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mass incarceration
This Juneteenth, America Must Choose to Live Up to Its Founding Documents
When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Jun 19, 2025
In 1796, 22-year-old Ona Marie Judge became one of America's most wanted fugitives. Born into slavery and held by President George Washington, Judge escaped from Philadelphia and fled north to New Hampshire. Washington immediately began hunting her, placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards for her return. For over 50 years, she would live as a fugitive, knowing that bounty hunters could appear at any moment to drag her back into bondage. Her story of survival reveals tensions that we're still grappling with today.
Judge's escape revealed the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding stories. As efforts to silence discussions of race and history spread nationwide—from federal agencies barring recognition of Black History Month to more than 44 states, including my home state of New Hampshire, limiting how schools can discuss racism—her story demands our attention.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology.
The paradoxes Judge witnessed still define us. Washington was not the infallible moral leader of our imagination, but a flesh-and-blood man who owned other human beings and spent years trying to recapture the woman who dared seek freedom. New Hampshire was not removed from slavery's horrors—Portsmouth had been a major slave trading port since the 1600s.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology. These tensions were the defining forces that shaped America's first century and continue to do so today. Judge's story illuminates how deeply slavery was woven into the fabric of the entire nation, connecting Black and white lives in ways our history books have long worked to hide. Understanding her experience becomes essential to understanding ourselves, especially as movements to obscure these complexities grow stronger.
The Pattern of Progress and Backlash
This current backlash against Black history education shouldn't surprise us—it follows a persistent American pattern. Every period of racial progress has triggered fierce resistance designed to roll back gains and rewrite the past. After Reconstruction brought Black political participation and civil rights, the country allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and KKK terror to reign while Confederate monuments were erected across the South to rewrite the Civil War as a noble struggle rather than a fight to preserve slavery. The rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black Americans followed the 1960s civil rights laws. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, triggered the Tea Party movement and birtherism campaigns designed to delegitimize his presidency.
Today's attacks on how we discuss race and history represent the latest iteration of this cycle. When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Why Local Stories Matter
This ongoing struggle is why the work happening in New Hampshire—a politically purple state where Black residents make up just 2% of the population—offers constructive lessons for the rest of the nation. If honest conversations about Black history can flourish here, they can do so anywhere; however, success requires understanding what we like to use as a guideline: the rule of thirds. One third will support, one third will be persuaded, and one third will oppose. The progress is determined by the persuadable middle. We've seen how we can make real change by reaching that crucial middle group in New Hampshire.
Look no further than our annual July 4 readings of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is Your Fouth of July" speech, which has grown from one participating town to 22, with communities reading simultaneously across the state. From synagogues to rural town halls, people gather simply to hear Douglass' words—no discussion required, no positions demanded. This creates space for reflection and connection without the political battles that often shut down conversation before it begins.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates.
Building unexpected alliances has proven equally powerful. Working with the Daughters of the American Revolution to install historical markers honoring Black Revolutionary War heroes demonstrates that historical truth enriches rather than threatens our understanding of patriotism. We've now placed nearly 40 markers throughout the state, each one making visible stories that were always there but rarely acknowledged.
This success stems from focusing on education and storytelling rather than confrontation, allowing facts and local narratives to speak for themselves. New Hampshire residents hunger for authentic stories about their own communities, even when those stories complicate their narratives about the past.
From resistance to Reckoning
The power of personal narrative will be on full display this Juneteenth, as Portsmouth hosts an unprecedented gathering where direct descendants of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved come together to explore our intertwined histories. Shannon LaNier, the ninth-generation descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, will join Laurel Guild Yancey, descendant of Portsmouth's Prince Whipple, a Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War while enslaved by Declaration of Independence signer William Whipple. In a profound twist of history, the Whipple family would later become the very people who provided sanctuary to Ona Judge when she sought refuge in Portsmouth—the same family line that had owned Prince Whipple would become her protectors, demonstrating how the arc of justice sometimes bends through the most unexpected transformations.
