“Thank you for telling the truth,” Willette Benford told me, after reading my recent article for Truthout. It was one of the best compliments I’ve received in a while. Willette was one of the 200 women who were subjected to a mass strip search by the Orange Crush, a notorious band of prison guards, in 2011 at Lincoln Correctional Center.
I wrote about the incident in the article, “12 Years After Degrading Mass Strip Search, Women in Illinois Prison Won $1.4M Settlement.”
I started Sentences to tell “the story and backstory” behind my writing. Every article is an adventure, and the latest one was no different.
In September 2023, I visited the Reclamation Center, home to the Women’s Justice Institute, in Chicago. I had a chance to sit down with WJI’s Alexis Mansfield, who works with criminalized survivors—women who are victims of domestic abuse, fight back against their abusers, even kill them, and are sent to prison by a criminal legal system that tragically fails to comprehend sexism. I was interested in writing about their experiences.
I did a lengthy interview with Alexis, who kindly shared a few contacts for me to follow up with. I walked around the Reclamation Center and took pictures of the artwork produced by women in prison.
I pitched an article to a publication that will go unnamed about several criminalized survivors who had recently won in court against their abusers, some of them Alexis’s clients. The all-male editors I talked to at the publication rejected the piece, claiming they had already published on the topic—as if they didn’t need any more articles about women’s experiences in the criminal legal system. Actually, the topic has received little attention in the media, as it is still largely men who are featured in stories about mass incarceration.
It was not my first rejection letter, certainly not my last, so I kept plodding along as freelancers do.
Out of the blue, I got an email a few weeks later from the communications staff at Loevy & Loevy, a law firm in Chicago widely known for suing police and prisons. They had filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the 200 women against the Orange Crush for the 2011 incident. A year and a half ago, I had written about the case which was won at a jury trial. Finally, after more than a dozen years, they had reached a historic $1.4 million settlement.
A follow-up article gave me the chance to write about criminalized survivors. I reached back out to Alexis who gave me the contact information for Willette Benford who she believed was involved in the mass strip search.
Willette is now senior advisor to MK Pritzker, the First Lady of Illinois, working on reentry issues for women. I interviewed Willette over the phone. She was initially skeptical. She had a bad experience from a previous lawsuit in which she was awarded a measly $325 for being subjected to a humiliating strip search at Logan Correctional Center in 2013. Turns out, she was present for both the 2011 and 2013 strip searches conducted by the Orange Crush, which were done as training exercises. Willette warmed up to me during our conversation and has been generous to me since we first talked. She gave powerful testimony of how such abuses were the norm during her 24 years of incarceration. “This wasn't something that was just a one off,” she told me in the interview, “they had done it multiple times over the years.”
I checked in with my pen pal Mishunda Davis, who is currently locked up at Logan. She remembered when the 2013 incident happened there, but she wasn’t on the wing where it happened. I told Mishunda about the victory in court, and she wrote back to me in an email from her prison cell. They hadn’t seen much of Orange Crush lately, she said, “maybe it’s because of the lawsuit.” She observed:
“That’s good because now maybe it’ll force the prison to treat people in custody with dignity & respect. People don’t understand until you hit em’ where it hurts, which is usually in the pockets.”
Great work, Brian. These stories need to be told.