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Susan Burton, a lawyer for previously imprisoned women, opposes time to space out those released early due to the increase in coronavirus cases in prisons.
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Dana Moore arrived in February as inmate WG4763 at the California Women’s Center in east Los Angeles, serving her two-year, eight-month sentence for possessing a firearm. The amount of coronavirus in the state’s criminal formula was expanding, a serious fear for Ms. Moore, who is immunocompromised. But last month, she cried when the crime door opened. She was released early and loaded into a car a cardboard box with her belongings in the car awaited by Susan Burton, the activist who helped her leave the gun towers, the barbed cordon and her identity as an anonymous criminal for a yellow hen bungalow on a quiet street in Los Angeles. .
Once there, Ms. Moore headed to the larger mattress, “like sleeping on a fluffy pillow,” he said. She began negotiating the personality of her new roommates, all ex-inmates, and savoring her new privacy in her new environment: a space committed to healing.
It was the ninth apartment created through Ms. Burton for A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a pioneering network of shelters and systems that it created for vulnerable women out of crime that some have compared to a modern underground train. An activist and writer, as well as an ex-inmate, she became a formidable force in creating safe houses for women 22 years ago, when she combined the savings of ikea and bunk beds to create a new way of life.
The houses, which have an average of seven women, are designed to be intimate, and away from criminals, with matching quilts and curtains, granite kitchen countertops and inspiring Post-it messages (such as “Always Using an Invisible Crown”) to rest. mirrors in the room. It’s the kind of safe haven Ms. Burton would have liked to have when she was dropped off the Greyhound bus in downtown Los Angeles after her first stint in a criminal for prostitution: “an environment that is bright, cheerful and motivating and says ‘you’re worthy,'” she says.
Ms. Burton’s dynamic technique, born from the cases of her own life, was widely recognized: she was one of CNN’s 10 most sensible heroines, a Soros Justice fellow and the subject of the short documentary “Susan.” Now, the pandemic is giving Burton’s paintings a new sense of urgency. Prisons and prisons have greenhouses for the virus, with 47 deaths and 8,000 cases in California in California, according to recent statistics from the California Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation.
“It takes ruthless and punishment in the extreme,” he says. To lessen overcrowding, thousands of inmates like Ms. Moore are released early, a resolution that issued a federal ruling last week ordered the state to reserve an area for solitary confinement and quarantine in California prisons.
Burton and his cohorts paint overtime to space out as many newly liberated women as possible. The yellow bungalow was assembled in a record time of 10 days, much of the furniture came from a target gift register. Ms. Burton is preparing a 1960s outdoor convent in Los Angeles, rented to the organization for $1 through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, with a squadron of decorators willing to volunteer. That’s not atypical: Ms. Burton’s persuasion and fierce sense of purpose attract people.
When a tired America entered the fourth month of shelter at the site, the women who lived in the project houses in Los Angeles and Long Beach enjoyed a sense of gratitude and relief. Habían pasado meses, si no años, que no habían sentido la falta de sangre de un refrigerador abierto o la emoción de dormir en una cama genuina de un trozo de espuma sobre una losa de acero.
Brazil-born Livia Pinheiro spent eight years in prison for first-degree robbery and was subsequently arrested through ICE, which planned to deport her. They were the first days of the virus and was housed in a crowded, roache-infested bedroom in a county criminal where the bunks were bolted to the ground, making social estrangement impossible. She and other detainees were eventually released after a coalition of legal organizations effectively argued that the situations were not safe for the pandemic.
“Everyone is afraid to take refuge in the place,” said Pinheiro, 40, who will have to wear an ankle monitor when he lives in Long Beach. “But I feel so relaxed and liberated from being with a giant women’s organization in this house.”
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