LifeLines Project

Sharing this powerful event where Dawud calls in from prison to discuss "WEology." His words and actions live on and continue to inspire and guide us. We love you comrade.

WEology was written by four incarcerated people in Pennsylvania about how they are practicing transformative justice while incarcerated. The booklet’s authors – Qu’eed Batts, Avron “JaJa” Holland, David “Dawud” Lee, and Nyako Pippen – discuss why transformative justice is important, how they are using transformative and restorative practices even in the confines of prison, and about how their own personal journeys led them to this approach.

This event features a panel of activists responding to sections of the booklet and sharing their own reflections. You can download the PDF version of the booklet here: https://lifelines-project.org/2021/09/14/weology/

PANELIST BIOS

Kempis Ghani Songster is currently leading the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project’s pilot Healing Futures Restorative Justice Diversion program. Prior to that, he spent three years as Amistad Law Project’s Healing Justice Organizer and host of ALP’s Move It Forward podcast. He is also a founding member of Right to Redemption, the Redemption Project, the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), and co-founder and director of Ubuntu Philadelphia. Since his release in 2018 after thirty years in prison – starting when he was 15 years old – Ghani has emerged as a leader and visionary in Philadelphia’s movement to end mass incarceration and to create transformative and restorative responses to harm and violence.

Kris Henderson is the Executive Director of Amistad Law Project. They are a movement lawyer, a co-founder of Amistad and a co-founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration. They are on the steering committee of Free The Ballot! Incarcerated Voter Family Network and on the board of directors of Black Youth Project 100. They are a 2018 Law for Black Lives and Movement Law Lab Legal Innovators Fellow and a 2019 Soros Justice Fellow.

David “Dawud” Lee is a co-founder and member of CADBI and sits on the inside advisory board for the Human Rights Coalition and Decarcerate PA. He regularly works with Amistad Law Project and Abolitionist Law Center and is one of the co-founders of the Abolitionist Reading Circle. He is also a co-founder of the Dare-2-Care youth leadership and empowerment project at the State Correctional Institute at Coal Township and has helped to facilitate that program since its beginning. Dawud is 57 years old and has been incarcerated for over 32 years, serving a death by incarceration sentence. He has been a part of the Lifelines Project since 2014 and is also a co-founder of the Life Line Association at SCI Coal Township.

Robert Saleem Holbrook is the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, a law project dedicated to ending race and class based discrimination in the criminal justice system and all forms of state violence. He has worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights to end Death By Incarceration sentences in the United States and the National Unlock The Box Campaign to End Solitary Confinement. He is a co-founder of the Human Rights Coalition. While incarcerated, Saleem wrote extensively on prison abuse, social injustice, state violence, and juveniles charged and sentenced as adults. His writings were featured in Truthout, The Appeal, San Francisco Bay View, and Solitary Watch. He was released from prison in 2018 after spending over two decades incarcerated for an offense he was convicted of as a child.

MODERATOR BIOS

Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher and anti-prison activist. Much of her creative work investigates state regimes of force and power, as well as individual and collective resistance strategies. She is the author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. Her newest book, Sousveillance Pageant, coasts restlessly between fiction, poetry, and research essay. She is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration and Address This!, as well as a co-creator of LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty.

Layne Mullett is a founding member of Decarcerate PA and the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, and a co-creator of LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty. They have been active in social justice movements for over a decade, organizing against gentrification, austerity, and the prison industrial complex, and working for the freedom of political prisoners. Layne’s writing has been published in the journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, in the anthology Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, and in The Long Term. Layne currently serves as the director of media relations for the American Friends Service Committee and sits on the community advisory board for Critical Resistance.