Get Proximate

Smart Justice California (SJCA) was founded in 2017 to influence policy and legislation away from mass incarceration. In 2021 they added a powerful lever for action with their Get Proximate program, which brings together those who have power over incarceration and those who are on the receiving end of it. Legislators and policy makers spend facilitated time face to face with the people whose lives are affected by their actions, humanizing what is often a conceptualized system of crime and punishment.

Get Proximate is part of a multipronged approach. One prong is getting people elected who are inclined to further the cause of reducing mass incarceration as the only answer to crime. Another is influencing policy and legislation to advance their goals together.

Get Proximate, the third prong, puts those communities in conversation with prison populations and their loved ones, so they can see what it really means to be incarcerated and how it affects life when they get out. And those in prison get a voice they might not have ever felt they had.

Says Anne Irwin, Director of Smart Justice California, “When we first started SJCA, ballot propositions clearly showed that the people of California felt mass incarceration had gone too far and was damaging society. But we couldn’t get elected officials at any level to embrace change, and even modest reform bills were dying in the system.” SJCA worked with other organizations to push some areas of criminal justice reform legislation over the finish line, but it was unsteady progress.

“When you’re asking people in power to do hard things that strike at their core beliefs, you need to impact their hearts as well as their minds,” says Anne. “The hardest belief to overcome is the idea that people who’ve created harm are only deserving of intense punishment.” The experiences of Anne and the rest of the SJCA team told them the most potent way to break down those barriers was to bring people close together with each other. “When you stand in their shoes you see the fundamental humanity of the people who are trapped in this brutal, breaking system.” 

Program Director Phil Melendez organizes and facilitates the Get Proximate sessions from a place of deep, personal knowledge as a person who was formerly incarcerated at San Quentin. “For the first fourteen years of my incarceration, I was conditioned to believe I had no hope, no voice. I felt there was no point in the gatherings taking place in there, until a couple of volunteers inside helped me find my voice and hope for freedom. They changed my life.” Since the start of Get Proximate in 2021, Phil has brought 429 legislators, prosecutors, and survivors into prisons. Many of them come away wanting to bring more of their colleagues to do the same.

“I try to dispel the ‘us versus them’ perspective,” says Phil.  “Stories are shared both ways so it’s a well-rounded healing space. If someone inside hasn’t really been understanding or processing the harm they’ve caused, this brings them closer to it so they can process it.” Getting incarcerated people  ready for a Get Proximate session can take three or four preparatory visits. He explains the process and how it works, gets their input, then works with them to understand where they are in their rehabilitation. “I love getting them ready for a visit, we process trauma together and understand the gravity of what they’ve done so they can be truthful, in order for these gatherings to be powerful.”

For legislators and prosecutors, SJCA follows up these visits with hard discussions about policy change. They also actively educate about how alternative criminal justice systems could work. One means of doing that is an organized visit to Norway and the facilities in action there. The results can be dramatic. As an example, a woman who’d been in the legislature for 10 years, never supporting reform because she worried about backlash from her community, was invited to Norway last year.  Says Anne, “Halfway through the visit she said ‘I never knew’ – and confided her own family experience with incarceration, which she’d previously chosen not to think about.” On getting home, she brought a group of female legislators into the California Institution for Women in Orange County – one of California’s two women’s prisons – and is spearheading policy bills. “For her, it was really about the insight she got from sitting inside that prison with the people impacted – and that was in a gentler system. She knew it was much harsher in the US.”

The idea of Get Proximate had been germinating inside Anne’s head for several years before it was made possible by working with The Patchwork Collective (TPC) as a trust based funder. “I knew that so much change could be unlocked if more people with power could get proximate with all kinds of people in prisons.” For TPC Principal Marie Dageville, previous prison visits had been part of her own criminal justice system education. The idea of the Get Proximate program resonated and she felt it could be accomplished through the skills and resources of Smart Justice California. “That trust was instrumental,” says Anne.

The Get Proximate program brings a highly humanizing influence to the more conceptual exercise of policy and legislation change. “What fuels me in this work,” says Anne, “is Phil and the Phils of this world I get to do it with. Every time I come out of a prison I feel inspired by having sat with people who are processing their own darkness and beginning to embrace their own light.”

It's work that requires a lot of resilience to accomplish. “Anne and I had an emotional time last week, with a pendulum swing back toward mass incarceration,” says Phil. “That pendulum is going to swing in perpetuity but the people inside keep me going. Each time it swings back in our favor, we get a chance to make change happen.”

‍