Crime Survivors Are Organizing. They Want Criminal Justice Reform, Too.

Change has come to the criminal justice system in Americas most populous state. Californias arrest rate last year dropped to its lowest level ever recorded , the result of a voter-approved initiative to reclassify several nonviolent felonies as misdemeanors. Funds saved by the drop in arrests are being shifted to other priorities like victim services and mental health treatment. Meanwhile, state residents with criminal records are currently benefitting from the largest opportunity in U.S. history to remove certain felonies from their records . Supporting these policy changes is a first-of-its-kind statewide network of crime victims , including survivors of violent crimes, who have lent their moral authority to reform efforts.

A linchpin of all these developments is a former punk drummer turned prosecutor named Lenore Anderson. She was the co-author and campaign chair of Proposition 47, the state ballot initiative that reclassified several felonies, and the nonprofit she leads organized the network of crime survivors. With big victories under her belt, Anderson is expanding her focus. Her new organization, Alliance for Safety and Justice , will deploy a similar model in a host of other states with large prison populations. The group is organizing new networks of crime survivors and pushing more states to shift resources from incarceration to effective alternatives.

Our most important goal is safety, she said. Over-incarceration is really unsafe. So our intervention is to ask, how are we spending our safety dollars?

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