Join the Human Rights Lab and UChicago SSA for a conversation with Susan Burton, founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL) and author (with journalist, Cari Lynn) of the award-winning memoir Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women. The conversation will be moderated by Reuben Jonathan Miller, Assistant Professor at SSA, and Lab Director Alice Kim.
Susan Burton has dedicated her life to helping others break the cycle of incarceration. She is widely recognized as a leader in the national criminal justice reform movement. A past Soros Justice Fellow, Women’s Policy Institute Fellow, and Community Fellow under the California Wellness Foundation’s Violence Prevention Initiative, Ms. Burton has served on California’s Little Hoover Commission and the Gender Responsive Strategies Task Force. In recognition of her leadership, she was appointed by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas as a member of the Los Angeles County Sybil Brand Commission for Institutional Inspections. In this role she is authorized to inspect Los Angeles County correctional facilities and advocate for the health and well-being of people housed there.
Susan Burton is also a co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON) and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement (FICPM), both national grassroots civil rights movements comprised of formerly incarcerated individuals, their families and community allies. In collaboration with UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, she launched an employment rights reentry legal clinic, which has grown to be the largest of its kind in Southern California. Her memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Formerly Incarcerated Women won the prestigious NAACP Image Award for outstanding literary work and the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.