UNLOCK THEM UP! In Massachusetts and elsewhere, advocates ate pushing for alternatives to incarceration.

• Author: Law, Victoria

(From left to right, clockwise): Antoine Jefferson and Stacey Borden on July 4,2021, outside the governor's house in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

Antoine Jefferson (holding sign) at the July 2,2021, kickoff rally for the Building Up People Not Prisons clemency campaign in Boston.

Clemency quilt outside the governor's house on July 4,2021.

Sashi James and her daughter Katori outside the governor's house on July 4,2021.

On July 4, Stacey Borden braved the rain for a picnic, driving forty minutes from her Boston home to Swampscott, Massachusetts. Dozens of others joined her, bringing blankets, lawn chairs, sandwiches, salad, soup, and cookies.

This was no ordinary picnic in a park. Instead, Borden and nearly forty other advocates were on the front lawn of Massachusetts Governor Charlie Bakers house demanding that he grant clemency, or shorten the prison sentences, for more than a dozen women currently in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham, the state's only women's prison.

They were also demanding something else: a state moratorium on constructing new jails and prisons, including a proposed new women's prison.

Despite the weather, the picnickers stayed out for four hours. Some, like Borden, had served time in Framingham. Others had family members still locked inside the prison and feared for their loved ones' health and safety in an environment where there was no space to social distance during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They brought a bullhorn and, in between bites, attendees addressed the crowd and, they hoped, the governor and his staff inside of the house.

"I let the governor know it was time to start reviewing clemencies," Borden told the gathering. She noted that Baker, a Republican, has not commuted a single prison sentence during his two terms in office. "It's time [for him] to sit down and review what's happening with the women who are in these cages."

Besides soup, sandwiches, and salads, the picnickers also brought a quilt bearing the names of eighteen women at Framingham who are seeking clemency. Some called in to the picnic from the prison; organizers connected their phones to the sound system and amplified their words.

One of those callers was Angela Jefferson, who has served more than thirty years of a life sentence and had recently been denied clemency. When she was first sent to prison, she told the crowd, her children were only three and five years old. Among the picnickers was that former five-year-old...