Every night, there are 450,000 human beings awaiting trial in U.S. jail cells solely because they cannot make a payment. We challenge wealth-based detention and advocate for anti-carceral alternatives to human caging that are less restrictive, more effective, and grounded in holistic community engagement and empowerment.
The state of criminal defense for impoverished people is in crisis. We challenge the systemic inadequacy in the advocacy that our society tolerates for the impoverished people who make up the vast majority of human beings charged with crimes in the United States.
Our criminal legal system is an assembly line that normalizes modern debtors’ prisons and that uses the mass processing of bodies to generate revenue on the backs of the poorest people in our society. We fight the systemic criminalization of poverty in all of its forms.
Our Prosecutor Project challenges pervasive abuses of power by criminal prosecutors. We create accountability for officials who have historically acted with impunity, and we change entrenched narratives about the purposes and effects of criminal prosecution in an era of mass human caging.