This event is limited to the campus community and not open to the public.

We invite students, staff, and faculty to join us for a live conversation about incarceration, harm, and healing with Jerome Morgan and jackie sumell.

Jerome Morgan was wrongfully incarcerated at the age of 17 in Angola State Penitentiary for 20 years before he was fully exonerated in 2016. He is an entrepreneurship and organizer, mobilizing communities to confront systems of oppression and to create spaces to heal from the traumas caused by the criminal legal system. jackie sumell is an artist and abolitionist organizer. Her public art and garden project, Solitary Garden, a collaboration with Tim Young, who is currently on Death Row in San Quentin, is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Jerome and jackie will discuss their individual approaches to mutual aid and organizing against carceral systems. They will speak about their shared work with New Orleans youth at the Ngombo Café and Sanctuary, a café and healing space created by exonerees, artists, and activists which aims to “provide plant based products grown in tandem with incarcerated individuals to facilitate healing for the communities they have been accused of harming. It is through this unique collaboration that we envision a world without prisons.”

This event is collaboratively produced and sponsored by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, the Dean of Humanities, The Humanities Institute, and the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz.

Of interest articles and writings by Jerome Morgan and collaborator:
“Education is Improvisation: Improvisation is Art”
“Go To Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression”

Jerome Morgan is a native New Orleanian who was wrongfully incarcerated at the age of 17 in Angola State Penitentiary for 20 years before he was fully exonerated in 2016. He is the Co-Founder/Programs Director of Free-Dem Foundations, Owner/Trauma Counselor with Jerome 4 Justice, LLC, Graphic Designer/Writer with Park Roots Productions, LLC, Real Estate Developer/Investor with J & A Justice Holdings, Inc, Social Justice Co-Facilitator/Community Activist with Students At the Center (SAC), Panelist for Criminal versus Gentlemen: What Defines The Black Male Image 1 & 2, co-author of “Unbreakable Resolve: Triumphant Stories of 3 True Gentlemen”, published in 2017 and “Go To Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression”, published 2021 and has conducted workshops at universities all over the country about how he overcame injustice. Morgan is a pioneer in Formerly Incarcerated Person (FIP) entrepreneurship, community-based business models, FIP peer mentoring, FIP youth advocacy and FIP literary works.

jackie sumell works at the intersection of abolition, social practice, and contemplative studies. She has spent the last 2-decades working directly with incarcerated folx, most notably, her elders Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, an A Blade of Grass Fellowship, Creative Capital, Art 4 Justice, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, Soros Justice Fellowship, Eyebeam Project Fellowship and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s work invites us to imagine a landscape without prisons. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana where she continues to work on Herman’s House, Solitary Gardens, The Prisoner’s Apothecary PLUS and several other community generated, advocacy based projects.