Criminal Justice Reform
The United States incarcerates its citizens more than any other country. Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts the poor and people of color and does not make us safer. EJI is working to end our misguided reliance on over-incarceration.
EJI believes ending mass incarceration is the civil rights issue of our time. We challenge excessive punishment in court, advocate for parole and provide re-entry support, and advance systemic reform through research, education, and narrative work.
Racial Justice
EJI believes we need a new era of truth and justice that starts with confronting our history of racial injustice.
American history begins with the creation of a myth to absolve white settlers of the genocide of Native Americans: the false belief that nonwhite people are less human than white people. This belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynching’s, demanded legally codified segregation, and spawned our mass incarceration crisis.
The dehumanizing myth of racial difference endures today because we don’t talk about it.
EJI is working to change that. We’re exposing the myth and its toxic legacy in our reports and videos-and on this page. Our Community Remembrance Project is empowering communities to change the physical landscape to honestly reflect our history. And we’re using the power of place to inspire people to visit Montgomery, Alabama, to learn and reflect in our Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Public Education
For more than 30 years, EJI lawyers have been winning relief for clients by telling their stories. We’ve overturned wrongful convictions and unfair sentences by exposing official misconduct and racial bias. We’ve had tremendous success in courtrooms across the country. But America needs and deeper and broader narrative shift to move from mass incarceration into an era of truth and justice: we need to honestly confront our history.
We’re harnessing the power of place to change a physical landscape littered with thousands of Confederate monuments but next to none about slavery or lynching. We’re working with communities to install historical markers and collect soil from lynching sites, and in 2018, we opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. More than 600,000 people have come to Montgomery to learn, remember, and commit to truth telling about our history.
