Event Details:

This panel will feature three guests from Survived & Punished (S&P), a national coalition that includes survivors, organizers, victim advocates, legal advocates and attorneys, policy experts, scholars, and currently and formerly incarcerated people. S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations. In this panel, speakers will discuss varying routes towards de-criminalization, both from an academic and grassroots organizing perspective. After the panel, there will be information and time for letter-writing to incarcerated individuals.

Speaker Bios:

Stacy Suh is a community organizer focusing on immigration, criminalization, race, and gender. She is a founding member of Survived and Punished (S&P), a national group organizing against the criminalization of gender-based violence survivors. She has led a number of successful freedom campaigns for criminalized survivors, specializing in deportation defense of immigrant and refugee survivors. Currently, she is focused on supporting S&P’s mass commutation campaign for criminalized survivors in California and nationally. Stacy is also a member of QYUL, a queer and trans workgroup of the Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse (KACEDA).

Ny Nourn is the Community Advocate for the Immigrant Rights Program at Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus (ALC). Her work involves interacting with organizations, lawmakers, and communities to help advance and implement legislation, inform affected community members, and represent ALC in coalition spaces. Ny serves as a volunteer with Survived and Punished Coalition and as a Council Member for Asian Prisoner Support Committee. Ny is also a formerly incarcerated community member and was immediately detained by ICE. But after many months of advocacy from community groups across California, Ny walked out of ICE detention. Though she currently lives without any clear immigration status and does not know when she will be deported, Ny sets out to give back to her community.

Kelly Ann Savage is the DROP LWOP coordinator for California Coalition for Women Prisoners. A 46-year-old white woman, Kelly was just recently released after 23 years of incarceration. Governor Jerry Brown commuted her Life Without Parole sentence in December of 2017, allowing her a chance for a parole hearing. In November 2018, Kelly was finally released. Kelly has experienced the shattering effects of both domestic violence and incarceration in which she survived the impact on her mind and spirit. She was an inside member of CCWP for over 15 years and helped initiate first the Living Chance storytelling project, and then the DROP LWOP campaign.  Kelly is now working first hand with survivors of both domestic violence and incarceration.