Born in Greenwich Village in New York City in the midst of World War II she was a political activist from an early age.
The Village was a bohemian and leftist neighborhood in New York City starting in the 1920s. Her parents were the poet Jean Roisman Boudin and the great constitutional litigator Leonard Boudin, who had represented Paul Robeson and Daniel Ellsberg. They were part of a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals. Her uncle I. F. Stone was an important independent left-wing journalist and her great uncle Louis B. Boudin was a prominent socialist scholar and labor lawyer. Their home was a gathering spot for political activists, intellectuals, and artists.
Boudin attended the leftist grade school Little Red Schoolhouse near her home in the Village and then went to its high school, Elizabeth Irwin, named after an associate of the progressive educator John Dewey. There she participated in the Woolworth boycott of that racist chain store and visited Cuba in 1960, supporting the nascent revolution.
Boudin attended Bryn Mawr college where she was an outspoken political activist. She graduated first in her class of 1965 after spending her senior year in Russia.
She moved to Cleveland in 1964 where she was part of the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) organized by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). There she did community organizing trying to better the lives of poor people recently relocated from Appalachia. Her guiding principle was then and thereafter that people need to be involved in their own liberation. This she practiced from her early days in Cleveland, then again while she served 22 years in prison, and finally in her work against mass incarceration when she was released.
As Dr. Oliver Fein has written, “Kathy joined 10 students from all over the country to live in a poverty stricken Appalachian community on Cleveland’s Westside. They created Cleveland ERAP, one of nine SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) community-based projects designed to build the “Inter-Racial Movement of the Poor”. Cleveland ERAP helped organize an active welfare rights movement in the white community united with the Black community to demand welfare reform, including “No Rent for Rats”. Kathy returned to Cleveland after completing college and spent several years working in the Black and white community together with other SDS activists organizing for improved food, housing and healthcare for welfare mothers and children. The bond formed between Kathy and many of these welfare mothers was so strong that when Kathy was arrested over a decade later, several of them went to visit her in prison.”
Kathy Boudin got out in 2003 after serving 22 years in Bedford Hills prison, a maximum-security prison for women in New York. She had plead guilty to robbery and felony murder in connection with a 1983 Brinks armed truck heist where she was a passenger in the getaway van.
She was a white supporter of the small Black Liberation Army, which was formed in New York City after the government’s destruction of the Black Panther Party. In order to raise funds for the Black Liberation Army, Kathy had agreed to support the action by being in the getaway van to act as a decoy. The robbery went awry. Two police officers and a security guard were killed. Kathy was quickly arrested. She was unarmed and did not kill anyone but the felony murder law in New York defines a person as guilty if they are a participant in a crime where someone dies.
Kathy was the first woman in the state of New York to earn a master’s degree while in prison, where she developed programs to educate people about AIDS, parenting from afar, and the securing of a college education after the Pell Grant program was discontinued.
In 2003 she was released on parole and went on to earn her PhD from Columbia Teachers College and then co-founded with Cheryl Wilkins “The Center for Justice at Columbia University” in New York City.
An extraordinary organizer, Kathy was able in concert with others to modify the composition of the New York State Board of Parole. Instead of understanding the potential for human transformation, the Board members at parole hearings used to only focus on the original crime committed by the applicant, and disregarded the good work they had performed in prison and the remorse they had expressed for their crime. Boudin‘s work helped remove people with this mindset.
Kathy Boudin was a kind and empathetic person, widely admired with many friends. She was proof of the fact that people cannot and should not be defined by the worst thing that they’ve ever done in their lives and that they are capable of change, transformation, and redemption.
As part of the activities of the Center for Justice Kathy and Cheryl Wilkins organized annual conferences called “Beyond the Bars”. This conference was more than just an academic one. It was led by formally incarcerated people and built a community in the forefront of justice reform.
In 2013, Kathy, Laura Whitehorn, and Mujahid Farid, with the support of Attorney Soffiyah Elijah founded Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP). As Whitehorn has written, “Our purpose was to dismantle the racist structures which underline the US prison system. RAPP focused on New York State in response to two phenomena: First, the exponential increase in the population of older people, most of whom are Black and brown, behind bars across the country; and second, the tendency of other prison decarceration advocates to exclude people convicted of violent crimes including harming police. Between 2013 and 2019, RAPP organized successful campaigns to change the regulations and personnel of the New York State Board of Parole. Since then release rates rose from about 25% to about 45%. RAPP also helped win release on parole or clemency for political prisoners held in NY: Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, Jalil Muntaquin, and Kathy’s life partner David Gilbert, who served 40 years as part of the Brinks truck heist.”
With David Gilbert, Kathy had a son, Chesa Boudin, who was elected by the people of San Francisco as their District Attorney in 2020. He was the most notable progressive prosecutor in the United States working for criminal justice reform and the end of the carceral state. He ended cash bail, started diversion programs for mentally disturbed defendants and for those addicted to drugs. He cut down harsh long prison sentences, exonerated the innocent, and did not try juveniles as adults. He prioritized putting resources into support for crime victims.
Chesa Boudin.
Big money interests paid for a recall of Boudin pouring $7 million into the effort saturating the media.
They used fear and fabrications to stir up the population against him. On June 7, 2022 he was voted out of office, but like his mother he left a powerful legacy of struggle against mass incarceration.
Michael Steven Smith is the author, editor, and co-editor of many books, including Imagine: Living In a Socialist U.S.A. and The Emerging Police State, by William M. Kunstler. He lives and practices law in New York City with his wife Debby (and Charlie). Michael Smith has also organized and chaired the Left Forum. He is co-host of the Pacifica radio show Law and Disorder and is a longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. His most recent book, written with his wife Debby Smith, is Parrot Tales: Our Life With a Magical Bird.