The Formerly Incarcerated Radically Empowered (FIRE) Collective is a growing and interdisciplinary team that shares a deep commitment to the wellbeing of formerly incarcerated people. Our approach brings a critical lens to the current discourse on mental health for formerly incarcerated people from sociology, history, literary studies, disability studies, and narrative medicine. Together, we are building a national network connecting those innovating and struggling with the problems facing those impacted by mass incarceration, and moving together to create revolutionary change.
Will Boles, MD, MPP is a Family Medicine Resident at East Jefferson General Hospital. A graduate of LSUHSC School of Medicine in New Orleans and Harvard Kennedy School, Will has worked for years at the intersection of medicine, public policy and law as they relate to mass incarceration. During his work for the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, Will assisted the state in understanding the dynamics of the hepatitis c virus in justice-involved Medicaid populations. In medical school, Will participated in various state and national policy activities focused on improving health care systems, including the Louisiana HR51 Study Resolution Task Force on Compassionate Release, Medical Treatment Furlough, and Medical Parole Requirements as well as the Biden-Harris Campaign’s Health Policy Committee. Will is most proud of his ongoing work in the New Orleans community assisting in the development, implementation and evaluation of trauma-informed peer support groups for formerly incarcerated people. Will’s work has been published in various outlets, including Health Affairs Forefront, American Journal of Public Health, The Milbank Quarterly, and Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American studies program at New York University. Her dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated women and the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project. As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert, she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of task forces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a senior research consultant, is part of the Survivor’s Justice Project, and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and the Correctional Association of New York, as well as the advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Education Trust, A Touch of Light, the Urban Institute, and ITHAKA’s Higher Education in Prison Research project. She is a founding member and board president of Constructing Our Future, a reentry and housing organization for women created by incarcerated women in Indiana; a Beyond the Bars fellow; a research fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; and a Ford Foundation Bearing Witness Fellow with Art for Justice, a SOZE Foundation Right of Return Fellow, a Code for America Fellow, a Mual Arts Rendering Justice Fellow, and an Artist for the People Practitioner Fellow at the Human Rights Lab/Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; and Researcher with the Women Transcending Oral History Project at the Columbia University Center for Justice. Daniel Jones is co-editor with Elizabeth Nelson of a new history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated colleagues titled, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848 – 1920. As an artist, Daniel Jones finds ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance, photography and visual art.
Elizabeth Nelson, PhD is an assistant professor in the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Program at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) and an adjunct assistant professor of Africana studies and history. Since 2018 she has coordinated the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project and is co-editor with Michelle Daniel Jones of the IWPHP edited collection Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920 (The New Press 2023). A medical historian, Nelson’s primary research interests center on modern institutions of confinement such as mental hospitals and prisons, exploring how people carve out bold and meaningful lives in the most inhospitable spaces. Nelson is currently working on a collaborative book project (with Emily Beckman and Modupe Labode) that examines the final years and closure of Indiana’s Central State psychiatric hospital through the lens of trauma and disability. Nelson has also developed several Medical Humanities courses at IUPUI that explore histories of trauma theory and diagnosis, including “The Culture of Mental Illness” and “Trauma Studies and the Medical Humanities.”
Anastazia Schmid is an artist, activist, and independant scholar. She blends her knowledge and artistic expressions in her work and contributes her time and talents to numerous activist, and outreach causes. Schmid is a founding member of the Prison History Project, a collective historical research team engaged in re-writing the history of women’s prisons. Her area of emphasis is nineteenth century gender and sexuality: the history of gynecology/obstetrics, medicalization of women’s bodies, sex work.and epistemic injustice. She is a co-author of the book Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920. In 2020, Schmid received a graduate certificate in Medical Humanities and Health Studies from Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). That same year, Schmid and a dozen other women currently and formerly incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison authored a hard-hitting report funded by the Lumina Foundation, “Barriers to Higher Education for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Students,” which exposed how colleges with programs in prisons can be exploitative of their students inside. It includes a chapter by Schmid on “Post Traumatic Prison Disorder (PTPD),” a widespread, largely hidden, and very disruptive phenomenon for post-incarcerated people on which she is a leading expert, both personally and academically. She has presented about PTPD on several panels and convenings. As an artist, Schmid channels her research and lived experience into theater, poetry, visual and performance art.
Jarrod M. Wall is a fifth-year doctoral student in an interdisciplinary program—City, Culture, Community—at Tulane University. His areas of focus have been stigma, Participatory Action Research, and the sociology of prisons and prison programming. His dissertation addresses cost of attendance and college affordability for incarcerated students. Jarrod serves as instructor of record for Tulane University, having taught both in prison and on theTulane campus. He is an alumnus of the Mellon Fellowship for Community Engaged Scholarship at Tulane University and an alumnus of The Education Trust’s Justice Policy Fellowship. Through his LLC, Directly Impacted Educational Consulting, Jarrod has worked with four higher education in prison programs in two states, helping students develop program evaluations through a Participatory Action Research methodology, and he is currently working with the Loyola University New Orleans students at Rayburn Correctional Facility. Since 2019, Jarrod has served as the Assistant Director of the Formerly Incarcerated Peer Support (FIPS) Group in New Orleans, Louisiana. He helped develop a 13-week curriculum for the group, addressing domains of reentry and adjustment for those potentially living with Post Incarceration Syndrome. Through a partnership with the Center for Public Service at Tulane University, he has mentored seven interns, always taking them through Critical Race Theory and Abolitionist readings to help them develop a systemic critique and understanding to contextualize the individual stories they hear at FIPS. He sees this mentoring as a way of investing in future allies. Jarrod’s ultimate goal is to develop an organization for formerly incarcerated researchers where, as his motto goes, “Experience informs research, and research informs experience.”
Community consultant:
Thad Tatum is the co-founder, director, and lead facilitator of the Formerly Incarcerated Peer Support (FIPS) group. After spending 28 and a half years in Louisiana State Penitentiary (colloquially known as Angola), Thad earned his degree as a substance abuse counselor. During his counseling internship at a substance abuse center, Thad encountered several individuals he knew from inside. What began as spontaneous discussions turned into set meetings twice a month, and years later with a 13-week curriculum and a published qualitative program evaluation. Even though each week has a different topic, Thad aims for FIPS to have two overarching themes. First, to address the lingering emotional, psychological, and behavioral effects of long term incarceration, known as Post Incarceration Syndrome, a concept by Terrence Gorski, which Thad first came across in his university substance abuse counseling studies. Second, to help the FIPS members and himself better understand their experience of mass incarceration within the racial history of the U.S. Thad has dedicated his life to advocacy for the recognition of Post Incarceration Syndrome, the mental health of those reentering, and the efficacy of the peer support model. The motto of FIPS has become, “Us helping Us.” (Due to his current lifetime parole, which is common for those released in Louisiana, Thad cannot become a licensed substance abuse counselor.)
