(Carolyn Kaster / AP Photo)
Last month, the state of Missouri executed 55-year-old Marcellus Williams, who spent two decades in prison, despite prosecutors’ efforts to overturn his conviction for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle.
The victim’s family and the St. Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office joined Williams’ family, faith leaders and thousands of community members in asking decision-makers to spare his life. But neither their pleas nor revelations of mishandled evidence and racially biased jury selection were enough to outweigh a legal system with disdain for human life.
This pattern of unjust sentencing to death is true across America. That includes my own state of Tennessee, where lawmakers and lobbyists make laws that fail to keep community members safe, attempt to disappear problems through legislation confining people to prison, and use state execution in an attempt to right the wrongs of harm. This systemic injustice does not honor the will of the people, will not bring victims justice and will not make us safe.
In Tennessee, like many cities and states across the country, far too many decision-makers are obsessed with an antiquated and draconian definition of community safety. Their definitions include increasing the number of reasons a young person can be prosecuted as an adult; bail reform measures “amending the state constitution and allowing judges to not set bail for a wider variety of chargers”; increasing police presence in schools; and blended sentencing, which enables juvenile courts to impose adult sentences.
My work in high schools, community centers and as a criminal defense attorney in communities impacted by incarceration and gun violence has forced me to ask how we can address the criminal legal system’s dehumanizing character and build safe communities.
The dominant definition of community safety is driven by the idea that the arrest, prosecution and detention of young people are what make a community safe. This is not true.
Too often, the people responsible for defining community safety are not the people impacted by police, prosecution, incarceration and harm. Without the input of young people and their families, the solutions we imposed fail to get to the root cause of harm in communities and to address the racial and economic disparities that corrupt the juvenile justice system.
By organizing people impacted by both harm and the criminal legal system and inviting them to use democracy to shift power to those communities, we can help solve the systemic safety issues in our communities.
According to The Sentencing Project, 27,500 young people were held in juvenile detention facilities in this country, a significant 75% drop from 2000. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2021, 2,250 young people under 18 were held in adult prisons or jails, a drop from the 2008 peak of 10,420.
This shift is encouraging, but more improvement comes from shifts in processes, programs and systems. Addressing the juvenile justice system failures has to come from people and communities most impacted by systemic harm. There must be new infrastructure and strategies to ensure that communities and families impacted by systemic and intra-community harm lead in developing solutions.
Participatory democracy – which includes people’s movement assemblies, town halls, mass meetings, participatory budgeting workshops, community surveys and leadership development — is the vehicle to develop solutions to these issues. Impacted people must be involved in organizing for policies that align with those solutions and engage in the co-governance needed for implementation.
And there are models we can follow. In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project organized parents, teachers, and students to redefine school safety and pass the George Floyd Resolution for Police-Free Schools. The People’s Coalition For Safety and Freedom used participatory democracy to engage community members in multiple states to co-develop The People’s Bill for Safety and Freedom, a proposal for a law to replace the harmful Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the 1994 Crime Bill).
Participatory democracy can be a powerful mechanism for people to collaborate with decision-makers to implement such policies and programs, fundamentally changing the power dynamics between communities and elected officials.
Here in Nashville, the city is attempting to address gun violence and racial disparities in the criminal legal system using participatory democracy tools. Students and their families impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison industrial complex have worked with the Southern Movement Committee, which I lead, to propose the Varsity Spending Plan, a $10 million investment in young people, families and neighborhoods.
This past summer, Metro Nashville Council voted to pass a portion of the Varsity Spending Plan, with a $750,000 investment to build an Office of Youth Safety inside Nashville’s city government. The next steps in the campaign are to build out the office to ensure it is an alternative to courts, police and jails.
These processes can be replicated across the country. To honor and implement community-based visions of safety centered on care and compassion, we must use a people-centered process.