Envisioning Justice

Arts Programming: Nine groups received funding in 2018 for their work inside the carceral system: groups working in Cook County Jail (ConTextos, Piven Theatre Workshop), the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (Fifth House Ensemble, Free Write Arts and Literacy, Literature for All of Us, Red Clay Dance Company, Young Chicago Authors), St. Leonard’s Ministries (Reading Between the Lines), and Stateville Correctional Center (Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project).

Follow the links above to learn more about each project.

Stories & Public Opinion: A series of fifteen project grants were made to support media makers of various types to help them tell important stories about lesser-known aspects of criminal justice. They range from arts groups and filmmakers to policy organizations and journalists, all telling stories in creative and engaging ways.

Learn more about each project:

• Adler University’s Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice, with researcher Dan Cooper, is developing an interactive website to host dialogue between an urban community of color, Austin, and a rural prison town, Pontiac, Illinois.
• The Chicago Community Bond Fund, which pays bond for people charged with crimes in Cook County, is producing films and animated videos explaining the bond system, centering the voices of people impacted by pretrial incarceration, with the goal of increasing dialogue around the harms of pretrial incarceration.
• Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, founded in 2011 as a cultural collective seeking justice for police torture survivors, will create public memorials embodying the experiences and testimonies of police-torture survivors.
• Chicago Votes, which was founded in 2012 and leads voter registration drives each month in Cook County Jail, tells the story of that work within the jail.
• Chicago-based freelance reporter and former NPR producer Jessica Pupovac produced a series of data-driven stories exploring the experiences of women in prison. Her stories were featured on NPR, in the Chicago Reporter, and elsewhere.
• Filmmaker Joshua Jackson is producing a series of six 10-minute video episodes, “From Prison to Professional,” telling the stories of formerly incarcerated people who have successfully transitioned into respected professions.
• The Juvenile Justice Initiative, a statewide policy advocacy center focused on reducing incarceration and ensuring fair treatment for children and emerging adults in conflict with the law is producing a film “Reimagine Youth Adult Justice” to highlight humane justice systems in Germany, Northern Ireland, Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere.
• Laurie Jo Reynolds co-produced the audio project A True Person of No Status in partnership with the Chicago 400, a group of men who are on public conviction registries and who are experiencing homelessness as a result of Illinois housing banishment laws for people with past convictions.
• Mikva Challenge, founded in 1998, develops youth to be empowered, informed and active citizens. With Envisioning Justice support for Mikva’s Juvenile Justice Council, young people who meet regularly with key justice system stakeholders will produce videos and blogs to communicate their city-wide advocacy on juvenile justice reform.
• Artist and activist Rachel Wallis is producing the “Inheritance Quilt Project,” which tells the stories of incarcerated mothers and the impact of incarceration on their families, through storytelling and design workshops.
• Read/Write Library, which preserves and provides access to local community media, is producing “Incarceration and Information,” three pop-up libraries featuring work from their collection produced by people who are incarcerated and their allies on the outside as well as materials from the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project.
• Storycatchers Theatre produced Changing Voices, a partnership with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to better train new CPD recruits.
• StoryCorps, which runs the StoryBooth at the Chicago Cultural Center, partnered with community groups to record and preserve stories of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system, to hold listening events and to provide training for partnering organizations to use stories to enrich their work.
• The Voices and Faces Project, created to bring the names, faces and testimonies of survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations to the public, produced with Brothers Standing Together and the Goldin Institute a two-day testimonial writing workshop for formerly incarcerated men who then shared their work at a public reading.
• Victory Gardens Theater produced Pipeline, by MacArthur Fellow Dominique Moresseau, and with Envisioning Justice support was able to partner with a number of community groups on outreach.

Civic Dialogue: The Envisioning Justice initiative grants program provided a series of micro-grants to groups across the city of Chicago to hold public discussions around criminal justice. Follow the links below to learn more about each organization.

Grants ranged from community-based discussions held on the far south side (New Life Baptist Church of Chicago, for “The Community Speaks” dialogues), Woodlawn (Experimental Station, for “Visualizing Racial Justice”) and Uptown (The Japanese American Service Committee, for the “Memories of Now” speaker series), to citywide discussions such as The Chicago Freedom School (“The Intersections of Mass Incarceration, Immigration and Youth: Can we imagine a future without jails?”) to Harry S. Truman College (“Dialogue on Returning Citizens and Opportunities”).

Other groups that participated included: Community Film Workshop of Chicago, ConTextos, Geneseo Public Library, Kalapriya Center for Indian Performing Arts, South Asian American Policy Research Institute (SAAPRI), SAM, Inc., and Social Change.