Tag Archives: Criminalization

Criminalization, Unemployment and Health: Kai Wright, William Gallo and Glenn E. Martin in Conversation

In a recent piece,  “Boxed In: How a Criminal Record Keeps you Unemployed for Life,”  Kai Wright, editorial director at Colorlines and a contributor to The Nation, takes an in-depth look at the impact of a criminal record on future employment.  In our ongoing effort to curate conversations between journalists, academics and activists around social justice issues for broad audiences, we partnered with TechChange and invited Kai Wright, Professor William Gallo and Glenn E. Martin to have a conversation about the connections between criminalization, unemployment and health, moderated by JustPublics@365 Digital Fellow Heidi Knoblauch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsQe6RBKHww&feature=share

In this extended discussion (1:55), our panel of experts Kai Wright (@Kai_Wright),  William (Bill) Gallo, Professor of Public Health at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Hunter College, and an expert in the health consequences of unemployment, and Glenn E. Martin (@glennEmartin), is vice president of development and public affairs of Fortune Society, a New York-based prisoner re-entry advocacy group, each discuss how journalists, academics and activists approach the same issue from different vantage points but with a shared goal of creating a more just society.

Challenging Punishment: From Mass Incarceration to Public Health , Human Rights, and Restorative Justice

This post is written by Ernie Drucker.

In my book A Plague of Prisons , The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America  (New Press, 2013) I proposed a public health model of mass incarceration, arguing that the war on drugs and its harsh sentencing policies ignited our epidemic of imprisonment. But the fact of  the imprisonment of 10 million  Americans in the last 40 years  demands more than re-imagining the problem – it demands solutions.

Plauge of Prisons book cover

The war on drugs fueled a “race to incarcerate”, deepening America’s racial and economic disparities , and drawing resources away from other vital social and health programs. The resulting criminalization and mass incarceration of three generations of young minority males has left a trail of mass trauma and imposed systematic disadvantages on this population – direct consequences of “toxic punishment” (Golash  D. The Case Against Punishment: Retribution, Crime Prevention, and the Law. NYU. 2005). The vast  “criminal industrial complex” that has been built upon mass punishment, is now rapidly commoditizing criminal justice through privatization , e.g.  in halfway houses for re-entering prisoners and special schools for juveniles – with little accountability for outcomes or collateral consequences.

The politically powerful and highly institutionalized system of mass punishment has taken on a life of its own and will not easily give up the lifetime grip it maintains on the population of former prisoners, all the while continuing to confer severe disadvantages on successive generations in urban communities where they are concentrated – i.e. increased homicide and suicide rates , greater risks of their own children’s future imprisonment , higher infant mortality rates , and shortened life expectancies , lower rates of employment and wages , less education ,  more failed marriages , and lower voting participation , associated with near universal felony disenfranchisement.

With growing privatization  of prisons , we can expect even less transparency and public accountability, as we  extend criminalization and mass punishment to other areas of social conflict – immigration, race relations,  sexuality – each of which now provides multiple  opportunities for our “culture of punishment” to assert itself in new areas  e.g. in 2012 over 500,000 “illegal” immigrants were held in detention centers and 400,000 deported; 500,000 sex offenders arrested , imprisoned,  and placed on computerized registries .

 Eric Holder, Attorney General(Image Source)

A Watershed Moment

Fortunately we are now at a turning point in this struggle – one we must take advantage of . US Atty. General Eric Holder recently said that  “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” This was an important first step toward a national recognition that our decades long war on drugs has been ineffective, expensive, and cruel.  As bipartisan support grows in  Congress for overhauling U.S. drug laws, Holder has ordered Federal prosecutors to remove any reference to quantities of illicit drugs that trigger mandatory minimums .

But it is only through re-thinking and challenging  our fundamental ideas about punishment that we will  find a way out of the shadow of this great crime against humanity that mass incarceration represents.  The recent case of Trayvon Martin demonstrates the limitations of our criminal justice system –  based as it is on narrow model of blame and punishment . But what are the alternatives to this ancient and almost universal trope that has now become the  foundation of our system of justice in America? One vital step in that direction is challenging punishment itself , turning our attention to the social injustices that underlie both crime and punishment.

