Eris Eady, a project organizer at the Alliance for Safety and Justice, began a Zoom call this week with a request to the hundreds of participants: Tell us why, or for whom, you are here.
The answers poured into the in-meeting chat. “For my son,” who was fatally shot. “For survivors of mental and emotional abuse.” “For myself.” “For all our Black men and boys.”
And then: “For those who don’t think that voting makes a difference.”
For all that narratives about crime shape American politics, crime survivors are rarely centered in the conversation, if they are heard at all. Many express a sense that their voices and their needs don’t matter at the polls, just as they didn’t matter to the person who shot, assaulted or otherwise harmed them.
Hence the Zoom call, which served as the introductory event for a new campaign called #HealTheVote that aims to turn out 100,000 crime survivors for the coming election.
The Alliance for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that supports crime prevention and rehabilitation programs instead of mass incarceration, will announce the initiative on Friday.
Its premise is that crime survivors are, like women or working-class voters or people with disabilities, a constituency with distinct needs that elected officials should be pushed to address — and also that engaging in the political process can help survivors themselves.
The campaign is nonpartisan, and it includes both Democrats and Republicans promoting a shift away from the 1990s-era “tough on crime” approach that led to mass incarceration of people of color.
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September 04, 2020 at 07:08PM
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Inside a push to get 100,000 crime survivors to vote. - The New York Times
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