Community Justice Exchange

Having been an organizer for social justice causes all her life, it was a natural evolution for Pilar Weiss to set her sights on the criminal justice system by creating Community Justice Exchange. CJE is a national hub for community-based organizations working in the many, interconnected aspects of incarceral change and abolition, providing connection, information sharing, training, organizational support, and funding. “All our activities are focused on building power from the bottom up, so those most affected by the incarceration system have the potential to influence it,” says Pilar, Executive Director of CJE.

She started by organizing the National Bail Fund Network, which unites over ninety community-led bail and bond funds across America and now resides within CJE. The lack of bail is a big driver of incarceration and many communities were providing bail for strangers, in order to shift power away from profit-based bail bond companies that can land many people in unrepayable debt. Pilar realized these individual efforts would be better able to change policy if they were connected for learning and strategizing. As she recalls, “Initially, the prison system didn’t even have the capacity to accept bail money from an individual instead of through a bail bond company. Sometimes you need to start with small changes.”

From there, CJE’s efforts expanded to include immigration detention as well as criminal justice system incarceration pre and post-trial, and the surveillance and supervision programs that are a form of electronic incarceration. Every one of these areas has grown massively over the past few decades. “I was struck by the interconnectedness of the many component parts of the system,” says Pilar. “The tendency is to focus on a single issue or theory of change, because one group can’t possibly cover all the bases involved. But human lives are never about a single issue and the tentacles of incarceration and immigration have their roots way upstream. By connecting related organizations together for ideas and support, and funding their efforts, we greatly increase the potential for impact on a wider scale.”

For CJE, scaling up doesn’t necessarily mean expanding their own organization. It’s about extending the network to create more cross-pollination across organizations that may be in very different places in their individual journeys. Because every state controls its own criminal justice system, what worked in one place can’t simply be replicated in another. But experimentation and group discussion around the outcomes are critical components of growing a country-wide movement for change. Their plans for  2025 include creating cohorts in communities of practice, with CJE support, who can then go on to build on their shared knowledge, regardless of where they are in their progression.

When your goal is power building, it can be challenging to measure progress. CJE looks to the growth and interactivity of its network, and successes at the level of individual organizations. It’s further complicated by the ever-changing nature of the challenges within the criminal justice and immigration spheres. Over the past year or so, for example, there has been an increase in charges against protestors under broadly mandated domestic terrorism and conspiracy laws, creating an increased need for pretrial support of people in those groups.

“When we think about experimentation around something like technology,” says Pilar, “everyone is anticipating the possibility of a practical success that can be measured in dollars. Whereas experimenting in the social justice sphere is about conceptual risk, chipping away at a problem and hoping to create a shift in how it’s perceived.” That not only requires openness to experimentation, but an understanding that such change takes much more time than a single year or even several years typical in grant funding. It’s work that requires decades.

When asked what keeps her going in this work, Pilar was quick to respond. “There’s all this solidarity among different groups to find innovative ways to show up for each other. It gives me chills. Especially when people have been seriously under attack and people in other, less hostile, places pull resources to help them.”

The Patchwork Collective is proud to contribute to Community Justice Exchange’s capacity to foster this kind of community-to-community support for change.

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