VISION
To build a safe California with healthy and economically empowered communities free from mass criminalization
MISSION STATEMENT
Initiate Justice aims to engage people directly impacted by incarceration to pass California state ballot initiatives focused on divestment from punitive systems and investment in people, communities, and restorative means of reducing harm.
GOALS
--Organize to support civic engagement of incarcerated people and their families,
--Introduce and pass ballot initiatives that call for justice reinvestment every general election in California, and
--Substantially reduce our prison population in a while investing in health, economic opportunities, and restorative justice in our communities.
PROBLEM
Our existing criminal justice system is failing to keep our communities safe--The United States is the most incarcerated country in the world and California is the most incarcerated state in the United States. This system focuses on “crime” and “punishment” instead of harm and healing, and often utilizes violence to achieve its version of “justice”. Furthermore, funding is siphoned out of social services and education and funnelled into police departments and prisons, creating a cycle where people fail to receive the services they need to be safe and healthy and ultimately end up a victim or perpetrator of violence.
SOLUTION
Initiate Justice recognizes that the very systems that are meant to protect us--such as the police, courts, and prisons--are often the sources of violence and that our communities need healing, evidence-based alternatives to these systems.
In order to make us all safer, and in order to keep our communities strong, we must proclaim what justice really means. Justice is not achieved when the police arrest someone or when someone goes to prison--Justice is achieved when the harm that has been committed is repaired and the system upholds philosophies of healing, restoration, and accountability.
Justice is achieved when our communities’ social services are fully funded and people can live free of state violence.
California ballot initiatives are key in creating sustainable policy change. Because ballot initiatives are enacted by voters as opposed to the Legislature, they have widespread legitimacy and therefore are easier to uphold and more difficult to dismantle. In recent years, initiatives such as Proposition 36 (2012) and Proposition 47 (2014) have established meaningful criminal justice reform, indicating that California voters are ready to see the end of mass incarceration and the beginning of justice reinvestment in our state.
Initiate Justice will build on this momentum and continue moving toward divesting from prisons and investing in communities through the ballot initiative process.
CORE PRINCIPLES
--Commitment to supporting evidence- and community-based practices in bringing people home from prison and investing in their re-entry and transformation
--Commitment to restorative, not punitive, means of addressing harm
--Commitment to uplifting the voices and experiences of those directly impacted by state violence
--Commitment to racial and gender justice--the dismantling of white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems
