About Us
Linda Small, Executive Director
Linda Small is the formerly incarcerated founder and executive director of Reentry Sisters and served on the New England Commission for the Future of Higher Education in Prison. She is a Columbia University Women's Collective Leadership Fellow, focusing on changing the impact of the carceral state on women and girls. She is a member of the Justice Scholars Network and Colby College Justice Think Tank, highlighting the scholarship and research of justice-impacted people. She is part of the grant team for the Freedom & Captivity Curriculum Project, developing community-based classes taught by incarcerated people. Linda is a program facilitator for the Maine Humanities Council, serves on the Mass Incarceration Convening Planning Committee in collaboration with state humanities councils, and is a program coordinator for the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. She is a DJ for Justice Radio, a talk show on WMPG, WERU, and WMHB about the carceral state. Linda holds an MS in Adult and Higher Education. She is part of a collaborative effort to develop a Justice Collective to bring restorative justice practices to Maine, and a member of Healing First!, an abolitionist survivor network.
MacKenzie Kelley, Program Director
Mackenzie is a formerly incarcerated woman in long term recovery. She is completing her bachelor’s degree in business management at the University of Maine at Augusta. MacKenzie is the Recovery Coach Coordinator for Healthy Acadia in Augusta Maine. She is also a teacher’s assistant for inside-out courses through MIT and works for the Maine Prisoner Reentry Center as a peer support and recovery coach. Mackenzie is a DJ for Justice Radio, a talk show on WMPG and WERU about the carceral state.
Board Members
Catherine Besteman
Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. An abolitionist educator, Catherine has built several programs to connect incarcerated community members with outside community members through pedagogical and humanities-based projects. In addition to building Colby's prison education program, Catherine also founded the Freedom & Captivity project, a multiyear initiative which is currently offering community classes taught by incarcerated residents on themes of loss, repair, trauma, healing, liberation and transformative justice. Catherine believes in restorative and transformative justice as the best possible responses to harm and to building safe communities, and is proud to be supporting Reentry Sisters in their mission.
Board Members
Erica King
Erica King, MSW, is a Senior Manager with the Center for Effective Public Policy. She directs the National Resource Center for Justice Involved Women. She develops pathways to increased safety and well-being with and for directly impacted women, nonbinary people, staff, and systems working with them. Before joining CEPP, Erica worked for two decades as a Senior Policy Associate at the University of Southern Maine and consultant with Orbis Partners, leading efforts to strengthen trauma-informed, gender-responsive, evidence-based policy and practice strategies. Erica is a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, co-leading Freedom & Captivity, an inside-outside public humanities curriculum on the themes of accountability, forgiveness, liberation, and healing. Erica brings hard knowledge into her relational work with people to inform how data and lived experience can drive meaningful conversations and intentional decisions to improve community health, well-being, and vitality.
Board Members
Katrina Hoop
Katrina Hoop, Ph.D., has over 15 years as a faculty member and as a former department chair of Sociology. Her previous experience includes 20 years of teaching inside Maine's prisons. Today, Katrina is a dedicated supporter of reentry and organizations that support a more humane and welcoming environment for justice-impacted people. Her research interests include how unlikely coalitions form in social movements and organizations, the role of civic engagement in pedagogy, and community-based learning. She has worked with Maine-based nonprofits and organizations focused on topics such as gender-based violence prevention, youth development, and academic programming in immigrant communities
and child advocacy.