Ivelisse Gilestra
A broken system does not excuse mistakes, but it does ensure that the punishment does not fairly fit the crime, particularly for individuals of certain communities, classes, and races. Ivelisse Gilestra knows this better than anyone.
A Puerto Rican immigrant, Gilestra was sent to prison in 2002, shortly after arriving in the United States. Though she lived in New York, she served her full sentence in New Jersey, meaning that she had to serve her first five years post-release living in New Jersey in order to comply with the stipulations of her parole.
Gilestra was arrested during a stop and frisk gone wrong, and although her actions during the incident were meant in self-defense, this was not taken into account during her sentencing. Gilestra, who did not know much English at the time, was assumed by the system to be in the wrong as well as assumed to be a gang member due to her appearance. This all contributed to an unfair sentencing. Gilestra attributes this injustice to her gender as well, feeling that, as a woman, police officers expected her to behave a certain way, and she was punished when she did not comply.
“When a woman does something to protect herself, it's almost like you have this code that you need to be submissive and obedient. And I was not having it,” Gilestra said.
Once Gilestra arrived in prison, she saw the hardships and problematic structure of the incarceration system itself. She refers to her correctional facility as a “plantation” because she feels it is an extension of the slavery plantations of the past. Incarcerated people are forced to work for almost nothing, with no rights, no union, and no say. She feels that the system is designed for incarcerated people to be exploited and used for cheap labor. Gilestra also views correctional facilities as plantations because they don’t actually aim to correct, rather they cause people to internalize more and more trauma.
“I use the word plantation because to me, using the word or the term correctional facility is a euphemism,” Gilestra said. “Those settings do not facilitate corrections. Those settings pathologize maladaptive behavior.”
Gilestra also faced injustice while in prison due to her race and her inability to speak fluent English. She was unable to articulate her thoughts and ideas to her full intellectual extent and therefore was treated as lesser and immediately tagged as a threat. Gilestra believes that due to the intersectionality of her race, class, and gender, she was particularly targeted by the system.
“It knows all of those intersectionalities are used; class, gender, your race, how you express yourself. I felt like they will try to use whatever it is in order to make a point out of you, especially if you're a woman that does not adhere to our code of appropriateness.”
In terms of being an incarcerated woman, Gilestra believes that patriarchy plays a huge role in the prison system. Women’s unique struggles are often not recognized, and their strengths are not appreciated.
“I think also that there are even more barriers for women,” Gilestra said. “I think we are the spine of our communities. And sometimes we’ve got to be in constant negotiation within the different worlds we inhabit”
Gilestra also feels that women are more powerful than they are often given credit for, and are underestimated within the prison system.
“We just wear a lot of hats, and we are powerful. And sometimes, I think that there is an invisibility to our struggles,” Gilestra said. “Because society is still very much stuck in patriarchal and sexist ways that don't really shine a light on the brilliance we really bring.”
One way that the women used their strengths during Gilestra’s incarceration was by forming communities and helping one another. The women with life sentences became the mothers of the prison, and they created the blueprints for the culture of the community. They modeled the interactions and behaviors toward other women, and overall created as positive an atmosphere as possible. Gilestra loves the way that women are able to build strong bonds in a place so unconducive to building community.
“That is a testament of the power we bring. Even in those settings, we are creating community, under your noses, and still planning our underground revolutions while smiling at you if we had to,” Gilestra said. “So to me it was a whole different way of surviving. It was a whole different way of using suffering as a catalyst to create new [bonds].”
Gilestra herself would help her fellow females while incarcerated. She cultivated a system of reciprocity, where the women could lean on one another. She took women who were being taken advantage of under her wing, always helping them reach their potential. Gilestra felt it was of the utmost importance to help fellow women while in prison because the trauma the system inflicts can be incredibly damaging for years afterward.
“I believe that most deal with trauma before. It is compounded trauma; the trauma prior to incarceration, and then incarceration re-traumatizes it. So it's a lot for a woman to deal with. And there's no outlet but each other,” Gilestra said. “There's no therapy...my healing came from me, really getting to learn myself. That's a difficult process when you have a lot of layers of pain and trauma.”
