right? I got you out of this case, so you gotta go work it off for us, and the such, right? Anyway, that’s the point of the Duchess of Stringtown, is just to empower those women and tell their stories from their angle. And also to talk about the greed of men and the overwhelming, you know, for a time memorial, men had nothing to do with women’s bodies. They didn’t have anything to do with the menstrual cycle, the birth cycle. Midwives handled all of that. Then the men of medicine decided… early men of medicine that, you know, we’re going to do these experiments on our slaves, and we’re going to learn about the women’s bodies, and now, once we’ve learned about that we’re going to move over and start experimenting on incarcerated women to learn about their bodies and their anatomies and then we’re going to decide what they need to do to be fixed, right?

And we tell that story to historicize medicalization and that link into the further exploitation of women’s bodies in the secretive, cordoned off spaces of prisons and jails. And so, all of this, we centered the women’s narrative wherever we could, whatever ephemera we could find in the historical record, we centered it and put it in the front so that they could tell their stories. Wherever we could find them, because we want these systems to understand that you are standing on a wretched, musty, and disgusting foundation. You stand on that. We’re not going to clap for you,we’re not going to celebrate you. You violated women who were secreted and cordoned off to build these institutions that also further harm us in these same spaces with secretive sterilizations, and creeping out in the middle of the night to get abortions, and keeping women incarcerated for longer periods than men for the same cases and the same crimes, to stunt their sexual reproduction. Because you don’t want those women having children. I mean, you see how I’m saying it’s all linked?

Verner: Yeah, I was going to say that I’ve interviewed before who’ve talked about somewhat similar cases. I interviewed Dr. Erin Costello Wecker, who… I was mainly researching with her about her work with an Irish woman who sued the Supreme Court for equal pay, but she also studied Magdalene laundries. But she was talking about Ireland. I had no idea that they were in the United States until I started researching that.

Jones: That’s where it started. It started, and it came here in 1848 with the first one in Louisville, Kentucky.

Verner: The story of Magdalene laundries in the United States, I have never heard anyone discuss it.

Jones: Exactly!

Verner: It’s an unheard story, at least from my experience, and I’m usually very interested in American women’s studies, and recently, carceral studies. Anyway, I think your work is very impressive and I think it’s needed to be said, because if the background of these is the Magdalene landures, I think almost anyone would agree that Magdalene laundries have no place in today’s society, right?

Jones: Right, right. Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s why, that’s how we found them in the historical record. They began to close in the 70s, in the 1970s here in Indiana. And so they were, you know, almost, like, a hundred years, a little over a hundred years operating as a private prison in this city. And so, anyway, all that parallels to what we see happening behind prison doors today. Sexual assault, sexual coercion, you must do certain things for certain access. Especially in solitary confinement, again, the more cordoned off you are, the more that can happen to you.

Verner: With the lack of power of the women, lack of access to people to talk to, yeah, they can be easily taken advantage of. The other person that I was thinking of that I interviewed that was related, and you might even know this story. I’ve forgotten what woman it was, but she had done research on a woman who wanted to come to Britain. She was a woman from Africa who wanted to come to Britain to be a performer, and she performed for a bit, and when she died, they, like, tore apart her body, and examined her. There’s so many stories of women of color being examined under a microscope. And in her case, it was much more sexualized, and obviously, a lot of these stories are taking advantage of these women, and also just experimenting on them because they were not seen as valued.

Jones: Well, their bodies were different, right? They were fascinated by large butts and big breasts, and they were, like, our women aren’t like this. And they would bring these women out and step them up on stools and look between their legs. They were fascinated by that. And that’s part of that era where men, white men began to enter this whole field. When women were taking care of women’s bodies, caring for women’s bodies, forever. But they wanted to professionalize that, and began to experiment on us. And unfortunately, the black body has been central to that, historically. It’s been the center of that conversation, historically. And then, we also know the carceral body. The captive. The enslaved body. Right? So, you know, Marion Sims was a mentor to ??? and Amos Butler. They were all in cahoots, and they often met right here in the state of Indiana.

