Project Information // Project Advisors // Incorrigibles Team // Press
Community and Outreach Advisors:
Donna Hylton is a Community Health Advocate for the Coming Home Program of St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. Coming Home is a special transition case-management and support program designed specifically for people who have been incarcerated and are returning to the community. In her capacity, Hylton identifies and addresses the needs of clients transitioning home from prison and jail. Hylton is also an active member of the Coalition for Women Prisoners, a statewide alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to reforming the criminal justice system as it affects women, children and communities. Donna spent 27 years in prison where she was a key member of the Coalition’s “Violence Against Women Committee on the Inside.” She has participated in numerous panel discussions and public presentations and is an advocate with STEPS to End Family Violence, the state’s only Alternative-to-Incarceration program for survivors-defendants. Hylton has a Bachelor of Science degree in Behavioral Science and a Master of Arts degree in English from Mercy College. Donna Hylton is the women’s outreach liaison and advisor for Incorrigibles.
Victoria Sammartino is a poet, teaching artist and youth development professional. She is the founder of Voices UnBroken, an organization that makes poetry workshops accessible to youth (ages 12-24) in the juvenile and adult justice systems, and served as Executive Director from 2000-2015. She began her career as an educator at the school for girls on Rikers Island and has worked extensively with young people in juvenile justice facilities; and with women and girls on Rikers Island, in New York State prisons, and upon discharge/release. She holds a BA in Community Arts from Bennington College and a Certificate from Georgetown University’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform. Victoria Sammartino sits on the NYC Administration for Children’s Services’ Juvenile Justice Oversight Advisory Board and the NYC Youth Board, and is a member of the Community Justice Network for Youth, the Juvenile Justice Coalition’s Conditions of Confinement Work Group, the Prison Arts Coalition, and the Bronx Nonprofit Coalition.
Lillian Perez was formerly housed at the NY State Training School for Girls in Hudson, NY in the late 1960s. Perez has worked as a missionary and is a volunteer at the Hackensack County Court in New Jersey, advocating for youth. She also drives a New York City bus in the Bronx. Perez is youth liaison for Incorrigibles and has been involved in each of our public programs to date from If These Walls Could Talk to Incorrigibles: A Sociodrama performance workshop with young women from Kinderhoff Group Home and Operation Unite at the Hudson Opera House.
Shawnda Chapman-Brown is a researcher and social justice advocate living and working in New York City. With particular focus on marginalized and vulnerable populations, she has broad experience developing as well as implementing research, monitoring, and evaluation materials both domestically and internationally. Partially based on her own experiences, her work has focused on racial justice and examining the ways in which youth of color get pushed into the criminal justice system. She is the co-director of the Beyond the Bars Fellowship Program at the center for Justice at Columbia University, and she currently serves as board chair at Black Women’s Blueprint, a transnational Black feminist organization that works to empower and end violence against Black women and girls through education, direct services and research and political advocacy. Shawnda is a community and outreach advisor for Incorrigibles.
Humanities Advisory Board:
Meda Chesney-Lind, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Nationally recognized for her work on girls, women and crime, her books include Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice (which is in it’s fourth edition and was awarded the Hindelang Prize by the American Society of Criminology), The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime, Female Gangs in America, Invisible Punishment, and Girls, Women and Crime, Beyond Bad Girls: Gender Violence and Hype. She has just finished two edited collections; one on trends in girls’ violence, entitled Fighting for Girls: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Violence (2010) which won an award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for “focusing America’s attention on the complex problems of the criminal and juvenile justice systems.” and the other a collection of international essays entitled Feminist Theories of Crime published by Ashgate.
Chesney-Lind’s testimony before Congress in the nineties resulted in national support of gender responsive programming for girls in the juvenile justice system. She was included among the scholars working with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Girls Study Group; she was also a member of the Gang Prevention Study Group organized by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More recently, she has just joined the National Institute of Corrections and National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s Working Group on Gender Responsive Programming in Corrections. In Hawaii, she has worked with the Family Court, First Circuit advising them on the Hawaii Girls Court (which has been recognized a “promising practice” by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) as well as helping improve the situation of girls in detention. Meda Chesney-Lind is Incorrigibles’ feminist criminology and women’s studies advisor.
