The United States’ criminal legal system is made up of a vast, interconnected complex of prisons, jails, police departments, courts, probation, parole, and databases. Because it promises to deliver justice and keep us safe, we have been willing to pay over $300 billion a year to keep all the components of this system well funded. Recognizing the harm done (particularly to Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color), criminal justice reforms seek to make fixes to different parts of the criminal legal system. This includes efforts to reduce the incarceration rate, improve conditions of confinement in prisons and jails, end solitary confinement, end the death penalty, ensure quality indigent defense, reduce police misconduct, and ameliorate the impacts of persistent criminal records. Unfortunately, many criminal justice reforms end up strengthening and enlarging the institution it is trying to reform. Reforms to prevent police abuses, for example, have resulted in tens of millions of tax dollars allocated for body-worn cameras, which have failed to change police behavior, while offering the police a powerful new platform for mass surveillance (when loaded with facial recognition). An increase in non-lethal weapons has increased market opportunities for makers of such devices, with little evidence of any decrease in deaths caused by police shooting guns. Similarly, prison reforms to improve conditions of confinement usually result in increased budgets, or new prisons being built, and ultimately create a financial incentive for filling beds.

In an ever shifting policy and movement environment, how can the changes we fight for be grounded in divestment rather than reform that bolsters the system of policing? Mariame Kaba offers insight in Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose. Critical Resistance has a great resource chart with specific examples on reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing.

Million dollar blocks describe places where more than a million dollars a year are spent locking people up from a single city block. From the perspective of community development, it is clear that the money spent incarcerating people from the neighborhood would be far better spent on preschool, public education, housing subsidies, or programs to increase economic opportunities. Additionally, when Black and low-income neighborhoods start to gentrify, newcomers use the police to create the kind of social order that is more appealing to the wealthier class of buyers. Arrests and prosecutions of Black and Brown people for minor offenses increase when neighborhoods undergo gentrification.

Criminalization and incarceration have had a devastating impact on Black and low-income neighborhoods across the country. When a large number of adults from a neighborhood move in and out of prison and jail, the disruptions weaken familial and social relationships, imposes severe material hardships on those imprisoned, and undercuts resilience by undermining the cultural fabric of a neighborhood. The Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families report shares how incarceration saddles loved ones with overwhelming debt – for example, 48% had trouble meeting basic housing needs because of the financial costs of having an incarcerated loved one. It has become clear that the high rate of incarceration, rather than protecting residents from harmful individuals, actually does the opposite, making a neighborhood less safe.

The over policing of communities that are predominantly Black, Indigenous, and people of color creates a high barrier to civic engagement. Efforts by residents to work together to solve community problems and improve the quality of life are undermined by criminalization of communities of color that creates high rates of incarceration, probation and parole requirements, that fines and costs the justice system extracts for traffic and public order offenses, and a heavy police presence.

Criminalization lessens civic engagement by limiting the right to vote. The single most significant structural barrier to full suffrage is felony disenfranchisement: at the time of the 2016 elections, a felony conviction barred 6.1 million people from being able to vote. Further, due to the placement of many prisons in rural areas and the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, younger prisoners of color are used to boost the political weight of whiter, more conservative rural areas. Additionally, by counting prisoners as residents of the county where the prison is located, the U.S. Census gives disproportionate power to rural, largely white, counties that contain prisons.

Those in power have a history of using criminalization to actively discourage civic engagement, particularly when a community’s activism is focused on police misconduct or other ills of the criminal legal system. The FBI, for example, created the term “Black Identity Extremist” to intimidate people who are taking action against the police killings of Black people.

Both public and private modes of transportation are heavily impacted by criminalization. A number of lawsuits brought in the late 1990s established that police were engaged in racial profiling when deciding who to pull over in routine traffic stops. The phrase “driving while Black” became shorthand for racial profiling, and was quickly expanded to include recognition of profiling of those “walking while Black,” “biking while Black,” “driving while brown,” and “walking while trans.” On public transportation, those who cannot pay their fare are often criminalized and fined, with disproportionate enforcement and sometimes police violence toward people of color. There are particular concerns in New York with how police enforce fare evasion. When a city creates or expands a light rail system, it usually causes mass displacement of usually low-income Black and brown residents and small businesses, which means people lose their homes, their businesses, and their jobs. Then, a private company operates the light rail with little oversight and accountability, and may welcome in police who then harass and arrest riders.