Verner: Yeah, it’s absurd. Sorry, we had a lot of fun there with our conversation. Okay, let me see… okay. I just wanted to quickly talk about your organization work, because I think that’s super important in general to… I feel like if you’re doing this type of research, and I mean, obviously our program very much believes, if you are teaching women’s history, this is a political organization act, at least at this time. So, can you discuss being a founder of Construction Our Future, and an organizer in general in the community of a lot of different organizations you worked with, from what I found, and how that’s important to carceral studies, why that’s important for researchers, and how you can impact change?

Jones: Yeah, I mean, I think… when I was incarcerated, I had an African dance background, and I had an artistic background before I came to incarceration, so I thought I would go back into the arts, get out of prison, get an MFA, and get involved in some artistic project. And then, as I got into my graduate program, we had ad hoc graduate level courses offered in a sort of seminar, colloquial orientation. And I got to learn more about the carceral state in those two years than I thought possible. And I thought, there’s more work here, right? There’s much more work here. And I need to be… I made that decision to be part of the solution. Because if I’m not a part of the solution, I’m part of the problem. And I really believe that, and so I could walk away… there are lots of people who walk away from being incarcerated and live lives just fine, and I’m glad for them. But I could not walk away from the things that I learned about the carceral state and the systems and structures that harm women and girls and kids and families, and perpetuate the system, and don’t solve for crises, and don’t solve for social and cultural needs at the home before people even end up in incarceration. So I thought, okay, I’ve made a decision: this will be my life’s work. I’m going to engage on this level. I’m going to engage on these issues for the rest of the time that I have on the planet. So, Constructing Our Future was built out of a public policy class where we were studying reentry alternatives. We read an article that said that state legislatures were not happy with any of the reentry alternatives that were operating at the time, and so we were challenged to come up with a reentry idea of our own. We submitted them to a competition in Boston, the Better Government Competition. And my idea, the GEP program, Government Employee Project, which was all about, put your money where your mouth is, state of Indiana, and hire these formerly incarcerated people.

Verner: That makes sense!

Jones: For a two year period, and give them the resources they need to level up. So, that was my project. It got honorable mention, it was the very first thing I had ever gotten recognized for, as a college student. And that got me on the go. One of the other ladies who submitted something was this idea called Constructing Our Future, which, the idea, the original idea was that the women would live together in homes, go out in in the community, purchase property, rehab them, and then keep rehabbing houses so that they ultimately earn their own home. It’s a great idea. It was hard to put to ground without significant investor capital, so when I came home and I was named Executive Director, I pushed for us to focus on the housing piece, because I really felt at that time, everybody was screaming that to solve recidivism was with a job. But they hadn’t talked to women. Women said to solve recidivism is mainly a place to stay, a comfortable, safe, place to stay, where they could figure out the rest. Only now has it become sexy for everybody, like, we’re gonna work on housing! We’re gonna prioritize housing! We care about housing, we care about housing! But we had been screaming that through our early research on reentry.

We studied housing blight through the city, and we thought we could marry this issue of housing blight with meeting the needs of women who need homes. And Constructing Our Future was created out of this idea that no woman comes to reentry, comes to incarceration, at zero. They bring some skill, talent, they bring some wisdom, they’ve got some lessons learned, things that they’ve unlearned, needed to unlearn, to every situation. I hated this whole idea when certain volunteers would come in and have this very much savior-orientation to incarcerated women who had one, two, three, four, five, and six children. Honey, you are not no one’s savior. They bring themselves and their experiences to any situation. So let me check you on that, right? And so, Constructing Our Future was, like, let us take ownership of the fact that if we want the life that we really want for ourselves and our children and our community, we will have to construct it ourselves. Let’s move away from this infantilized idea that incarcerated people need everything done for them because they don’t know enough. They don’t know how to do anything. We gotta tell them everything to do. There is that orientation, that class of people who feel like formerly incarcerated people do not have capacity of their own, right? Because maybe they’re dealing with a substance use disorder, or maybe they’re dealing with domestic violence trauma. Or maybe they’re dealing with whatever. Constructing Our Future was created to push against that entire notion, that entire messaging, and that if you give us access to resources and opportunity, with what we already have within us, we can construct a better future for ourselves. Period.

So that meant having a board, fifty percent, at least fifty percent representatives of formerly incarcerated people. That meant prioritizing the hiring of formerly incarcerated people, because we’re not going to end up in ???. We’re going to be about us and for us, right? And that’s what we do, that’s my philosophy. On my website, on my LinkedIn, I have an image, and it says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which is a statement written by Alice Walker, and it means that people who have not lived my experiences, who have not come from where I come from, who have not experienced what I… cannot tell me how to create a new life for myself. Cannot tell me what job I should have, cannot tell me how I should raise my child who’s grown up in the hood and on the streets, and know nothing about this environment. So, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. This is about prioritizing and putting in the front what society would typically put in the back, or not prioritize at all, is that formerly incarcerated man and woman. They are tainted with criminality. They are failed and flawed. How dare we put them in the front and say, let’s listen to them to figure out how to find solutions so they never go back to prison.

Verner: Yeah, and I think a lot of the feeling… if an organization is made for previously incarcerated people, it seems absurd that it would be run by people who are not previously incarcerated, because then it just feels like… 

Jones: Well, historically, public policy legislation, community practices, everything from, I mean, I love this term by, oh my god, she’s escaping me, but she calls incarceral bureaucrats. These gatekeepers of access to resources and opportunity in our community are largely people who don’t have our lived experience. And/or don’t see value having come from and come through what I would argue is a very traumatic experience.

Verner: Right, it’s just. like. disenfranchisement and everything, as well.

Jones: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s all in there as well, right. So, yeah. I am about this life. I am about this life, and I continue to develop and create new programs. We are developing proprietary courses specifically focused on formerly incarcerated people and women, in particular, to serve them, because I feel like I’ve looked at a lot of people who’ve put together… “I’ve put together a reentry thing! I’ve got a program I wrote!” And these people have no lived experience. How can you tell me about saving money and organizing my life when I have a fourteen dollar a day ankle bracelet around my feet? How do I say, when I come out of prison poor, how do I… But if you don’t start, and that’s what you’ve gotta center the lived experience. Because our approach to financial literacy is something that they can do with wherever they are right now. And same thing with the parenting after incarceration course, and the same thing with the civic engagement. We start where they are, and not some glossy ideal.

Verner: Right. Because those are, like… if you don’t start with the people who are maybe struggling the most, that is how they can go back to prison, right? Because poverty is such a strong predictor and strong cause of people going to prison in the first place, let alone the difficulties of trying to figure out how to get a job and everything, and find housing that accepts people who have been previously incarcerated.

Jones: I mean, real talk. That is real talk. So that’s why we do what we do. I don’t know that it’s my life thing to do just one thing. I am not a very… I’m a multi-tasker person, so I’m going to be doing some art, I’ve taken a new job with the Correctional Association of New York, so I will be doing archival research.

Verner: So cool.

Jones: And I will also be helping this nonprofit thrive and grow. And who knows what else, right? There is another book in me. Yeah, yeah, there is, there is. And I’m still publishing. So, whatever I’m going to do, it’s going to… it will somehow link to this whole idea of ways in which to remediate the carceral state and empower people impacted by it.

Verner: Right, right. I guess for my last two questions, I’m just going to talk about, like, oral history, and everything like that. And I just wanted to ask, as someone who worked with the women transcending oral history project, as well as, it seems like your dissertation was mainly interviews… Why do you think it’s important to focus on women’s oral history? It’s also just important to us, because this is the entire project, is an oral history project, right?

