Envision finding yourself in prison and wondering how to make sense of this new and unexpected journey.  This is exactly where former Lee County (Florida) Commissioner, Vicki Lopez Lukis found herself in 1999 when she self-surrendered to FCC Coleman, a female minimum-security federal prison.  She began serving a 27-month sentence for honest services mail fraud for lying to a newspaper reporter about an affair that she was having with her then boyfriend, a lawyer lobbyist, and now husband. 

Few individuals who were voted most likely to succeed by their high school class and one of the youngest persons to graduate from the University of Notre Dame would ever believe that their charmed and privileged life could take a sudden and bizarre twist.  Yet this harrowing experience provided a unique opportunity for Ms. Lukis to go “inside” to see firsthand the fastest growing industry in America and experience the impact of incarceration.

On November 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton commuted Ms. Lukis’ sentence.  Upon returning home to Miami-Dade County, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of women in prison, girls in detention and ex-offenders who are released and return home to Florida’s communities.  She has emerged as a well-respected authority on these issues.

Responding to a growing crisis in our country and particularly in Florida that has resulted in more and more women and girls being arrested, detained and incarcerated, often for very long periods of time, Vicki Lopez Lukis is determined to break this vicious cycle. 

Her work with girls in detention highlighted the urgent need to intervene in the lives of these at-risk girls to teach them that every action has a consequence. Each time she told her own story about her prison experience, she saw the power of someone who had “walked the walk and talked the talk”.  She invited other formerly incarcerated women to talk with the girls, bringing into detention the stories of those who had “been there, done that” and who desperately wanted to save the girls from following in their own footsteps.

In the absence of being able to bring together the women in prison and girls in detention for a series of meaningful dialogues around the negative impacts of incarceration, she developed a writing workshop to “bridge” this gap.  Thus was born BRIDGING THE GAP: A Writing Workshop.