Join the Organization of Exonerees for the 2025 International Wrongful Conviction Gala — a moving evening dedicated to honoring those wrongfully convicted, raising awareness, and strengthening national advocacy for justice reform.

This event will bring together survivors, advocates, and allies to celebrate resilience and push for systemic change. The campaign aims to raise $150,000 to expand trauma-informed reentry services and elevate the Organization of Exonerees as a national leader in justice reform and restorative support.

Food: Hearty hors d’oeuvres reception (no seated dinner)
Attire: Dressy — tuxedos welcome but not required.
Location: Private; address provided with ticket purchase.

The post 2025 Gala: Honoring the Wrongfully Convicted appeared first on Voting Access For All.

House speaker Joe Tate said of those who failed to show up, “they refused to do their jobs.” Attorney General Dana Nessel said that failing to attend was “literally criminal,” referring to a one-year misdemeanor of willful neglect of duty. Deep divisions between the two major political parties, as well as within the Democratic party, are being blamed.

The House is officially scheduled to meet one more day on December 31, but this day will likely include nothing but formalities to end the session. The House will reconvene in January with newly elected members and new leadership.

• Michigan House Democrats order police to retrieve boycotting Republican members, December 19, 2024.
• Michigan House of Representatives sputters to an end without enough members present to vote, December 20, 2024.
• Internal divisions doom Michigan Democrats in their final days of legislative control, December 20, 2024.

The post Lawmakers Absent in Michigan appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Get more information from Prison Policy Initiative:

• LinkedIn
• Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2024
• Incarceration shortens life expectancy
• Who is jailed, how often, and why: Our Jail Data Initiative collaboration offers a fresh look at the misuse of local jails

The post Criminal Justice Wrapped 2024 appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Prison Policy Initiative released a new report that outlines a number of criminal legal system reforms that should be considered in the coming year.

The 34 reforms focus on eight areas:

• Expanding alternatives to criminal legal system responses to social problems;
• Protecting the presumption of innocence so people receive a fair shot at justice;
• Decreasing the length of prison sentences, and providing pathways for all people to exit prison;
• Treating people humanely during incarceration;
• Treating people on community supervision fairly, and helping them thrive in their communities;
• Setting people up to succeed when they leave prisons and jails;
• Giving incarcerated/formerly incarcerated people political representation and voice;
• Reducing spending on the criminal legal system while increasing investment in communities.

This article was originally published by Prison Policy Initiative as “34 criminal legal system reforms that can win in 2025,” authored by Wanda Bertram

The post Prison Policy Initiative: Criminal legal system reforms for 2025 appeared first on Voting Access For All.

According to activists like Johnny Perez, “The thing that they take the most, also, is actually your identity.” As the authors of The Roles of Dehumanization and Moral outrage in Retributive Justice point out, “viewing others as lacking core human capacities and likening them to animals or objects may make them seem less sensitive to pain, more dangerous and uncontrollable, and thus more needful of severe and coercive forms of punishment.”

The Humanization Project provides a powerful framework for advocacy

The Humanization Project has been working with the impacted community to reform Virginia’s justice system since 2017. Co-founded by Executive Director Taj Mahon-Haft and his partner Gin Carter while Mahon-Haft was still incarcerated, the organization began by noting that the “human consequence” of policy decisions was often left out of reform discussions. Informed by Mahon-Haft’s experience as a trained sociologist, The Humanization Project used a humanization framework, centered in empathy and common ground, to develop several strategies to change this dynamic, including:

• Using multimedia platforms to curate narratives and impacted person-produced research that provide human faces and voices for issues and connecting those narratives with policymakers, advocates, and the public;
• Using community engagement and direct outreach to educate and inform impacted people and their families on how the legislative process works, what a bill will do, and the processes and procedures of system change;
• Leveraging their intersectionality as impacted advocates to facilitate human-centered discussions across a diverse array of partners in order to build capacity and coalition through commonality and compassion.

