THE HUSTLER FILES Lisa Reilly

For three decades, Jean Trounstine has dedicated her life to being a storyteller, activist, educator, and theatre Director in the criminal legal system.  She came upon her calling while working as an educator at the Women’s Prison in Framingham, Mass, where over the course of a decade she directed eight plays for the incarcerated women, groundbreaking work that resulted in her highly praised book, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison.  From her next non-fiction, Boy with a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice to her first foray into the fictionalized book, Motherlove, just released by the Concord Free Press dot com, (check out for a free copy!),  Jean brings to life and light stories that will leave you spellbound while acknowledging that the U.S. criminal justice system is not, and never has been,  black and white.

Rewind 25 years, and for most men, their parenting role was that of bread winner and disciplinarian, like their father before them, and so on.  Mark Perlman, a licensed social worker and councilor saw an opportunity to change that dynamic while the Executive Director of his wife’s counseling center.  As Mark so aptly puts it, “I started writing a program that would offer fathers a workbook guide, but as I wrote the program, I felt as if the subject matter was coming through me, rather than from me’.   Mark’s program, and soon to be passed on to one of Mark’s sons, Corey, is being facilitated through counseling agencies, the military, social work curriculums and behind the walls of minimum, medium or maximum prisons, across the United States.  Mark’s program takes the voluntary participants on a journey from understanding the roots of their own upbringing to developing attitudes and skills that will ultimately, over the course of the program’s 13 weeks, heal their father wound and change the trajectory of their relationship with their children.

Her team at NBC Universal Filmed Entertainment refers to her as an “inspiration for change”. She herself has faced prejudices throughout her life, but as a HR Professional in the entertainment industry for over 25 years, and now SVP of Human Resources, Globally, Hoai Scott, has played a key role in educating leaders in diversity and inclusion, leading with purpose and creating a culture of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.  Beginning in 2018, NBCU began a partnership with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in Los Angeles to open a door to those who were justice involved but pledged to be crime free, gang free, drug free, enrolled in a school and volunteering in their community.  The fair chance hiring opportunities that Hoai and her team offer is a life changing career pathway, and one that celebrates and supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is at the very heart of the NBCU culture.
 

In 1989 two horrific crimes took place in New York City.  The first was the rape and almost death of the woman who would be come to know as the Central Park jogger.  The second was the arrest, interrogations, and ultimate prison sentencing of five Black and Latino teenagers, for that crime. A crime they would later be exonerated for, in 2002.   It was during her senior year of college in 2003, while interning for a law firm, that Sarah Burns began the arduous process of unearthing the entire story, initially for her college thesis, to understand why and how these five teenagers could have been so falsely convicted.  Almost a decade later, Sarah, simultaneously, along with her husband David McMahon, not only published the book, The Central Park Five; A Chronicle of a City Wilding, but along with her father, documentarian, Ken Burns, produced, wrote, and directed a film by the same name.  The Central Park Five documentary received numerous awards in 2012/2013 and is still available to watch via streaming.
 

Noelle Hanrahan was 57 when she attended law school.  As a founding member of Prison Radio dot org, Noelle realized that it wasn’t enough to just be a journalist and broadcast the voices of those incarcerated individuals who were brave enough to speak out about prison treatment and conditions, she needed to find a way to get their release.  Prison Radio stories serve as catalysts for policy changes, public awareness campaigns and community activism aimed at addressing systemic issues within the justice system. Across the U.S. there are approximately 5.5 million people under a form of correctional control.

Venturing Out is the antithesis of what most women behind the wall at MCI Framingham (Massachusetts) will ever be granted.  Yet for Beth Goldstein and Elizabeth Swanson their in-prison initiative, Venturing Out, offers so much more than the literal description of their program.  For Beth and Elizabeth, whose day job is as educators at Babson College, to go behind the wall to empower and educate the incarcerated female population with an entrepreneurial mindset in humanities and leadership is a way to have local and personal impact on these women’s lives.