Our Community of Support.

SEEN

The Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop & We Are All Criminals

SEEN is a prison portrait and poetry project. But more importantly, it’s a Minnesota portrait and poetry project. Through photography, video, and written word, we share the poignant brilliance of poets and prose writers in Minnesota state prisons, and work together to make the invisible visible, the unheard heard, and the unseen seen. Mass incarceration is dependent upon the ignoring and erasure of the human beings we cage. In collaboration with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW) and the thoughtful, intelligent, humble, and deeply gifted writers on the inside, WAAC challenges and disrupts mass incarceration by clearing the pathways for people behind bars to have their voices heard, faces seen, and humanity recognized–and for people on the outside to reckon with the inhumanity of our country’s mass incarceration mass disaster.

Everybody Has a Story.

Sierra Williams, host of the video podcast, Everybody Has a Story, interviews previously incarcerated and justice impacted individuals giving traditionally unheard voices, an opportunity and platform to tell their story and be heard. Check out Kevin and Kahlee’s interviews with Sierra and support her by following and subscribing for future interviews.

Everybody Has A Story Facebook
Everybody Has A Story Live Podcast Show

The Felony Murder Law Reform (#FMLR) seeks to change the outdated and deeply unfair felony murder rule, which had allowed people who did not kill to nonetheless be charged, convicted, and sentenced as murderers. The current felony murder laws allow prosecutors to charge all accomplices to a crime with first degree murder.  It does not matter if there was no intention to kill, if the death was accidental, or if the accomplice had no knowledge that someone else would kill.  Everyone is just as responsible, as if they had planned and committed the murder themselves. In practice, this means that even if one was unaware that a killing would or did take place, they could still face a murder charge and receive a sentence equally or in some cases more severe than the actual perpetrator. This doctrine has been abolished for decades in all other common law countries, but many states still have these laws in place, including Minnesota.