Hear from a WPA Clinical Intern, Fatoumata Magassa

Fatoumata Magassa (she/her) is passionate about bringing trauma-informed care into client-centered counseling at jails and prisons, advocating for the rights of incarcerated individuals, and helping her clients find hope and unyielding courage during incarceration and reentry. 

A Harlem native, Fatoumata is graduating in May of 2025 with a master’s in social work from Columbia University. She previously studied at the University of Chicago, earning her BA in Public Policy Studies with a specialization in criminal justice and critical race theory. 

Throughout her educational career, she has held numerous internships, including positions at the Closing Rikers Island Task Force, The Justice Collaborative, The Innocence Project, The Legal Aid Society, and Lawyers Without Borders. She has worked hands-on at MDC Brooklyn, Cook County Jail, Essex County State Prison, and Philadelphia Juvenile Detention, providing clients with mitigation support. Using an individualized and trauma-responsive approach, she strives to support and uplift each and every person she encounters through her work.

What inspired you to pursue a career in criminal justice reform?

I was 16 at the time when I joined the Harlem Youth Court, a program under The Center for Justice Innovation. Any youth aged 14-19 who complete programming would get their first criminal arrest taken off their record. Through Peace Circles, my job was to teach restorative justice and healing practices as Circle Leader.

It sparked my passion because I got to see the criminalization of poverty in person, and I was faced with the injustice of it. There were people who looked just like me who were being penalized and punished; I felt like I was a cog in the system, criminalizing their behavior, and I was perpetuating injustice. I saw how broken the system was. I saw how it was meant to break families apart, and so I have vowed since then to work to dismantle it. 

How do clinical services play a role in criminal justice reform?

Although discrimination might feel personal because it’s a personal experience, it’s actually a representation of systemic and structural violence. The people who are passionate about criminal justice reform understand there is a prison industrial complex—there are multiple aspects to it—and the need to address it holistically.

Part of that holistic solution is addressing the personal encounters. Clinical services are so key and important. The incarceral experience is traumatic—it causes trauma, and some people have experienced trauma beforehand—but through clinical work, through that direct practice, we are able to see people for who they are and work on healing. Healing is both on a community level and it is also on a one-on-one interpersonal level. 

You’ve worked with many incarcerated individuals in art-based counseling. How can the arts help clinical counselors support their clients with trauma-informed approaches? 

If we care about disability justice, that means accessibility, that means creating spaces where different learning styles and capabilities are acknowledged and centered, and art therapy can appeal to those who think and recall in different ways. For some people, especially people who have been traumatized in some way or it’s hard for them to express what they’re feeling, drawing and other artforms can help them. It gives people, adults and children, the space to be. Society tells people there’s one way to act, there’s one way to be normal, there’s one way to behave; art therapy or play therapy allows for diversity of expression. It can be self-affirming for the client.

Through Cook County Jail, I led the writing workshop program [for incarcerated individuals]. The one lesson I enjoyed the most was magical realism, the idea that you can build a world that is almost like ours but has a magical element. It was new to a lot of participants. We gave [them] the space to radically imagine a new or different society. Some people chose to talk about their traumas or write a version of themselves who wasn’t exposed to the trauma. The beauty was in the variation, how everyone chose to do something different. Using trauma-informed practices to create safe spaces doesn’t mean you have to talk about your trauma in every session to approach healing.

Much of your experience is in juvenile justice advocacy. What policies and practices do you hope become commonplace when working with incarcerated adolescents? 

Youth’s ties to their families are so important. Family therapy or relationship therapy is a way to bring people together. A lot of the children I work with were exposed to violence or exposed to community-level trauma, and communities and families haven’t really gotten the chance to grieve together. Working with adults now who have childhood trauma, it’s those relationships that they had when they were a kid that really impacted them. It feels radical to have adolescents invite family in to engage in that therapy. 

As a clinical intern at WPA, what do you hope clients gain from your counseling sessions?

More than anything else, I hope they can come to rely on me. Research shows that therapeutic relationships and alliances between therapists and clients is so important for healing and trauma work. I hope they feel that they can be supported by me in their journey to healing. My role is to give them the tools to support themselves, but the first step is rapport-building and it’s pivotal to this work. 

What have you gained from your experience at WPA?

We can’t help people unless we as an organization are aware of how white supremacy plays a role in society and organizations, and so something I’ve enjoyed about my experience is that WPA is devoted to anti-oppressive work. It’s been nice to build professional relationships with my colleagues at WPA and knowing we all have that similar mindset. 

Research shows how a lot of Black women experiencing IPV have only three options: incarceration, at higher rates than their white counterparts; death, as homicide [of women] is more likely to occur through [intimate partner violence]; or social services, but a lot of people are silenced as inauthentic victims and don’t receive the services and care that they need. 

I’m seeing how an advocacy organization, WPA, is devoted to helping incarcerated or systems-impacted women, trying to combat IPV, trying to help women heal. Most of the people I’ve worked with at WPA have been Black women and some of them are survivors of IPV. 

You grew up in New York City. What change do you hope to see for communities at home? 

Our current justice system does not work. It traumatizes people, it destroys families, it puts people in a worse place than where it found them. I envision a justice system in New York City that does not perpetuate anti-Black racism, mass incarceration, over policing, transphobia, criminalization of poverty, ableism, and heterocentrism.