The Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative (JBPC)
JBPC Overview & Goals
The Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative (JBPC), is a new three-year initiative housed at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, dedicated to strengthening our movement efforts’ for narrative change around violence, punishment and incarceration. We are in a unique time of rising public awareness and activism in which popular narratives about what actually makes communities safe are changing, providing greater possibility for concrete change in policy and practice. Still, narratives about changing course on addressing violence remain marginal. Centering the leadership of directly impacted people and addressing the fundamental racism in the current narrative, the JBPC is bringing together groups in New York that have common and intersecting missions. Together, the JBPC is working to end the reliance on punishment, criminalization, and incarceration as the primary responses to violence, to build power and solidarity around shared messages, to develop shared tools and campaigns, and to amplify our individual and collective voices to press for lasting narrative change in New York. Our objectives are to develop the narrative and thinking of those active in the movement to end mass incarceration so that together we can make an impact on the broader society’s thinking, including thinking by and about those who have committed and/or are labeled as violent, and those who have survived violence.
The Collaborative is made up of the following organizations: The Release Aging People in Prison Campaign, The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the Immigrant Defense Project, Girls for Gender Equity, Common Justice, Drug Policy Alliance, Color of Change, Exodus Transitional Community, H.O.L.L.A!, Center for Constitutional Rights, the Osborne Association, Community Capacity Development and the Fortune Society.
The Work of the JBPC
The JBPC engages in shared learning and research by:
1. Mapping and assessing existing messages and narrative strategies
2. Compiling and leveraging research on effective narrative change efforts both past and present
3. Learning together about the factors that combine to make narrative change possible, and to build from narrative change towards systemic change
4. Exploring differences among collaborative members and examining complicated issues
The JBPC will together develop and disseminate shared and complementary messages and narrative change strategies that can be applied and amplified, collectively and individually. The JBPC also strengthens and supports the capacity and impact of the existing work of the organizations within the Collaborative.
