[ Abolitionists and advocates of criminal justice reform in Los
Angeles County have amassed some impressive victories, laying out a
vision for reducing incarceration and providing care that could have
national significance. ]
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LOS ANGELES IS CREATING A MODEL FOR FIGHTING MASS INCARCERATION  
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Mark Engler and Paul Engler
August 22, 2022
Dissent
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_ Abolitionists and advocates of criminal justice reform in Los
Angeles County have amassed some impressive victories, laying out a
vision for reducing incarceration and providing care that could have
national significance. _

JusticeLA activists at a rally in 2019 , Dignity and Power
Now/Facebook // Dissent

 

In the late spring and summer of 2020, protests for racial justice
erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd.
Mobilizations spread throughout the country and continued for months,
producing what scholars identified as arguably the largest wave
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mass protest in U.S. history.

However, as with other surges of popular uprising, the actions died
down over time. At that point, critics claimed that protesters made a
lot of noise and drew public attention but were unable to translate
their discontent into concrete policy gains. When the moment of peak
protest passed, these detractors held, the movement disappeared with
little to show for its efforts.

This narrative overlooks ongoing organizing efforts that have made
important gains both before and after mass protests captured the
spotlight. And there are few better places to see such organizing in
action than Los Angeles County.

While their work has gotten little national attention, organizers in
L.A. have amassed some impressive victories. First, in 2019, a
coalition against mass incarceration succeeded in stopping
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prison expansion plan that the county claimed would cost $2 billion,
but that activists and community leaders charged could drain in excess
of $3.5 billion in public funds. Subsequently, grassroots groups
steered the work of a county Alternatives to Incarceration Workgroup,
which in 2020 produced a set of recommendations that JusticeLA
[[link removed]], a coalition of more than fifty
community organizations, unions, and activist groups, called
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groundbreaking roadmap for decarceration and service expansion.”

Adopted by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors as official
policy in 2020, the Care First, Jails Last
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a detailed set of recommendations that “aim to provide treatment and
services to those in need, instead of arrest and jail.” Among them
are mandates to dramatically scale back cash bail, broaden
implementation of community-based harm reduction strategies, channel
funding to programs for at-risk youth, establish pretrial services in
highly impacted communities to replace law-enforcement supervision,
provide beds for those released from jail who are in need of interim
or supportive housing, and create urgent care centers to provide
trauma-informed mental healthcare throughout the county.

To make sure that these policies would actually be carried out—and
that budget shortfalls would not be used as an excuse for
stonewalling—activists secured a funding stream that is set to
channel hundreds of millions of dollars each year toward
alternatives-to-incarceration initiatives. In the wake of the George
Floyd mobilizations, organizers successfully pushed for the passage of
Measure J, requiring that 10 percent of the county’s unrestricted
general funds be invested in implementing the agenda. In principle,
this could translate to well over $300 million
annually. _Vox _called
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“perhaps the most significant victory for the police reform movement
since [the] summer’s protests.”

No doubt, the wins thus far are only partial ones. Activists have been
forced to fight against both bureaucratic intransigence and legal
challenges from deputy sheriffs. In March, they issued a report card
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administrators full of failing grades, accusing these officials of
falling short of their commitments. Court rulings impeded the initial
implementation of Measure J, although activists have since pushed
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county to honor the funding requirements. In spite of all the
difficulties, the model put forth by grassroots groups in L.A. holds
genuine promise, representing an effort to fundamentally reorient the
county’s approach to public safety and care.

Lex Steppling, a native of Los Angeles and National Director of
Organizing for Dignity and Power Now, has been present throughout
these battles. His group has been at the core of coalition drives to
pressure officials for change from the outside—and also to engage
with the county in its internal processes to craft and implement new
policies. Among other related efforts, Dignity and Power Now is part
of the executive committee of the JusticeLA coalition. We recently
spoke with Steppling about the model coming out of L.A. County and the
significance of local organizing to advance racial justice and oppose
mass incarceration for people in other parts of the country. Our
conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

MARK ENGLER: If we were to make a timeline, what would you say was
the first big campaign in the current drive against mass incarceration
here? Was it stopping L.A. County’s plan for prison expansion?

LEX STEPPLING: Timelines are difficult because nothing has a starting
point. Our organizing is always drawing off generational work. Los
Angeles plays a really important role in abolition conversations. We
go all the way back to George Jackson [the author of _Soledad
Brother_ [[link removed]]],
and to what came before him. The origin stories of the modern
conversation around abolition in some ways started with him. That
generational lineage is very fresh here.

Plus, the postmodern version of mass incarceration we see today was
first workshopped in L.A.: SWAT teams, the militarization of police,
policies like “three strikes,” gang databases and
injunctions—the whole legacy of Daryl Gates [LAPD chief from 1978 to
1992], and prior to him William Parker [LAPD chief from 1950 to 1966].