When viewed through a public health lens which views  mass incarceration as a collective problem that require social solutions

I’m working on a new book challenging America’s “culture of punishment” within a pubic health model based on human rights and restorative justice principals and practices. Instead of relying, as it does now, despite lip service to ideas about  rehabilitation  based on  “correctional” systems that are, in practice vast engines of cruel retribution – even torture . My new book will map the road to restorative justice through such challenges and how these new models can allow us to put an end to mass incarceration and heal the mass trauma it has left behind .

Three Key Steps to Move from Punishment to Public Health

To launch this process in America here are three steps we must take:

  1. Recognize the  Toxicity of Punishment:  Punishment can be a form of state violence and mass trauma, where pain and suffering are intentionally applied to human beings in the name of justice. Research shows that “toxic punishment” is “excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems ( and has) damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health across the lifespan” (Harvard, Center on the Developing Child).  [2] Mass incarceration is mass exposure to toxic stress. The public-health model and epidemiology of punishment , as a form of violence, allows us to examine the impacts of  mass punishment and its health consequences (Velasquez-Manoff, “Status and Stress,” New York Times, Jul 27, 2013).
  2. Challenge Our Most Toxic Systems of Punishment:  we need to recognize and end the most toxic forms of  punishment that characterize our system of  mass incarceration. This first means reducing the size of the problem, for it is the huge scale of incarceration that drives the significance of its impact on public health and casts a shadow over American life.  We can do this by setting a goal of limiting the use of prisons as the default response to so many actions by so many people – with a goal of getting back to levels before the epidemic of mass  incarceration began – a figure of 100/100,000 populations in line with that of other modern democracies .  Challenging mass incarceration we can build on other successful campaigns against punishment in America :  e.g. opposition to the death penalty and rolling back the Rockefeller drug Laws. A great place to start is with reining in the massive use of solitary confinement – the most prominent and most torturous of all methods use in modern incarceration – the US , with 5% of world population and 25% of its prisoners, America accounts for over 50%  of those held in punitive isolation. We must take on and learn from  these cases , examine their  sustaining sources, organizations, and  leadership. Publicize the ways in which we can reduce incarceration without compromising public safety and work to build public support for alternatives to punishment .
  3. Build New Systems Based on Public Health , Human Rights , and Restorative Justice: Restorative principals and models of conflict resolution based on human rights do not impose toxic punishment – they work to break the cycle of retributive violence by challenging the use of collective punishment as tools of state power, replacing them with public health methods and outcomes, and  show that these better serve legitimate public concerns about public safety.

Positive changes in drug polices are gaining new momentum in the US , with more state undertaking marijuana’s legalization. But reducing the length and frequency of drug-related incarceration going forward, however welcome, wont do anything about the large population of drug users already stuck in our prisons and the post prison correctional control over the lives of millions more. Over 300,000 drug offenders are still serving out long terms under the now discredited mandatory sentencing policies. Most of these are young minority men with children, drawn from our poorest urban communities. We must consider ways to remove most prisoners from the strangle hold of the criminal justice system  – an amnesty that would allow those who  can do so to re-establish a useful place in our society and in those communities most affected by mass incarceration – restoring them to full citizenship – the most essential ingredient to human rights.

~ Ernie Drucker, PhD, is a Research Associate at John Jay College-CUNY and on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health.

From Punishment to Public Health: Our Next Social Justice Topic Series

Today begins our new month-long social justice series called From Punishment to Public Health.  In this series we will explore how public health might offer a more humane and just approach to social ills than the current approach that is based on criminalization.

Overcrowded Prison Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison, Creative Commons Attribution

Is this the best response to social ills?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison, Creative Commons Attribution

Since at least the 1970s, the response to drug use has been one that emphasized punishment and criminalization. The punishment framework has shaped the collective response to drug use for the past thirty years, in the US and globally. Catch phrases like “lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” “three strikes and you’re out,” and “let them rot in jail,” have characterized this time period and this attitude toward drug use.

More recently, the reliance on criminalization has been giving way to an approach that is more rooted in a public health. For example, in 2013, US Attorney General proposed moving away from mandatory minimum sentences for drugs. And, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) – colloquially known as “Obamacare” – goes into effect, an estimated 32 million Americans will have new access to drug treatment programs. Outside the US, other countries are moving to legalize drugs (such as Portugal, Uruguay) and closing prisons due to lack of inmates (such as the Netherlands).

