From Justice Reinvestment to Defund the Police: Solutions for a Better World
A discussion on historical and current approaches to reallocate funding throughout the U.S. criminal justice system toward priority areas that can directly influence crime rates.
Related to: Incarceration, Racial Justice, State Advocacy
Demands to ‘defund the police’ surfaced as part of a larger protest movement in the wake of the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery and so many others. But what would reallocating funding from police to the community look like?
One option is to look to the long history of efforts to prioritize savings from decarceration towards other social policy priorities. Justice Reinvestment, for example, was conceived with the intent to reduce corrections populations and budgets in order to generate savings for the purpose of reinvesting in high incarceration communities to make them safer, stronger, more prosperous and equitable.
This webinar explored historical and current approaches to reallocate funding throughout the U.S. criminal justice system toward education, quality housing, health care, and living wage employment — priority areas that can directly influence crime rates.
Speakers:
Susan Tucker, former Director of Justice Reinvestment Initiatives for NYC Probation and co-author of Ideas for an Open Society: Justice Reinvestment
Amber Rose Howard, Californians United for a Responsible Budget
Kelly Lytle Hernández, University of California, Los Angeles
Leah Sakala, The Urban Institute
Moderator: Nicole D. Porter, The Sentencing Project