Todd Clear Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and was a former Provost at Rutgers University-Newark, and former Dean of the School of Criminal Justice. Clear received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from The University at Albany, and has also held professorships at Ball State University, Florida State University (where he was also Associate Dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice) and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Clear has authored 13 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. His most recent book is The Punishment Imperative, by NYU Press. Dr. Clear has also written on community justice, correctional classification, prediction methods in correctional programming, community-based correctional methods, intermediate sanctions, and sentencing policy, and is currently involved in studies of the criminological implications of “place,” and the economics of justice reinvestment. Dr. Clear has served as president of The American Society of Criminology, The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and The Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice. His work has been recognized through several awards, including those of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, The Rockefeller School of Public Policy, the American Probation and Parole Association, the American Correctional Association, and the International Community Corrections Association. Dr. Clear is also the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy, published by the American Society of Criminology. Todd Clear is criminal justice advisor for Incorrigibles and liaison to Rutgers students and faculty.
Stephanie Covington Ph.D., L.C.S.W. is a clinician, author, organizational consultant, and lecturer. Recognized for her pioneering work in the area of women’s issues, Dr. Covington specializes in the development and implementation of gender-responsive and trauma-informed services in both the public and private sectors. Educated at Columbia University and the Union Institute, Dr. Covington has served on the faculties of the University of Southern California, San Diego State University, and the California School of Professional Psychology. She has published extensively, including eight manualized treatment programs. Dr. Covington is based in La Jolla, California, where she is co-director of both the Institute for Relational Development and the Center for Gender and Justice.
Rebecca Epstein is the Executive Director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. She has dedicated her career to advancing race and gender equity. At the Center, she puts a special focus on policies and practices that support marginalized girls. Rebecca is the lead author of Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girlhood (June 2017); Gender and Trauma: Somatic Interventions for Girls in the Juvenile Justice System and Implications for Policy and Practice (2017); and Blueprint: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Domestic Sex Trafficking of Girls (2013). She is also the co-author of Be Her Resource: A Toolkit About School Resource Officers and Girls of Color, as well as a seminal report on the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline for girls.
Cheryl Hicks Ph.D. is an associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she teaches as a faculty affiliate in Africana Studies and an adjunct faculty member in Women and Gender Studies. Her work addresses the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the law. She has published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Reviewand the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her first book, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform, and in New York, 1890-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) was award the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.
Thomas Keenan is the Director of the Human Rights Project and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Literature, Experimental Humanities, and Human Rights at Bard College. He holds a B.A. from Amherst College, a Master of Philosophy and Ph.D. from Yale University. In the field of human rights, he has worked with the Soros Documentary Fund, WITNESS and The Journal of Human Rights. Thomas Keenan is the experimental humanities and human rights advisor to Incorrigibles. His book Fables and Responsibilities: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997) is a strong point of reference for the project.
Allison McKim, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College with specialization in gender; punishment and social control; deviance and criminology; sociology of law; drug policy; the welfare state; and ethnographic research methods. Her current research focuses on how gender, race, and class shape approaches to addiction and crime in the United States. Other research interests include: patterns in American crime control and punishment; gender inequality; attempts to regulate and normalize women; intersections of race, class, and gender; the construction and treatment of addiction; the welfare state; the governance of health. This work has appeared in the journals Gender & Society and Signs. She presents regularly at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology and the American Sociological Association. Allison McKim, Ph.D. is sociology advisor to Incorrigibles with specialization in gender; punishment and social control; and ethnographic research methods.
Beth Richie is Professor of African American Studies & Criminology, Law and Justice at University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of Dr. Richie’s scholarly work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States and numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy. Her earlier book Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, is taught in many college courses and often cited in the popular press for its original arguments concerning race, gender and crime. Dr. Richie is a qualitative researcher who is also working on an ethnographic project documenting the conditions of confinement in women’s prisons. Her work has been supported by grants from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The National Institute for Justice and The National Institute of Corrections. Beth Richie is an African American Studies & criminology, law and justice advisor for Incorrigibles.
