Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance makes visible women's experiences in the criminal justice system. The stories, originally planned as a book, are supported by a collection of resources, such as organizations, reports, essays, and links to a wide range of information about women in prison.
Firebelly Design chose Beyondmedia's Women and Prison project as it's first client for their annual Camp Firebelly program.
Over the course of a week, 10 designers worked to create a full-color 30 page zine titled "Writer's Block" along with marketing materials. Included were 8 stories by incarcerated women and children of former incarcerated mothers plus artwork in full color.
Taking inspiration from Camp Firebelly's work, I incorporated assets from the zine and launched a full-featured website that was searchable and updatable by volunteers.
Stories were categorized by topic and further organized by tags that researchers and viewers could filter to investigate stories and resources related to specific issues of interest that incarcerated women were facing.
Leveraging data relationships in Jekyll made this easy, creating collections for each category, and organizing articles with more specific sortable topical tags.
A big challenge for disseminating the experiences of the women sharing on the website has always been access. We looked to leverage the Internet to publish these stories to the largest audience possible.
The website has been used in college classrooms across the country and visited by thousands of new visitors each month. I enrolled Beyondmedia in a Google AdWords Grant program, and with the success and traffic to the website we were able to sustain free hosting for the website for its duration.