The much criticized practice of broken windows policing strategies relies on a speculative (and in fact never established) link between low-level offenses like spitting on the sidewalk and crimes like assault. This kind of policing occurs almost exclusively when someone in the targeted group is moving from one place to another, whether on foot, in a car, or on public transportation.

Incarceration harms individual and public health. Chronic stress, poor nutrition, physical and sexual assault by by detention officers, poor sleep and hygiene, lack of or delayed access to medical services, and increased exposure to communicable diseases are all part of daily life when incarcerated. Many of these health impacts are present for those on probation or parole, where fines, fees, check-in requirements, and other facets of the surveillance of probation or parole often increase stress and interfere with health care. The dire impact on health and inability to provide care for incarcerated people is especially evident in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, as many facilities did not provide appropriate personal protective equipment and it is impossible to socially distance in jails and prisons. This resulted in preventable outbreaks and deaths of incarcerated people in many facilities, including San Quentin.

People with mental health challenges are especially hard hit. Many of the individuals locked up for public disorder offenses or other minor violations are arrested for behaviors stemming from unmet mental health needs. Once detained, their condition often worsens, increasing the likelihood they will be re-arrested for a new offense upon release. As a result, there are now ten times as many people with severe mental illnesses in prison and jails than there are in hospitals.

This absurd and inhumane situation can be readily remedied by shifting resources from the criminal justice system to high quality, community-based, outpatient mental health services. Public health research about how inequity and experiences of racial discrimination impact mental and physical health confirm that criminalization has measurable and profound effects on individual health outcomes. These negative impacts, compounded by the scale of mass incarceration, makes criminalization a matter of public health.

Criminal laws are enforced in a discriminatory manner against LGBTQ people. As a result, while 3.8% of adults in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ, the number of lesbian, gay, or bisexual people incarcerated is double that percentage. LGBTQ youth are especially hard hit, with approximately 20% of young people in juvenile detention facilities identifying as LGBTQ or gender nonconforming. And since criminalization targets Black people and other people of color, those suffering mental illness or addiction, and low-income people, the LGBTQ people of these targeted groups are doubly (or triply) impacted.

Nearly one in six transgender people (16%) (including 21% of transgender women) have been incarcerated at some point in their lives—far higher than the rate for the general population. Among Black transgender people, nearly half (47%) have been incarcerated at some point. Black trans women engaged in survival sex work are particularly hard hit by criminalization. They are perhaps the most heavily policed group within the LGBT community, while simultaneously the most at risk of being victims of violent assault or murder.

Once criminalized and enmeshed in the criminal legal system, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people suffer more abuse at the hands of police, prison guards, other incarcerated people, and other criminal legal actors. Policies that isolate and stigmatize incarcerated people disproportionately affect LGBTQ individuals and are also more likely to experience assault and violence in prison. For example, nearly 60% of incarcerated trans women in California male facilities reported sexual assault. We also see this in the case of Ky Peterson, who was told that as a transman, he was not a “believable victim” of rape after defending himself against a brutal sexual assault, and he was bullied into signing a “plea deal” of 20 years in prison.

LGBTQ groups have responded to this biased enforcement and harmful police practices with research, advocacy, and grassroots organizing. These efforts have been bolstered by the publication of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in 2011, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex in 2015, and Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People in 2016.

Police and prisons have a profound impact on the U.S. economy, the labor market, and working people, helping drive inequality in wealth, income and job quality along lines including race, gender, sexuality and ability. This traces back in part to the earliest days of the US legal system and colonialism,  which hinged upon genocidal enslavement of Black and indigenous people enforced by colonial and enslaver patrols and institutionalized legal exclusion and exploitation of different immigrant populations, women, LGTBQ and disabled people. From the very first strikes in the US (as early as 1824) and across the history of the US organized labor movement, the police have been used to intimidate workers and block their efforts to collectively bargain for improved working conditions, benefits, and wages. At numerous junctures, like the rise of Justice for Janitors in the 1990s that centered migrant workers, or during the civil rights/public sector Black worker strikes of the 1960s, police have been directly deployed to stifle worker movements.

