RECOMMENDED READINGS
Reading recommendations from Thea Sebastian, Policy Director for Civil Rights Corps, “Legal Justice Policy Change, to end criminal-legal injustice and build a new, non-carceral paradigm for public safety”, Presentation, May 26th, 2021
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The BREATHE ACT, dubbed the “Civil Rights Act of the 21st century”
- Launch video
- Landing page for federal, state, and local packages
- Section-by-section summaries (federal package only)
- Landing page for Biden-Harris Administration demands
Vision for Justice
- 2020 Platform (short version and long version).
Bail / Pretrial Justice
- Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School, Bail Reform: A Guide for State and Local Policymakers
- The Bail Project, After Cash Bail: A Framework for Reimagining Pretrial Justice (2020)
Criminalization of Poverty
- National Consumer Law Center and Criminal Justice Policy Program, Harvard Law School, Confronting Criminal Justice Debt: The Urgent Need for Comprehensive Reform and A Guide for Policy Reform (2016)
- NY Times Opinion, Lang and Sebastian, Too Poor to Vote,
- DOJ Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015). Ella Baker Center, Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families (2015).
Noncarceral Safety
- Patrisse Cullors, Abolition and Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice, and Accountability (2019)
- Leigh Goodmark, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (2018).
- Ruth Morris, Why Transformative Justice? (1999).
BOOKS
- Peter Edelman, Not a Crime to Be Poor
- Alec Karakatsanis, Usual Cruelty
- Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
- James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017).
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007).
- Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2016).
- Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (2019).
- Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2017).
- Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (2014).
- Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (2018).