Humanizing future advocacy can strengthen reform

While many factors contributed to Virginia’s massive drop in prison population since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the passing of Earned Sentence Credit has played a huge role, as has the use of humanization as a framework for change. The Humanization Project is now applying this same advocacy model to other issues they’ve identified, such as their “Reentry Begins: Day 1 Inside” initiative, which focuses on creating earlier access to programming for people in prison. Currently, people may have to wait months or even years before accessing programming. With the passage of HB5148, earlier access to programming would mean incarcerated people could begin to accrue good time and ultimately become eligible for release earlier as well, further amplifying the success of the changes to earned sentence credit. The campaign is also turning the lens of humanization towards protecting visitation quality and access for those in Virginia’s prisons and their loved ones, an effort that the Prison Policy Initiative’s advocacy department has supported through research.³ Focusing on humanization as a method of advocacy has proven effective in many contexts, and advocates across the country can use it in their own reform work.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the dehumanization force of incarceration serves as a roadblock to reform by disconnecting policymakers from the human experiences of those in prison. Humanization is a framework that uses intersectionality, compassion, and common experience to implement meaningful, sweeping change by countering narratives that too often overlook the people in the policy. As the Humanization Project’s co-founder Gin Carter puts it, “This particular argument has been won with humanity conquering the day. We discuss the human impacts more while stereotypes, dog whistling and fear-mongering win out less often.”

Learn More

• Read the original article about The Humanization Project, by Emmett Sanders, from Prison Policy Initiatve.
• Learn more about good time and other ways to shorten excessive prison sentences in the report, Eight Keys to Mercy.
• Learn how mass decarceration does not make us less safe in Large scale releases and public safety.

The post Prison Policy Initiative: The Humanization Project appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Their approach centers around the idea of dignity. Prisons should give people access to education, therapy, and other rehabilitative activities. Through allowing incarcerated individuals to pursue meaningful activities inside prisons, they will be empowered to “lead a life of social responsibility after release, which requires a recognition that people can change.”

This kind of approach has been successfully implemented in a number of European countries. The authors acknowledge that in order to make this vision a reality in the United States we must drastically reduce the number of people we incarcerate. There are also deeply ingrained cultures and policies in US prisons that limit or prohibit conduct that would be rehabilitative, with the focus instead being on discipline and control.

Read their full article for more information and suggestions.

The post Reframing the Goals of Incarceration appeared first on Voting Access For All.

We wrapped up another busy year at the Prison Policy Initiative, and are thrilled to share our 2023-2024 Annual Report with you. We released 7 major reports, 32 research briefings, and two guides for journalists to support further investigative work on issues related to mass incarceration. We also provided technical support to advocates at the state and local levels working on issues such as ending prison gerrymandering, parole reform and fighting jail expansion. Here are a handful of accomplishments we’re particularly proud of:

• Publishing updates to our bedrock reports detailing the scale of mass incarceration in the U.S. and globally, including Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, and States of Incarceration: The Global Context
• Releasing a report on how jails and prisons misuse money from “inmate welfare funds” on staff perks or to cover budgetary gaps, rather than use those funds on services that benefit incarcerated people. We released a companion guide for press to encourage journalists to further investigate welfare funds in state prisons and particularly in local jails.
• Discrediting the argument that jails and prisons are rehabilitative by spotlighting how they fail to provide evidence-based voluntary treatment for people with substance use disorders and refuse to release elderly people who pose no safety risk to their communities.
• Keeping the need for jail reform front and center through multiple publications that challenge the efficacy of detaining people pretrial, show how pretrial detention has a warehousing effect, and debunk common arguments used to justify jail expansion.
• Helping Minnesota join the growing list of states that have ended prison gerrymandering. Progress on this issue has been so rapid that the National Conference of State Legislatures recently called state efforts to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”

The post A bustling year at Prison Policy Initiative appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Why it Matters:
By visiting prisons, legislators gain firsthand insights, shaping informed decisions on legislation. This initiative aims to open doors for continued reform efforts in the new year.

How You Can Help:
Contact your legislators and urge them to visit a prison. Use the provided guide (link below) as a valuable resource for informed decision-making in justice system improvement.

Let’s actively support this initiative for a better future!

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFqTmJ8fsg/L2eGjwjA7hInjRxmXwsMrg/view?utm_content=DAFqTmJ8fsg&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelink

The post 🔗 Support Informed Decision-Making in Prison Reform! appeared first on Voting Access For All.