CLAIM

Photo by Jason Reblando    

CLAIM was founded to address the gap in legal aid and advocacy for incarcerated women and their families. Since 1985, CLAIM has served thousands of women and their families on family law cases and made Illinois the first State in the nation to outlaw the dangerous practice of transporting women in labor to the hospital in shackles and chain-belts and then shackling them to their hospital beds. We won the establishment of Illinois’ first community-based mother-infant program, which allows women convicted of nonviolent offenses to bond with their babies while addressing the root cause of their offenses.

Since its founding, CLAIM has grown from a one-woman office to a dependable source of legal aid, education about the law, and systems change advocacy for and with women prisoners and their families.  In 1989 we launched the volunteer Panel Program, which provides free representation to CLAIM clients in family law cases.  In 2006 the Family Law Clinic began providing free legal advice to women in the Cook County Jail through volunteer lawyers.

In 1992 we launched the Advocacy Project to help formerly incarcerated women develop their leadership skills and to empower them to organize for policy change.  From its beginning, formerly imprisoned women have been in key staff positions of the Advocacy Project. The Advocacy Project is a vehicle for the activism of women who speak with the authority of their experience and who have the courage to work publicly as former prisoners to bring about change.