Resources

How are community justice organizations creatively imagining more holistic alternatives to the criminal justice systems? Join members of Reclaim Philadelphia, Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout (YEAH) Philly, Amistad Law Project, and Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP) to discuss this topic.

Portland Street Response (PSR) is a new first responder program for non-emergency calls involving people experiencing homelessness or mental health crisis. The program launched on February 16, 2021 in the Lents neighborhood in Portland, OR and operates Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 6 PM. The pilot is coordinated by Portland Fire & Rescue (PF&R), and the founding team consists of a firefighter paramedic, a licensed mental health crisis therapist, and two community health workers. The team is dispatched from the Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) when a caller reports one or more of the following and the individual has no known access to weapons and is not displaying physically combative or threatening behavior.

The mixed-methods evaluation is comprehensive, community centered, and includes feedback from a variety of stakeholders and sources, including interviews with unhoused community members and others served by Portland Street Response. This six-month program evaluation report summarizes the findings of our evaluation thus far. However, the evaluation is ongoing and will culminate in a one-year program review at the end of the pilot period in spring 2022.

This report examines the way our criminal legal systems have driven up incarceration rates, disproportionately harmed communities of color, and failed to provide true public safety. Specifically, we analyze sentencing and incarceration policies and law enforcement practices, including those in policing and prosecution, that have created systems of control but failed to treat underlying challenges. The report then lays out a new path for public safety that looks to the comprehensive, research-based strategies in policing, prosecution, and sentencing that elected and appointed leaders are using to move away from harsh carceral practices and respond to social and economic needs. These reforms illuminate a new vision of public safety that reduces our reliance on systems of enforcement and control while relying instead on research, collaboration, and community engagement—not incarceration—to build and support communities.

Institutional violence within community centers, healthcare organizations, and social services, in concert with the “helping” industry’s increasing collusion with and reliance on law enforcement, fuels the prison pipeline. In response to pervasive institutional violence and increasing policing, surveillance, and targeting of queer and TGNB (trans and gender non-binary) youth of color, street-based youth, and youth experiencing homelessness, Project NIA created a toolkit to share strategies of resistance to the increased securitization of non-profit spaces.

Solutions to Violence profiles 18 groups forging new paths to safety and healing that do not rely on the police or incarceration. The report uplifts restorative justice practitioners, community advocates, and other local leaders who are doing the day-to-day work needed to build stronger and healthier communities, help people heal, and hold those who cause harm responsible for their actions.

Police are facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in a generation. In the wake of the largest uprisings in U.S. history, sparked by police violence, bloated police budgets, and the deadly impacts of a failure to invest in community health and safety laid bare by the pandemic, pro-police forces are on the defensive. So they are reaching for one of their most reliable weapons — fear.

This is nothing new — cops and policymakers have always used fearmongering to push “law and order” agendas and pour more and more money into police departments. Now, with police budgets under scrutiny by campaigns to defund the police and refund our communities all across the country, lawmakers and the media are once again recycling old talking points about increasing violence and crime, claiming that campaigns to defund police are responsible.

Read our new report to explore data, talking points, and narratives that highlight the fact that COPS DON’T STOP VIOLENCE.

This report profiles several jurisdictions that recently removed police from their schools and detail how communities were able to wage successful campaigns and the types of resources schools have implemented in place of law enforcement.

As the national media is shifting its attention away from demands to restructure, defund, and abolish the police, Scalawag’s Abolition Week is an appeal to keep these conversations at the forefront. This week, we’re only publishing work by or about incarcerated writers, artists, and thinkers in an effort to center their experiences and their humanity.

Whether you’ve never heard of abolition, have questions about what it means, or are already deeply committed to the work—the journey toward abolition is an ongoing process, and it’s one that we are all on together. This journey involves both changing our systems and our personal mentalities.

The Collective Freedom Project is a website and digital space made to uplift the work of advocates across the country working to dismantle narratives that criminalize our communities for cross-sector solidarity.