Resources

This blueprint, developed by TJC’s attorneys and criminal justice policy experts, outlines concrete steps to address the country’s mass incarceration crisis and provides actionable solutions to creating a fairer and more equitable justice system.

A collection of written and audio resources around various topics related to policing, prisons, and criminal justice reform and abolition. Author’s note: In general, I’ve tried to list shorter pieces, articles, and listening/viewing material. Though the sources are organized thematically, there is no issue in the carceral state that doesn’t intersect with another; therefore, most of the categories are necessarily false divides used for purposes of organization. In places where I’ve listed books, I include a link to the book or to an interview with the author.

Over the course of 2019, Local Progress engaged local elected officials and community leaders in a range of communities to evaluate their localities’ policing practices using the Reform/Transform toolkit. Those evaluations have produced the first results of the Reform/Transform toolkit in 12 cities: Chicago, Dallas, Durham, Louisville, Madison, Minneapolis, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.

Today the Brown sisters talk with transformative justice practitioner Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) and get our minds blown with frameworks and breakthroughs on how to really address harm and grow beyond it.

Over reliance on the criminal justice system only inflicts more harm on people who need help while burdening taxpayers with an expensive and ineffective system. That’s why cities across the nation have begun to rely on pre-arrest diversion and crisis response strategies that direct people away from the criminal justice system and toward treatment, housing, and other services. Unfortunately, legislative barriers often exist at a state level that prevent local governments from maximizing the benefits of this approach.

In this episode, Maya Schenwar joins us to talk about abolition today: the abolition of incarceration. She doesn’t just spout statistics; she asks good hard questions about the system as it as: is this really what we want? Is there a better way? We cannot ask The Next Question about justice without asking the next question about CRIMINAL justice. Austin, Chi Chi, Jenny and Maya do just that on this week’s episode.

Community Justice Exchange partnered with Project NIA, Court Watch MA, Families for Justice as Healing, and Survived and Punished NY to produce a document that outlines abolitionist principles, as well as strategies and tactics, for organizing campaigns targeted at prosecutors. The principles came out of a prosecutor accountability convening hosted in June 2019 and they were created to provide a framework for what organizing around prosecutors might look like with an abolitionist lens. They are intended to foster alignment and inter-movement accountability for groups and individuals committed to abolition as a political vision and a practical strategy for organizing.

This report examines fare evasion arrest data from public defender organizations and finds that, in Brooklyn, poor black communities have higher arrest rates for jumping the turnstile than other areas of Brooklyn, even when accounting for poverty and crime.

After a decade of organizing, three Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Coordinators co-wrote this piece to share the lessons learned over the years. We also asked SOS members from the past 10 years about their reflections on our successes, struggles and our hopes for the future. We write these lessons for all the people seeking to address violence and envision safer communities.