Validus Movement Meeting for the “Cost of the Cage” Campaign

Written By Michelle Daniel

COF Board member Tiara Shelton, our friends and I attended last night's Validus Movement. We heard from various speakers about the Cost of the Cage campaign. Learn more at https://mirrorindy.org/validus-movement-indiana.../. and join us at the next Sunday Movement Meeting - May 14th!!!!

Nationally, families spend an estimated $350 billion supporting incarcerated loved ones — approximately $4,000 per family impacted.

The Validus Movement is a grassroots organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana, focused on empowering individuals returning from incarceration, promoting reentry support, and advocating for criminal justice reform. It seeks to break the cycle of recidivism by providing resources and building community power, often working alongside organizations like Live Free Indiana.

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Michelle Daniel

Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American Studies New York University. Michelle’s dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people. As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a Senior Research Consultant and the Women Transcending Oral History Project as a co-researcher. and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Survivor’s Justice Project, The Education Trust, Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Ed in Prison Project.

She is Executive Director of Constructing Our Future, a housing organization created by incarcerated women in Indiana. Michelle author and co-editor of the award-winning Who Would Believe a Prisoner: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920, published by the New Press. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into theater, dance and photography. Her co-authored play, “The Duchess of Stringtown” was produced in 2017 in Indianapolis and New York and her artist installation about weaponized stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran in New York 2019 and 2020, Philadelphia 2021 with a public mural. “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment, explores COVID-19 in prisons, ran in Chicago 2023 and producer on the film, Degrees of Freedom that premiered in 2024.

https://www.michelledanieljones@gmail.com
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