When descendants sit together sharing these narratives, they reveal how the stories of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved have been inseparably linked across generations. These family histories, passed down through centuries, offer living proof that our nation's racial past isn't separate and distinct, but intimately woven together from the very beginning. Their gathering in Judge's adopted hometown creates a bridge across time, connecting her story of resistance to our current moment of choice.
After all, her choice to flee slavery, knowing the dangers ahead, required extraordinary courage. She lived in poverty, often depending on charity, and had outlived her three children and husband when she died in 1848. Yet she chose uncertainty over oppression, a fugitive's life over bondage, never abandoning her claim to freedom despite facing consequences far more severe than anything we encounter today.
The free Black families in Portsmouth who risked everything to shelter her further demonstrate that resistance has always been collective work, requiring people to see their own freedom as incomplete while others remained in chains. Their courage offers a template for our current moment, when we need that same spirit of collective action.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates. Speak up when school boards attempt to ban books that tell the full story of American history. Engage with the persuadable middle in our communities, attend town halls, and vote for leaders who understand that historical truth strengthens, rather than weakens, our democracy. Most importantly, discover the complete stories of all who have lived in your community—Indigenous peoples, Black families, immigrants, and others whose experiences have been overlooked—and support those working to bring these histories to light.
This Juneteenth, as conversations unfold in the place where Judge found refuge, her story asks us to choose: Will we allow fear to silence these essential truths, or will we find the courage to engage in the honest reckoning needed to fulfill the promises of equality our founding documents made to all Americans?
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Abrego García’s Detention Opened a Window Into El Salvador’s Obscure Prison System
The basic rights Abrego has been denied in El Salvador—including to communicate with his family—are a stark reminder of the plight of thousands of Salvadorans.
May 18, 2025
After mounting pressure, on April 17 U.S. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Kilmar Abrego García, 29, a Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 by the Trump administration. Abrego García was granted a rare opportunity to speak with someone outside of prison—in this case, a U.S. senator.
But Since Salvadoran authorities suspended some due process rights in March 2022, security forces have detained more than 85,000 people—often without warrants, access to legal counsel, or any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. My organization has interviewed dozens of people who have gone months or even years without being able to communicate with their loved ones in prison or access information about their whereabouts, the status of legal proceedings, or their well-being.
“Every week I went, and every week I left crying,” the mother of a 24-year-old domestic worker told us, about her visits to government offices to seek information. Her daughter was detained in April 2022, as she slept beside her 4-year-old daughter. Officers entered their home without a warrant, citing “presidential orders.” They took her first to a police station and then to the women’s prison.
When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years.
She was later charged with “unlawful association,” a vague offense frequently used to hold people detained in El Salvador. When her mother attempted to submit documents to show her daughter was not a gang member, including employment papers, a public defender told her they were “useless.” The public defender did not give her any answers, alleging, as she recalls, that “sharing information with families of detainees is prohibited.”
The mother has been forced to piece together information from multiple sources, including calls from people who said they had been detained with her daughter, and rumors in WhatsApp and Facebook groups created by relatives of people detained. She learned, for example, in September 2023, that her daughter had a hernia, causing her to vomit frequently. Sixteen months later, she learned that her daughter had been hospitalized briefly, for a medical checkup. She does not know what her health status is.
The relatives of a 61-year-old civil engineer, who was detained in June 2022, told us a similar story. He has multiple serious health conditions—including diabetes, glaucoma, neuropathy, hypertension, and other chronic illnesses. Yet his family does not know if he is receiving the medical attention he needs, including daily refrigerated insulin—something detainees in El Salvador rarely obtain.
He was detained at a police unit in San Salvador, then transferred in September 2023 to a prison. Since then, his family has only been able to see him once, very briefly, in June 2024. They saw him then from afar, handcuffed and escorted into a courtroom, where he appeared visibly weakened.
His lawyer has asked repeatedly that he be sent to house arrest to receive adequate medical treatment, to no avail.
This regime of extreme incommunicado detention has also allowed corruption to thrive. As the investigative news outlet El Faro recently exposed, many relatives have paid bribes to be able to exercise a basic right: to communicate with their detained loved ones.
Yet many, often from vulnerable neighborhoods in El Salvador, are unable to pay. Many told us that the most they can do is take a bag with basic items, such as food, medicine, and clothes, to prison. They spend a significant amount of their income and time to do so, often fearing that their relatives will never receive the goods.
