Donna Hylton had faced sexual abuse for most her life when, at the age of 20, she entered prison — which is where she finally learned, however ironically, that she was not alone.

“I thought I was alone in my abuse,” says Hylton, now a 54-year-old activist, speaker and author, about the start of her long journey to freedom. “I realized as soon as I went into prison, like, oh my God, I’m not alone.” The realization was cold comfort, though, as she quickly put the pieces together about the stories of inmates in the system. “Prison is violent in its very being. And so to place someone who has been so traumatized, so abused, into an environment like that — how do we expect healing?”

Hylton received a tough sentence for her part in a brutal crime: 25 years to life for participating in a group kidnapping and murder of a 62-year-old man. She wound up serving 27 years in New York’s maximum-security prison for women, and realized many harsh truths along the way, including the fact that “We don’t think about what happens before a woman gets to prison.”

Donna Hylton with her memoir (Photo courtesy of Donna Hylton) More

She knows, of course, what happened to her. “I was sex-trafficked,” she says. “I didn’t know that then. I was brought to this country to satisfy a grown man who I was told to call ‘Dad.’ I didn’t know. I thought I was going to Disney World.” She tried to reach out to various adults for help, Hylton explains, but no one believed her. “And from there I was turned into a liar,” she says.

“We’re human beings. And for the majority, we don’t just wake up one day and say we’re going to go commit a crime or be involved in a crime,” says Hylton. “They’ve labeled me monster, all kind of things. That is not who I am.”

It’s a pattern she still sees happening all around her. She was recently reminded of this in the case of Cyntoia Brown, who was granted clemency and released recently after serving a life sentence for killing a Nashville man who bought her for sex at age 16. “Unfortunately, there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Cyntoia Browns, Donna Hyltons. We wind up in prison. There’s a sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline,” she says. “I was convicted of a heinous crime. I hear that. But I am not the crime. I’m a human being. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a friend, I’m a sister.”

Donna Hyland at the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017 (Photo: Getty Images)h More