Walls to Bridges: Evolving Our Work Within Carceral Spaces by Rupturing Racism and Oppression Through a Participatory Process

Melissa Alexander was incarcerated at Grand Valley Institution for Women
from 2011 to 2017. While incarcerated, she took four W2B classes and was
a member of the GVI W2B collective. After release, she became involved
in the Ontario W2B Community Based Collective, which designs and
facilitates workshops on W2B’s pedagogy. She is an advocate for women’s
access to education and employment. She is currently in a carpenter’s
union working as a floor covering installer apprentice for Local 27 and an
accountability coach for Building Up, a program that supports youth and
adults who experience barriers getting into the trades. Melissa is also a peer
support worker for youth and adults in underprivileged neighbourhoods.

Denise Edwards – I love many things, but especially travelling. One of my
many quests led me to experience the carceral space of a federal prison
institution in Canada. Four out of a ten-year stint led me to self-reflect,
learn and most of all, grow not as an individual but in a community. Walls
to Bridges allowed me that opportunity.

Hayden King is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing
in Huronia, Ontario. He is the executive director of Yellowhead Institute,
an Indigenous-led research centre focused on issues of law and policy,
including criminal law, justice, abolition, and Black-Indigenous solidarity.
Hayden advises the Faculty of Arts on Indigenous education and is an
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University
(formerly Ryerson University). Motivated by his family’s experiences
with incarceration, Hayden participated in the Walls to Bridges Instructor
Training program in June 2019 and since then has been working to establish
education initiatives for Indigenous people inside.

Lorraine Pinnock is an advocate and a supporter of folks transitioning from the
criminal injustice system to healthy communities. After spending nearly five
years under correctional institution surveillance, she believes that providing
disadvantaged people with some form of higher education and academic
development can radically ensure one’s success in breaking the revolving
door trap of admission, discharge, and re-admission of incarceration. She
is an alumni and co-founder of the Walls to Bridges Collective, based in
Kitchener, Ontario. She counts spending time with her family and pets,
running, traveling, and soup-tasting among her myriad interests.

Rai Reece (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar-abolitionist whose
work broadly examines how carceral logics are relationally organized by
racial capitalism and white supremacy. Her work specifically examines the
intersection of punishment/criminalization and misogynoir in a Canadian
context. In 2016, she participated in the Walls to Bridges Instructor Training
program to further ground her work in the critical importance of examining
the connection between abolition, community-based collaboration,
experience, and self-reflection. Since then, she provides anti-racist training
during the annual W2B Instructor training course held at Grand Valley
Institution and helped train the alumni collective at GVI in facilitation skills.
Rai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto
Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University).