But yes, the recent condensed policy timeline started with us stopping
the jail plan through the JusticeLA campaign. They were going to build
multiple jails. Between 2018 and 2020, we were stopping all of it. We
were able to do that through grassroots power, collective pressure,
and having an alternative vision. The Alternatives to Incarceration
Workgroup came out of that.

Often, when you put pressure on a local government against something
they want to do, they’ll say, “Well, what are we supposed to do
instead? You guys are only good at diagnosing the problem, not
figuring out what to do.” 

We anticipated that and developed a very comprehensive plan around
what you could do instead of expanding the largest jail system in the
world. We put together the Los Angeles County Decarceration Report,
and we published [[link removed]] two
editions of that report. When we did stop the jail plan—which was a
big and profound win that no one thought was possible, because the
expansion plan had already been put in motion—the county moved
forward with a workgroup inviting all the stakeholders to develop an
agenda around what we do instead of building these jails. And we were
ready.

I don’t know whether their intentions with this workgroup were good
or not, but it actually became an excellent example of how civic
democracy can work in a participatory context. Because everybody came
to the table—not just us, not just people from the community, [but
opponents as well]. 

PAUL ENGLER: When I look at the alternatives to incarceration
program, I’m shocked by all the groups and individuals that have
signed on to it. It ranges all the way from abolitionists to very
mainstream people. 

STEPPLING: It speaks to the fact that we mobilized a bigger base than
anyone else. We essentially overwhelmed the county with a critical
mass of well-informed people. And we welcomed them to try to tell us
where we were wrong. Every analysis that we put forth, every demand
that we put forth, we had vetted it. We knew that we had to be
accountable for everything we were saying.

Local governments try to use think tanks and the consultant class to
counter your vision. In L.A. County, they tried to do that with the
RAND Corporation. But then RAND issued a study
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echoed what we said—which was that you can cut the jail population
in half through comprehensive diversion programming, and it will have
better public safety outcomes.

In creating our vision, many of us in the community were able to draw
on things we knew had worked before. For example, I drew on my
experiences from the mid-to-late 1990s, when we saw a bunch of public
health and public safety improvements. During the HIV crisis, a lot of
resources, relatively speaking, came into the community through public
health grants. Some of them found their way into the hands of local
community-based service providers, and a lot of dynamic programming
came out of it. You had free clinics, comprehensive sex ed, outreach
to sex workers, and genuine harm reduction health services, where
people could go and get the care they needed without being judged. And
you had youth programming that saved my life.

I didn’t finish school. The last grade that I finished was the tenth
grade, and I was out on my own for a number of reasons. I was able to
get a job at the L.A. free clinic to work with other “at-risk”
youth. At sixteen or seventeen years old, I became a certified HIV
counselor and worked with other young people to develop our own
curriculum to teach people in the community about safety. We
transitioned some of that into doing neighborhood peace work, working
intergenerationally to help stop the violence. All these dynamic
approaches were happening whether the government or the nonprofit
health funders realized it. And as a result, you had service clusters,
you had drop-in centers, you had clinical spaces, you had housing
programs, and you had job training programs, all done in a very
unconditional way. It wasn’t punitive.

I saw people coming through our programs having so much success. But I
also saw that my family members and friends who were going through the
court system were having horrible outcomes. I realized it was simple:
those who were facing the same risk factors as people getting
incarcerated, but who were getting treatment and services in ways that
were set apart from the court system, were having success. Those going
through the court system were not.

That was obvious to those of us who have been impacted by these
systems by virtue of where we’ve lived. We knew that the system of
law enforcement didn’t care about success; it cared about
punishment. It cared about the mass corralling of people. In contrast,
these public health models care about safety and health.

When the Alternatives to Incarceration process started, we took so
much of that perspective and essentially tried to force it into the
workgroup’s recommendations. In the final recommendations
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so much of what I just shared with you is in literally the first pages
of the report. That was something we were conspicuously able to muscle
in, because there was no real logic against it. And the
recommendations passed in full because the county felt the pressure
from the community.

PAUL ENGLER: It seems like Dignity and Power Now and the other
progressive forces in the workgroup were able to get all the
civil-society groups to coalesce and have some alignment around your
vision.

STEPPLING: That’s a good way of putting it. There was a coalescing
between the civil-society forces and the abolitionists around a
vision. And it was because that vision was undeniably the right
direction. There were more moderate people in the room, and I always
would say to them, “There’s a way forward, and there’s a way
backward, but there’s no way around this.” To be frank, if we had
let them dictate the direction, we would have gone back toward the
center. So we held a line: “If anybody tries to water down what
we’re doing, we will hold you accountable. Because we have no
choice.”