How are these policy changes transforming the lives of everyday people? Are public health approaches to the criminalization of drugs really better or do they simply expand control over citizens? Through a variety of knowledge streams (e.g., podcasts, data visualizations, and blog posts) we will host a month-long conversation between academics, activists and journalists about the shift from punishment to public health and if that moves us closer to a more just society. As we did with the stop-and-frisk series, at the close of this series we’ll pull all these resources together in an all-in-one guide that you can download for your own use.

In the coming weeks, we’ll also curate a mix of academics, activists, and journalists talking about how to address this complicated social justice issue.  To open this series, we will feature the following:

The aim of JustPublics@365 is to foster just the innovative work that can foster connections between academics, activists and journalists who are working to address some of the pressing social problems of our time.  From where we sit in the heart of New York City, criminalization is at the top of the list of pressing social problems because of the deleterious effects it has on the democratic life of the city and the nation.

So, we offer this series on Punishment to Public Health as another case study of how we might reimagine scholarly communication for the public good.

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Click here for more information about our Monthly Social Justice Topic Series.

 

Envisioning A Better Future: Youth Action Against Stop-and-Frisk

Our series on Stop-and-Frisk continues as we take a look at what it means to ‘come of age’ under stop-and-frisk.  Over the next two days, we’ll focus on the impact on young people in New York City dealing with stop-and-frisk and how U.S. youth mobilize to resist criminalization.

Young adults, between the ages of 18 and 25, comprise at least half of all recorded stops in NYC. In 2012, over 286,000 young people in this age group were stopped and frisked. A study by the Vera Institute on Youth Justice recorded that young people in NYC are now less willing to report crimes, even when they are the victims. What does it mean to grow up within a system that targets, rather than protects, you? How do U.S. youth envision their futures within a system they fear?

In December 2010, the Community Justice Network For Youth (CJNY) organized a conference in D.C. to address the injustices within the U.S. juvenile justice system. They called on youth, parents and advocates to share their personal experiences and research on the justice system and create a vision of alternatives to youth incarceration. The keynote speaker, Chino Hardin (the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives and Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions), addressed the audience by sharing a personal journey as a youth within the prison system.  “In my youth I was arrested sixteen times and incarcerated on eight different occasions, so I know what goes on inside the walls of juvenile detention centers,” says Chino. 

While Chino addressed the broken policing systems in America, Chino also instilled hope for the future, “Sometimes, you’ve gotta make the bridge by walking and sometimes that bridge is gonna be your back… [but justice will come].” Here is Chino’s keynote address (14:55):

Envisioning a better future, a future beyond stop-and-frisk, means creating a future that listens to the voices of young people. In Hardin’s words, “The children are the future… we’ve gotta make sure they can hold it and they can’t hold it if their hands are cuffed behind their back.”

Get Involved
Do you have a personal story that you want to share related to stop-and frisk? JustPublics@365 is collecting digital stories related to stop-and-frisk and we would love to hear your voice. If you are interested, please contact Morgane Richardson at justpublics365@gmail.com with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Digital Storytelling.”

Be Informed. Stay Updated.
For more information on the The Vera Institute Study, take a look at Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Self-Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications or contact Jennifer Fratello at jfratello@vera.org.  Tomorrow, our series will offer focus on this study.

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This post is part of the Monthly Social Justice Topic Series on Stop-And-Frisk. If you have any questions, research that you would like to share related to Stop-and-Frisk or are interested in being interviewed for the series, please contact Morgane Richardson at justpublics365@gmail.com with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Series.”

If you’ve read the news lately, you might think the ‘war on drugs’ is coming to an end. Just last week, Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie showed his support for a bill that would allow people who have overdosed and their friends to call 911 without fear of punishment. Two weeks ago, Deputy Director of the National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli, said “we have to think of [the ‘war on drugs’] as a public health issue and a public health response in partnership with law enforcement.” And, three weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that 32 million Americans will have access to drug treatment programs when the Affordable Care Act goes into full effect.

