Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Jennifer Musto, associate professor of women’s and gender studies, and Laura Grattan, Jane Bishop ’51 Associate Professor of Political Science, have created the Anti Carceral Co+Laboratory (ACC) at Wellesley. The ACC takes a community-centered approach to understanding the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones, and neighborhoods.
Through the Project on Public Leadership and Action (PPLA) at Wellesley, Musto and Grattan have been working for years with regional prison abolition groups, including Families for Justice as Healing, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and New Beginnings Reentry Services. The ACC serves as a hub to bring these and other voices together, along with scholars and students, to spark mutual learning exchanges with individuals and communities impacted by carceral systems. “I think an educational space in its most capacious, expansive imagining of it creates ways for people to connect and to learn from one another,” Musto says, “to really change the conversation, and shift the paradigm about how knowledge is produced.”
What the hub is about “is building sustainable, deep relationships with community partners who are doing this work and letting that inform everything we do.”
Relationships are integral to the ACC’s core programs, development, and organizational design, which includes an advisory and accountability board composed of community partners. This approach honors a long history of abolitionist organizing in which “the significance of relationships derives from an understanding that our connections to one another and the solidarity that those connections seed are our greatest source of power,” says Olivia Poulin, ACC program coordinator.
The ACC has provided seed grants to anti-carceral organizations to help them pursue their missions and move their work in new directions. Recently funded projects include a healing arts class for formerly incarcerated women and a quilting workshop for girls whose parents have been impacted by incarceration. Artists Kimberly Love Radcliffe and Marla L. McLeod, who led these workshops, are both featured in Aiming for Freedom: Race, Reparations & Right Paths, a traveling exhibition of Black feminist art that envisions “our shared liberation,” curated by ACC postdoctoral fellow K. Melchor Quick Hall. Additionally, through a fellowship program, ACC has given grants to 10 individuals to create art, spoken word poetry, an interactive gallery documenting Black Lives Matter organizing in the region, a doula training program to support Black mothers, and more.
Fellow Ebony LePenn is a licensed massage and Reiki therapist, energetic mentor, abolitionist, and founder of High Frequency Academy Ltd. With her grant, she completed her guide and workbook Alternative Healing Modalities for Healing from Systems of Oppression. LePenn’s husband, Anthony Clay, Sr., was murdered in 2016, leaving her with two young sons. She had started studying Reiki before his death, and since then she has taken courses on alternative healing as well as a number of trauma trainings, which have helped her understand her own experience and create her curriculum.
“We really need to understand that when somebody is experiencing criminal legal system involvement, that affects children, it affects loved ones, it affects aunts, uncles, cousins, the entire community.”
LePenn brought the Anthony P. Clay Healing Project to campus in May to lead a sound healing event during finals, which included a guided mindfulness and Reiki workshop, playing crystal singing bowls, and more. “Overall it’s sound vibration therapy, with the intention and invitation to transform the ways we cope and heal from trauma in marginalized communities.” LePenn says.
“What I realized was that a lot of us don't even realize that we are affected by trauma, the amount of trauma, and how we have been affected by the systems of oppression,” she says. She wants to help people heal by “taking our care into our own hands and, you know, just really becoming our own medicine.”
Another ACC fellow, Sean “2ruTh7” Evelyn, a Massachusetts-based poet and writer, is producing a spoken word mixtape, ARS MORIENDI: Ruminations of a Rogue Prophet. “A lot of the work that I focus on is centered around the interrelationship between urban trauma, urban violence, and mass incarceration, and a lot of healing and accountability and restorative practices at the center of that,” he says. “So this project was like an artistic kind of approach to trying to elevate that discussion.”
Evelyn earned his bachelor’s degree from the Boston University Prison Education Program. “I discovered my talent and my passion for words and poetry over the course of my incarceration,” he says. “It was a very revolutionary act for me to … discover and engage in spoken word while I'm in a system that took my voice at the front door. They say ‘anything you say, we're going to use it against you.’ And now it's like I'm being offered an opportunity to … elevate my voice, take control over my own narrative, and … facilitate some healing in the process.”
Zainab Khan ’26 and Sara Popkin ’25 were ACC research assistants this summer. Khan says getting out of the Wellesley bubble, going into the community, and really listening to people was some of the most important work they did. She says the ACC “was built to serve community partners and work with them in partnership, as opposed to being something that’s extractive.”
Their research included looking into community archives—online spaces where groups can collect and share their stories, art, and more—and creating a literature review the ACC team can refer to while compiling their own archive. Each also pursued an independent project: Khan studied connections between art and abolition, while Popkin helped The Black Response in Cambridge with its Black Lives Matter archive.
Grattan, who teaches POL4 341: Beyond Prisons: Resistance, Reform, Abolition, says students are interested in connecting with ACC’s community partners: “I could teach a lot of theory, and I do, but students are hungry for, well, what does this look like in practice? What does this look like beyond this room?” She and Musto brought the voices of community organizers and practitioners to their classes even before the start of the ACC. What the hub is about, Grattan says, “is building sustainable, deep relationships with community partners who are doing this work and letting that inform everything we do.”