Building Bridges and Erasing Jail Debt: Katherine Passley
The winner of our Labor Organizer of the Year Award co-runs a member-led worker center in Miami for people with criminal records and their families — the first organization of its kind in the country.
Kim Kelly Photos by Melody Timothee
This article is part of the In These Times Labor Organizer of the Year series. The award honors emerging leaders building worker power across the country. Katherine Passley is one of the three 2025 winners.
As Covid-19 rampaged through the nation’s jails and prisons, the people locked inside were largely left to fend for themselves. South Florida was no exception. Katherine Passley was frantic to protect her father, who was in his 50s and had been recently arrested. She advocated for the county jail to provide masks, soap and anything she could think of to keep him safe.
Through that work, Passley also made the acquaintance of Maya Ragsdale, a lawyer who led a coalition of civil rights groups in suing the Miami-Dade jail system for the release of medically vulnerable prisoners.
“The lawsuit ended up not winning, which is crazy to me, but [Ragsdale] was just like, ‘Well, lawsuits aren’t the only way to change things,’” Passley says. “So I said, ‘OK, let’s start meeting.’” Ragsdale linked Passley with other women trying to protect their own relatives behind bars, as well as two formerly incarcerated people. “And so us eight started meeting on Zoom on Thursdays,” Passley says. “We went from eight to 15, then it was 20 — and then we were writing our demands.”
Those demands led to the creation of Beyond the Bars, where Passley and Ragsdale now serve as co-executive directors. Starting with a campaign to make phone calls free (after Covid shut down visiting hours), the group eventually convinced the Miami-Dade County commission to wipe out $10 million in jail fees and more than $100 million in jail debt, alleviating a major financial burden for an estimated 60,000 formerly incarcerated workers and their families annually.
Beyond the Bars is a member-led worker center for people with criminal records and their families — the first organization of its kind in the country. A current focus is teaching temp workers impacted by the criminal justice system how to advocate for themselves and improve their working conditions. “Traditionally, criminalized workers have been deemed ‘unorganizable,’ trapped in extreme precarity, many with average annual incomes of less than $10,000, and subjected to background checks and employer discrimination that relegate them to the lowest rungs of the labor market,” explains Richard Wallace, founder and director of the Chicago based nonprofit Equity and Transformation, which organizes Black informal workers. “Katherine is determined to shatter this false narrative, proving that these workers are not only organizable — they are essential leaders in the labor movement.”
At the headquarters of Beyond the Bars in Miami, about four dozen people listened as a tall young Afro-Latina woman with a crown of shiny black hair translated in rapid Spanish for a Black man named Terrence. “[There] should be more jobs that go from temp to permanent,” Terrence said, drawing “yeahs” and “mmhmms.” The translator — Passley — radiated warmth, pausing frequently to crack jokes or flash an encouraging smile to latecomers.
It was a meeting of the organization’s temporary workers’ organizing committee. “Temp work is one of these really insidious ways of giving people labor when they have a record,” Passley explains. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, six out of 10 people with felony convictions are unable to secure employment within four years of their release. Many formerly incarcerated people end up turning to temp agencies, and employers are well aware of how easy it is to exploit those with few options.
Corporations hire formerly incarcerated workers through temp agencies to avoid taking on liability, Passley explains. “You’re doing the exact same thing as a worker that’s hired there permanently, but you can’t be hired permanently just because you have a record.” Once the temp agency takes its cut, “You’re making a lot less money.”
Beyond the Bars began running a daily door-knocking operation to reach temp workers this year. Miami-Dade publicly posts a staggering amount of personal information on every person released from jail, including phone numbers and addresses, so Passley and her team visit everyone released to let them know they’re on this public list, identify whether they’re a temp worker and then invite them to a meeting. People tend to be less than delighted to find out that their personal information has been made so public, but Passley explains it works as “a point of agitation for us, because we’re like, ‘Well, you could do something about it’ by joining Beyond the Bars.”
That’s how Terrence and the other attendees ended up in that conference room. As Terrence spoke, an energetic toddler nicknamed Princess chased a friend around, her chubby cheeks breaking into a joyful grin. The meeting was just getting started and already everyone had been given a free plate of tasty Cuban food, dropped off their kids in the childcare room (watched by Passley’s mother), viewed a presentation from a labor lawyer and joined an icebreaker with their seatmates. Miami is a predominantly Spanish speaking city and attendees relaxed once it became clear the meeting was fully bilingual.
Passley and Ragsdale were nominally in charge, but the tightly knit Beyond the Bars crew shared every task, from dishing up rice and beans to handing out worksheets to scooping up Princess if she veered too far outside safety. According to Passley, that familial vibe is no accident.
“It’s at the core of what it means for us to organize,” explains Passley, who grew up in an Afro-Dominican household in North Miami. “If you speak Spanish, if you speak Creole, we have that for you; the materials are also in all of those languages. If you need it, we’re gonna have childcare. We’re gonna have food. Sometimes that’s the only place that folks can get a good, decent meal. These organizers are our brothers or sisters or cousins, folks that are directly impacted, people that are coming out, people that just want to see their communities be better.”
Like Passley, all of Beyond the Bars’ eight staffers have had family inside or were incarcerated themselves, and all initially became involved in the organization as members. Among them is Freddy Pierre, a formerly incarcerated, formerly super-shy Beyond the Bars community organizer whose brilliant smile and infectious energy lit up the room. As Passley and Ragsdale walked through a Know Your Rights training, Pierre kept an eye on Princess and the elders and newcomers, offering encouragement and a chair.
