Topic: Community Engagement

This past November, during our bi-annual Facing Race Conference, community organizer Sendolo Diaminah–Co-Director and Founder of the Carolina Federation–made the following statement: “We have power, we want more, and we want to be responsible with it and be accountable to an ethic.” This bold statement was shared to challenge the audience of 3,000 racial justice advocates to “release our fear of power”, while elevating the importance of “being responsible with power”.

We offer this in the spirit of deep reflection this Black History month. We at Race Forward and the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) believe in the audacious dream of a multi-racial democracy. We envision a world without prisons, and one in which people of color thrive with power and purpose. But we have a long way to go.

In GARE, we support a network of over 400 city, state, regional jurisdictions, and state departments committed to advancing racial equity. And as we know, the work to advance racial equity requires disrupting and shifting power to the people most harmed and impacted by systemic racism. Within the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) community, this often means letting go, making space, and centering the expertise of system-impacted people and frontline staff, while investing in infrastructure for community-led government accountability.

On the heels of Black History Month, our team will be hosting the SJC Racial Equity Cohort sites–Cook County, Pima County, Philadelphia, and New Orleans–in Montgomery, Alabama, on the Indigenous land of the Muscogee people, as the first of a three-part Learning Exchange Retreat series. We are gathering there to hold space, build solidarity, and deepen our collective learning about our history of colonization, genocide, enslavement, and mass incarceration, in order to support the Focused Racial Equity Cohort Sites’ work in that social, historical, and political analysis.

We will be joined by community leaders, people who have been harmed by the justice system, and government leaders seeking to make change from the inside. Preparing for this event reminds us of the generational trauma of our people, and the impact of that trauma today. But we do not want to use this platform to focus on trauma. Instead, let us center generational resilience.

Generational resilience lives in every cell of our bodies. It surfaces when we cook, share a meal, listen to music, soak our feet, dance, laugh, and cry. While generational resilience is a personal experience, it is also a political expression. We are reminded of Shaun Ginwright, an author, activist, and professor in the Africana Studies Department at San Francisco State University, and his writing about this: “Healing centered engagement is explicitly political, rather than clinical,” he writes. “When people advocate for policies and opportunities that address causes of trauma, such as lack of access to mental health, these activities contribute to a sense of purpose, power and control over life situations.”

Earlier this month, we all witnessed Tyre Nichols killing at the hands of Memphis, Tennessee law enforcement as a result of being severely beaten and left uncared for. We, along with others across the country, grieve for Tyre’s family and his community which continues to recount how they have been terrorized by law enforcement. Public safety requires public trust; but the history of law enforcement was not built on trust, it was built on White supremacist “slave patrols” and a “law and order” paradigm that continues to haunt Black and Indigenous People of Color today.

Every day across the country, law enforcement agencies welcome a new cadre of officers who swear an oath not to a Governor, or a legislature, a Police Chief, Commissioner, or a political party, but to the United States Constitution. Yet, every year, thousands of Black and Indigenous People of Color lose their lives at the hands of law enforcement.

We cannot train or program our way out of this human rights crisis. We need to disrupt and shift power. What would it look like, and feel like, to shift power? To truly listen to and follow the leadership of the people most harmed by police brutality? To center our generational resilience? And in the words of Sendolo Diaminah, to “release our fear of power” while building our capacity to “be responsible with power”?

Jan 16 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but the commitment of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to improving racial and ethnic equity in the jail system runs year-round.

With that in mind, here are several blogs on the theme of racial and ethnic justice featuring members of SJC from the last year.

Reckoning with the Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre

Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge learned during their annual convening in January 2022 about how Tulsa, Oklahoma has struggled to reckon with the legacy of its 1921 Race Massacre. The discussion showed how Tulsa’s history impacts its present. It also demonstrated the complexity any jurisdiction must face in navigating ongoing inequities as it seeks to lower its jail populations sustainably and fairly. Madison Dawkins, manager of local partnerships at the Square One Project, chaired the discussion.

Two years since George Floyd, The Challenge of Sustaining Momentum for Reform

May 25, 2020 marked two years since Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Following his death, people protested racial injustice in the criminal justice system across the country and beyond, and as a result, some cities and counties pledged to make significant changes to law enforcement. But in conversations with people involved with the Safety and Justice Challenge, many reflected on how not enough has changed in two years since Mr. Floyd’s death and how the landscape for criminal justice reforms is now becoming more challenging. And yet, they also pointed to areas of progress.

A New “Tap-In” Center Aims to Restore Community Trust

There is new hope in St. Louis County for people afraid to move on with their lives or engage with the criminal justice system because of unresolved warrants, municipal code violations, or having missed a court date. The “tap-in” center, which is part of a national effort to lower jail populations in jurisdictions across the country as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge, aids in responding to concerns raised by the Department of Justice about racial injustice related to municipal court practices in its 2015 investigation into the Ferguson Police Department which is located in the northern part of St. Louis County.