We could only do all that because we had the two editions of our
report laying out a very granular plan. Whether fair or not, we had to
have answers for everything. So we spent a lot of time developing
that. The county used the term “stakeholders,” but we would not
have even been considered a stakeholder if we had not forced our way
into the room by virtue of being the only ones who actually designed
something.

Part of how we were able to be part of the governance process was by
having very intentional conversations internally. This is always a
tricky thing to do in an activist community—to say, “We’re not
going to just do the protest stuff that they expect us to do. We’re
not going to just shut it down.” We had to say, “We’re building
something. We’re creating something, and it has to be
collaborative.”

But there’s a difference between collaboration and negotiation. We
said, “There is no negotiation. We will not accept anything but
these demands, but there will be collaboration, because we have to get
there together.” The only way you achieve that is by overwhelming
them with force. But it has to be a constructive force. To play the
inside game, we let the county take credit for a thing that we
developed and wrote—the recommendations are literally based off of
our two decarceration reports. You want the county to feel a sense of
proprietary energy, because then they’re more likely to carry it
out.

The tag line for the policy recommendations became “Care First,
Jails Last.” On the community side, we would have said, “Care
First, Jails Never.” But if you read the recommendations, it’s
essentially an abolitionist vision.

Mind you, we had to be very tactful because we also had the sheriffs
in the room. We had the probation department in the room. I was often
the one asked to go sit at the table with the sheriffs. That was a
really interesting experience, developing this alongside them.

PAUL ENGLER: In a lot of other cities, we see efforts to take small
bites out of the issue of criminal justice reform—for example, bail
reforms, or reducing sentences for nonviolent offenses, or treatment
of juveniles, or “ban the box
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campaigns. But your approach seems to be different, in that it unifies
these different issues into a single campaign with a common vision.

STEPPLING: I learned something a long time ago, when I stepped into
this more nonprofit, criminal justice reform world. I encountered this
professionalized version of advocacy, and I felt pretty horrified at a
few things. One was the siloing of the issues. Saying, “OK, we’re
just doing bail reform. We’re not talking about those other
things.”

We have to tell people the truth. And the truth is that the issues are
unified. One doesn’t exist without the other. We can close as many
brick-and-mortar jails as we want. But all we’re going to do is pave
the way for them to build new jails if we don’t tie it to the
policies that feed jails. And the policies that feed jails then have
to be tied to the policies that feed poverty, and so on—so that
we’re including not just the economic justice conversation, but also
one that talks about trauma, that talks about what family separation
actually looks like and the disruption it causes in communities.

I’ve always felt like the word “radical” can be a canard. So
much of what we demand is really sensible. It’s only radical in
relationship to the status quo. And the status quo is actually
what’s radical. A system of mass punishment and brutality—to me
that’s radical; that’s the hard line. 

I think the abolitionist vision is very sensible, because it’s about
models of well-functioning civic life. It’s about actual safety.

MARK ENGLER: In many situations, progressives might try to win a
policy change but leave it to the politicians to figure out how to
fund it. In the case of Measure J, you went directly after the money.
How did you land on that strategy?

STEPPLING: Measure J was a kind of addendum to Alternatives to
Incarceration. It was developed to ensure—or at least to try to
ensure—that they wouldn’t be able to use austerity as an excuse to
not implement the recommendations.

Measure J was a real stroke of genius on the part of [Dignity and
Power Now colleague Ivette Alé]. Ivette saw an opportunity: At the
county level in California, we have a ballot measure system. Usually
it requires signature gathering, which takes a lot of time and money.
But the County Board of Supervisors can also put something on the
ballot by virtue of a motion. And so we wrote a motion saying, “We
want L.A. County’s discretionary budget to be protected from law
enforcement, so they can’t dip into it. And we want 20 percent of
that discretionary budget, every year in perpetuity, to go to funding
the ATI recommendations.”

The supervisors came back to us and were like, “That’s insane.”

But we didn’t let up. We asked for 20 percent knowing that they
might say it was completely impossible. But to us, everything’s
possible. We ended up getting 10 percent of L.A. County’s
discretionary budget into a measure, which for us was still a massive
thing. On average, it’s about half a billion dollars per year. And
we got them to put it on the ballot.

They didn’t do it because they liked us. They did it because we had
them cornered, and because we had mobilized a critical mass. This was
right before the pandemic. Even then, we were anticipating them
creating an austerity narrative to not fund the vision they just
agreed to. And then the people promoting Measure J became their own
coalition, because groups such as the United Way reached out to us
wanting to help.

MARK ENGLER: Can you explain why this discretionary pool of money is
so important?

STEPPLING: The policies of how budgets work feel very conspicuously
designed to take agency away from communities. It’s one of the ways
that they limit democracy, or the power of democratic mandates.

