Our Approach
At Common Justice, we leverage our experience in New York to support the expansion of alternatives to incarceration for violent felonies nationally. We do this by forming deep partnerships with aligned initiatives across the U.S. and supporting them with the training and community to help ensure their work flourishes. Despite significant retrenchment in efforts to end mass incarceration broadly, never since our founding have we experienced such a robust and serious appetite for expanding these solutions.
At the core of our approach is a focus on relationship-building and trust. We prioritize jurisdictions where there is a genuine invitation and a well-established movement for change, actively seeking concrete solutions to violence. We partner with people and organizations working to divert cases of serious violence in the adult courts away from prison sentences and toward strategies that hold people accountable for harm, break cycles of violence, and secure safety, healing, and justice for survivors.
Common Justice Practitioners Lab
The Common Justice Practitioners Lab is a 10-month cohort-based training and practice space for groups in jurisdictions that are not core partners but are fully values aligned and immensely promising. The Lab is designed to be collaborative and interactive, drawing from the experiences of the Common Justice team and Lab participants grappling with shared challenges to co-create the practices and conditions necessary to divert cases of violence well. We aim to foster a network of solidarity with our cohort members as they build and implement impactful diversion programs for serious violence nationwide.
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New York City Collaborative to Transform Violence
Anchored in our mission, the New York City Collaborative to Transform Violence aims to build bridges between restorative justice and Community Violence Intervention (CVI) work. In Year 2, this 8-month Restorative Justice Training of Trainers will develop a core team of community violence intervention practitioners interested in bringing restorative justice more deeply into their day-to-day work. Participants will develop key skills and then deliver training to larger cohorts at their own and affiliated organizations.
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Community Workshops
The Common Justice Community Workshops is a virtual series where we will gather with our broader community, explore the core principles that guide our work, and learn alongside each other as we navigate this moment in our shared history. We welcome both experienced practitioners and people newly drawn to this work to join us in conversation about how we approach restorative justice and violence, and to explore critical questions about safety, accountability, and racial equity in the context of addressing serious violence.
Learn More & RegisterGuiding Principles
Survivor Centered Solutions
We prioritize the needs and voices of survivors, focusing on their healing and safety.
Strategic Legal and Political System Navigation
We navigate relationships with entrenched systems and push them to act differently in specific cases and to take steps that reduce harm and transfer power back to the communities most impacted by violence.
Our Core Partners
At the heart of our Partnerships and Training work are our Core Partners—organizations with whom we have deep relationships, shared values, and a commitment to building survivor-centered alternatives to incarceration for serious violence. These partnerships reflect years of trust-building, shared learning, and collective effort to develop approaches that are rooted in community and responsive to local context.
We walk alongside our Core Partners over the full arc of program development and early practice, offering long-term, customized support that includes training, technical assistance, and strategic guidance. This work focuses on strengthening community-led efforts to reduce harm, support survivors, and expand what safety can look like beyond incarceration.
Our current Core Partners include the Freedom Community Center in St. Louis, MO; the People’s Advocacy Institute in Jackson, MS; and the Raphah Institute in Nashville and Memphis, TN.
Ecosystem Partners
We understand our work as part of movement and work to contribute to our shared success more broadly. We foster a broad network, sharing foundational resources and engaging in field- and public-facing dialogues to advance aligned work in varied contexts.
To learn more, reach out to Stephan Thomas at sthomas@commonjustice.org or RJ Maccani at rmaccani@commonjustice.org.