Lots of this trauma is inflicted by the prison officers themselves. For example, Gilestra recalls the dehumanization she felt when being strip searched. For women who were menstruating, guards could ask them to expose their tampon and even remove it, under the guise of saying they needed to do a thorough search. This total violation of privacy caused immense trauma for many women, and Gilestra recalls it impacting visitation. Since women had to be searched before and after being allowed to see visitors, many women would just tell their families not to come visit while they were menstruating in order to avoid this traumatic experience.
Officers could further control visitation by denying entrance to certain visitors simply on a whim. Gilestra recalls how visitors would be turned away simply based on the color of their shirt. Officers would deny visitors wearing certain colors, since they associated these colors with gangs.
“They see a security threat group,” Gilestra said. “[But] I think that the biggest gang is correctional officers and law enforcement themselves.”
While incarcerated, Gilestra spent her time working. She worked a myriad of jobs including working in the commissary and the kitchen. She calls the jobs that incarcerated people have to do “sustaining the beast.” Their labor contributes to making sure the prison system continues.
Gilestra also worked in the prison’s private business operations that make the prison system millions of dollars a year while the workers make nothing. Her correctional facility had a tourism business where incarcerated women would answer phones and answer tourism questions for people visiting New Jersey.
“It's amazing...the many, many agencies and entities in private organizations that really benefit from the exploitation of people,” Gilestra said.
“Education kind of changed my thinking, my lens,” Gilestra said. “I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so I come from a school of thought of movement, of resistance. I knew the colonial wounds we inherit, once [I arrived] in New York. I think I saw or felt the social maladies that affect marginalized communities, the communities that I come from, more pervasively. And that created a pathway to prison.”
Along with working while incarcerated, Gilestra also committed herself to education. She immediately enrolled in college courses within her correctional facility. Between learning in the classroom and learning outside of the classroom while incarcerated, prison allowed Gilestra to reexamine her life and open her eyes to why she ended up in her situation.
Gilestra feels that being in prison helped her put these pieces together. She saw how so many of her fellow incarcerated women came from similar backgrounds with such similar stories, and knew that this was evidence of a problem. She was struck by the fact that, even though they were in a prison in a rural area of New Jersey, most of the women in the prison were from the inner city, miles away, and most were black and brown. The foundation of systematically compounded trauma was the same for most of the women.
While incarcerated, Gilestra educated herself on the way that prison mirrors the problems of the communities from which many of the women come. This education was transformative for Gilestra, however this was not a rehabilitative transformation. Rather, it was a transformation through suffering in a hostile, violent environment where Gilestra had no choice to transform and wake up to injustice.
Gilestra learned English while incarcerated and learned more about the patriarchy, sexism, and dynamics of power that contributed to her situation.
“It's not that I take accountability [away] from my actions. But there's a lot of things that are in place,” Gilestra said. “There's an entrenched neglect with specific communities. There's an entrenched poverty rooted in systemic structures, a racist, exclusionary policy.”
Gilestra sees how people in these communities develop maladaptive behaviors in order to survive, and this lack of choices often leads to prison. Without money or education, members of neglected communities often are given no choice regarding how to live their lives, showing a deep-rooted problem with the incarceration system.
“Survival looks very different when you have resources,” Gilestra said.
In her thirteen years incarcerated, Gilestra also saw many people leave prison and then end up right back inside. She saw the same people do her whole sentence with her, just in years long or months long non-consecutive stints. When people return home to a system or community that remains unchanged, what is necessary for survival remains unchanged as well. Gilestra acknowledges the dominant false narrative that the system perpetuates which tells people that they are destined to end up back in prison. Without help and actual rehabilitation, incarcerated individuals internalize this idea and often end up fulfilling that expectation.
Gilestra sees how prison is a lifetime of consequences and suffering that won’t end until the system changes.