Linking Mass Incarceration to Black History in Los Angeles and Beyond

Members of the Safety and Justice Challenge grappled with questions about how mass incarceration is linked to Black history at a recent fireside chat during the annual convening of SJC network members. Bria L. Gillum, Senior Program Officer, Criminal Justice with the MacArthur Foundation hosted the conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a professor of History and African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a member of the SJC Advisory Council and a MacArthur Fellow.

A Deeper Look at Racial Disparity Data in Jails

Cities and counties participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge significantly reduced their jail populations over the past few years – both prior to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that progress, racial and ethnic disparities in jails persist. In early 2022, the SJC selected four jurisdictions to join a new Racial Equity Cohort based on proposals that explicitly focus on racial and ethnic equity in the criminal justice system; center lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color; and emphasize the SJC Community Engagement Pillars of authenticity, accessibility and transparency, respect for diversity, and commitment to ongoing engagement. Reagan Daly and Stephanie Rosoff with the Institute for State and Local Governance investigate the data.

Focusing on Racial Equity in the Justice System

Hear from SJC sites in Philadelphia, Chicago and New Orleans about their efforts as part of the new racial equity cohort.

Finding Our Voice to Reduce Native American Incarceration Across SJC Sites

November is Native American Heritage month. It gives a platform for Native people in the United States of America to share their culture, traditions, music, crafts, dance, and ways and concepts of life. It is also an appropriate time to highlight the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in jails across the country while actively pursuing solutions. Michaela Seiber, MPH, blogged about a recent trip she took to Pima County, Arizona, from Minnehaha County in South Dakota to see how Pima County’s SJC initiative is working with the community to reduce incarceration and improve health outcomes.

A Q&A on Hispanic Heritage Month with 70 Million Creator Juleyka Lantigua

70 Million, LWC Studios’ podcast about criminal justice reform, was nominated for a Peabody Award and won several others. Juleyka reflects on the rising-majority population of the country, the local impact of jails, and the role of racial and ethnic equity in reform.

Counties Enhancing Racial Equity in the Criminal Justice System through Grantmaking

The National Association of Counties, in partnership with the National Criminal Justice Association and with support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, has released a toolkit for counties interested in addressing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system through grantmaking. The toolkit outlines eight principles, developed by a working group of county stakeholders, state administering agency representatives, and community-led organization leaders, to help enhance equity in the criminal legal system. It features several communities participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge.

A new national report from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation highlights that Native people are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States.

The report, commissioned as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), shows that in states with higher Native populations, incarceration rates are up to seven times that of White people, and that Native people are sentenced more harshly than White, African American, and Hispanic individuals. Moreover, American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) were incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average and were overrepresented in the prison population in 19 states compared to any other race and ethnicity.

The full report can be read here. A variety of media covered the report’s launch including Montana Public Radio,Wisconsin Gannett, Native News Online, the Lakota Times and Cheyenne Arapaho Tribal Tribune.

“Like many modern challenges in Indian Country, over-incarceration of Indigenous people is intimately tied to colonial violence and upheld by policies throughout the years,” said Dr. Ciara Hansen, currently a clinical psychologist in the Iina’ Counseling Services department at Northern Navajo Medical Center and author of the report. “Paternalistic solutions applied to Native communities often miss the important step of seeking to understand the issue from the community’s perspective. This report offers a starting point for discussion and knowledge sharing.”

“The report not only highlights the painful and unacceptable treatment of Native people in the criminal justice system, but also underscores the overreliance on incarceration to solve community issues,” said Bria Gillum, a senior program officer at MacArthur.  “It is our hope that the report contributes to the growing conversation about racial disparities in this broken system, sparks deeper collaboration between state and tribal agencies, and leads to investments in diversion services that can end this devastating cycle.”

The national report is authored by Dr. Desiree L. Fox (Bitterroot Salish), Dr. Ciara D. Hansen, (Shawnee/Cherokee), and Ann Miller, an attorney with the Tribal Defenders Office of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

Additional key findings in the report include:

• According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 45 percent of people incarcerated in tribal jails were being held pretrial, and pretrial detention rose by at least by 80 percent since 1999. The average length of stay doubled from 2002 to 2018.
  • Additionally, the most serious offense for 16 percent of people held in tribal jails was public intoxication and 15 percent were held for drug related or DUI charges.
  • Native youth are more likely to face conviction in adult court, especially for drug-related crimes.
• The number of jails in Indian Country has increased by 25 percent since 2000, which has led to filling them with more people charged and held with petty crimes for longer periods of time.
• The 2020 Bureau of Justice Statistics report showed tribal jail incarceration rates steadily increased by 60 percent since 2000. The most recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, however, has shown a significant reduction of incarceration in tribal jails during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report demonstrates the need for ongoing research to decrease the rates of arrests and incarcerations of Native people. More research is particularly needed to better understand the experiences of Native people and the systemic change necessary to meaningfully improve outcomes.

