Emancipate NC Board member Kristie Puckett and Strategic Director Elizabeth Simpson traveled to Yale Law School to the Arthur Liman Conference on public health and incarceration this month. Elizabeth was a Liman Fellow in North Carolina from 2010-2011.
As part of the conference’s closing panel on “Moving Forward,” Kristie and Elizabeth told stories about sharing power between people personally impacted by policing and incarceration and their attorneys. Kristie spoke about her own experience being pregnant in jail and the activism, direct action, and story-telling that accompanied successful litigation to free 4,500 people from incarceration during the height of the COVID pandemic, including a sit-in at the judge’s home. Elizabeth spoke about the need for attorneys to take direction from the people who are personally impacted by State subjection, and she described the deliberate non-hierarchical organization of Emancipate NC.
Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and researcher Sophie Angelis joined the panel. Chesa spoke about his experience growing up with incarcerated parents, and Sophie discussed her research in Norway on abolition and prison “reform.”