The Bronx emcee, who served a six years sentence for an assault charge, opens up about the struggles she and other Black women faced while they were incarcerated after watching Ava Duvernay’s 13 documentary.
“People think I dwell on my incarceration. They don’t understand that literally, one day, I’m in my house, and the next, I’m miles and miles away behind bricks and barbed wire. It literally rips you out of the world, puts you somewhere else, and when they feel that it’s time, like, ‘Okay, now’s the time,’ they just throw you back out into the world. You try to fill out for a job application, you try to fill out for housing, anything as simple as voting for something that you did,” she told Huffington Post . “It’s never really like you paid your debt to society. This system is designed for you to fail.”
While there are constant critics and studies compiled about Black men who have been incarcerated in the aftermath of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, the rising criminalization of Black women has yet to make media attention with the same fervency. According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, Black women are eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than white women, and Black transgender and gender nonconforming people are more likely to be incarcerated out of the queer population.
CREDIT: Facebook