Since the 1970s, rather than funding social services or job-creation programs to deal with questions like unemployment and economic restructuring, police and prisons have become a stand-in that only worsens working conditions and rights on the job and often limits people to seeking low-wage or criminalized and precarious informal work (like street vending). Immigrant workers across industries face criminalization from the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, compounded by regressive and xenophobic immigrant worker policy that renders these workers vulnerable and prevents many from speaking up in regards to basic labor protections and rights on the job.  In prisons, workers, whether on behalf of the state (making license plates, working in the kitchen, fighting wildfires) or private corporations, are paid cents on the dollar.  Formerly incarcerated people face discrimination when trying access employment, housing, and financial assistance for higher education, and fines, fees and parole tear into any prospects of savings. Companies like Amazon and others using temporary staffing agencies actively recruit recently-released worker for lower-paying, dangerous jobs. At a regional level, prisons and detention centers have actively targeted small town economies gutted by de-industrialization or agricultural change, pushing and keeping out better jobs while offering none of the economic benefits promised.

In theory, the principle that children who break the law should be treated differently from adults allows for the care and positive growth of young people in lieu of punishment. In fact, however, the first juvenile justice court was established in 1899 in Chicago. It was largely in response to the influx of Eastern European immigrants and Black families to U.S. cities, whose children were considered prone to deviant behavior. Concurrent with the “tough on crime” rhetoric of the 1980s, juvenile courts became more punitive, and in the 1990s many states passed mandatory sentencing laws and increased transfers to adult courts for certain crimes. As advocates and litigation brought the violence of juvenile prisons into public view, a movement to close the worst prisons gained steam. When parents of the children were brought into the advocacy effort, they insisted that the resources expended to incarcerate their children must “follow the child.” That is, resources to address the child’s needs should follow the child out of the youth prison to support community-based services. Strategic advocacy has produced extraordinary results, with the youth incarceration rate now half of what it was at the system’s peak in 1997.

However, racial disparities are getting worse, with Black youth more than five times as likely to be detained or committed compared to white youth. Native youth are approximately three times more likely to be confined than white youth. The incarceration of young people is still a priority in public budgets: in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Alameda County in California chose to invest an additional $75 million dollars to the budget of Camp Sweeney, a juvenile detention facility, rather than investing “in safety net and community support and care so young people can have what they need to live and thrive outside of the justice system.”

The time is right for grassroots-led campaigns to close youth prisons: in a 2017 poll, 61% of Californians support or strongly support the proposition that “we shouldn’t have youth prisons at all, and instead invest in holding young people accountable for wrong-doing in ways that don’t involve incarceration.” Nearly 90% prefer a restorative justice approach over punishment as a response to crimes committed by youths.

Racism, xenophobia and economic exploitation have been the main drivers of immigration policy in the United States, upheld by systems that criminalize immigrants and facilitate abuse. In recent history, the criminalization of immigrants intensified in 1996, when Congress expanded who and how immigrants can be classified as “criminal aliens” who are subject to detention and deportation. These policies resulted in a growing archipelago of private prisons and local county jails used to detain the immigrants in this classification, enriching corporations that have, in turn, lobbied vigorously for even more enforcement. Programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities brought local police officers into immigration law enforcement, a function that had traditionally been a federal civil matter. On the increasingly-militarized border (and increasingly in the interior), the shift from civil enforcement to criminal enforcement has resulted in nearly $7 billion in detention costs since 2005, while also worsening an epidemic of migrant deaths at the border or in transit across the Americas.

The impacts of criminalization on immigrants are far-reaching. Daily fear of workplace raids and individual enforcement leave many migrant workers afraid to speak out about their rights and subject them to lower wages, higher workplace injury, and other abuse. Within six months of a parent’s immigration-related arrest, detention, or deportation, families typically lose between 40 and 90 percent of their income. Jails and prisons often collaborate with ICE, so that upon release undocumented people are immediately transferred to ICE detention. There are an estimated 5,000 U.S. citizen children in foster care because of a detained or deported parent. For the nearly 6 million U.S. citizen children under the age of 18 who live with an undocumented parent, the fear that a simple traffic stop might result in deportation is a source of chronic stress that manifests as depression, anxiety, and sleeplessness and shape the choices one makes about their futures. Mixed-status families rarely utilize public services out of fear of deportation, even if their citizen children qualify; many go without basic supports like food stamps or obtaining health care. In the last several years, cruel detention policies have expanded the forced separation of migrant families, leaving young children in detention to be subject to horrific physical violence and traumas at the hands of officials, and allowing their immigration cases to be adjudicated separately from their parents.

