Update
Throughout her rise to become the first woman speaker of the Pennsylvania House, former Prison Society board member Joanna McClinton has been a champion for human rights. She is a powerful advocate for the health, safety and dignity of people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, and people otherwise impacted by the criminal legal system.
That’s why we are honored to name Speaker McClinton our 2023 Human Rights Champion.
The speaker will receive this honor at the Prison Society’s Love Above Bars event on September 27.
Speaker McClinton began her career as a public defender. For seven years, she lent her talents to ensure that the most in need Philadelphians had effective legal counsel. Keisha Hudson, chief defender of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, recalls how she worked to divert people struggling with substance use disorders into treatment, so that they wouldn’t continue to get ensnared in the criminal legal system. “Joanna was a leader here, supervising one of our trial divisions, and training and mentoring attorneys and staff on how to most effectively represent clients in drug cases,” Hudson says.
She then became chief counsel for State Senator Anthony Hardy Williams, where she focused on helping people shake the stigma of a criminal record, find employment, and start with a clean slate. After the speaker won election to the state House, she co-sponsored the bi-partisan Clean Slate Act. Signed into law in 2018, the groundbreaking act seals criminal records for nonviolent, low-level offenses for people who do not commit another crime for 10 years, as well as any charges that didn’t result in a conviction. It has helped give formerly incarcerated people a chance to start over and break the cycle of recidivism. Speaker McClinton continues to work on this issue, working to pass an expansion of the Clean Slate Act in the state House this year that would remove low-level felony convictions from public view after 10 years.
During her time serving on the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, she voted against adopting a risk-assessment algorithm because of its potential to increase the use of incarceration and exacerbate gender and racial biases.* As a member of the commission that redrew Pennsylvania’s legislative districts, McClinton helped a successful effort to end the practice of prison gerrymandering. As a result, most people in state prisons now count towards the voting power of the districts where they resided before they were incarcerated–which are disproportionately Black or Hispanic–rather than the predominantly white districts where the prisons are located.
“Most of the people currently in state facilities will, sooner or later, be released from custody and resume their lives on the outside,” Speaker McClinton said when she cast her vote to end prison gerrymandering. “Today, we are standing up for equal treatment before the law and truly embracing the ideals of ‘one person, one vote.’”
We hope you can join us in honoring her tireless work as a Human Rights Champion at our Love Above Bars event on September 27.
*Note: An earlier version of this supporter update incorrectly implied that Speaker McClinton stopped the adoption of the risk-assessment algorithm. The commission adopted the algorithm over the objections of the speaker and prominent critics like the ACLU.