“This is a lifetime of consequences. I am off parole, I have a job, I pay taxes in two states, I vote. I facilitate workshops. I teach, I have five to six meetings...a day with legislative representatives. And still, to get housing, this place that I have, it took me fourteen applications,” Gilestra said.
All of this hardship inspired Gilestra during and after leaving prison and led to her current passion, community organizing. Gilestra served her time with a constant mind frame of searching for how to solve the problems she was seeing. She left incarceration with a goal of no longer feeling on the outside of American society, but rather a full participant seeking to make the system better.
“Once I embarked...on that self discovery and I used education as a tool, then I was able to uproot certain things, and it gave me a different lens,” Gilestra said. “I was no longer seeing myself as an outsider, but as a full participant of society.”
After the trauma she suffered while in prison, Gilestra knew she needed to devote her life to trying to change these things. Community organizing became a way to manage her own trauma by seeking to rectify what she saw and experienced while incarcerated.
“Most organizers have a passion, a fire, in connection to being folks of service or being called to community. So I think that was there before my incarceration, and incarceration only polished me, because then I was looking at strategies so that I wouldn't get into trouble. So I started to develop tactics. And I started to read books exactly about those social costs,” Gilestra said.
Incarceration lit the match that Gilestra already possessed and led her to her current work. Gilestra works for multiple organizations, including Survivors of the System and Botanic Garden, an organization that gets its name because its members are “all a bunch of wild flowers.” Gilestra acts as a mentor, she leads healing circles, and overall helps other people to manage their trauma and work through it in order to turn hardship into productivity.
“I think that I have learned how to use trauma as a radar,” Gilestra said. “I'm highly intuitive. I sense the room.”
Gilestra particularly loves working with women and is deeply inspired by their resilience.
“I get inspired daily. I learn from women,” Gilestra said. “I feel the way that we protect and heal one another, the way that we tend our wounds collectively, and the way that we also come with full force when we see an injustice cannot be downgraded or...cannot be silenced.”
Gilestra also feels a responsibility toward other women, and appreciates the love she receives from them in return.
“There's a different type of learning that I get with women. This [is] a different type of community love that I receive from women,” Gilestra said. “I feel that as a woman, it's my duty.”
Gilestra attributes the deep rooted camaraderie that women feel from one another to ancestral matriarchal lineage. She feels that this love is in women’s DNA and memory, and women seek to heal one another instinctually.
“When I see someone in pain, most of us have that healer in us. And usually we have that healer in us because we've been broken and we have experienced that level of pain,” Gilestra said.
Gilestra feels that there is a beauty in the activist community, and she is proud to serve as a part of this group. The activist community knows and trusts one another, they suffer together, share joy together, and work together. Gilestra is honored to be working with Witness and fighting alongside Witness in order to create change.
“Thank you for the work that you do,” Gilestra said. “Thank you for the energy, the life force, and for believing, because in order to do this work, one has to one has to believe in the goal on the horizon, which is liberation.”
Witness’s The Map project is particularly important to Gilestra, as she feels that highlighting the efforts and contributions of formerly incarcerated individuals will allow more awareness to be raised regarding the importance of these people in society.
“We are one of the most resilient, committed, dedicated folks when it comes to work. If I'm going to do the work, I am going to do my work,” Gilestra said. “I feel that we are [a] population not being recognized. We are excellent. Just excellent. Our workers and folks in the labor market don't recognize the gifts that we bring.”
It is also important to Gilestra that fellow formerly incarcerated individuals help one another and invest in one another.
“I think that when you created [The Map], it was a way to really shed light on, this is where you need to be spending your money. And this is where we, as a community, need to invest in one another,” Gilestra said. “Why am I paying this in this other community when I can invest and give it to one of my sisters [or] one of my brothers that is struggling?”
Gilestra also values the Map for its ability to create economic opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals, because socio economic hardship creates pathways to prison.
“If we really invest, promote, and spend our money and get communities to spend within our community, we are really changing and altering and rectifying those dynamics of power, that really [are] maintained by our invisibility and our oppression,” Gilestra said. “Oppression really thrives on those misunderstandings of us.”
Abby Stern