Boudin, Kathy

BOUDIN, KATHY (1943-2022). Kathy Boudin, a leading figure in the fight against mass incarceration in a country that holds more prisoners per capita than any other in the world, gained fame and notoriety through her own imprisonment and her response to it.

Born in Greenwich Village, a bohemian and left-leaning neighborhood, Boudin was the daughter of poet Jean Roisman Boudin and the great constitutional litigator Leonard Boudin, who had represented Paul Robeson and Daniel Ellsberg. The circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals around her family circle included her uncle, journalist I. F. Stone, and her great uncle Louis B. Boudin, the famed socialist scholar and labor lawyer. The family’s Village home offered a natural gathering spot for political activists, intellectuals, and artists.

Kathy Boudin attended the famed leftist grade school, the Little Red Schoolhouse, nearby, and went on to Elizabeth Irwin High School, itself named after an associate of the progressive educator, John Dewey. In these years, she also participated in the boycott of racist practices at Woolworths and visited Cuba in 1960, supporting the nascent revolution.

Boudin went on to Bryn Mawr College, where she became an outspoken political activist, meanwhile graduating first in her class of 1965 after spending her senior year in Russia. She had also managed to spend much time in Cleveland in 1964, working in the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), the SDS community organizing project. Aimed there and elsewhere at bettering the lives of poor white people relocated from Appalachia, ERAP provided Boudin with her guiding principle, the involvement of people in their own liberation. After her graduation from college, she returned Cleveland for several years to work for improved food, housing and, especially, healthcare for welfare mothers and children in Black and white neighborhoods. She later joined the Weather Underground, survived an explosion in Greenwich Village, and became a fugitive for the next decade.

To support and raise funds for the small Black Liberation Army, formed in New York City after the government’s destruction of the Black Panther Party, Boudin had agreed to participate in the 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York, by being in the getaway van. The robbery went awry, and two police officers and a security guard died in an exchange of gunfire. Unarmed, she shot no one, but the felony murder law in New York defined anyone as guilty of murder if they participated in a crime with death resulting. During her incarceration in Bedford Hills prison, a maximum-security prison for women in New York, Boudin became the first woman in New York state to earn a master’s degree while in prison, assisted in part by a Pell Grant. She also developed programs to educate people about AIDS, and she parented from afar. After serving twenty-two years, and released on parole in 2003, she went on earn her PhD from Columbia Teachers College and co-founded, with Cheryl Wilkins, the Center for Justice at Columbia University.

An extraordinary organizer, Boudin played a key role in urging changes in the role and even the composition of the New York State Board of Parole. Previously, board members at parole hearings had focused on the original crime committed, disregarding the good work that the prisoner had performed in sincere remorse for their crime. Boudin’s urgings helped board members to modify this practice and encouraged a wider representation in the board’s composition. She offered herself as proof that people cannot and should not be defined by the worst thing that they had ever done and that they are capable of change, transformation, and redemption. As part of the activities of the Center for Justice, Boudin and Cheryl Wilkins organized annual conferences called “Beyond the Bars.” This conference, more than academic, came to be led by the formerly incarcerated, and it built a community of sorts, at the forefront of justice reform.

In 2013, Boudin, Laura Whitehorn, and Mujahid Farid, with the support of Attorney Soffiyah Elijah, founded Release Aging People in Prison(RAPP). As Whitehorn explained, they sought to dismantle the racist structures underlining the US prison system, focusing on New York State, and responding to two crises: the exponential increase in the population of older people, mostly Black and brown, across the country; and the tendency of most other prison decarceration advocates to exclude people convicted of violent crimes, including actual harm of police. Between 2013 in 2019, RAPP organized successful campaigns to change the regulations and personnel of the New York State Board of Parole. Folllowing these reforms, release rates rose from about 25 percent to about 45 percent. RAPP also helped win release on parole or clemency for political prisoners held in New York. These included Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, Jalil Muntaquin, and Boundin’s life partner David Gilbert, who served forty years for the Brinks events.

Chesa Boudin, David and Kathy’s son, elected by the people of San Francisco as their District Attorney in 2020, rapidly became the most notable progressive prosecutor in the United States working for criminal justice reform. A heavily funded campaign successfully using fear and fabrications against him drove him out of office in 2022.

Ayers, Bill. “Kathy Boudin, Timeless Fighter for Justice - Rest in Power,” Truthout, May 9, 2022.

Bedard, Rachael. “ The Radical Life of Kathy Boudin,“ The New Yorker, May 7, 2022.

Jones, Jeff and Eleanor Stein. “Our Friend Kathy Boudin: A Great Life and a Great Loss,” The Nation, May 2, 2022.

Whitehorn, Laura. “ Remembering Kathy Boudin,“ Jewish Currents, May 12, 2022.