The Criminal Justice Initiative (CJI) began in 2000 as program of The Funding Exchange, a progressive foundation based in New York. Born out of a growing concern with prison expansion, mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, as well as understanding the limited funding for progressive criminal justice organizing, the CJI Circle was established to create a new source of support for meaningful, transformative and systemic change of the criminal justice system. CJI was founded as a community of activists and donors working together based on the recognition that to change systems that affect all of us, we must all work together. CJI has been housed at Solidago Foundation since 2009. Following the 2016 grant cycle, CJI will have given away over $2 million dollars in grants to over 50 grassroots organizations working to transform the criminal justice system.

 

VISION

They envision a world in which all people are acknowledged, valued, and supported to maximize their potential and share their innate gifts with the world. They envision a world in which incarceration and prisons are not the first response to harm caused, but rather that harm is addressed in ways that affirm the humanity of both those responsible and those who have been harmed. They are all interconnected and interdependent, and they envision a world in their systems acknowledge this interdependence by affirming all of their humanity. 

 

MISSION

CJI’s mission is to end Mass Criminalization and Mass Incarceration in the United States by building and strengthening the infrastructure of the grassroots criminal justice movement. They fund where the movement is developing, shifting and growing. They fund work that uproots the systems that harm and perpetuate injustice while sewing justice, healing, atonement, kinship, creativity, and love in its place. CJI believes this movement should be led by those most impacted by the injustices of the current system, working in alliances across race, class, faith, gender, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status and age.

 

PRINCIPLES

They believe that the current criminal justice system was and is a means of control rooted in slavery and Jim Crow, and designed to create an exploited underclass. They believe that this system thrives off the criminalization of many peoples' daily lives and disproportionally affects black and brown people, poor people, transgendered and queer people, people with a history of mental, developmental or emotional disabilities, women and young people, Muslims and people of other U.S. religious minorities, and activists.

 

They believe that violence is largely caused by lack of access to resources and opportunity, and that the current system based on retribution and punishment hijacks resources that could provide essential services--housing, food, education, and health care--in favor of caging human beings, routine torture, and perpetual punishment that denies the humanity of those affected. They believe that a denial of any person's humanity injures the humanity of each of us, and all of us collectively. Hurt people hurt people. This must stop.

The only way to stop this madness is through building up the power of those affected so they can lead a movement that challenges the status quo and provides not just a vision, but a blueprint for a new social order. They believe that they need a critical mass of people, those most impacted along with like-minded lovers of justice, of every hue and class, who join in demands for change and the accountability of those responsible.

They believe that you are essential to that movement for change.

 

VALUES

Funding for movements should be accountable to those movements.

People directly impacted by injustice, especially formerly incarcerated people, should be leaders of their own liberation movement.

They cannot move forward as a society without the transformation of both systems and selves. They value their funding model as a way to do both.

Whole selves--Their work is based on the belief that each of us has more to bring to social justice work if they bring their whole selves. They each have more to offer than expertise, money, connections, or only one part of their identity. They believe that part of the violence of privilege and oppression in their society is that it cuts us off from their humanity and their ability to see others as their full human selves. They value the CJI process as one that affirms the wholeness, gifts and strengths of each of us in their uniqueness.