We are told the only solution to the symptoms of urban neglect—drugs, violence, joblessness—is more prisons, more police, and more punitive and discriminatory laws to lock more people up. A racist re-enslavement complex and rising police state are enveloping entire Black, Latino, immigrant, and low-income schools, communities, and individual lives—and tracking them into prison cells.

The Community Rights Campaign is organizing in L.A. high schools and among L.A.’s 500,000 low-income bus riders to build campaigns to push back the growing police/prison state and push forward an expanded social welfare state; push back the police/prisons/punishment approach to organizing society and push foward a resources/reparations/redistribution approach.

We organize high school students in Take Action after school clubs to stop the school-to-prison pipeline and the schools-as-jails culture in favor of building a positive, empowered learning environment. We also seek to build broad coalitions to defeat local and state initiatives (such as Prop 6 and Prop 9 on the 2008 ballot) and police state programs (such as regional gang-databases) that criminalize our communities.  Real public safety will be achieved only by challenging the Prison/Police State — not allying with it.

For more information visit: http://www.thestrategycenter.org/project/community-rights-campaign