Human rights violations are prevalent inside prisons and jails. Overcrowding, combined with a culture of violence and secrecy, creates extraordinarily harsh conditions of confinement for incarcerated people. The suffering that results from inadequate or denied medical care (including mental health care) is particularly acute, and widespread. Because a person who is incarcerated is prevented from even walking to the corner store for a bottle of aspirin, the government is responsible for providing health care. It regularly fails this basic responsibility. With little oversight and a profoundly disempowered patient population, long delays, denial of treatment, and substandard care are common. Extended solitary confinement as it is practiced in U.S. prisons and jails is violative of human rights. Some legal scholars also believe that the length of sentences has reached a point where the sentence itself – thirty years for burglary, for example – violates human rights. Other human rights violations that persist in a prison’s closed environment include rape, extortion, and “gladiator” fights arranged by prison guards. Such violations are rampant, as documented in Angola prison in Louisiana and Santa Rita jail in California.

The impacts of criminalization on women, femmes, and girls that are Black, Native, and people of color are often overlooked. Police violence against women of color is underreported, a deficiency that compelled Andrea Ritchie to write Invisible No More (2017). And as the overall rate of incarceration drops, there are places where the number of women incarcerated continues to climb at an alarming rate. Two-thirds of incarcerated women are mothers of minor children. An astounding percentage of these women are survivors of physical or sexual assault – the result of a pipeline that leads young survivors of abuse into criminalization and the juvenile system. The racist narratives of Black female criminality impact girls, trans women, and mothers. Black girls are far more likely to be disciplined or suspended for minor infractions than their peers. As Monique W. Morris, Executive Director of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, describes, “Black girls describe being labeled and suspended for being “disruptive” or “defiant” if they ask questions or otherwise engage in activities that adults consider affronts to their authority. Across the country, we see black girls being placed in handcuffs for having tantrums in kindergarten classrooms, thrown out of class for asking questions, sent home from school for arriving in shorts on a hot day, labeled as “truant” if they are being commercially sexually exploited, and labeled as “defiant” if they speak up in the face of what they [identify] to be injustice. We also see black girls criminalized (arrested on campus or referred to law enforcement) instead of engaged as children and teens whose mistakes could be addressed through non-punitive restorative approaches.”

Black trans women disproportionately experience criminalization. This was exemplified in the case of CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was criminalized and incarcerated for defending herself against transphobic violence. In Atlanta, Black trans women report being profiled and sexually assaulted by police. And when Tanya McDowell, living in a van and homeless shelters, enrolled her son in a more affluent school district, she was arrested and convicted of “stealing education services.”

As we see in the report: “Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families”, women, particularly women of color, often “do time” alongside their family members: they drive hundreds of miles for visitation, put money on a loved one’s books, and parent without a partner. Fighting to maintain family and economic stability, these hidden costs of incarceration and criminalization are disproportionately borne by Black, Native, and women of color.

The United States’ food and prison system are closely related. Communities where farming, timber, and mining were in decline have actively sought out prisons as economic development. Pennsylvania in 1997 gifted 200 acres of farmland to the federal bureau of prisons for a dollar. Legislators from South Georgia and the Mississippi Delta, using outsized political power secured during the sharecropping era, “won” for their counties dozens of new prisons (including private prisons) during the 1990’s building boom. In rural areas during this decade a prison opened every fifteen days. In urban areas, the Black and Brown communities that are the most over-policed also tend to be food deserts, and have the deepest health disparities caused by diet and nutrition.   Prison food is, by and large, meager and disgusting. In Alabama, where sheriffs are allowed by law to personally profit by cutting meal costs, the Morgan County Sheriff bought half of an 18 wheeler load of corn dogs for $500 and served them every meal for six months. Nearly $100,000 from his office’s food money account went directly into his own pocket. Many prisons and jails continue to use “the loaf” (a mash of cheap ingredients molded into a brick) to punish people.     Large agriculture companies have long looked to prisoners and probationers as a cheap, easily controllable labor force. Where the crackdown on hiring undocumented workers created labor shortages, companies were eager to use prison labor to harvest Vidalia onions and chickens in Georgia, tomatoes and watermelons in Arizona, and corn in Colorado.

