From June 13 to November 21, The Judith Center partners with the nonprofit organization Just Detention International (JDI) to present an exhibition featuring nearly one hundred works by individuals who have experienced trauma behind bars, including those who have been subjected to sexual abuse while incarcerated. The exhibition foregrounds personal testimony and creative expression, bringing visibility to voices that are too often excluded from public and cultural discourse. Founded in 1980, Just Detention International is a health and human rights organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse in all forms of detention. JDI is the only organization in the United States—and globally—focused exclusively on addressing sexual abuse behind bars. Its work includes holding government officials accountable for prisoner rape, challenging the cultural and institutional conditions that allow sexual violence to persist, and ensuring that survivors have access to the support and resources they need. Please email us at info@thejudithcenter.org to schedule an in-person viewing of the exhibition.

On November 12, 2026, from 5-8 PM, The Judith Center will host the closing event for our exhibition From the Inside: Presented by Just Detention International. The evening will feature the panel discussion Reimagining Justice: Making Change from the Inside Out. Bringing together expertise in legal action, trauma-informed care, and LGBTQIA+ advocacy, this panel will dissect the various ways that Just Detention International’s programs facilitate the intervention and prevention of circumstances that perpetuate sexual abuse behind bars—sharing direct actions to promote support while in detention as well as decarceration. Moderated by Esther Lim, a member of Just Detention International’s Board of Directors and a criminal justice reform advocate, the panel participants will include: Vanessa Sapien, Just Detention International’s Mental Health Program Director; Dee Farmer, a member of Just Detention International’s Survivor Council and the Founder and Executive Director of Fight4Justice; and Christine Parker, Senior Staff Attorney in the Gender, Sexuality & Reproductive Justice Project at ACLU, Southern California.

The Judith Center Book Club Session 06 timeports us between two worlds: the radical feminist politics of the late 1960s and an eerily recognizable Los Angeles in 2024, as imagined three decades earlier by pioneering speculative-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Pairing Valerie Solanas’ incendiary SCUM Manifesto (1967) with Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower (1993), this session moves between the revolutionary provocations of one era and the societal collapse of another.

Building on our recent discussions of Mad Like Artaud and Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, which examined madness, institutional power, and the social construction of sanity, this session considers how gendered experience can give rise to radically different responses to a world in crisis: excessive anger and excessive empathy. In SCUM Manifesto, Solanas imagines the elimination of men as a means of dismantling patriarchal society, employing hyperbole to inspire rebellion against misogyny. In Butler’s Parable of the Sower, fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina navigates a California devastated by environmental collapse, economic inequality, and social violence. Living with a condition called “hyperempathy,” Lauren physically experiences the pain of others, an extraordinary sensitivity that both endangers her and informs her vision of a radically different way of relating.

Where Solanas imagines dismantling the existing order, Butler’s protagonist moves towards constructing another. Read together, these texts invite us to consider how gendered experiences of violence, vulnerability, and social inequality inform divergent visions of social transformation. They also extend our ongoing inquiry into the boundaries between sanity and madness, asking when anger, empathy, and other seemingly excessive responses might constitute entirely reasonable reactions to an unreasonable world.

In conjunction with The Judith Center’s forthcoming exhibition, Too Hot to Handle: Posters on Climate Change, Pollution & Environmental Justice, organized in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, this session brings speculative fiction and radical feminist polemic into conversation with the visual language of political protest. Against the backdrop of an extraordinary collection of environmental protest posters, we will consider how the manifesto and the dystopian novel use provocation, imagination, and speculative thinking to confront the crises of their times in the context of our own.

Soon, The Judith Center will announce a special guest for our conversation. Find more information about the event, where to source the books, and how to register if you are a first-time book club participant here.