Our Values

Our goal is to shift our justice and safety paradigm to one of community investment, healing, and restoration and away from punishment, mass criminalization and mass incarceration. Repealing the 1994 crime bill and redirecting federal resources away from all relevant punitive programs is necessary. We also will enact multiple reforms at the federal, state, and local levels to transform the justice system and ensure investments in our communities. It is this larger goal that drives our communication strategies, our organizing, and our policy proposals.

Communities who are closest to the problem—currently incarcerated, formerly incarcerated people, communities who are surveilled and criminalized  under these policies, and other directly impacted people—should be key in determining the solutions. We will engage in democratic and community-driven processes to determine the content of any possible legislation and are committed to being accountable and transparent to communities throughout the legislative process.

We believe any reform must include proactive provisions to assess, acknowledge, and seek to repair harms for every person who has been impacted by existing and historical policies. Black families and black communities have specifically been targeted and exploited by these harmful policies therefore any reform should honor Black people’s specific demand for reparations.

We advocate to shift public resources away from punitive systems and institutions to community-accountable and community-controlled alternatives. We will not promote policies that give more power and/or resources to harmful structures within the criminal legal system. We do, however, support harm reduction tactics that do not undermine our efforts to shift power and resources away from  the criminal legal system. We will advocate that critical public resources flow to Black and brown people, this includes: healthcare services, mental health services, safe housing, job placement and educational opportunities (including services for currently incarcerated people).

We will promote policies and narratives that recognize the full humanity and dignity of our people.  We will not promote policies or narratives that reinforce the false “violent/non-violent” and/or “drug seller/user” dichotomy or result in harm to any of our family members, including those who are designated as “too dangerous.” We will challenge the values of punishment, retribution, disposability, and incapacitation as defining justice and safety. We will create a new meaning of safety and justice informed by communities whose criminalization, surveillance, incarceration and punishment have been justified by prevailing definitions of safety and justice.

We advocate to shift public resources away from punitive systems and institutions to community-accountable and community-controlled alternatives. We will not promote policies that give more power and/or resources to harmful structures within the criminal legal system. We do, however, support harm reduction tactics that do not undermine our efforts to shift power and resources away from  the criminal legal system. We will advocate that critical public resources flow to Black and brown people, this includes: healthcare services, mental health services, safe housing, job placement and educational opportunities (including services for currently incarcerated people).

We want policies that build community infrastructure and allow for the implementation of promising community-controlled and -run alternatives to incarceration and criminalization, including broad investments and local programs in health, housing, education, youth, and harm reduction. We reject any policies that force our communities to police and surveil one another.

We reject reforms that create opportunities for for-profit private companies and corporations to financially benefit from the criminal legal system.

We adopt an intersectional and Black Queer Feminist analysis. We believe that those traditionally at the margins bear the burden of the harms of the criminal legal system and are most likely to be left behind in reform efforts. Consequently, we believe our analysis, policy solutions, and narrative interventions must center those most marginalized—including currently and formerly incarcerated people, survivors, Black and indigenous communities, Latinx communities, people with disabilities, immigrants, Muslim, Arab, South Asian, queer people, trans people, young people, and cash poor people.