Abstract: The current system of mass incarceration entrenches inequality and segregation. Before, within, and after people enter prison, they experience a range of structural barriers and institutional biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This talk investigates a network of food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue that food justice can be a tool for addressing non-food problems, and in turn help advance social justice for former inmates. To explain this strategic pivot I show how the incarcerated geographies of former inmates, that is their perspectives and experiences throughout the prison pipeline, motivate a reimagining of food justice activism to help decrease various social inequities. A set of healing and mutual aid practices create spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.
