Susan Burton is a visionary, inspirational leader of the criminal justice reform movement, and author of award-winning memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton. Her lived experience through prison to recovery serves as her motivation to continue leading the fight against mass incarceration. The impact of her work and leadership has been recognized through numerous awards. In 2010, she was named a CNN Top Ten Hero and received the prestigious Citizen Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is also the recipient of the Encore Purpose Prize (2012) and the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award (2014) among many more.
Ms. Burton struggled to rise above a life of poverty, violence, and loss. After being released from prison for the sixth time, she was finally able to access recovery services in an affluent area of Los Angeles. There, she discovered and embraced opportunities that were never offered before. Determined to bring those resources to areas plagued by poverty and over-incarceration, Burton founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL) in 1998. Now, over two decades later, A New Way of Life is an internationally recognized non-profit organization that promotes healing, leadership development, and safety for formerly incarcerated women. ANWOL has supported the reentry of over 5,500 individuals through safe housing, pro bono legal services and leadership development to date.
After a 2017-18 tour with her award-winning memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, in 64 prisons and jails throughout 26 states and three countries, Burton launched the SAFE (Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality) Housing Network to replicate A New Way of Life’s effective and humane reentry model. Since 2018, Burton has mentored and supported twenty four organizations in sixteen US states (Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington) and three countries (Uganda, Kenya, and the US) to open their own safe homes. It is through this work that she thrives, enjoying the progress of her foundations, all while knowing how many individual lives she has touched and changed throughout her own journey.
Burton is also the co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON) and the Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM), both national grassroots civil rights movements composed of formerly incarcerated individuals, their families and community allies. In collaboration with UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, she launched an employment rights reentry legal clinic, which has grown to be the largest of its kind in Southern California.
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