Initiate Justice

Inside-Outside Organizing: Initiate Justice has an inside-outside strategy where we prioritize organizing people directly impacted by incarceration, inside and outside prison walls. Our inside organizing takes place in the prison visiting rooms, in front of state prisons, and inside prisons through workshops, mailings, and in-person or phone training. Our outside organizing occurs through membership meetings and member committees that meet monthly with participants from around CA. We keep our community informed on the latest changes to California laws and prison policies that will affect them; in 2023, we sent 172,115 newsletters to our 42,000+ incarcerated members and 3,112 newsletters to our 420+ inside organizers. We also aired Abolition is for Everybody Podcast," which hosts conversations led by our system-impacted co-hosts. These conversations explore the history, futures, obstacles, and joys of abolition. The podcast intends to connect the day-to-day legislative work of Initiate Justice with larger abolitionist theory and to engage new audiences in a way that allows them to lead and participate in meaningful conversations about prison reform and abolition. This project is also intended to be a resource for our primary and system-impacted audiences to help them shift the culture of punishment into a culture of care.

The Institute of Impacted Leaders is a 12-week organizing training and leadership development program designed for people directly impacted by mass incarceration. Each cohort trains between 20-25 people on community organizing principles, political education materials, and training on how the California legislative process works so that graduates are empowered to join Initiate Justices work or lead their own campaigns in their communities. By the end of 2023, the Institute has graduated 329 people across Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, Fresno, San Diego, Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Orange County, Long Beach, Contra Costa, and the Inland Empire.

Initiate Justice gathers policy priorities and bill ideas from our incarcerated members and organizers that guide our policy goals and culture change work that is necessary to educate the public and change the policy landscape around incarceration in California. We create guides, public educations materials, and offer training on how the public policy process works and how to create, support, and implement state policy. In 2023, we passed AB 60 (Bryan), AB 581 (Carrillo), and AB 1118 (Kalra).