Meet Aisha Elliott, WPA’s Chief Program Officer and Mission-Driven Strategist

Aisha Elliott has joined the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) as the Chief Program Officer, bringing over two decades of experience in criminal legal system reform. Her extensive experience positions her as a key leader in driving transformative change within the organization. Aisha is passionate about dismantling the harmful systems that inflict injustices against women in marginalized communities. She holds a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management from Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies.

Education justice is central to Aisha’s work. She was one of six women who rebuilt the college program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility after incarcerated students lost critical federal and state funding for their education, leading to the establishment of the Bedford Hills College Program.

Aisha’s leadership is informed by both her professional and personal experiences with incarceration, and she is deeply invested in creating pathways for healing, opportunity, and freedom, particularly for women and girls who have been impacted by the criminal legal system.

What do you hope to give back to the New York communities through your work at WPA?

If I had to assess what to give back to New York communities, it would be the people who were taken away from them—the women, the mothers, and the main caregivers who hold communities together and make them accountable—in a healed way. You can’t just close a jail and throw people onto the streets or close a prison and return traumatized people to traumatized communities without proper guidance and support. Some people need a certain set of supports, or a particular type of care, and if they don’t receive that, you’re further harming them and the community into which they go. You’re creating community safety issues. You need to give them the ability to halt these generational issues, such as getting to the root cause of why they committed a crime, or address any mental health needs, and let them receive the support and healing that they require.

You’ve confronted criminal legal system reform as a researcher at Columbia University’s Justice Lab, centering on the voices of those impacted by incarceration and injustice. Based on your experience, how should researchers and interviewers working with justice-impacted individuals prioritise their humanity and agency throughout the research and interview process?

Through inclusion. The main thing is to have justice-impacted folks involved in every step of the interview process. You have to use certain language because you don’t want to traumatize people, and you don’t want to trigger certain feelings about their experience. When they ask women to share their stories, they need to make sure that they have the appropriate staff on hand to support them if anything triggers them. If someone has flashbacks, they need some support afterwards. Don’t ask them about their life and then just say, “Okay, thank you, here’s a $30 stipend for your participation and we’ll see you later.” That’s unfair to them, and they need that follow-up support to reground them after telling triggering or traumatizing stories. 

Often, researchers say, “This is what we want to do.” And the question I have is always, “Why? Who asked you for this? Did the folks whose lives you’re delving into say they needed this?” They don’t ask impacted people, “What do you need?” and then do their research based on what they say. Inclusion is important.

You believe storytelling is healing. How does storytelling support justice-impacted women, and how can organizations and advocacy groups foster spaces for women to define their own stories?

When you tell someone your own story, it creates a human connection. But the courts, news reports, conviction lists, and the folks who tell these stories never highlight what makes someone human. If you only know the negative things about me, that’s all you’ll see me as, and that is what you’re going to treat me as. But if you see me as Aisha and as a human, you will treat me as Aisha and a human. The only way to do that is if I tell you my story.

Let me tell my story. I’m not going to leave out the ugly parts, but I’m also not going to leave out the good parts about who I am.

People sometimes need guidance on how to tell a story, perhaps through storytelling training. It’s closely connected to why people in prison need education. A lot of us were not educated, so we sometimes don’t know how to represent ourselves. If you want to support us, you have to support us wholly, and that includes making sure people have the right tools on hand and the correct language to use to appeal to others with humanity.

One of your core values is accessible education. How has establishing the Bedford Hills College Program informed your current work and advocacy efforts?

I was home for about a year or two, and as I was getting on the train, I called one of the folks who were very instrumental in helping us build this college program. I asked, “Do you realize that we are responsible for hundreds of women getting college degrees?” It didn’t dawn on me in that way until I was long gone out of prison and the program had been established for some years, but that’s because I feel like I was just doing what I was supposed to do. I think that if you have the capacity to do good and help someone, you’re supposed to just do it. 

I was a high school dropout when I was arrested, so when I got to prison, I obtained my GED, which sort of had a lot to do with wanting to get out of prison. At the time, there were women in Bedford serving long sentences, and when they finished their time and went to the parole board, none of them were getting out. Early on, I said to myself, “Do this prison time in a way that it’s going to be hard for them to keep you.” 

So, I got my GED, and I started college afterward. Two classes shy of my Associate’s, along came Clinton’s Crime Bill and gone were the Pell and TAP grants. College being gone meant, to me, everything was gone, including that freedom that I looked forward to. I needed to do something; I still had a lot of time left on my sentence. I spoke about it with two women who were in prison with me at the time, both of whom had experience organizing and had established the ACE Program (AIDS Counseling & Education), as well as some parenting programs. I said, “Let’s start this program. How can we make it happen?” And it snowballed from there.

There was an impact. We established something that people actually benefited from. Education and educated became the thing to do and the thing to be, respectively. 

It’s important to not only educate yourself, but to use what you have to bring others along with you. You’ve learned this thing; you have this opportunity. Now, what are you going to do with it? A lot of the women who went to college in prison are now out, in leadership positions, and some have their own organizations. 

Once you have that community in prison, it has to be carried forward outside. It informs my work in that we need to maintain that community, not just with those of us who went through the college program, but also with others who have gone through the whole prison system and are still in there. We have to maintain a community. “Nothing about us without [all of us].” 

In your past work, you’ve helped communities reimagine and shift the narrative around public safety. How can communities transform our approach to incarceration and public safety?

You have to prepare people for where you want them to go. You have to start from within and support people while they’re incarcerated—establishing programs while they’re in prison, making sure they have the correct mental health care, access to education, making sure they’re safe in there—but you also have to get people ready for release. They have to be mentally stable, whether that’s through counseling or whatever kind of mental health support you can offer them, and have housing. People need to be prepared to be free. 

If you’re not setting people up to be better and do better, it’s just punishment. It’s creating a public safety issue. They don’t ask us, “What do you need to be successful once you go home?” Incarcerated people need to be a part of those discussions. 

What excites you about the future of WPA?

I am a part of the change that’s about to happen here, and I want WPA to be put back on the map. We can move WPA forward with amazing programs that people turn to, and one day, sit back and say, “Look at what we did and look how many women have prospered as a result.”