Dignity and Power Now, its program Freedom Harvest and its Deputy Director of Health and Wellness, Melanie Griffin were presented at this year’s We Rise Los Angeles.

The We Rise cohort was a gathering of activists and organizers who do work related to abolition, put on by an organization based in Portland called Freedom to Thrive. It was a lovely training where folks got a chance to dialogue about how we can commit our organizations to dream and vision abolition into reality. We participated in different exercises like a visionary fiction writing workshop, shared strategies for prison divestment, and dove into how we all must center Black and Trans people(and especially the intersections of these identities) into our movements for liberation.

The urgency to end the overcrowding and torturous conditions inside L.A. County Jails is shared by the community and County officials alike; and the fastest, most holistic approach to alleviating conditions is an expansion of community-led diversion and alternatives to incarceration. Shifting its focus, L.A. County can look to the core issues of houselessness, access to mental and behavioral health services, and pretrial reform to provide immediate and sustained relief.

Compared to those with relative economic stability, houseless people are 17 times more likely to be criminalized and funneled into the criminal justice system. Thousands of people who do not have a place to live are warehoused in the L.A. County jail system. Additionally, 5,300 people in the L.A. County jail system are suffering from mental health needs and/or exhibit varying behavioral and clinical needs. At forty-four percent, the number of people incarcerated pretrial in the L.A. County jail system represents nearly 7,500 detained bodies at any given time. These people have not been convicted of the current offense and are only incarcerated because they and their loved ones are unable to pay for their pretrial freedom by way of money bail. The Office of Diversion and Reentry has helped to decarcerate over three thousand people from our County jail system in the last three years, and have identified an additional 3,000 people in the County jail system who have behavioral health needs and who are houseless- all of whom would have better outcomes if they were placed in community-based services and provided with integrated care.

The #JusticeLA Campaign urges the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to invest serious and significant county dollars towards the development and scaling up of a local and decentralized system of community based services that offer integrated mental health and substance use services, as well as genuine alternatives to incarceration that allow for safe and sustained decarceration of our most vulnerable populations- those cycling in and out of our County jail system. Additionally, #JusticeLA urges the Board to establish a pretrial system based on the presumption of innocence, bolstered by needs and strengths assessment, while ending the practice of using money bail to reserve pretrial freedom only for those who can afford it. For years, directly impacted people, their loved ones, advocates, and justice system and reform experts have called for the County to invest in these desperately needed supportive services and demand that the Board stop spending its limited resources on building new jail beds.

The largest jail population in the entire U.S. is incarcerated in Los Angeles County. Check out our “Decarceration Report: A New Vision for LA County” and join us and the #JusticeLA coalition in urging the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to stop the jail plan and invest significant County dollars towards alternatives to incarceration.

Read the full report

The following statement is from Dignity and Power Now in response to the news that the Los Angeles Police Department is pulling over Black drivers at disproportionately high rates.

“Over policing has always harmed public safety, including the reality that it can allow an already unnecessary interaction with a community member to escalate to harm and death. The LAPD, unfortunately, has a well-documented legacy of such tragedies. While some may think traffic stops are innocuous, they are often the point of contact between law enforcement and community that leads to instances of abuse and loss of life. In addition, some fail to realize the real economic consequences that lead to thousands of dollars taken out of family’s homes to pay for the consequences of unnecessary traffic stops. Black drivers in LA and Black folks in LA, in general, do not have a healthy relationship with the LAPD, and the LAPD does not have a history where they can brush this news off, or make any reductive excuses.”

Dignity & Power Now stands in proud and committed solidarity with the teachers of Los Angeles. UTLA teachers stand on the frontlines of the generational struggle that is the impetus for our organizational existence, and we know that a better L.A. is not possible without a robust system of support for the incredible work and passion of our school teachers. In an era where more money goes to locking people away than it does to offering education, the demands of teachers represent a struggle we all share. The system of mass incarceration cannot be divorced from the generational undercutting of public education, and a healthy Los Angeles is only possible when the Los Angeles Unified School District is accountable to the youth who they are in service of.