Thanks to outside pressure, Abrego García was not only able to speak to a U.S. senator but also to be transferred out of the draconian Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), where thousands of the detainees are being held.
These positive steps are clearly insufficient: Abrego García should be sent back to the United States. But the basic rights Abrego has been denied in El Salvador—including to communicate with his family—are a stark reminder of the plight of thousands of Salvadorans who have seen their loved ones completely cut off from the outside world for months or even years.
When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years. A prison system cut off from the rest of the world where the lives of detainees remain in limbo and families are left in anguish, endlessly searching for answers.
“I wish I could be a bird and fly into the prison just to see how my daughter is,” one of their relatives said.
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I Returned Home From Prison With Nothing; Here’s What Helped Me Rebuild
Programs like the Returning Citizens Stimulus don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds.
Apr 23, 2025
In April of 2020, one of us was navigating reentry during a global pandemic, while the other was working to implement the largest-ever cash assistance program specifically for people returning from incarceration. With the publication of groundbreaking research, five years later, we know that cash assistance has a positive impact on public safety. It’s time to scale this proven strategy to California’s recidivism challenges.
Karina:
I grew up in Los Angeles, where 1 in 3 children grow up in poverty. Despite a loving mother, I was placed in the foster care system at an early age—a system known to be a pipeline to incarceration. During my third pregnancy I was incarcerated, and I spent the next three years trying to figure out how I would support my family when I got out. With no savings and limited resources, I had no idea how I would get back on my feet.
Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
The pandemic forced employers to go remote. I didn’t have access to a computer or money to buy one, and I didn’t have a clue on how I would afford housing. My kids have pulmonary issues, and I couldn’t see or live with them without risking exposure.
While incarcerated, I learned about the Returning Citizens Stimulus (RCS), a first-of-its-kind initiative launched by the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). RCS offered financial support to people returning from incarceration. I received $2,750 in installments over two months after my release.
RCS cash made all the difference because getting and keeping a job right out of prison was nearly impossible. I applied to a job at a warehouse known for hiring justice-impacted people. I was fired on my day off because of my time in prison. For people like me this experience is commonplace. Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
RCS covered my immediate needs, such as new clothes, transportation, and I could pay off my restitution. It even allowed me to take my kids out for a meal for the first time in three years. Today, I’m a member of CEO’s policy and advocacy team, where I’ve been able to use my story to advocate for direct cash assistance.
Sam:
In April 2020, when many justice-impacted people, like Karina, were locked out of government support, CEO—being one of the largest reentry services providers in the nation—conceived of and implemented RCS. The program delivered $24 million in direct cash payments to over 10,000 people returning from incarceration.
Research nonprofit MDRC’s most recent independent evaluation of the RCS program in Los Angeles and Alameda counties found that RCS reduced parole violations by nearly 15% for up to a year after enrollment with noteworthy statistical significance—meaning we can be almost certain it was the cash assistance that drove the outcomes. Parole is a costly and punitive system that accounts for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons and costs the U.S. over $10 billion annually.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Programs like RCS don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds. A short-term financial intervention had long-term impacts on reducing both violent and technical parole violations. It’s simple: When people have the resources to succeed, they don’t cycle back into the system.
Prop 36 is primed to roll back California’s progress in reducing its incarcerated population. More people are likely to go to prison, and less money will be directed towards reentry. The need to invest in solutions proven to halt the revolving door of incarceration have never been more necessary. California has already implemented direct cash assistance before and has a whole host of organizations ready to put it in action once again.
The governor and lawmakers must renew funding for Helping Justice-Involved Reenter Employment (HIRE). This program, set to sunset this fiscal year, has already distributed more than $500,000 in needs-based payments to justice-impacted people across the state, pairing cash support with pathways to good jobs.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Karina:
RCS offered me agency to determine my own career path. I could provide for my family while also pursuing a fulfilling job. As someone who was able to build a life through RCS, it is my responsibility to push for programs, like HIRE, that will have a lasting and significant impact on the future of my city, my state, and people returning home.
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