Western Prison Project Becomes Partnership for Safety and Justice

Article by David Rogers

After seven solid years of work, the board and staff of the Western Prison Project decided to take a step back from our work to reflect on what we have accomplished, assess how our work has evolved, evaluate changes in the external landscape, and envision how we can best sustain and strengthen our work. This strategic planning process has been valuable in affirming our past work and in developing a useful roadmap for the future. Although core parts of our work will remain the same, we are also excited to describe some new directions for our work.

Our New Name: Partnership for Safety and Justice

The scope of our work has grown since our founding as the Western Prison Project back in 1999. We have expanded our range of issues and we have brought in important new constituencies. Our new name better reflects the multi-faceted nature of our work, the importance of bringing people together to create change, and the values that unite us. We will continue to advocate for a criminal justice system that is just and that more effectively creates the types of safe communities we want to live in.

Geographic Focus: In addition to our new name, we are letting go of our regional capacity building program (that worked with criminal justice reform groups) to become a state-based organization in Oregon. We have maintained our regional capacity building work without dedicated funding over the past couple of years; at the same time we have been developing a deeper and more vibrant grassroots base in Oregon. Going forward, we will focus on the place where we have the broadest and deepest base, and the greatest potential to make change. We are thrilled about intensifying our work in Oregon, yet it is also hard to change our relationship to the dedicated activists and organizations working throughout our old region. We did not make this decision lightly, but we believe that we can be most successful in creating change by staying strategic and working on a realistic scale.

Because we place a high value on movement-building, we will continue to serve as an information resource center for criminal justice issues throughout the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana). We will continue to provide prisoner support referral information to incarcerated people in our new four-state region, and we will continue to point our members towards “news you can use” about changes in the criminal justice system in these states.

Mission Statement: We have revised our mission statement to both affirm our vision and direction over the past seven years, and to articulate our evolving analysis, programs, and constituencies.

Our new mission statement is:

Partnership for Safety & Justice unites those most affected by crime, violence, and the criminal justice system (people convicted of crime, survivors of crime, and the families of both) to advance approaches that redirect policies and resources from an over-reliance on incarceration to effective strategies that reduce violence and recidivism, and increase personal and community safety.

Our Four New Programs:

We are also re-structuring our program work. Although the content of our work remains mostly unchanged, we have re-organized our work in ways that would be more easily explained and understood by the range of individuals and groups we relate to. The following is a brief description of our new program structure.

The Prison Program:

The Prison Program continues our focus on people in prison and the conditions under which they are confined. The program advocates for increasing access to quality programs within prisons that strengthen rehabilitation, ensuring that prisoners and their families have access to information on issues directly affecting the incarcerated, and preventing the implementation of policies or legislation that further erode the constitutional and human rights of incarcerated people.

The Safety and Sentencing Program:

This program works to develop approaches to public safety that help foster safe communities, are fiscally responsible, and reduce our reliance on prisons. The program promotes safe and sensible sentencing reform (such as reform of mandatory minimum sentencing laws), alternatives to incarceration, and diversion programs.

Crime Survivors for Community Safety (CSCS):

CSCS is dedicated to building the voice of survivors of crime and violence to promote progressive responses to the needs of survivors and to support criminal justice reform that reduces future violence without increasing our reliance on prosecution and incarceration.

Beyond Barriers:

Beyond Barriers focuses on eliminating the civil and social barriers formerly incarcerated people experience. The program works to create a society that better supports the successful re-entry of people returning to the community from prison and jail.

All of our programs will work together to build the leadership and voice of the people most affected by crime, violence, and the criminal justice system – survivors of crime, people convicted of crime, and the families of both. We are the first grassroots advocacy organization in the country to unite all of these constituencies and we are committed to continuing this approach. We believe this strategy offers a holistic perspective and an effective strategy for shifting the criminal justice system away from the punishment paradigm and towards more effective approaches to creating community safety.

We are incredibly excited about the results of our strategic planning process and have a strong roadmap for the organization’s future. On October 1st, we will officially become Partnership for Safety and Justice. At that point, you will see our new website, redesigned logo and materials.

Beginning Monday, October 2nd, we will be answering our phone “Partnership for Safety and Justice.” If you have any questions about what these changes might mean, feel free to give us a call or email us. We’ve experienced great success these many years thanks to the commitment and participation of our members and allies, and we’re looking forward to the next seven years.
 

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Justice Matters.