From the beginning of our history, race has structured American institutions – with slavery and colonization as the country’s pair of original sins. Some forms of racialized domination end and then others take their place, as white supremacy reconstitutes itself in new guises. This tragic rhythm beats especially strongly in the carceral state: the Black codes picked up where slavery left off, and the rise of mass incarceration took on the function of Black codes. The growth of mass incarceration has always been an active policy choice to fund a punishment economy, with too many dollars flowing to prisons and law enforcement instead of to programs and institutions that can bolster thriving communities - like jobs, education, and healthcare.
CLICK THE IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD THE PROP 47 CASE STUDY
Recent social movements (especially Black Lives Matter) have turned a spotlight on the workings of the punishment economy, and have dramatically shifted public debate on criminal justice. After the massive demonstrations in the summer of 2020, people who had never before thought about the funding of local police departments waited in long queues to give public comment on city budgets. Citizens called for shrinking police department budgets and expanding investments in programs that support communities.
Such a reallocation of funds is part of a broader justice reinvestment strategy that The California Endowment describes as: "reimagining a criminal justice system that centers on prevention and healing." This strategy isn’t new. For years, criminal justice reform advocates and grassroots activists have pursued justice reinvestment, demanding that local governments shift resources from incarceration to communities. This work often happens in meeting rooms with members of local government, and so it rarely generates headlines. But when justice reinvestment advocacy succeeds, its influence over how the government spends money has a direct effect on daily lives.
In 2014, one such justice reinvestment effort met a critical milestone as California voters passed Proposition 47: The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, a law that changed six classes of non-violent felonies to misdemeanors. Prop 47 was designed to roll back mass incarceration in two ways. First, fewer people would be put behind bars; and second, savings from reduced incarceration1 would fund mental health and substance use programs designed to prevent justice system involvement. California’s Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) was chosen to administer the Prop 47 Fund, making program grants to public agencies (which in turn would partner with local nonprofits).
However, it is one thing to pass a law, and another thing entirely to implement it. There was no guarantee that the promise of Prop 47 would bear fruit. On the contrary, criminal justice advocates in California had had plenty of experience with promising reforms that were not able to escape the gravitational pull of a law-and-order approach to public safety. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a criminal justice advocacy group central to the Prop 47 implementation fight, saw two possible futures for the new law, one hopeful and one bleak:
California is essentially at a crossroads: Proposition 47 could be an early step in the movement to dismantle the culture of punishment and incarceration and begin repairing the devastation that over-incarceration has wrought on low-income communities of color, or it could fortify and expand the state’s reliance on incarceration for social control, further bloating the prison system and eviscerating the state’s most vulnerable and destitute communities.
In the bleak future, criminal justice institutions would recapture too many of the resources made available by the Prop 47 Fund. Instead of funding programs focused on community-based solutions to healing, Prop 47 grants might instead go to programs housed within the carceral state, such as services inside of jails or to probation officers acting as counselors. CJCJ worried about possibilities like these because of the BSCC’s shared law-and-order worldview: “The BSCC has historically appointed law enforcement and justice system officials, like sheriffs, probation officers, and CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] employees, to [their grantmaking committees], creating a bias away from community-based programs.”
To make real the hopeful future, criminal justice advocates mobilized for implementation advocacy, targeting the BSCC and its Prop 47 Fund grantmaking. Now that the proposition had passed, advocates took on job of ensuring it was implemented in a way that was authentically aligned with justice reinvestment principles. In doing so, they went up against a bureaucracy steeped in the law enforcement worldview. And they won.
Of the 23 grants the BSCC made from the Prop 47 Fund during the fund’s first grantmaking round in 2017, only three grantees were from law enforcement or corrections,2 and the dollar amount of these three grants translated into only 4% of the total funding ($4.6 million out of $103.6 million).3 These dollar amounts show that Prop 47 grantmaking did not, in fact, function as a mechanism to simply return dollars back to agencies that administer the carceral state. Instead, the grantmaking reversed the dynamic of the punishment economy.
The California Endowment, recognizing the magnitude of this win, commissioned a case study to tell its story. The Prop 47 study highlights the importance of implementation advocacy (which is studied less often than is advocacy focused on getting a policy passed). In addition, the study shares a new perspective on what it means to build power in the context of implementation advocacy, and offers a framework for understanding the centering of impacted communities in power-building as way of fighting testimonial injustice: the devaluing of speech spoken by those with marginalized identities.
Prop 47 Committee
Among the many lessons of the Prop 47 advocacy case are:
- Implementation advocacy - the work done "beyond the win"4 - is critical to a policy's ultimate success. It is easy to see the drama of advocacy engaged in the struggle to pass a policy. As a result, case studies usually look at policy wins (and losses), and pay scant attention to how policies are implemented. But implementation is where the rubber hits the policy road. The Prop 47 advocates who stayed in watchdog mode and brought their struggle to the BSCC were right to do so. Without their efforts, the bleak future that CJCJ pointed to could easily have come to pass. These advocates held the BSCC accountable to the justice reinvestment values embedded in Prop 47 – and as it happens, the story of their implementation advocacy has no shortage of drama!
