Partners
Partners
Movements Against Mass Incarceration is produced through partnerships with several social change, art, and archival partners across America.

Social Change Partners

We've partnered with social change organizations——built by justice-impacted people and their allies, and with various georgaphic and issues-based interests——to capture the history of movements against mass incarceration in the United States.

Barred Business
(Atlanta, Georgia)
Visit website

Barred Business aims to uplift and empower marginalized justice-impacted individuals, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and transgender people of color——along with their families and communities. Their vision is a world where these individuals can live, work, and thrive without discrimination. To achieve this vision, Barred Business advocates for policy changes, institutional transformations, and electoral strategies to empower these communities and ensure their well-being and safety. They believe in redirecting resources from punitive systems to community-based services, addressing racial and economic disparities that have long persisted.

Both Sides of the Wall
(Birmingham, Alabama)
Visit website

Both Sides of the Wall is a grassroots organization dedicated to reforming the criminal justice system. Their focus includes advocating for prison reform, restorative justice, participatory defense, re-entry support, effective programming, and parole.

Founded by spouses and family members of incarcerated individuals in the Alabama Department of Corrections, Both Sides of the Wall works to ensure fair sentencing and rehabilitation through evidence-based programs. They stand in solidarity with all incarcerated individuals and their families, leveraging protests and rallies to raise awareness about inhumane treatment and poor living conditions in prisons.

California Coalition for Women Prisoners
(Oakland and Los Angeles, California)
Visit website

California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) is a grassroots abolitionist organization that challenges institutional violence perpetrated on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison-industrial complex. CCWP believes that the fight for racial and gender justice is essential to dismantling the prison-industrial complex. This movement is driven by the leadership of those most impacted——including people inside and outside of prison, families, and communities.

CCWP envisions a world where the prison system——designed for punishment, control, and the incarceration of primarily people of color and the poor——is abolished. Their goal is a society that prioritizes education over incarceration, directs investment towards employment rather than prisons, rejects sexual violence, and upholds human rights for all individuals.

Chicago Torture Justice Center
(Chicago, Illinois)
Visit website

The Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) is dedicated to confronting traumas resulting from police violence and institutionalized racism by providing access to healing and wellness services, trauma-informed resources, and community connections.

CTJC actively contributes to and aligns with a movement aimed at eradicating all manifestations of police violence.

Death Penalty Project
(Chicago, Illinois)
Visit website

The Death Penalty Oral History Project is a project led by Social Change Fellow Renaldo Hudson, in partnership with nonprofit Soapbox Productions and Organizing, and oral historian Liz Futrell to develop a people’s history of how the death penalty was abolished in the state of Illinois.

More specifically, this project focuses on the history as told by people who were on death row and their political allies. Together, they narrate how they organized to transform Illinois from a state that regularly executed people to a state that commuted and then abolished the death penalty.

The project is producing a micro-documentary that will combine the oral history interviews and cinéma vérité following a group of death penalty survivors as they share life outside of a prison cell.

System Impact Media
(Oakland, California)

System Impact Media is an Oakland-based film production company led by people impacted by the prison system.

System Impact focuses on making films that impact the prison system in transformative ways, telling stories that are rarely told and that open people's minds about the lives individuals lead and the transformations they experience and create in prison and beyond.

In addition to producing independent films, System Impact Media provides various platforms, including festivals, where people who are currently or formerly incarcerated can present their work and get their films screened to wider audiences.

Women Transcending
(New York, New York)
Visit website

Women Transcending focuses on the impact of the mass incarceration system on women and girls, emphasizing women's crucial roles in driving change within these systems.

Led by formerly incarcerated and directly-impacted women, Women Transcending strives to illuminate the factors leading women into the criminal justice system and raise awareness of the repercussions of punitive measures on individuals, families, and communities.

Empowering women to lead and effect change, Women Transcending also seeks to reshape the current narrative on incarceration through public programming and initiatives including the Women Transcending Collective Leadership Institute, Oral History Research Project, and The Right/Write to Heal.

Archival Partners

Our collection will be safeguarded and made acessible by archival partners in New York and California.

Freedom Archives
Visit website

The Freedom Archives, a non-profit educational archive based in Berkeley, is committed to safeguarding and disseminating historical audio, video, and print materials that chronicle progressive movements and culture from the 1960s to the 1990s. By offering free access to their digitized materials, the Freedom Archives serves as a valuable repository of cultural diversity and a crucial resource for students, educators, community groups, filmmakers, activists, historians, artists, media outlets, and researchers seeking to engage with and learn from the rich tapestry of progressive movements and cultural expressions spanning five decades.

We're partnering with the Freedom Archives to archive and activate our project's materials.

Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture
Visit website

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem stands as a leading cultural institution dedicated to the examination, preservation, and presentation of materials pertaining to African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

Operating as a division of The New York Public Library, the center boasts a collection of over 11 million items that shed light on the rich history, arts, and culture of the global Black community. Our project's 200+ oral history interviews and related ephemera will be housed at the Schomburg.

Creative Partners

In addition to traditional archival work, we're working with justice-impacted creatives to produce artwork across media that capture and amplify the experiences explored in our archive.

Empowerment Avenue
Visit website

Empowerment Avenue uses art, writing, journalism, and film to empower people in prison.

More specifically, they support talented writers and artists in prisons across the country, providing resources to get their creative work outside prison walls, be fairly compensated, and contribute their creativity to the movements of abolition, de-carceration, and liberation of incarcerated people. Moreover, they support capacity building for publications, galleries, museums and other organizations committed to this work, to help them meaningfully center currently-incarcerated people in creative spaces while fairly compensating them.

Street Theory
Visit website

Street Theory is an award-winning creative agency that activates communities, spaces, and global brands through street art, experiential marketing, cultural placemaking, branding, and design.

Central to their mission is the support and promotion of artists of color in making integral contributions to reshaping cities, neighborhoods, institutions, and communities into more diverse, multicultural, and tolerant spaces.

Newsletter

Join our mailing list to find out about Movements Against Mass Incarceration project, news, events, and more.