A Living Chance is a multimedia storytelling project created in collaboration with people serving Life Without Parole (LWOP) in California’s women’s prisons. People serving LWOP describe themselves as the “lost population” of the prisoner rights movement. Their sentences are so severe, they seem impossible to reverse. The majority of people serving LWOP are survivors of childhood abuse and intimate partner violence. In most cases, evidence of their abuse was not presented at their trials. Through visual storytelling, A Living Chance will humanize the LWOP population and make visible the struggles and resiliency of these people who are, essentially, sentenced to die in prison.
Through audio recordings, interviews, letters, and photographs we will document and archive the stories of people sentenced to LWOP. These stories will be compiled into a website and publication to be used for public education, broader campaign work against LWOP, and to support individual cases. This project emerges from the current organizing inside prison—specifically the work of incarcerated members of California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots social justice organization with members inside and outside of prison.
By carrying the voices of this lost population beyond the prison walls, A Living Chance has the potential to affect cultural and legislative change, thus giving those sentenced to LWOP in California a living chance at freedom.
Go to the donation page here: A Living Chance donation page