We are facing unprecedented challenges to America’s long fragile experiment in democracy. There are countless risks we have to manage. One central one is our underestimation of the role of the criminal legal system in securing a multiracial democracy.

All too often, criminal justice reform is considered ancillary to other more central dimensions of a functioning civil society: the protection of voting rights and freedom of speech, adherence to the constitution, and the assurance of meeting people’s basic material needs, among others. The sector is often regarded as morally desirable but not quite necessary to democracy, and as a body of work that implicates only a small segment of our society. This orientation vastly misunderstands the scope and role of the criminal legal system in a democracy. Below we offer an invitation to reorient toward this work and its impacts on our shared future.

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Danielle Sered Executive Director