Resources

A racial disparity is defined as a persistent difference in outcomes between racial groups. This project is designed to provide data on these outcomes for American society, and to highlight areas of progress and regress in closing disparities in critical life outcomes. We currently only have data for Black and White Americans, but we hope to expand this project and include data for more races in future iterations. This dashboard allows users to track changes within the United States from 1970 to 2020 across 15 different important variables, including incarceration rates, life expectancy, and more.

In this report, we find that the militarized portion of this budget is by far its largest single component. And yet the same legislators demanding billions in discretionary savings have vowed to exempt that militarized spending from any cuts. Instead, they’ve targeted the much smaller portion that funds human and community needs for even deeper cuts.

This report shows just how over-militarized our federal discretionary spending already is. We argue that this militarized spending has done far more harm than good, while our consistent under-investment in human needs has made us much less safe. Finally, we make recommendations for getting our national priorities right in the future.

The Abolition Working Group steering committee is pleased to share our Abolition Toolkit with you. Why make a toolkit when organizations like Critical Resistance and Interrupting Criminalization have already produced so many wonderful resources?

We wanted to lift up the abolitionist projects being done in DSA by chapters across the country and make clear the connection between abolition and socialism. We do not believe you can have one without the other.

For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society. -DSA’s Political Platform

Non-profit organizations like police foundations can be tricky to research due to limited public disclosure requirements. In this research training we’ll walk through a variety of tools and tips that can help you find key information.

A visual data map tracing the $60 million in ‘private’ capital the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) promised to build Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia.

Chicagoans deserve real community safety—a city in which every child has a fair opportunity to grow up and achieve their full potential and every resident has the resources they need to thrive. Communities that invest in their people are safe communities. Parents in towns with well-funded public schools, public parks and libraries with a lot of youth programs, and strong public health infrastructure don’t fear for their kids’ lives every time they let them out of the house. Cities with good jobs, free public transit, and free child care give residents the opportunity to provide for their families. Real community safety comes from addressing the underlying issues that lead to crime and violence. The proposals in this report would generate $12 billion in new revenue and savings that we could invest in our people and neighborhoods.

Never heard of police foundations? That’s the point. Behind closed doors, police foundations and their corporate sponsors privately fund the ongoing militarization and expansion of policing – targeting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Color Of Change and LittleSis have compiled the most extensive report to date of the links between police foundations and corporations, identifying over 1,200 corporate donations or executives serving as board members at 23 of the largest police foundations in the country.

Youth arrests and incarceration increased in the closing decades of the 20th century but have fallen sharply since that time. Public opinion often lags behind these realities, wrongly assuming both that crime is perpetually increasing and that youth offending is routinely violent. In fact, youth offending is predominantly low-level, and the 21st century has seen significant declines in youth arrests and incarceration. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities fell from 109,000 to 25,000—a 77% decline.

As The Sentencing Project marks 50 years since the era of mass incarceration began, states working to end this overly punitive era can learn important lessons from both the rise and then the sustained fall in youth arrests and placements.

Despite being broadly banned in warfare under the terms of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, tear gas as an agent for so-called ‘riot control’ has become the preferred means for police, in the US and around the world, to clear dissenting voices from public spaces. But the toxic chemicals contained in tear gas and other widely-used chemical munitions can cause serious short- and long-term side effects, from asthma and chemical burns to lung injury and neurodegeneration.