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CLASP collaborates with movement partners to build abolitionist futures for youth and young adults by uplifting economic, racial, and social justice policy solutions to disrupt the relationship between poverty, race, and punishment. We amplify innovative, youth-led approaches to community safety that invest in life-affirming systems of care and eradicate systems that surveil, police, prosecute, or incarcerate Black, brown, and Indigenous youth and their communities.
Check out our new resources for insight into key issues, strategies, and principles surrounding justice.
"Public and private actors are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and other big data technologies to engineer new futures for structural racism and social inequality in the United States, a phenomenon that the sociologist Ruha Benjamin has termed the ‘New Jim Code,’” Clarence Okoh writes in his newest report, “Dangerous Data: What Communities Should Know About Artificial Intelligence, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and School Surveillance.”
Okoh's report helps youth justice advocates, youth leaders, educators, caregivers, and policymakers understand and challenge the impact of school surveillance, data criminalization, and police surveillance technologies in schools. This is critically important because, as Okoh writes, “These technologies are upending decades of civil and human rights legal standards, expanding mass criminalization, restricting access to social services, and enabling systemic discrimination in housing, employment, and health care, among other areas. The New Jim Code carries unique threats to youth and young adults of color, especially in the context of K-12 public schools. As the infrastructure of police surveillance grows in public schools, communities must be prepared to safeguard rights and freedoms of students and families.”
read the report
Check out CLASP’s recent advocacy challenging the impact of police surveillance technologies on the rights of youth and young adults:
- CLASP was one of over 40 social justice organizations that signed on to a letter from the NOTICE Coalition to the Department of Education demanding that the agency ban and divest federal funding for police surveillance technologies in schools. Read the letter here and coverage of the letter in EdWeek here.
- CLASP is a member of the PASCO Coalition, which successfully advocated for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate a Florida school district’s data-sharing practices with law enforcement. The DOJ announced a settlement agreement with the school district, citing civil rights violations related to the district’s use of threat assessments and exclusionary discipline against students with disabilities. Learn more about the agreement here.
- Okoh also testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on the impact of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies on the civil and human rights of marginalized youth. Check out his testimony here.
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