For Passley, who spent four years working with victims at the state’s attorney’s office, identifying with people on the other side was a shift. As a field paralegal on the domestic violence task force, she had been focused on the needs of survivors. “Every single time I went to a person’s house, they’d be like, ‘Yes, this crime was committed, but I don’t want this person to go to jail,’” she recalls. “Even though I’m like, ‘Yo, what they did was F’d up, and you need help,’ they’d say, ‘Yeah, but they also need help.’”
It was challenging for Passley to understand, but that perspective changed after her father’s arrest. “I think I really had to make that shift within myself, where it was like, ‘OK, yeah, people are getting arrested for a million reasons,’” she says. “Some did it, some didn’t, but all of them need help.”
Passley has a bachelor’s in pre-law from Florida Memorial University — the only historically Black college in South Florida — and a. master’s in criminal justice from Florida International University (where she’s working toward a Ph.D. in legal psychology). After her stint at the state’s attorney’s office, she worked at a police department as an administrative specialist. But her education in justice really started earlier, thanks to her father and their church, Columns of Fire in Allapattah, where she has served as education and outreach director since 2013.
“Growing up, my dad was really active in helping people, like writing affidavits for people when they were going to immigration court,” Passley explains. “And our church was always really active in the justice system since I was little. They all spoke Spanish and I was the one in church who spoke English, so even though I was young, nine or 10, I was reading people’s court documents and helping the secretary write things in English. My dad was like, ‘You’re gonna be a judge,’ and that stuck with me, so I just studied for a legal career.”
Beyond the Bars was founded from a place of deep personal connection, love and fear for those on the inside, which guided the first campaign. Thanks to the Miami-Dade County Corrections and Rehabilitation Department’s then-practice of charging 14 cents per minute for a phone call, Passley was regularly paying $50 a week just to talk to her dad; others were paying hundreds. Anyone who sought to contact a loved one inside — and anyone in lockup who needed to contact their employer, child’s school or lawyer — had to pay. As Covid raged, Beyond the Bars started pressuring the county to change its policy. In 2021, the group won a significant price reduction—from 14 cents to 4 cents a minute. A year later, they won 90 minutes a day of free calls, although rollout has been delayed, Passley explains, by a contentious multiyear restructuring of the jail system. “But we’re not letting up,” she says.
Beyond the Bars’ ultimate goal is to spread its message and tactics way beyond Miami-Dade. The group has worked closely with the University of Miami, Rutgers University and Harvard Law School to conduct research into the temp work issue for its forthcoming May 2025 report, “Temp Trap: Temporary Jobs, Permanent Struggles for Workers with Criminal Records in South Florida,” as well as with Worth Rises’ #EndTheException campaign, which highlights the need to close the 13th Amendment’s loophole for forced prison labor. Right now, Beyond the Bars is leading a statewide fight to stop HB 6033, which, as Passley explains, would eliminate the few legal protections temp workers have in Florida. They successfully got the bill stalled in committee in April.
“We’re building a model for how criminal justice organizations can engage in labor fights, not just theoretically (by reframing reentry through the political economy of incarceration), but also narratively and practically— showing that reentry means demanding dignified work, not just any work, and teaching people how to take on corporate targets and campaign with labor where our stakes are shared,” Passley says.
Beyond the Bars also engages with labor organizations, which often “don’t understand how community organizing can impact union density [and] don’t know how to organize workers with records (especially those under state supervision),” Passley says.
Even in the Miami local of the dockworkers’ union — the International Longshoremen’s Association, which has a historically Black membership problems arise, Passley says, as the union doesn’t accept members with certain records, which stops some criminalized workers from applying at all. But “you can have a misdemeanor or a low felony and be a dock worker,” Passley says. “It’s just the way things are explained.”
That’s why she’s trying to work on ways to bridge gaps between the labor and criminal justice movements, build education and make space for her members to thrive. When janitorial staff launched a union drive in the building that houses Beyond the Bars, for example, Passley and her coworkers put together a cafecito social to help union organizers with SEIU Local 32BJ get building access.
“Our focus has been heavily on allyship and we need to bring everyone, whether you’re Black, brown, Hispanic, a poor white person, all people,” she explains. She describes a meeting at which a clash between Latino and Black workers over jobs led the organization to intentionally beef up its political education program. “We had to do a lot of education and narrative work around how we’re systemically kept apart, and how the fight is going to take every single one of us,” she says. “And the times now call for a mass leadership development of the working class. … This is a revival of the Rainbow Coalition. We need everyone in this fight.”
That’s why Passley takes the most pride in watching someone like Freddy Pierre develop as a leader. Pierre joined Beyond the Bars during the early days of the jail phone call campaign. He and his wife, Stacy (now training as an organizer with Beyond the Bars herself), had been burdened with paying Pierre’s fines, court fees, child support and other costs upon his release. For them, fighting back alongside other affected people, many of whom Pierre had known inside, felt urgent and necessary. Years later, he now helps other formerly incarcerated folks find their own power — and Passley has been there to offer support every step of the way.
“I think that’s what I learned to love about myself,” Passley says. “It’s allowing other people to shine in space and being able to sit back and see that has been the most rewarding thing for me.”
She adds, “That’s what I hope people do for my dad when he gets out, that they don’t see the record, they just see the power of him as a worker and him as a dad, him as a friend.” After all those years of worrying, Passley is finally preparing to welcome her dad home in August.
Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a labor writer for In These Times, a labor columnist at Teen Vogue and Fast Company, and regularly contributes to many other publications. Her first book, FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, is now available from One Signal/Simon & Schuster. Follow her on Twitter at @grimkim and subscribe to her newsletter, Salvo, here.
