Leverage advocacy strategies to effect change. After you have identified your power to effect change, formed partnerships with others in the community, gathered necessary evidence, and identified specific policy goals, you can utilize a broad range of advocacy tools to make your voice heard. These might include testifying at public budget or legislative hearings, organizing letter-writing campaigns, conducting briefings with key local or state decision makers, organizing a delegation of decision makers to visit the local jail or meet with people who have direct experience with incarceration in your community, or meeting directly with candidates for key local or state offices. For more details on these tactics, consult this advocacy toolkit tailored to the immigration justice space, and watch Vera’s website for a toolkit for organizing against jail construction in your community.
Educate the media. Local media can play an important role in garnering community support for jail decarceration efforts. Keep journalists, local newspapers, and other media outlets informed of your efforts, and leverage their platforms to convey a positive image of the work to the community. Connect reporters with objective data and subjective anecdotes that highlight systemic issues. The media can also help elevate successes, respond to misunderstandings or backlash, and hold system actors accountable for proposed actions toward decarceration.
Set clear goals and substantive benchmarks for achieving change. Some places have found it helpful to set target-date benchmarks to reduce jail populations or other similarly concrete goals to implement policy changes. Tracking benchmarks over time is also essential because jail incarceration trends may fluctuate; initial reductions are not always sustained.[]Oliver Hinds, Jasmine Heiss, and Olive Lu, The New Dynamics of Mass Incarceration (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2018), https://perma.cc/N7RF-XGXB. However, it is equally important to set goals that are not as straightforward to measure—such as community members’ perceptions of fairness and transparency of processes and agencies in the local criminal legal system—as it is to meet quantitative goals.
Prepare for temporary setbacks. There will inevitably be difficult moments in your local decarceration work. Know that you are not alone and that nearly all people who do this work will encounter a range of issues, including lack of data accessibility and transparency, lack of cooperation from key actors, political blowback, a key change agent stepping down from a leadership position, or something else unexpected. Having a strong coalition of support from other key actors and community members will help you to weather these issues. This work does not happen overnight, and your dedication to the long term will help you achieve meaningful changes.
