Colby Lenz

Colby Lenz is a legal advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Colby has been working with people imprisoned in California women’s prisons for the past 14 years. This work includes survival and release support, building leadership power with currently and formerly imprisoned people, and developing community-based responses to violence that do not rely on or reinforce the prison-industrial complex. Colby organizes with the Survived And Punished project, a national organizing project to end the criminalization of survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Colby is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California where she studies criminalization, imprisonment and social movements against life and death sentencing. Colby is committed to collaborative scholarship focused on refining and strengthening social movement strategy.