Justice Now

Justice Now works with people in women's prisons and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons.

Our organization has a legal training clinic structure, providing internships year-round to community members, law students, and undergraduates, We take seriously our goal of training the next generation of activists and lawyers in a multifaceted approach to social change.

Justice Now is a legal services and human rights organization in Oakland, California that works with people in California's women's prisons. We have three program areas:

Human Rights Documentation Program

Our Human Rights Documentation Program partners with people in women's prisons to educate the public on how prisons damage communities of color, and to challenge policies harming people in women's prisons and their families. Using a participatory documentation approach, we train people in women's prisons in human rights documentation and collaborate with them to produce human rights reports on abusive prison conditions. Issues we are currently focusing on include inadequate reproductive health care, human rights abuses around medical care more generally, and the overly aggressive and racially discriminatory termination of parental rights.

Direct Legal Services

Justice Now interns work closely with Justice Now staff attorneys to provide clients with direct legal services in the following areas: child-custody, life-threatening illnesses, acute medical conditions, winning compassionate release (early release) for terminally ill or medically incapacitated prisoners (in men's and women's prisons) with less than 6 months to live, and alternative sentencing.

Prison Abolition Campaigns

This area involves organizing, policy and public education campaigns to end our society's reliance on prisons to respond to social problems. Justice Now interns collaborate with people in California's women's prisons and communities outside to challenge prison expansion and promote alternatives to the prison industrial complex.