Reforming and transforming our policies and the narratives of people impacted by them is an important part of building collective power. Through our team and network’s personal experiences and subject matter expertise, we advocate for narrative and policy change in a number of ways, inviting various stakeholders to participate in the process.
The Center for Justice is involved in numerous community advocacy and organizing coalitions and initiatives. Our work has included advocating for decarceration through parole reform; challenging the exclusion from criminal justice reform of people convicted of violent crimes; influencing the NYC City Council to pass the CARE Act, which addresses the care of returning aging people; rallying for safer streets in the neighborhoods our participants live; uplifting the experiences of women who have been impacted by incarceration; and more. Our work has been shared at conferences, published in reports, and documented in a video series.
Additionally, the Center believes in the importance of art in shaping narratives and providing avenues for directly impacted people to share their own stories.
Our Narrative and Policy Change programs include:
Inside Criminal Justice, a joint initiative of The Manhattan D.A. Academy, the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the Center is a semester-long seminar comprised of individuals incarcerated at Queensboro Correctional Facility and prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The seminar is intended to encourage in-depth and respectful conversation about the criminal justice system, culminating in jointly-authored policy proposals. The objective is to think together about a justice system that emphasizes public safety, while supporting healthy development from birth to old age and making engaged citizenship possible for everyone.
Learn more about Inside Criminal Justice
Justice Ambassadors is a platform for 18 to 24 year olds, who have been previously justice- involved and youth residing in New York City, to participate in an eight week, structured classroom setting with city officials to hold conversations about challenging community issues, including racial inequality, poverty, trauma, and to co-develop policy proposals. The program’s components are: 1) personal change - members complete a 3-5 page statement that identifies an aspect of themselves they wish to improve and change, 2) community change - youth conduct group presentations at NYC youth centers to advocate for community change and individual accountability, and 3) social change - students and city officials develop co-authored policy proposals to improve adverse social conditions. In sum, the Justice Ambassadors build on the leadership skills of previously disenfranchised youth and provide them with the opportunity to become drivers of democratic change within their community.
Learn more about JAYC
The Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative (JBPC), is an 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.
Learn more about JBPC
The Oral History Research Project will document the stories of successful organizing efforts by incarcerated women. This project will begin with an oral history of the successful organizing by the women incarcerated in Bedford Hills correctional facility to bring back college to prison following its elimination in the 1990s. The Project, led by a research collective comprised of formerly incarcerated women, university faculty, and students, will be a model that can be replicated to show the growth of women’s leadership in the struggle to end mass incarceration.
Learn more about the Oral History Research Project
The Right/Write to Heal is a writing and performance group for currently and formerly incarcerated women in New York and Maine. The Intitiative is a collaboration with the Center for Justice (CfJ) at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and VDay. We believe the time is overdue for women to tell their own stories, in their own voices, about how they came to be incarcerated, what prison has done to their lives, and what they face on the inside and after being released.
Learn more about Right/Write to Heal