Judith Ryder, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John’s University. Ryder specializes in gender and family violence, has a broad background in criminology with a concentration in violence and trauma among adolescents considered within psychosocial and feminist theoretical frameworks. She is the author of Girls and Violence, Tracing the Roots of Criminal Behavior (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013), in which she constructs a theoretical model of the dynamics underlying girls’ antisocial behaviors. Her research has been published in numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed journals including Crime and Delinquency, Critical Criminology, Feminist Criminology, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, and Women and Criminal Justice. A member of the editorial board of Contemporary Justice Review since 2008, Dr. Ryder also served as Editor-in-Chief of Criminal Justice Abstracts (2000-2010).
Grounded in community engagement, Dr. Ryder’s scholarship has contributed to student participation in community-based projects, including the development of surveys for a teen drop-in center and providing tutoring for recently released offenders. She also has coordinated the annual campus Clothesline Project to raise awareness of violence against women and girls. Judith Ryder, Ph.D. is sociology and anthropology advisor to Incorrigibles with a focus on gender and family violence.
Rickie Sanders is Professor of Geography/Urban Studies and former Director of Women’s Studies at Temple University and Director of the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium. During her tenure at Temple University she has served as both Graduate Chair and Chair of her Department and was a Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Temple. She has published in numerous publications including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Geography, Professional Geographer, Gender Place and Culture, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Antipode, Urban Geography, and a Legislative Atlas for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on images of the city/photography/visual studies, urban geography, and gender on the landscape, Sanders was recently honored by the Association of American Geographers for her success in Enhancing Diversity in the discipline.
Heather Ann Thompson is Professor of History and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Thompson wrote the book Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001 which was re-published in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Riot of 1967. Thompson is a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Heather Ann Thompson is the history advisor for Incorrigibles.
Oral History & Audio Advisors:
Sady Sullivan an independent oral historian and was Director of Oral History at Brooklyn Historical Society; Curator for the Columbia University Center for Oral History Archives. Sullivan has worked as a radio producer and journalist and has led many oral history projects. She is particularly interested in “shared authority” and other oral history ethical praxis. With extensive experience in public history and humanities she brings an intersectional feminist lens to her work. Sullivan was co-director of Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, at the Brooklyn Historical Society (2011- 2015). Her work is influenced by the Buddhist practice of deep listening, and formative experiences at three feminist institutions: The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies and Wellesley Centers for Women. Sady has radio experience, both pre- and post- podcast era. She received a Master’s in Cultural Reporting & Criticism from NYU and a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Women’s Studies from Wellesley College. Sady Sullivan is oral history and podcast advisor to Incorrigibles with a focus on women’s issues and oral history ethical praxis.
Digital Humanities Advisors:
Danielle Riou is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, where she co-curates the Human Rights Project’s public programs, organizes special projects and partnerships, and oversees the student internship program. She is co-creator of the Milosevic Trial Public Archive, the complete on-demand video archive of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague, Netherlands. She has presented at conferences and panels on new media, the archive and memory. Danielle Riou is the new media, the archive and memory advisor to Incorrigibles and liaison to Bard College students and faculty.
Nancy Hechinger is on the full-time faculty at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. She has a diverse background in technology and education — including multimedia and film production, the development of interactive museum exhibits, and publishing– and in the strategic uses of information and telecommunication technologies, focusing particularly on how technology might make science more accessible, and also promoting the teaching and learning of essential twenty-first-century skills. She was the founding Director of the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York;a founding partner and the Director of Technology for the Edison Project; on the Senior Design Team of Apple’s Multimedia Lab (1988-1990); and had her own interactive media production company, Hands-on Media. She received her B.A. in 1969 from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA in Writing (Poetry) in 2009. Nancy Hechinger is the narrative and digital humanities advisor for Incorrigibles.
Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Visual Studies curriculum, and the Center for Spatial Research. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, and the art, science and visualization of data. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art. She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009.
Special thanks to our past advisors:
Katina Paron
Michelle Fine
Maria Elena Torre
Tom Scheinfeldt
Francine Sherman
Laurie Leitch