- Implementation advocacy can offer important opportunities for power-building. We typically think of power-building in terms of large, organized constituencies with the capacity to pressure decision-makers from the outside. Implementation advocacy, on the other hand, usually hinges on the ability of advocates to build collaborative relationships with decision-makers inside administrative agencies. In this case, their power is related to their ability to influence key decisions. But implementation advocacy can work another way as well: advocates sometimes have the opportunity to join agency committees and actually become decision-makers. The structure and process of the BSCC created a small opening for advocates to join a committee that had meaningful authority over the Prop 47 Fund, and they pushed on that opening to successfully build institutional power inside the BSCC. Once they became members of the Prop 47 committee, advocates were in a position to ensure that grantmaking aligned with justice reinvestment principles.
“We pushed up on the BSCC, and changed the way they selected the [Prop 47 committee]. It was not a makeover, it was a takeover!”
- Prop 47 Advocate
- Authentic power-building centers impacted communities. The study of power-building must attend to the question of whose power is built. Are those moving into positions of influence or leadership people who speak “on behalf” of impacted communities? Or are they people from the impacted communities themselves? While there is room for allies in power-building strategies, strategies that don’t center impacted communities suffer from a foundational weakness. Only those who have directly experienced harm from systems of domination will have the insights necessary to offer policy solutions aimed squarely at liberation. Formerly incarcerated people were consistently at the center of Prop 47 advocacy. As a result, their institutional power-building resulted in a Prop 47 committee inside the BSCC that seated six formerly incarcerated people (out of 18). This was the first time such a committee had any members who had spent time in prison - let alone a third of the committee.
“The ideas and movement emerge from those closest to the pain.”
- Prop 47 Advocate
- As impacted communities assert their own expertise as part of implementation advocacy, they fight testimonial injustice and build power. Members of impacted communities are often marginalized – and people with marginalized identities suffer from testimonial injustice: listeners deny credibility to them as knowers and speakers.5 When someone is a victim of testimonial injustice, their speech is discounted and ignored. But members of impacted communities can assert their own expertise that grows out of the direct and personal experience of harm (along with other knowledge they bring to the table). The proud assertion of such expertise partly explains the fact that six formerly incarcerated people joined the Prop 47 committee. When formerly incarcerated people came to the BSCC as advocates, they made their expertise clear – and also claimed special authority as the people who know most intimately the harms of the carceral state, and who can speak truths that would otherwise remain hidden.
“The first meeting with formerly incarcerated people on the [Prop 47 committee] was a panel. … We totally changed the discourse. … We have a whole different kind of relationship to this issue. We speak from a place of personal experience. We were able to really highlight that we were the authorities.”
- Prop 47 Advocate
- Advocates can gain moral leverage by using a narrative strategy that exploits value contradictions inside organizations. It’s common for organizations to espouse separate sets of values that work at cross-purposes, or to act in ways unaligned with their stated values, or both. Such value contradictions can be powerful tools in advocacy campaigns, as advocates narrate a very clear moral choice: organizational leaders can act in alignment with a stated value, or they can subvert that value - a move that undermines their own credibility. As advocates raise the salience of this stark choice, they identify and highlight underlying tensions, thus forcing organizational leaders into uncomfortable public positions. A subset of the Prop 47 advocates pursued this strategy. The BSCC, despite stating justice reinvestment values as part of their work with the Prop 47 Fund, voted to make grants for jail construction. Advocates turned public comment on the jail construction program into a referendum on whether the BSCC truly believed in justice reinvestment. How could the BSCC simultaneously believe in shifting money from incarceration to communities and fund jails? In framing the narrative this way, advocates put the BSCC on the defensive and gained moral leverage in their advocacy. This leverage created additional eagerness on the part of the BSCC to demonstrate that they truly valued justice reinvestment. In practice, it bolstered earnest collaboration with advocates in the effort to ensure that formerly incarcerated people were fairly represented on the Prop 47 committee.
The story of Prop 47 implementation advocacy shines a light on the brilliant work of skilled, determined, and tireless advocates, all righteously centering the humanity and expertise of formerly incarcerated people. The heroes of this story undertook the painstaking grind of implementation advocacy that happens in the months and years after the big, thrilling win. Their success also provides a glimpse into how building institutional power can give advocates a perch from which to make social change. The implementation of Prop 47 could easily have reconstituted carceral harms. Instead, at this important site within California’s criminal justice system, advocates stymied the dynamics of the punishment economy and steered history in a new direction.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
What types of implementation advocacy have you studied or witnessed?
What power-building methods have you seen advocates use as they turned the administrative state into a site of struggle?
What effective implementation advocacy strategies have you seen advocates employ?
1 Sixty-five percent of the savings were allocated to prevention and rehabilitation programs. The other 35% of savings is designated for California’s Department of Education to implement crime prevention and support programs in K-12 schools (25%), and for trauma recovery services for crime victims (10%).
2 Merced County Probation Department, Pasadena City Police Department, and Plumas County District Attorney’s Office. 3 These amounts are calculated using data from a BSCC document listing the Prop 47 Grant Projects: Proposition 47 Grant Program, Cohort 1 Grant Cycle. It should be noted that some of the projects outside of those three had some partnerships with law enforcement or corrections agencies. However, the partnerships were not for service provision; they were for the purpose of setting up referral systems to service providers. 4 Stachowiak, S., Robles, L., Habtamariam, E., and Maltry, M. (2016) Beyond the Win: Pathways for Policy Implementation. ORS Impact & The Atlas Learning Project. 5 Fricker, M. (2003) “Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing.” Metaphilosophy. Vol. 34, No. 1: 154-173.