Serving the Justice Involved Community

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** Justice Services
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Led by Amani, our Director of Justice Services, STV + PID has spent the year making big gains in IDs and voting for currently and formerly incarcerated citizens.

One of the things we noticed early in our work is how many returning citizens came to us for ID help. Unsurprisingly, jails and prisons aren’t usually very considerate about taking and replacing IDs and upon release people are told to get jobs right away but aren’t given the documents they need to do so. We have also seen the homeless to prison cycle repeat itself over and over as we both criminalize homelessness and don’t help people reentering society get the jobs and homes that would keep them off of the streets.

One of our biggest wins this year was setting up a program through which the Michigan Secretary of State (the agency that distributes IDs in Michigan) directly visits jails, obtains IDs, driver’s licenses, and commercial driver’s licenses for soon to be released residents, and directly bills Spread The Vote + Project ID. We piloted this program over two years ago and were finally able to get this program started a few months ago. At the first visit, the SOS helped 34 people get IDs that day. We will be expanding the program to multiple jails across the state in 2023.

Along with the need for IDs, we also found that the over 400,000 currently incarcerated citizens- mostly those being held pretrial because they can’t afford bail or folks who have been convicted of misdemeanors- who were eligible to vote weren’t getting the opportunity to do so. So we started Vote By Mail in Jail ([link removed]) , the only national program to help incarcerated citizens vote.

This year, our Justice Services department made some huge wins in that area. We communicated about voting with almost 4000 incarcerated citizens, helped almost 2000 register to vote, and over 1300 people submitted ballots from jail.

We also run the Fines and Fees program, an initiative designed to help clear the many, many fines that our clients face, blocking them from receiving the driver’s licenses that they so often need to work and provide for their families. It is almost impossible to leave incarceration without some amount of fines and fees, not to mention people who just get something as simple as a traffic ticket that severaly impacts their lives. We have seen fees from a few hundred dollars to over $10,000. Our budget doesn’t allow us to cover all of these fees but our clients desperately need their driver’s licenses, so we started the Fines and Fees fund ([link removed]) to help. That’s how we helped Alice ([link removed]) , a single mother who needed an ID just to register her kids in school but then needed to pay
a ticket to get the driver’s license that would help her provide for them.

In 2023 we’ll be helping more incarcerated citizens vote, setting up even more ID partnerships with jails and prisons across the country, and paying even more fines and fees. Will you commit to supporting currently and formerly incarcerated citizens next year? Together we can make a difference in so many people’s lives.

Thanks as always,

Kat
Support our Justice Services Work ([link removed])
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