When Fiona Apple spoke via Instagram on Sunday before the Grammy Awards about the importance of access to the courts and mentioned “the court-watching group I’m part of,” she was talking about Life After Release (LAR)—which, at less than four years old, has grown into an organization with national recognition.
Life After Release was founded in the fall of 2017 by Qiana Johnson, a formerly incarcerated woman. Starting as a small, local Prince George’s County, Maryland, group that met monthly in the local library for résumé clinics, today, the organization’s work has been recognized by local and national press alike.
Johnson said that LAR’s current growth and efforts came about through a process of “trial and error” to “really find out what is needed, what we needed to do in the work.”
Today, Life After Release takes care of “what’s needed” in several areas.
There’s Court Watch PG (for Prince George’s County), an online petition, and other efforts to push for continued online access to the courts, even as the country begins to move back to doing business in person. Apple included a link to an online petition, “Keep Courts Virtual,” in her Sunday Instagram post.
Other work includes the #FelonyVote campaign to build a voting bloc of more than 50,000 formerly incarcerated Maryland residents; local campaigns seeking justice for individuals caught up in the legal system; Justice & Liberation Institutes to help formerly incarcerated individuals and their loved ones navigate the criminal justice system; legal empowerment efforts including court watching, a participatory defense program, and post-conviction/reentry clinics; and transitional services to support formerly incarcerated people as they return to the community.
But don’t call those last services “re-entry” programs.
Self-determination as a bottom line
“I’ve evolved from the word ‘re-entry’ because what I notice is that most of the organizations that say they do re-entry, don’t really do re-entry,” Johnson told Blue Tent. “It’s usually a cookie-cutter approach, and usually, it’s more about the organization than it is about the people.” Instead, Johnson said, she has substituted “self-determination” for “re-entry.”
The goal of assisting people toward that self-determination is a theme through all of LAR’s work. Whether they’re helping a returning citizen with transitional housing, or working with them to navigate the criminal justice system, Johnson and her staff are all about teaching people how to advocate for themselves.
For example, if a person going through the system feels a particular judge is unfair, or a defendant is having issues getting proper representation from their attorney, Johnson said she asks that person who their state delegate is.
“That’s usually my first question to them,” Johnson explained, adding that the question is also usually a surprise to the person she’s speaking to.
“They’re like, ‘Well, I didn’t know I could talk to them,’” Johnson said, to which she replies, “Yeah, you can talk to them. You can demand to talk to them. You’re their constituent, do you know what a constituent is?”
The commitment to self-determination includes how Johnson hires and pays her staff. All four of her directors are formerly incarcerated individuals; LAR’s executive assistant is “one of the mamas we bailed out in 2019.” Johnson said that every staff member is paid above a living wage and that LAR provides both life and health insurance.
In other words, Johnson said, her staff has “all the things that most nonprofits don’t look to get, even though [those nonprofits are] getting the grant money, right, they’re not returning it in ways that are equitable, sustainable to the community.”
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to be able to say that I’m practicing exactly what it is that I’m preaching,” she told Blue Tent.
Life After Release is fiscally sponsored by Tides Advocacy, a relationship that began in November 2020. Luis Diaz-Albertini, Tides Advocacy’s manager of strategic partnerships, told Blue Tent that LAR has raised more than $150,000 through this partnership since it began. In addition, LAR is a recipient of Tides’ Life After Release Fund, which works “to fundraise and make grants in support of charitable activities that build the leadership of people directly impacted by the criminal legal system and educate the public about the criminal legal system, both at Life After Release and other charitable organizations.”
Life After Release has also received funds from Civil Rights Corps’ regrant program.
Johnson told Blue Tent that working with a fiscal sponsor suits her organization because “I’m an executive director that is in the community, I am answering the phone, I’m doing all those things so I really don’t have the time. And to protect myself, I would just rather have somebody else manage all that other stuff.”
In fact, if the law didn’t require it, Johnson said she would prefer if Life After Release, which she called a movement organization, “would just be a community group and just be in the community.”
“The only reason that we show up the way that we show up (LAR recently registered as an official 501(c)(3) organization) is because Uncle Sam says we have to be a nonprofit and we have to do this and we have to do that,” she said.
Quality relationships, not quantity, build a local movement
Paperwork and organizational mechanics aside, Life After Release has grown into a network of 200 volunteers, including Fiona Apple, by working through intimate, small-group, “intentional relationships” whenever possible.
For example, LAR’s first Justice and Liberation Institute last fall worked closely with 11 women, “and we’re still in community with them,” after first working together on a range of topics including challenging their legal cases, expungement of past convictions, and healing from the trauma of being incarcerated.
Johnson explained that her approach to all of LAR’s work is “very intentional. I’m not crazy about helping, like, 500 people, right? That’s government, they do all this mass stuff, but they don’t get to know the people. I want to always leave room for intentionality around getting to know my people.”
That community-building approach is central to LAR’s work. When it comes to helping released citizens find work, Johnson said, “it’s basically me making connections with people in the community.” So she can call a local business, tell them she has people in need of work whom she has already vetted, and the employer says “OK, send them over and I’ll hire them.”
Johnson said that she has a “collection of folks” and their biographies so that when an organization calls needing a formerly incarcerated person as a speaker or for other work, Johnson is ready to make that connection.
LAR is also in community with other organizations. In addition to their relationships with Tides Advocacy and Civil Rights Corps, Life After Release is in coalition on a national level with Free Black Mamas DMV, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and the National Mass Liberation Project. Life After Release has dedicated itself to MLP’s principles, including eliminating the criminal justice system.
Locally, LAR works with Out for Justice, Black Lives Matter DC, and the Criminal Justice Reform Network.
Drawing lines and keeping politicians from ‘hanging around on our issue’
When it comes to elected officials or getting involved in local elections, though, Johnson draws a line. “I don’t really trust those people in the offices,” she said. “This is not a performative action where we want a whole bunch of politicians to be hanging around on our issue.”
And as an organization dedicated to abolishing, not reforming, “the criminal legal system as we know it,” Johnson said that LAR is also not interested in finding and promoting a progressive for state’s attorney. “Because we are an abolitionist organization, we can’t run a state’s attorney in good faith and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s get a state’s attorney’ when we want to abolish them,” Johnson said.
“I’d rather have Fiona Apple put pressure on them [elected officials] to get in line for us and to make our demands,” Johnson added.
Fiona Apple speaks up for people ‘whose futures we need to help protect’
Apple first became involved with LAR during the Gasping for Justice campaign organized by Zealous. Apple was one of several individuals and leaders, including other performing artists, who taped recordings of themselves reading sworn statements in an April 2020 lawsuit seeking relief for people incarcerated in the Prince George’s County Jail during the jail’s COVID outbreak. She has been volunteering as a court watcher with Life After Release for the past few months.
Earlier this month, Apple was part of an online group discussion about LAR’s court-watching efforts.
While Apple didn’t provide a statement to Blue Tent, she summed up her commitment to the campaign for access to the courts in Sunday’s Instagram video. Talking about people being held pre-trial in Prince George’s County for nonviolent charges, either on no bond or on bonds they can’t afford to pay, Apple said that the situation is “ruining families, and fucking with futures that we need to help protect.”