The National Black Food and Justice Alliance explains that because of the urgency of conditions, disenfranchisement, and continued exploitation and exclusion from food systems for Black communities, it is critical to reclaim, lift up and strengthen the abundance of Black food and justice work nationwide

The prison industrial complex benefits and expands from surveilling communities and using that data towards criminalization. Surveillance has long been used to police and criminalize Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities, particularly to repress resistance. One notorious example is COINTELPRO.

Existing databases, changing norms, and new technology in the United States has expanded in significant ways since 9/11. It became even more acceptable to impose and evolve tactics for intense, pervasive surveillance of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian (MASA) communities, (although Black Muslims have always been a target of state surveillance). Special registration programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) required people from certain countries to report for inspection. Soon thereafter, the New York Police Department started using surveillance cameras, plainclothes officers, and informants to illegally spy on every mosque within 100 miles of New York City, creating secret police files on thousands of people.

Today, we see even more examples of surveillance and collecting data. The prevalence of smartphones and spread of high-resolution cameras, combined with greatly expanded data streams and improved data analysis (including facial recognition and other AI assisted analysis) makes it possible to place large groups of people under real time surveillance. Additional contemporary examples include street light cameras and contact tracing technology due to COVID-19.

Government officials and corporations building the apparatus of mass surveillance insist their efforts are necessary to prevent violent crime. Law enforcement officials are using surveillance tools primarily to collect fines through increased traffic enforcement, to extend the surveillance of people already “captured” in existing databases, and to track political protesters. All these uses are disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods of predominantly people of color. In reaction to Black Lives Matter protests of police shootings, for example, the FBI in October 2017 issued a warning to local law enforcement that “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE) are an emerging domestic terrorist threat. As detailed in an op-ed published by political newspaper The Hill, Racial Surveillance has a Long History in the United States.  The BIE label is related to a series of federal and local programming efforts, countering violent extremism (CVE), which paint Muslims, and particularly Black Muslims, as potential security threats and coopt teachers, health professionals, and members of the public in identifying individuals who may be prone to violence. CVE is founded on junk science, securitizes Muslims and communities of color, and is based on offensive stereotypes like theorizing that men who grow beards or Muslims who become more devout may be at risk of being extremists.

These tactics are not new, but they have expanded and evolved to focus on more communities and thereby tie together the fates of Black, Muslim, and other communities of color in this common fight.

This section benefited greatly from contributions made by the RISE Together Fund at Proteus Fund.

Design of public spaces has been marked by racially inequitable practices and still rarely incorporates planning processes including the voices and perspectives of those communities most impacted. Closely related is the role of the arts in building community – whether through design of buildings and public space, or arts education, or passing of communities’ culture, traditions and people of a place over generations, or of arts as resistance – like public murals in gentrifying neighborhoods. When we understand that art is the currency through which our values are communicated, we can see that there is an opportunity to disrupt dominant thinking by investing in arts and artists who are elevating stories about the cost of mass incarceration on families, communities and individuals themselves. Looking at the intersection of art, design and public space, we know that most public spaces are not designed with principles of restorative justice in mind; these same public spaces are often the same physical structures where communities are over-policed and subject to state violence. The sense of belonging in these spaces is varied for communities of color and poor communities. A city’s fundamental design functions to both welcome and exclude. Examples include housing developments, mass transit stations, parks, new business building developments, and highways. Communities of color congregating are increasingly seen as illegitimate and criminal, and laws are being created to explicitly criminalize such activity. The big picture challenge is a normalization of the frequency and impact of criminalization in the lives of communities of color and poor/low wealth communities, and in society overall.

Many are beginning to imagine what a police free city would actually look like. As a result of uprisings across the country in 2020, this has a real chance to become a reality.

Since the 1980s, rural areas throughout the U.S. have been decimated by globalization, automation, the opioid epidemic, and population decrease related to financialization of our economy (learn what financialization is here). These communities have also suffered from divestment from social safety net systems and lack of access to healthcare, education, and quality jobs. A robust rural economy once populated by family famers has been replaced with corporate factory farms, resulting in loss of land and livelihood for farmers across the country, and an ironic reality in which some of the most food insecure counties in the country are rural.

