Inside/Outside Strategy
Philanthropy New York hosted a briefing on the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform (aka the Lippman Commission) earlier today. It was a fascinating event. I have been spending a fair amount of my time on this issue of late. Even so, I felt like I learned things from the session, which featured former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Glenn Martin of #CloseRikers, Ken Zimmerman of Open Society Foundations, Sarah Williams of Propel Capital, and Justin Lapatine of Global Strategy Group.
Ken Zimmerman made a persuasive argument (to me at least) that even funders without a declared interest in criminal justice should care about the topic. He said that every social policy issue (poverty, immigration, housing, education, etc.) inevitably involves people who are engaged in the criminal justice system.
Sarah Williams made the case that to achieve significant cultural change, you need both an inside and an outside strategy. Judge Lippman and Glenn Martin embodied the two sides of this coin. Martin talked about the various techniques that #CloseRikers has employed to raise public and political consciousness about the idea of closing Rikers Island. And Judge Lippman talked about how he marshaled various institutional players (including the Center for Court Innovation) to support the work of the Commission.
Speaking of Rikers, I wanted to share a few links:
An Urgent Checklist for Closing Rikers -- Daily News op-ed.
Goodbye Rikers -- Off Kilter podcast
Radicalized on Rikers -- Slant podcast from City & State
The End of Rikers? -- New Thinking podcast featuring Courtney Bryan
As even the most optimistic advocates will admit, there is still a lot of work to be done to make the dream of closing Rikers a reality. Certainly the Philanthropy New York session highlighted that there is a need for deeper, long-term investments on a number of fronts -- advocacy, direct service, research, and others. But I left feeling encouraged that there is an interest in criminal justice among the foundation community that simply didn't exist when I started working in this field twenty plus years ago.
