OPERATION RESTORATION BY EMILY WILKERSON
ACCORDING
TO THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU), WOMEN ARE THE FASTEST GROWING POPULATION
IN
THE
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, THEIR NUMBERS INCREASING AT A RATE ALMOST DOUBLE THAT OF MEN SINCE 1985. IN ADDITION, THE ACLU REPORTS THAT TWO THIRDS OF WOMEN IN STATE PRISONS HAVE CHILDREN THAT ARE MINORS, AND MORE THAN 1.5 MILLION CHILDREN IN THE U.S. HAVE A PARENT IN PRISON. In 2015, Annie Phoenix began her doctoral studies in the City, Culture, and Community (CCC) Program, a collaborative doctoral program of Tulane’s Schools of Liberal Arts, Social Work, and Architecture, to address these statistics. Before enrolling in the CCC Program, Phoenix was teaching in public schools in Louisiana. “I felt like I wasn’t making the impact I wanted to make,” expressed Phoenix. She applied to the Ph.D. program “as a way to transition my life to be more about the issues that I wanted to address—I wanted to explore incarceration more in depth and had always been interested in gender and women specifi-
32 | TUL A NE SCHOO L O F LIBER A L A RTS M AG A ZIN E
