About This Site

In this space you will:

• Learn about criminal court processes, procedures, and actors.
• Deepen abolitionist analysis and critique. 
• Envision other ways of evaluating and adjudicating harm.
• Link campaigns to defund and divest from police to larger efforts to shrink the resources, size, power and hold of the criminal punishment system on our lives.

Beyond Criminal Courts: Divest and Defund is a collaborative project created by Community Justice Exchange, Interrupting Criminalization, and Critical Resistance.

For organizers

Overwhelmed and want help figuring out how to use this site? Check out our guide to how to use this site for your organizing!

Unless otherwise noted, the resources on this website were written by Rachel Foran and Zohra Ahmed, in collaboration with Andrea J. Ritchie, Mariame Kaba, and Woods Ervin.

We are grateful to be in struggle and community with brilliant people who provided critical feedback on different resources contained on this site: Amna Akbar, Emmanuel Andre, Monica Cosby, Premal Dharia, Sharlyn Grace, Savannah Felix, Eli Hadley, Andrea James, Katy Naples Mitchell, Atara Rich-Shea, Catherine Sevcenko, Jocelyn Simonson, Pilar Weiss, Amanda Woog, and Nathan Yaffe. Thanks to the law students who provided research and notetaking support: Jacob Friedman, Hailey Laurie, Charlie McKeown, and Millie Price. 

Sincere thanks for website feedback and testing: Daniel Chhum, Jacob Friedman, Nate Gilliam, Dawn Harrington, Andrea James, Puck Lo, Mon Mohapatra, Tiera Rainey, Ana María Rivera-Forastieri, Amita Swadhin, and Pilar Weiss.

Thanks to the organizers, thinkers, and practitioners who joined us virtually in November 2021 and June 2022 to imagine possibilities for exploring, evaluating, and adjudicating harm outside of criminal courts: Amanda Alexander, Emmanuel Andre, Avalon Betts-Gaston, Angelica Chazaro, Matt Clair, Monica Cosby, Cynthia Conti-Cook, Kelly Gillespie, Sharlyn Grace, Eli Hadley, Dawn Harrington, Katie Hurley, Andrea James, Talila Lewis, Erin Miles Cloud, Joey Mogul, Kate Mogulescu, Jumana Musa, Erica Perry, Atara Rich-Shea, Dylan Rodriguez, Brendan Roediger, Danielle Sered, Jocelyn Simonson, Dean Spade, Jennvine Wong, and JM Wong. Their insights and conversations inspired several resources on this website.

The website was built by Research Access Design. Illustrations by Noah Jodice. Web design support from C4 Tech & Design.

Spanish translations by tilde Language Justice Cooperative.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

If you have questions or feedback, please be in touch with us at [email protected].