These are great triumphs and signal the beginning of a shift towards thinking about drug policy in a public health framework. So, does this mean that the war on drugs is over? Can we sit back and relax? Hardly.

On Friday, as a social media reporter on behalf of JustPublics@365, I went to a conference on drug policy in Buffalo, New York.  Knowing about the history of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the racist underpinnings of New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy makes me somewhat “educated” about drug policy, but as a white female getting her Ph.D. at Yale University, I thought I had never been effected by the war on drugs.

It turns out I have, and so have you.

The ‘war on drugs’ is a war on people. It has targeted people of color – specifically young black and hispanic men – but it has a lasting effect on all of us regardless of age, sex, or race. It has created a culture of mass incarceration and elevated racial tensions in my communities. It has cost tax payers billions of dollars and allowed big businesses to profit from the mass incarceration of millions of Americans. It has created a system that every American should want to change or, at the very least, be aware of.

On the first day of the conference, which was hosted by the Drug Policy Alliance and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, there was a screening of The House I Live In. This documentary film exposes the failures of the ‘war on drugs’ and has been getting a lot of buzz. A central argument in the movie is that drug laws were introduced to control ethnic minorities and a theme that is consistently repeated by the interviewees is that the ‘war on drugs’ has ravaged their lives and destroyed their communities.

I had seen the movie before but, unless your heart is made of stone, the stories make you want to do everything in your power to change drug policy in this country.

So, what could I do? My career choice had taken me in a different direction from public health and I was by no means a good community organizer. What action could I take?

I sat in on panel about harm reduction and drug policy the next day with the voices from The House I Live In still whirling around in my mind. Julie Netherland from Drug Policy Alliance opened up the discussion with a question: how can we push harm reduction beyond individual interventions. Since I had always equated “harm reduction” with “needle exchange” I perked up. What did she mean?

She meant that working on drug policy is, in and of itself, harm reduction and that by focusing on policy rather than individual behavior change we can accomplish a lot. Changing drug policy from a criminal justice model to a public health model is harm reduction because it minimizes the harm the ‘war on drugs’ does to communities. Changing policy changes the stigma that most drug users feel – that is harm reduction.

This panel made me realize that I could do my own form of harm reduction: I could write and I could vote.

At the last panel of the conference, gabriel sayegh from the Drug Policy Alliance encouraged people to work on a local level rather than a national level to move drug policy towards a public health model. Marsha Weissman, Executive Director of the Center for Community Alternatives, reminded the audience that, “there are still people in New York State prisons doing life sentences on drug related crimes.” And, she declared, “our work is not done.”

On the flight back from Buffalo, I drafted Nydia Velázquez, my Congresswomen. It said:

“My name is Heidi Knoblauch and I am writing today because I believe the ‘war on drugs’ is doing more harm than good. I believe New York State should not use the criminal justice system to control drug use. I am in favor of policies that provide drug treatment rather than incarceration for drug users. I urge you to support legislation that takes a public health approach to drug policy.”

Sending this letter is a form of harm reduction and I encourage all of you to take this small step towards better drug policy in New York State. If you do not have time to write a letter, please use mine. You can find your representatives here.

Round Table Discussion on Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The New York City school police force is the fourth largest police force in the country. It’s bigger than the entire City of Boston police force. This sobering statistic is just one in a huge volume of numbers that tell the story of what is referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the idea that schools become an early sort mechanism that pushes some children into the hands of the criminal justice system. 

School to Prison infographic(Infographic from here.)

 

On Monday, I participated in a round table discussion among academics, activists and journalists as part of the JustPublics@365 Summit on “Resisting Criminalization.”  In one of three concurrent round table discussions, participants were invited to discuss ways to people in different arenas (academia, journalism, activism) might work together to “resist criminalization.”   All the invited round table sessions addressed three questions: 1) what’s the underlying problem? 2) how do we address it? and 3) what can we do when we leave here to create change?

What follows is a brief summary of the round table discussion on ending the school-to-prison pipeline.

What are the underlying problems causing the school-to-prison pipeline? The broad view of schools as a place where children are channeled into prison was further informed by the stories of social workers, activists, and directors of community-based organizations about what that reality looks like on the ground. On the one hand, students who are still in school don’t have adequate supports. They often need housing, job training, and caring, adult mentorship. On the other hand, the school-to-prison pipeline is the result of particular choices about how society responds to the behavior of young people. Youth need compassionate accountability processes when they mess up, rather than the full force of the correctional system. In addition to holding students accountable for their actions in compassionate ways, participants agreed that we need to hold accountable the multiple layers of systems that produce bad school experiences.