The recommendations put forth by the authors of the report include:

• Empower tribal justice systems which are better positioned to intervene because they offer services that are culturally relevant, restorative, and fair.
• Change the trajectory before, or even after, Native people are pulled into state and federal systems by addressing the underlying issues that bring people into the criminal justice system and the collateral consequences that pull them back in.
• Provide funding to appoint counsel to the indigent, tribally based public defender offices to support positive change that are most congruent with traditional, restorative practices.
• Encourage tribal public defenders to work with their clients in the context of their community—their families, their elders, their values, and their definitions of success.

The report is based on data from several surveys and sources, including the Indian Law and Order Commission, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and others. The full list of sources can be found at the end of the report.

December 3 is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. So, we spoke to leaders working in the area involved with the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) about what needs to change, and where there has been progress.

(From left to right: Chris Huff, Supreet Minhas, Candace Coleman and Jalyn Radzminski).

Chris Huff (he/him) is Diversion and Reentry Policy Analyst at Access Living—a center of service, advocacy, and social change for people with all kinds of disabilities, based in Chicago. In this role, Chris leads policy efforts centered on supporting people with disabilities impacted by the criminal justice system.

“I think we’re at an all-time high, right now, in terms of putting people with lived experience of disability and the justice system in the position to advocate for the changes that we need,” he said. “And I’m encouraged by that.”

The most discouraging part of his work is the lack of engagement and support from the law enforcement community to address the issue of working with people with disabilities. Oftentimes contact with law enforcement is a person’s first entry into the criminal justice system.

“To me, the root of these issues is that the system is not designed or intended to support people, but rather punish them,” he said. “Two thirds of survivors of crime say they prefer a system focused on rehabilitation than punishment, but we continue to run the system with that outdated mindset.”

When bringing up the idea of working to make the system more supportive of people with disabilities, Chris says he has been frustrated with responses that do not see that as part of the role of the criminal justice system.

“Even collecting data on people requires a level of clinical or social work-type training to be able to ask the questions in a proper way, to identify disabilities without being invasive or intrusive,” he said. “But to make that happen we need to have a sincere and aggressive interest in making it happen by law enforcement. And we’re not there yet.”

It matters to Chris to focus on more support and rehabilitation for people with disabilities in the criminal justice system because it is about unleashing more potential. Instead of focusing on people as potential risks, we should focus on their potential strengths, Chris said.

“To me this is really about helping America reach its full potential and living up to the high ideals we set forth at the creation of this country,” he said. “Without addressing the inequities created from the criminal justice system, there’s no way we can have a society where folks are fully free and have equal opportunity.”

Supreet Minhas (she/her) is a Senior Program Associate with Activating Change—a national nonprofit working to end victimization and incarceration of people with disabilities and Deaf people in the United States. Activating Change launched in 2022, but its work began in 2005 as a project of the Vera Institute of Justice. Activating Change launched as an independent nonprofit to increase the visibility of the justice issues people with disabilities and Deaf people face and to have a greater impact on ending those injustices. The organization is a Strategic Ally in the Safety and Justice Challenge.

“Criminal justice reform cannot take place equitably without accounting for the millions of people with disabilities ensnared in the system,” Supreet said. “Centering disability justice is essential to understanding and eliminating mass incarceration.”

Supreet helps organizations to understand how ableism and racism intersect. For example, 30-50% of people killed by police are people of color with disabilities. 40% of people in jail have at least one disability.

“The most vexing part of this work is continually being confronted with ableism and its pervasiveness in our society,” she said. “The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 32 years ago but people with disabilities and Deaf people continue to be routinely denied access to accommodations like sign language interpretation.”

The criminal justice movement is decades behind in addressing ableism, especially in comparison to progress being made toward tackling sexism or racism, Supreet said. The omission of disability in the broader equity framework, has upheld and perpetuated structural barriers. People with disabilities are systematically excluded from having a part in crafting policies or making decisions—from being “at the table.” And there are myriad barriers for someone with a disability to even be at the table, from not being deemed worthy enough to warrant an invitation to the table itself being inaccessible. The impact of these challenges is borne out by the data on disability disparities, which shows that people with disabilities and Deaf people make up disproportionately high percentages of justice-involved individuals.