Jones: Yeah. We are largely absent from the archive. The stories of women impacted by the criminal legal system are largely absent. We largely do not write memoir, biographies. There are some, there are a few, you know, ??? talks about when she was in prison, Angela Davis talks about when she was in prison. There are a few others. But we are largely absent from this, from this American history experience with the carceral state. That’s why we gotta do this work. Period. We have to tell these stories. Another article that I have coming out is about Jenny Harper. She was one of the first black women incarcerated in the brand new reformatory for women in Indianapolis. And she arrived with buckshot in her head because she ran from her overseer, and she escaped her enslavement. Nobody knows her story, right? But it’s important to tell that story, because she lived with lead in her head, and it made her mentally ill. And it wasn’t until she was incarcerated till the buckshot was removed. But in those times, in those early years of the incarceration, she came back to prison. She was always fighting in the neighborhood. She was always cussing at the judges, going off, being arrested. She gets incarcerated, and the second time, the department removes the buckshot from her head, and she disappears from the carceral record, never to come back to prison. That was a woman in crisis. And the response was to incarcerate. She had buckshot in her head, that caused all of this other stuff.

Verner: And if she had just been checked for her health, then she could have stopped… she wouldn’t have needed to go at all.

Jones: You understand. You get it, right?

Verner: Yeah. It’s absurd. And, connecting specifically to women’s history in general, I think a lot of our project is basically being, like, not only are women’s stories not told, if you look at, like, a big thing we talk about is in the AP U.S. Gov course there was, I believe, only one woman required to be taught, and that was the anonymous woman in Roe v. Wade who now no longer needs to be taught. In AP U.S. History, you can learn about a couple women, but it is, like, the three primary women in the women’s movement, and that’s about it. And so, all of those women are mainly white, you can go most of your courses never learning about a black woman, never learning about incarcerated people.

Jones: You get it, you get it, you get it. You get why this is… because there’s an actual, active silencing and removal of women and women of color, in particular. When’s the last time you heard or saw a commercial or a movie starring a famous Indigenous woman?

Verner: I might not know any. That’s terrible, yeah. It’s absurd, yeah.

Jones: Right?

Verner: Yeah.

Jones: So this is our work. This is, this is our work. This is our work as women. And yeah, because I am… was a woman coming from the poor, the black, the feminine, the woman, and also dealing with the taint of criminality coming from tragedy, I feel like it is my right to take up space to tell these stories. I take up this space.

Verner: Yeah, because we haven’t.

Jones: I demand this space. And that took a lot for me to get there. I didn’t always have that. I felt like an outsider in my cohort in a lot of ways, because I was older than everybody, and I hadn’t gone the traditional routes to apply to a grad program, and I had to build myself up, brick by brick. But I do credit, in my dissertation, just a massive list of women who helped me get there. And it’s… I dedicate the entire dissertation to my husband and my son, but all the women. The women, the women, the women. Women whose books I’ve only read, women who’ve sat in here on my couch. But just the scope of these women who helped me get here. So, I take up space.

Verner: Yes, I love that. That makes me so happy. I felt like my heart melted when you said that you credited the women.

Jones: Yeah, I did.

Verner: Yeah. Okay, so this will be my last question, and it’s, do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so, could you share why this course is needed?

Jones: Yeah, of course I support that. And I think I’ve kind of already talked about it, it’s because we’re missing. We’re missing. We’re missing. We’re missing. And it should be… I think just as much as general American studies courses and general ??? courses, basic methodology courses, are there because they’re such… failure to bring women and women’s stories to the forefront. A lot of this stuff should be required. A lot of people don’t want to hear that, they don’t wanna hear that, “Don’t want my kid to learn whatever.” You know, they’re burning books and banning books and acting like idiots in the town square. I still feel like there’s much more information that people need to learn, and they need to be getting this information earlier. Because I tell you, I worry about some of the high school students getting ready to go on to college, and certainly to a rigorous school… if they’re going to humpty-dumpty college, fine, you’ll get a humpty-dumpty education and, you know, you’re gonna have a great fall. It’s gonna be great. But for people who want to do something real, and go to a rigorous program, they will be behind. There’s so much they won’t know.