The school-to-prison pipeline also happens because we put police in schools. How do we come to see kids as criminal threats? Well, the police toolkit doesn’t come with very many different ways of viewing a problem. As Aaron Kupchik (University of Delaware) put it: when you put police in schools, more kids go to jail.

School to Prison Tweet Screenshot
(See all the Twitter updates from this session here.)

Many others pointed out that policing (as in police in uniforms) and incarceration are only two of the most visible manifestations of zero-tolerance, criminal-justice-style disciplinary practices that have overtaken schools. Many American schools are put in the impossible position of trying to manage more kids with fewer and fewer resources all the time. This context contributes to an environment where any non-conforming behaviors (including gender presentation or questioning authority) become disciplinary problems.

How do we resist? In addition to the school-to-prison pipeline, many participants talked about the prison-to-school pipeline. We learned about a lot of work being done to help formerly incarcerated people attend University. The experiences of formerly incarcerated people in the room spoke strongly to the value of education as a way out of the criminalization cycle. More than a few participants talked about the need to love and care for young people who have been marginalized. Others agreed and asked what it meant to put love into action in our day to day reality – what does love look like in the context of school? In the context of a community organization? How do we build community power so that parents and students feel confident resisting criminalization at the school and neighborhood level? Can community organizing against these processes be achieved in community organizations as we know them today? Or is the funding model too restrictive?

What can we do? In the last part of the panel we discussed how we could best share the harsh realities of criminalization and all the work being done to resist it with the many “publics” whose minds we need to change in order to be able to mobilize on a larger scale. One activist told a story of distrust and trepidation toward the news media. A journalist who had spent four weeks with him and his organization as they did outreach work with a community of drug users ended up publishing a long news story that focused mainly on the sensational problem of drugs and addicts, rather than the effective work being done to respond to those problems. This raised questions of what community-based organizations can do to be in control of media representations of their work? Or, if that’s not possible, how can both activists and academics make our own media? One journalist spoke of the value of telling specific and detailed stories in order to garner public understanding about issues that can sometimes seem remote. Academics in the room asked activists what kind of information would be useful for their work. Still others insisted on the need to link personal stories to the systemic scale, insisting that both are vital to the process of criminalization. The need for team building and collaboration came up again and again as we listened and made connections between the many vantage points in the room.


You can watch the archived livestream of the session here.  Soon, we’ll have a more polished video that we’ll share.

Round Table Discussion on Stop-and-Frisk

The policing practice known as “stop-and-frisk” is a key feature in the oppression of African American and Latino people in New York City. In particular, the NYPD targets young men of color with practice. These encounters are often the beginning of being “caught up” in the criminal justice system.  It destroys individual lives, families, and entire communities.

Although the legal authority for street stops has existed since 1968 (based on the US Supreme Court decision on Terry v. Ohio) the kind of stop-and-frisk policing we see today really began in New York City in 2002 under the Guiliani administration. The number of stop-and-frisks continued to rise exponentially under Bloomberg’s administration. In 2011, some 685,000 people were stopped and frisked by NYPD, most were black and brown, and 90% were never charged with any crime.  Of the 10% who were charged, most were for small amounts of marijuana.

Yearly stops by NYPD from 2002-2011(Image from NYCLU)

On Monday, academics, activists and journalists met at the JustPublics@365 Summit on
“Resisting Criminalization.”  In one of three concurrent round table discussions, participants were invited to discuss ways to people in different arenas (academia, journalism, activism) might work together to “resist criminalization.”   All the invited round table sessions addressed three questions: 1) what’s the underlying problem? 2) how do we address it? and 3) what can we do when we leave here to create change?

What follows is a brief summary of the round table discussion on stop-and-frisk.

