On Zoom; register here. Communities Not Cages is a new statewide campaign building the power of people and families impacted by mass incarceration to overhaul New York’s racist and draconian sentencing laws. Together, we’re taking on mandatory minimums, two- and three-strike laws, opportunities for re-sentencing, and good/merit time laws with the goal of decarcerating state prisons, reducing the power of prosecutors to coerce pleas and dictate sentences, and addressing the harms of the carceral sentencing laws passed in the 1970s and 1990s that have metastasized into our current crisis of mass incarceration. Over the past year, we have drafted three bills that will be at the heart of the legislative advocacy component of this fight.

So far, the campaign has been a powerful collaboration between CCA, Bronx Defenders, Citizen Action, Drug Policy Alliance, fwd.us, Legal Aid, New York Communities for Change, New Hour for Women and Children – LI, New York Civil Liberties Union, Partnership for the Public Good, and Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), as well as Appellate Advocates, Brooklyn Defender Services, Center for Appellate Litigation, CUNY Criminal Defense Clinic, Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, New York County Defender Services, and many others who have provided key input.