Cynthia Chandler

1995

Cynthia Chandler

Women's Positive Legal Action Network (Women's PLAN)

Oakland, California, United States

Civil and Human Rights

The Bold Idea:

Women's PLAN works to reduce the suffering of women prisoners with serious diseases by challenging the decreasing the medical neglect, abuse, mistreatment and discrimination this population faces.

Biography:

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1995, Ms. Chandler started her first nonprofit organization, the Women’s Positive Legal Action Network. This was the first nonprofit organization in the U.S. providing direct services to incarcerated, HIV positive women. In 2000, Ms. Chandler redirected her passion to another area of prison reform, prison abolition.  As a co-founders of Justice Now, she is concerned with ending violence against women and abolishing the prison industrial complex.