Alumna empowers women who have incarcerated loved ones

Gina Clayton doesn’t just want to help the women she works with. She wants them to become advocates for themselves and for others.

As founder of the Essie Justice Group, Clayton has created a path for women with incarcerated loved ones to take charge of the seemingly insurmountable difficulties they face. Many of the women she works with struggle to make ends meet while a husband, boyfriend, child or other relative is behind bars. They often face eviction and the possibility of homelessness.

Clayton, a Los Angeles native who earned her bachelor’s degree in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife in 2006, first became aware of these challenges working as a housing lawyer at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem in New York City. She represented low-income women, many of whom were in jeopardy of losing their homes simply because someone in their family had been accused of a crime.

“I saw that they were so clearly under attack by a system that was not just looking to evict them but also required that these grandmothers and mothers and wives and girlfriends and daughters take on extra jobs to pay for the loss of income of incarcerated family members,” Clayton said. “They were taking on all of the childcare responsibilities, paying for commissary bills, expensive phone calls and visits to prison.”

At the same time, these women revealed to Clayton they felt stigmatized and alone.

“They were made to feel ashamed for having loved ones who are caught up in the criminal justice system,” Clayton said. “And so, there was this huge need that I saw. But I also saw this tremendous power.”

The collective power of their voices

Clayton wondered how she could make a difference. Of the 1.5 million people living behind bars, 90 percent are men, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They leave behind family members — a disproportionate amount of whom are women. Clayton noted that women’s incarceration rates now outpace those of men, which she said is particularly concerning considering the unique harm women’s incarceration plays in families and communities.

Clayton took a year to meet with women whose loved ones were behind bars and listen to their stories. She ran focus groups. She asked herself how she could change the way people think about those who are incarcerated or charged with crimes, and make them understand the challenges faced by them and their families. A solution emerged.

As an attorney, Clayton would meet with her clients one-on-one. Never would a client meet another, even though many were facing similar hurdles.

“What I realized is that it would take sisterhood — connections between those women,” she said. “This was a group of women who I thought, if their silence could be broken, could be powerful advocates for themselves and for others.”

Clayton founded Essie Justice Group, which she named for her great-grandmother, who grew up on a sharecropping farm in Louisiana.

“She was often in my thoughts as I represented my clients because her story is one of fighting these tremendous barriers of racism, sexism, poverty and Jim Crow,” Clayton said. “But her story is also one of resilience.”

Since Essie’s launch in 2014, five cohorts have completed the program’s nine-week curriculum, which focuses on healing from trauma and building each woman’s voice as an advocate. Women are nominated to work with Essie, usually by an incarcerated relative. Eleven more cohorts will begin in the next few months. Initially located in Oakland, Calif., the program has grown to offer sessions in Vallejo, San Jose and Los Angeles, which is home to the largest jail system in the country.

A foundation in equality and activism

Clayton traces her interest in issues of equality and justice to an early age. She remembers a high school teacher assigning the alternative chronicle A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn while the class concurrently read their standard history textbook. The experience was eye-opening.

“It was probably then that I first began to realize that there were different versions of history,” Clayton said. “That perspectives on the past were formed by many different people and cultures and so many other ways in which we interpret the world around us.”

That realization motivated her to study American studies and ethnicity at USC Dornsife. She was inspired by her classes in African-American literature and blackness in American visual culture. Her studies informed the lens through which she approaches her work in criminal justice, seeking out and lifting up the stories of marginalized people to build a better world.

As an undergraduate, Clayton learned to look for the power in communities that have been silenced. That point was reinforced during her time serving as chapter president of the NAACP at USC where she was advised by chairman Julian Bond, and as a research assistant for USC Gould School of Law professor Jody Armour, whose scholarship focuses on the intersections between social justice and the law. Their mentorship inspired Clayton to pursue a law degree from Harvard Law School.

But it was her own experience that really focused her work. During her first year at law school, someone very close to her was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“All of a sudden my world just narrowed,” Clayton said. “My world of being a social justice generalist focused in on the criminal justice system and the pervasiveness of our mass incarceration crisis.”

Her work has not gone unnoticed. This year Clayton received the Grinnell College Innovator for Social Justice Prize, which honors a person effecting positive social change in an innovative way.

Clayton said it was very humbling to receive the award. It is also an opportunity to shine a light on the issues she and the members of the Essie Justice Group are seeking to solve. “I see it as encouragement and as motivation. I take this as part of what I aspire to live up to and earn,” she said.

Showing women their value

Clayton is inspired by the women who have participated in Essie’s cohorts over the past few years, and the strides they have made personally and for their community. She recalled one woman whose experience illustrates the power of collective action.

“This woman had not spoken about her partner’s incarceration to anyone, she had been homeless for a period of time and was struggling to provide for her school-aged children on her own,” Clayton said. “She was silently suffering beneath the enormity of what her family was going through and what she as a woman with an incarcerated loved one going it alone had to do.”

The woman attended one session but was unsure if she would come back. Her children urged her to return for a second session because they had so much fun in Essie’s childcare program. She came back a third time because she bonded with two of the women in her circle. At her fourth session she signed up to speak at an event in Sacramento to share the personal impacts of an elder parole bill, which would make long-term inmates eligible for parole once they’ve reached a certain age.

“She has gone on to speak to national and local press, has been cited in reports and now runs her own Essie cohort,” Clayton said. “We have had the pleasure of watching her become a leader.”

That is Clayton’s goal. Essie, she said, is not a charity but a place to help women find their value. “We are building an organization of women leaders.”