Our History
Civil Rights Corps (CRC) is a non-profit organization founded in 2016 that challenges systemic injustice in the U.S. legal system. We have pioneered landmark civil rights litigation that has liberated hundreds of thousands of people from illegal jailing, won tens of millions of dollars for the most vulnerable people in our society, pioneered political education and narrative strategies to change the way our society thinks about mass incarceration and family separation, and set the agenda for innovative solutions to make our communities safer. Our work is guided by a commitment to the people and communities harmed by policing, surveillance, incarceration, discrimination, and the criminalization of poverty. We work with individuals accused of crimes, people currently and formerly incarcerated, their families and communities as well as organizers, policy organizations, and government officials to shift power to social movements fighting for greater equality, freedom, and human flourishing.
For almost a decade, CRC has been challenging pretrial detention, cash bail, debtors’ prisons, mass supervision and surveillance, corporate profiteering, brutality, family separation, and other aspects of the punishment bureaucracy that oppress poor people and disproportionately harm marginalized communities. The goals of this work have centered on reducing the size and power of carceral bureaucracies; reducing the ability of corporations and governments to profit off of caging people; preventing family separation; increasing fairness, equality, and justice in the system; and reimagining health and safety.
The Crisis of Mass Incarceration:
- The U.S. spends $300 billion a year on prisons, police, prosecutors, probation, parole, courts, surveillance, and other forms of state control. These massive investments in state repression threaten all progressive social movements and are a key component in the imminent rise of authoritarianism.
- But these bureaucracies also surveil, infiltrate, repress, and crush progressive social movements seeking to reduce inequality of all forms.
- The system doesn’t work. It’s an ineffective and unaccountable bureaucracy that doesn’t keep us safe.
Investments in the root causes of violence and harm are far more effective, and far less destructive, than investments in punishment.