The county wanted to do a jail expansion that we argued would have
cost $3.5 billion. So early on in JusticeLA, we went to people and
asked, “What could you do instead with that $3.5 billion?” It’s
always a good exercise for people to think about what we should
actually be investing in.

But the reality is that those billions that were earmarked for the
jail expansion plan cannot legally be taken and just put into schools,
for example. There are capital construction laws in California that
are complex and very difficult to get information on. As far as public
dollars are concerned, it’s easier in California to build a prison
than it is to build a library—or even to build a stadium or a
shopping mall.

Discretionary money at the county level is one of the few places where
there’s more flexibility. It’s up to the county to decide what to
spend it on. A lot of times, they don’t spend it at all. They just
try to develop a surplus. So we said, “Out of that discretionary
budget, you can easily find the money to fund Alternatives to
Incarceration.” The service clusters and clinical spaces we need,
the youth development work that saved my life—all that can be funded
with the discretionary budget.

PAUL ENGLER: It seems like a lot of your work has not just been about
getting these changes passed, but about getting them implemented once
they’ve already been adopted as policy. And that has involved
fighting inertia and taking on government bureaucracies that
are _not_ excited to carry out the changes. 

STEPPLING: We’ve had to deal a lot with the county CEO’s office.
It’s a very bureaucratically oriented office that doesn’t seem to
face the same pressure as politicians. In some ways, we let them off
the hook for about six months when we were embedded on the
inside—because we thought we were working with them in good faith to
develop the ins and outs of how the policy was going to be
implemented. And then when it was time to implement it, we saw that
they didn’t want to. This included not only Measure J, but also
things like closing Men’s Central Jail, or implementing our model
for independent pretrial services that do not rely on law enforcement.
They’re dragging their feet on that now, too. 

You encounter limitations in local government where they’re afraid
to do things that go against how they’ve been trained to administer.
It’s outside of their comfort zone, outside of how they’ve been
taught to do this. They agree with us that Measure J is good, yet
there’s still inertia. Sometimes we work with them to engineer
things perfectly, and then they still don’t do it.

Working in good faith on the inside worked really well with the
Alternatives to Incarceration recommendations. With implementation, it
didn’t work as well. To me, that has to do with the fact that our
outside game got diluted a bit.

There’s that great saying, “Don’t confuse access with
influence.” Once you have consistent, effective access to the
inside, sometimes folks get confused. And that’s where a lot of
stuff goes wrong. Just because you’re inside doesn’t mean shit.
The inside game is only so valuable. You have to always have a strong
presence on the outside. And that’s where I come from, politically.

PAUL ENGLER: If you were to take stock of the things you’ve won and
try to describe them for people outside of Los Angeles, what would you
say?

STEPPLING: The fact that we stopped the jail plan in less than a year
is amazing—let alone that we developed the visions that are now in
place. Alternatives to Incarceration is in place. Our vision for
pretrial services is approved. Measure J passed by a huge margin. An
earlier ballot measure—Measure R, giving subpoena power to the
Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission [in investigating complaints
against the Sheriff’s Department]—passed by more than 70 percent.
We’re doing work around coroner accountability, and a huge report
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came out from UCLA. I could go on and on. It’s almost like there
have been too many wins for us to even articulate.

And then there’s where our minds are at day in and day out. I know
that when we talk to activists, a lot of times it’s only negative,
because they talk about their frustrations. I don’t feel that way; I
don’t feel negative about any of this. I try to make sure I’m
looking at everything honestly, neither glass half empty or glass half
full.

For me it’s always, “How can we make sure that we’re politically
evolving, both drawing on history and in anticipation of what’s
coming? We’ve encountered the limitations of one kind of
collaborative relationship with local government. What new strategies
do we develop to make that collaboration better, while also reminding
ourselves that the outside has to still be the most robust force in
all of this?”

Some of the people that I respect the most get bogged down on the
inside sometimes. And it’s because they really want to make it work.
It’s easy to forget that the only reason we won in the first place
was that we overwhelmed them from the outside. The inside game only
exists because of the outside game.

_[MARK ENGLER is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial
board member at Dissent. PAUL ENGLER is founding director of the
Center for the Working Poor, in Los Angeles, and a co-founder of
the Momentum Training [[link removed]]. They are
co-authors of This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping
the Twenty-First Century
[[link removed]] (Nation
Books), and they can be reached via www.democracyuprising.com
[[link removed]].]_

_Research assistance provided by Akin Olla and Celeste
Pepitone-Nahas._

_Thanks to the authors for sending this to xxxxxx._

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* Racial Justice
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* incarceration
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* Mass Incarceration
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* Prisons
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* criminal justice reform
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