Entry Points is a project that responds to the needs of returning juvenile lifers. Because Michigan has the second highest juvenile lifer population in the U.S., and because those sentences are now unconstitutional, re-sentencing hearings have been underway since 2015 and people are coming home, often without support.

Entry Points is a re-entry artist residency for returning citizens, sentenced to mandatory life without parole as juveniles, without accessible housing or income, to live and work as artists and writers while they transition to life outside. While in residence, opportunities and re-entry support will be provided by a convergence of activists, educators, artists, and writers in our existing network to support their transition.

During their residency, housing costs and utilities will be covered and an honorarium will be provided to cover studio materials. Opportunities to publicly present work, or to produce a text, at the end of the residency is made available to each resident.

Entry Points surfaced out of urgency, not ideation. In 2022, when artist, writer and juvenile lifer James D. Fuson was resentenced after thirty years behind bars, he had no viable housing option available to him. In response to his need, the Entry Points artist-in-residence program emerged.

Discrimination and stigma, unwilling landlords and public housing exclusions in Michigan prevent a substantial number of adults with conviction histories from finding stable housing. It is well evidenced that a lack of stable housing is a major causal engine for recidivism. Because Michigan has the second highest juvenile lifer population in the U.S., and because those sentences are now unconstitutional, re-sentencing hearings have been underway since 2015 and people are coming home, often without support.

Entry Points emerged in response to the urgent and unique needs of Michigan's juvenile lifer population by supporting re-entry through free housing and space for continued cultivation of their creative practices.

We are influenced by the thinking of abolitionists, among them Angela Davis and her text "Are Prisons Obsolete?" (Seven Stories Press, 2003). We regard mass-de-incarceration not merely as a dismantling practice but as a process of imagining new thinking frameworks and ways of being together, for one another. Our work is further influenced and energized by the ideas of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's collaborative work, "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study," (Minor Compositions, 2013), particularly their ideas on credit/debt, study, and the general antagonism. We are influenced by one another, our lived experiences, our highs and lows. Our work necessitates the input and collaboration of systems-impacted voices.

The poet Audre Lorde said that “...poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Our work is energized by the deeply felt experience of witnessing the power of art within the realm of action-oriented social justice.

Our first resident was juvenile lifer James D. Fuson. James was sentenced to mandatory life without parole in 1994, at the age of 16, a sentence that was later determined to be unconstitutional. On his release day in 2022, we commuted James from the Macomb Regional Correctional Facility to Entry Points, where he lived for twelve months while transitioning to life outside. Working collaboratively, Entry Points supported James in finding immediate full time employment, transportation to parole reporting, and aided his efforts to apply for a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship in Literary Arts, an unrestricted grant of $25,000 that he received in 2023 to support his writing practice.