At Just Communities Arizona, we work alongside and for people with convictions, formerly incarcerated people, and our shared communities to:
- Center their stories
- Cultivate the next generation of community leaders
- Reframe justice through a lens of healing, not retribution
- Dismantle outdated ideas and harmful systems
- Build community-based solutions
The work we will do as Just Communities Arizona is a continuation of our decades of advocacy and organizing to reduce the size and scope of the punishment system, but with a complementary focus on fostering and resourcing new community-based approaches that contribute to safe and healthy people and communities.
Just Communities Arizona is an abolitionist organization–we are building a world in which prisons and jails are unnecessary. We envision a world in without prisons and jail. This requires two types of responses to the punishment paradigm: Work that dismantles the current system and work to co-create true alternatives that center power within communities and support them in creating safety, well-being, and abundance.
As our new name implies, this new organization will build on our successful work by uplifting and strengthening community-led solutions that create safety completely outside the punishment system. We will build a reverse pipeline that frees people and resources from the punishment system and delivers them back into the hands of their communities.