During the same time frame, the rural prison and detention center economy grew exponentially; 70 percent of prisons are in rural America. Prisons and detention centers have become a bedrock of employment for many rural communities. More than half of immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs are housed in remote rural prisons. Comparing farmer to prisoner populations data shows that there are currently more prisoners than farmers in the United States. Today, many states are now leasing out prisoners to support corporate agriculture and other industries based in rural areas with disenfranchised laborers, a practice eerily reminiscent of the “convict leasing” seen during the Jim Crow era. In order to justify such a massive expansion of the prison industrial complex, a vision of dangerous urban people of color was amplified and marketed to rural communities as a package of personal and economic security in rural areas.

Additionally, many Native communities are in rural areas. Though Indigenous people make up more than 2% of the population, with leadership at the frontlines of cross-cutting issues ranging from climate justice to public health, a meager .4% of total philanthropy since 2006 has flowed toward Native issues – with even less funding reaching explicitly Native-led organizations.

Housing policy in the United States is built on a legacy of racial discrimination, criminalization, and racist systemic processes. These policies have shaped Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian communities across the country. Theft of Indigenous land, redlining and racial covenants, federal funding for the creation of white-only suburbs, gated communities, predatory lending, and the targeted destruction of public housing across US cities, government and banking policies have displaced communities of color and benefited wealthier white individuals at the expense of everyone else. These inequities have been enforced by a criminal justice system that has multiplied the harm done to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian neighborhoods and communities.

Cities across the country currently spend significantly more public money on police and criminal justice strategies than on community development, housing assistance, and homelessness prevention. In Baltimore, 18.2% of the FY2017 budget was allocated to the police department while just 1.7% was allocated to homeless services and housing development. In Minneapolis, the city spends 9 cents on housing and development for every dollar spent on policing its communities.

The discredited broken windows policing strategy results in both immediate displacement through arrest and incarceration, and the longer term displacement that accompanies gentrification. This kind of displacement is facilitated not only by 911 calls, but 311 (city services and information public line) calls as well. In the Mission district of San Francisco, a historically Latinx neighborhood, 311 complaints tripled as tech industry residents moved into the neighborhood. In New York City, 311 complaints spike  in lower-income communities of color when wealthier residents move in.

A recent body of research reveals how policing perpetuates racially concentrated poverty and how segregation, in turn, shapes racially biased policing. With segregation and racially biased policing mutually reinforcing one another in this way, a myriad of other social inequities follow. These include poor health caused by chronic stress, the creation of food deserts, lack of living wage work, and neighborhood instability caused by high rates of eviction and incarceration.

When formerly incarcerated people are released from jail or prison, finding secure housing is central to ensuring stability and preventing recidivism. Yet, the nation’s dire affordable housing crisis – combined with policies that restrict access to federal and state housing assistance programs for people with criminal records – makes it nearly impossible to find a safe, affordable home after release. Research from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition showed that federal and state lawmakers are now reexamining sentencing policies that have proven to be overly punitive and harmful to families and communities, and they are working towards comprehensive criminal justice reform. There are hundreds of federal, state, and local laws and regulations that either create mandatory housing restrictions or promote exclusionary practices toward individuals impacted by the carceral system and their families. Likewise, many municipalities have “crime-free” rental housing ordinances or voluntary programs that actively encourage private landlords to deny housing to individuals involved in the criminal legal system.

Everyone has a right to a safe, healthy, equitable and affordable home, regardless of their zip code or criminal record. We have a moral imperative to divest from systems that criminalize, displace, and lock out communities of color and low-income communities while investing in safe, quality, affordable homes for all.

This Housing Justice section of the Divest/Invest website was authored by Right to the City Alliance (RTC), which emerged in 2007 as a unified response to gentrification and a call to halt the displacement of low-income people, people of color, marginalized LGBTQ communities, and youths of color from their historic urban neighborhoods. RTC is a national alliance of racial, economic and environmental justice organizations. Through shared principles and a common frame and theory of change, RTC is building a national movement for racial justice, urban justice, human rights, and democracy. To learn more about RTC, visit them online, and right to Alia Trindle, National Organizer for Resource Development: alia@righttothecity.org.