Biography
Andrea James, JD, is the Founder and Executive Director of The National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Founder of Families for Justice as Healing, author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts on the Politics of Mass Incarceration, a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award.
As a former criminal defense attorney and a formerly incarcerated woman, Andrea shares her personal and professional experiences to raise awareness of the effect of incarceration of women on themselves, their children, and communities. Her work is focused on ending incarceration of women and girls and contributing to the shift from a criminal legal system focused on police and prisons, to a system led by directly affected people from within their communities and based on individual and community accountability.
Andrea’s Story
“No one thinks it will happen to them. We hear things on the news like: the United States is home to the largest incarcerated population in the world. We read and see the stories of formerly incarcerated people, like Piper Kerman’s experience at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. But we never imagine that it will happen to us.
I didn’t either — until I ended up in the same Connecticut prison because of one mistake in judgment. I was a criminal defense and real estate conveyance attorney in Roxbury, Massachusetts. In 2010, I was sentenced to serve a two-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud.”