The “invisibilization” of people with disabilities has always been one of the most formidable challenges facing us, going all the way back to people with disabilities being excluded from ancient societies (e.g., leper colonies), then institutionalization in the modern era, and present-day mass incarceration. Most people do not want to talk or think about disability issues unless they are directly impacted—it’s a ‘problem’ for “others,” Supreet said.

“Even within the criminal justice reform field, the majority of organizations working to advance equity in the criminal legal system are not even considering disability justice in their approach, much less centering it,” Supreet said. “Disability is perceived as a complex, thorny issue best left to be worked on by disability-specific organizations in silos. However, until we all realize that justice and fairness for all cannot be achieved without intentionally considering people with disabilities and including them at policymaking tables, disability disparities will worsen, and we will have two separate, unequal tiers of justice.”

One of the biggest hurdles to improving outcomes for people with disabilities and Deaf people and achieving an equitable criminal legal system is that these two goals have been disconnected from one another, Supreet said. “The movements and organizations striving for these respective goals have been working in silos. This must change.”

Candace Coleman (she/her) is a Black disabled woman from the South Side of Chicago. As a Racial Justice Organizer at Access Living she works closely with disabled people affected by the justice system to organize around racial justice and disability. Candace’s most notable work involves organizing around mental and behavioral health emergency response. She played an integral in passing the Community Emergency Services and Supports Act in 2021—paving the way for Chicago’s 988 service. She continues to work diligently to implement non-police alternatives to emergency response in these situations.

Candace said a major area of her focus, right now, is the absence of accurate data about people with disabilities in the jail system.

“I’m encouraged by the work we’ve done over recent years to put people with lived experience at the center of decision-making, but if anything that has highlighted how little we did it in the past, and we’re really building the lane for people to participate,” she said. “Meanwhile, we’re doing that with very little data collection about people with disabilities who are in the system. If we don’t even have accurate numbers to reflect the scale of the issue, how can we move forward to help solve it?”

Recent focus on behavioral health and mental health issues has continued to marginalize other disabilities from the criminal justice reform conversation, Candace said.

“We’re not tracking people with cognitive disabilities, we’re not tracking people who are visually impaired, people who are Deaf, people who require physical accommodations and accessibility,” she said. “It’s just not been a priority to track such people. And without it being a priority, we can’t make progress.”

“We need to move towards supporting people as they come out of the system,” she said. “It means we need to identify people with disabilities who come into the system so that we can provide the programs and support they need when they come out of jail, or we fail.”

Jalyn Radziminski (they/she) is a Black and Japanese Disability activist from Indiana. Jalyn is the Communications Manager & Lived Experience Advocate at Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and an Evening Student at Fordham School of Law. Jalyn builds coalitions to support the work of other peers with lived experiences of Jalyn also works on campaigns that promote community-based mental health supports.

“We’re trying to reduce the chances of people going through involuntary commitment and police response to a mental health crisis,” Jalyn said. “A lot of grassroots leaders and legal advocates are starting to understand that the mental health system and the criminal legal system are intertwined. I’m working to keep people out of both.”

“One of the major challenges of the new 988 numbers around the country, is how they can lead to these undesired outcomes. People may call these sort of hotlines in distress, and before they know it, the police might show up at their door. People are scared that if they say the wrong thing, then the police will come,” they said. “It’s surprisingly easy for people to fall into a loophole of a police encounter and then before long, there’s involuntary commitment or incarceration”

Despite community-based models operating successfully since at least the 1970s, the majority of mental health research cites involuntary psychiatric-based treatment and response methods. There are many barriers for people of color with disabilities to have their work funded and published. The data from community-based perspectives is often lacking and this feeds into the lack of published research on community-based models of mental health treatment, Jalyn said.

“I’m working to push academia to bring these alternative models into the research field,” they said. “One of my proudest moments is recently receiving a competitive research grant for a joint-research project between the Bazelon Center, Mental Health America, and the University of Pittsburgh to help study the disparities of that research while uplifting peer voices.” Projects like these are just the start of a larger push to better collect and analyze data on community-based models and compare their success rates to the mainstream involuntary, incarceral responses.

“Investment is a major challenge, too,” they said. “A lot of the time policymakers think simple reform will fix some of the issues but you’ve got to invest in peer-led models. Underinvestment can lead to short-staffing, and there’s a domino effect.”

Jalyn cited the Kiva Center’s Karaya Peer Respite as a great example of successful peer-led respite program with a mobile team. They also pointed to the Promise Resource Center in North Carolina. “These home-like models give people somewhere to go where they can get rest and reflection when they’re experiencing emotional distress,” Jalyn said. “They support people through crisis to find healing.”

“The more we uplift peer networks and lived-experience-led approaches, and the more we push back in our voices from the policy to on-the-ground level, we’ll start to have better ways of preventing these issues from happening over and over again,” they said. “It’s long overdue to move away from these models and on to something new.”