Solidarity and Hospitality: Radical Acts in a Ruthless World

Katrina and James Baugh, co-founders of Radical Hospitality Ministries, met while working with the Justice Debate League, a nonprofit founded by Katrina Baugh that coaches debate teams in United States prisons. While COVID-19 rendered them unable to enter prisons to help people, they began to realize the enormous need to help people who are leaving prison.

“This is a population we know and love. If we cannot go in, we will help them get out,” Katrina Baugh says. “Housing is the biggest need. This need is not just to prevent homelessness; if you don’t have a release address to go to, they keep you in prison.”

Over 1000 people in Illinois alone are serving “dead time,” meaning time spent in prison that does not count as credit towards a sentence. For this reason, Katrina and James Baugh began their journey to fight housing discrimination for previously incarcerated individuals.

Along with other types of discrimination that our queer community unfortunately knows all too well, housing discrimination towards those impacted by the prison industrial complex is illegal, but there is no recourse when it occurs. Most people don’t know that it is illegal according to the Illinois Human Rights Act.

Despite the illegality of discrimination across the country, the following statistics were made available by the Prison Policy Initiative. LGBTQ+ people are more than twice as likely to be arrested as their straight counterparts, which is likely due to drug law enforcement, sex work and the criminalization of homelessness. Nearly half of trans people in prison have been denied access to requested hormones. Despite the clear and lasting damaging effects of the practice, 85% of LGBTQ+ people in prison have been put in solitary confinement, often in the name of “protecting” them. Last but not least, 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, which funnels many of them into the juvenile justice system, where they make up 20% of the population. For more information on queer people and the justice system, I would recommend “Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States”by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock.

Despite housing discrimination towards people who have been to prison being illegal, landlords refused to rent to the Baughs because they planned on sharing their home with formerly incarcerated people.

Through Lombard Mennonite Church, the Baughs met a couple who believed in their mission to house people and had an empty family home waiting to welcome the Baughs and their first clients in January 2023. Through Radical Hospitality Ministries, the Baughs connected their clients with other services in the area, such as counseling to help them get back on their feet after release.

When the Baughs applied for a license to operate a group care home in the city of Wheaton so that they could go beyond direct housing provision, they were met with opposition as some neighbors claimed that they were trying to sneak ex-convicts into the neighborhood.

The neighbors protested at city council meetings and lied about everything. They claimed murderers were coming to the neighborhood. One person claimed a client had an incident of indecent exposure. Many used racially charged language comparing their neighborhood to Chicago, saying they were afraid to let their kids outside out of fear of what could be lurking in their backyard. This NIMBY-ism resulted in a denied license, which was done through a denial of due process that violated city code and state law along the way.

In addition to denying the license, the city council is preventing them from receiving grants. The Baughs were approved for a grant from the Illinois State Department of Human Services that could have allowed them to buy a new house to legally house new clients without the license. The city of Wheaton is refusing to furnish the paperwork, which is ironic, as there is no reentry housing anywhere in DuPage County, and Wheaton is the seat of the county jail.

If you want to help the Baughs in their provision of reentry housing, please sign the Change.org petition called “Housing equity, reentry, and rehabilitation in Illinois.” For more information on their programming, please visit radicalhospitalityministries.com. To support those doing similar good work with this population in Minnesota, please support All Square, which I also wrote an article about that can be read on lavendermagazine.com.

If you want to help LGBTQ+ people impacted by the prison industrial complex, please check out Black and Pink Pen Pals to write to people who are incarcerated as a form of harm reduction.