I was traumatized by how much I had to catch up on when I got to NYU from my “Indiana general studies education” with my minor in American studies and whatever. I thought I knew shit. I did not. I did not. I was woefully behind. And so, that’s what I’m saying. If they’re going to want to have meaningful impact, they gotta have a curriculum that meets it. And a curriculum that is absent of women is just trash. It’s just trash. You’re eliminating fifty percent of the wisdom and expertise and knowledge. And, if you don’t balance that out with our voices, you’re going to be reinforcing this elitist, dominant narrative from the elite white male. The elite, white, old male, at that, right? When there’s so much more. It’s so much more. Folks should not be trying to go to grad school and have no idea about black women, black radical feminism. Not knowing any of these people or any of these histories and stories, and, like, why did we have to fight for black studies in the first place. They need to understand what markedness really means. It doesn’t mean that, oh, you need to have a black studies course, where’s the white studies course? Well, the white studies course is all courses. That’s why there’s a black studies course, you understand? But if they’re not taught that, they go onto their higher ed, higher ed and above and above and above, lacking key, basic information.

Verner: Right, right.

Jones: And they underserve everybody. Because those are the people that are going to be the teachers next, the social workers next, the judges next, the lawyers next, you know? And as we can see, marginalization is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Verner: I had a democracy course last semester, and one of the things that she talked about was, “Democracy isn’t a continually forwarding course, it is up and down.”

Jones: Up and down, up and down. Anyway, I digress. My point is, we need it, and we need it earlier and earlier. I mean, you got people fighting in the removed states statues that tell the story of slavery. You’ve got the entire rotunda of the U.S. Capitol with not one single black person identified at all. On those dome paintings. Before pictures of Pocahontas. We are erased, literally, from the history of this country. So if our educators won’t give it to us…

Verner: Then who will?

Jones: Who will?

Verner: Right. I think there was… I don’t remember what this was, but there was some statue circle in New York, where there was, like, no women featured. So they were, like, “Oh, sorry, we’ll just add Alice in Wonderland.” And it’s, like, I don’t really think that that was what we were saying when we were saying women weren’t featured here. We’re not saying imaginary women. We’re saying we want you to discuss real stories.

Jones: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So, more of that, right? So that’s why this is important. And it should be a required course, it should be right up there with, you know, English 101 and all these other things. Because if you don’t have that base, you’re going to underserve our community. Most men, most men get that. Most men have a certain understanding. They understand that there must be a balance, a balanced reading of women’s stories, women’s histories, women’s scholarship on the same issues that they’re studying because they’re going to come from a little bit of a different lens.

Verner: Yeah. My teachers did a U.S. Gov with women featured primarily, and to be able to see how they can feature women more, be able to work on this course, and one thing they noticed, was, the class wasn’t all women. It was about, I think it was probably 6-% women, 40% men. Men are interested in learning this topic. It’s not just serving women, you know?

Jones: Exactly, exactly, exactly. That’s exactly what I mean. It’s so folks who think that, like, offering up some targeted study on women’s history, women’s scholarship, is somehow disenfranchising to men. I mean, they’re way behind the times. They don’t understand how much women are erased from the historical record, and are not prioritized in syllabus creation, you know? Unless it’s that one class, or that one little section on the syllabus, right?

Verner: Yeah, we had to eliminate some parts of the syllabus that were maybe too radical, which is absurd, but, you know? We deal with things.

Jones: Well, and that’s why you always add the supplemental, and the optional reading, and the additional reading. Because there are going to be women in that class going, “Yes, okay, I need that book and that book and that book. I’m going to do that deeper dive.”

Verner: Exactly. Well, that’s most of the interview. Thank you so, so much.

Jones: You’re welcome, Madison, I’m glad I could participate and sit with you. I’m really proud of what you guys are doing.