Resources

These documents provide information using a public health lens for families, organizers, and advocates who are demanding a response to this pandemic that upholds human dignity and prioritizes healing, not policing and incarceration.

A letter on the criminalization of COVID-19 response and recommendations for Congress to address the issue.

A new toolkit from Community Justice Exchange and Defender Impact Initiative for folks working to end mass criminalization and incarceration, who have taken to social media to share the injustices they witness or experience in courtrooms, whether as public defenders, court watching groups, or individual advocates.

Every day, new policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic are making it far easier for government and private companies to collect and share vast amounts of personal and private health information. While this data is critically important from a public health standpoint, there are many unknowns around its future use. We must be aware and informed to ensure that public health emergencies are not misused to increase deportation, criminalization, and further harm to the health of immigrant, Black, and Brown communities.

This is a recording of a conversation with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui on the intersections of disability justice and transformative justice. Participants talked about non-punitive responses to harm, restorative justice and ways to engage the public, and building accountable communities.

Decades of organizing to end the prison industrial complex has prepared Critical Resistance and movements for liberation to respond to the COVID-19 emergency with a focus on putting people’s immediate well-being first, tapping into communities’ knowledges about how to build structures for support and mutual aid, and moving forward with a vision for long-term building. This platform is an offering to our movements, and we hope that it will inspire communities to continue articulating and using abolition as a powerful strategy in a time of uncertainty, hope, and solidarity.

This interview with Bilphena Yahwon, abolitionist and restorative practices specialist, provides a primer on what police abolition means, as well as links to further resources to begin exploring alternatives to relying on police within your community.

COVID-19 has created new conditions for police violence against low-income communities of color that will impact those who are most vulnerable to criminalization and/or infection the most. That’s why JC is calling on NYers to CopWatch while practicing social distancing.

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Black people we fight to prepare and save ourselves and our communities. We know, like in all other crisis, that Black people will be hit hardest. We often suffer the worst because of the state’s failure to protect us and oftentimes the states targeting of us—like during Hurricane Katrina and many other atrocities. Everyday, we are still recovering from the tragic and unnecessary theft and loss of Black life. These demands are a product of collective work and reflect demands made by numerous other groups.