What is the underlying problem with Stop & Frisk? Many participants discussed the idea that over-policing of youth of color was based on essentialized ideas of black and brown youth as inherently criminal. Carla Barrett from CUNY John Jay drew disturbing parallels between the moral panic over ‘super-predator’ youth of 1980’s and today’s stop-and-frisk policies. Chino Harden of the Center for NuLeadership pointed out that this policing strategy does not result in fewer guns on the streets. The seizure rate of guns from these stop-and-frisk encounters is less than one percent by the police department’s own figures. The result, Hardin noted, was an increase in marijuana arrests. These charges act as a marker making future police interaction more perilous for our young people. She relayed a story that in her own police encounter, an unpaid criminal fine resulted in her arrest and incarceration. Annette Dickerson from the Center for Constitutional Rights emphasized that the problem of police mistreatment of minorities did not begin with stop-and-frisk and no court case (referring to Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.) is going to end it. The struggle will be long.

How can we resist Stop & Frisk? Resisting Stop and Frisk comes in many forms. The facilitator of this session, Tara Conley (Media Make Change), is developing an easier to use version of the android app for uploading film of police encounters called TxtConnect. Steven Wasserman of Legal Aid said that he believes that the police view stop-and-frisk as a way to make ‘being on the corner’ uncomfortable for people of color. To which Annette Dickerson concurred, saying that ‘stop-and-frisk is part of somebody’s quality of lifestyle,’ connecting the politics of gentrification to over-policing. Other suggestions for resistance included sharing police encounter experiences over social media and print journalism. Chino Hardin also called for coming up with community-based solutions and not relying on police.  Another strategy she suggested was to build resistance via ‘a hood call’ where people hold police accountable by being visible presence when stops occur.

Tweet Screenshot
(See all the Twitter updates from this session here.)

What can we do when we leave here to end Stop & Frisk?  Everyone in the room wanted to not simply “resist,” they want to end it. Strategies for doing so included through alternate civilian patrols that would make minority neighborhoods safe for all (including LGBTQ members and elders). Great hope was placed in the change of mayoral administration as a means to affect change. As the participants agreed, “No one thought two years ago every mayoral candidate would have to have a position on Stop and Frisk. Now they do.” We just need to make sure a candidate whose position is to end it gets elected.

The archived livestreamed video of the event is here. To follow soon, we’ll post a more polished video recording of the panel discussion.

Resisting Criminalization: Youtube Video Campaign

About Resisting Criminalization: JustPublics365 is convening a Summit to bring together academics, journalists, and activists in a conversation about the emerging trend toward resisting criminalization. While many have pointed to incarceration as a central, defining issue of social inequality of the contemporary U.S. context, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Graduate Center) explained recently, “It’s not the boxes, it’s the criminalization of our youth.”

Criminalization includes an ever-widening array of practices that reach far beyond the traditional criminal justice system. A growing number of academics, activists and journalists are critical of the expansion of criminalization for the inherently undemocratic tendencies in such practices.

Video Submissions: Conversations around criminalization often remains segregated between those who face it’s effects on the ground and those who study it. In an attempt to change this dynamic, we invite you to share your own stories with criminalization in video format.

Tell us: What does criminalization mean to you? How have you and/or your communities experienced it? What are the problems that you see happening on the ground, as citizens, as academics, as activists and/or as journalists? And, what can we do to change this system?

Some topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Stop and Frisk
2. School to Prison Pipeline
3. Public Health

Selected videos will be shared on our blog, and will be projected at the Resisting Criminalizaton Summit on April 22nd, 2013 at the CUNY, Graduate Center, in NYC.

All participants are encouraged to attend the summit, which is free and open to the public. For more details and to register, visit: https://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/resisting-criminalization/

Rules and Regulations
1. Make a short video that in some way communicates the importance of resisting criminalization. Videos cannot be more than 1 minute and 30 seconds in length.
2. Upload video on Youtube using the tag “Resist13.” Instructions here.
3. Submit the link of the embedded video to justpublics365@gmail.com with the Subject Line, “Your name_#Resist13_Video Submission”
4. Videos can be filmed using a video camera, phone, computer, ipad – anything that records. They can also be live-action, animated, include photographs and slideshows. If you use outside content (content – including images, video, etc –  not created by you), it must be under a creative commons license and the work must be cited in the description.
5. Submissions are open to residents all over the world.

Deadline: All entries must be submitted no later than April 20th 2013, 5pm.