April 22, 2025, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Teachback #3 — Forced Labor in U.S. Prisons
Free professional development workshop for educators. Online via Zoom.
Advance registration required. Register here.
Are you interested in exploring the history and present-day impact of incarceration with your classroom? Do you want to equip yourself with the resources necessary to convene complex conversations about the justice system and its impact?
Engage with fellow educators at one (or all) of our four Teachbacks for 2025 — professional development opportunities made for teachers, led by teachers. Each Teachback features a presentation by a special guest speaker, an activity led by an Eastern State educator, and a classroom lesson discussion facilitated by educators who participated in Eastern State's Summer Teacher Institute.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 — 4:00-5:30 pm ET
Guest Speaker & Topic: Jennifer Turner (Principal Human Rights Researcher, ACLU Human Rights Program) — The Persistence of Forced Labor in U.S. Prisons
Featured Educator: To be announced.
Open to all educators. All participants will receive copies of teaching materials. Pennsylvania-based teachers will also receive Act 48 credit.
Jennifer Turner is the Principal Human Rights Researcher in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)'s Human Rights Program. For more than 17 years, she has conducted documentation research and advocacy on human rights violations in the United States, with a focus on the criminal legal system, policing, economic injustice, and racial injustice in the United States. She led a multi-year human rights investigation on incarcerated labor and is the primary author of Captive Labor, a report co-published by the ACLU and the Global Human Rights Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School documenting the exploitation of incarcerated workers. She has authored, co-authored, developed, and supervised numerous additional ACLU human rights fact-finding reports on topics such as the criminalization of private debt, life without parole sentences, police brutality, probation and parole systems, disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions, and the health impacts of less-lethal weapons, among other subjects.
She has testified in Congress, spoken at Hill briefings, worked in coalition to pursue legislative and executive agency reforms at the federal and state levels, conducted advocacy meetings with White House and Department of Justice officials, and briefed state attorneys general and court rules committees. She also carries out advocacy before the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and serves as an ACLU representative to the International Network of Civil Liberties Associations. Prior to joining the ACLU, Jennifer was a fellow in the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. She has also worked in the asylum program of Human Rights First assisting refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. to obtain pro bono legal representation. Jennifer is a graduate of Yale University and New York University Law School, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar.
