The American criminal justice system is built upon certain basic assumptions: we are all created equal, we are innocent until proven guilty, and we are entitled to due process. For many Americans, though, these rights can’t be taken for granted. For the entire history of this country, from slavery through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era, and up to today, when implicit and overt biases still undeniably persist, our justice system has punished people of color disproportionately. The acute human toll and the collective impact of this legacy of injustice is impossible to measure, but the stats don’t lie.
According to the Sentencing Project, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population, yet they make up 67% of the prison population. Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than White men, and on any given day, one of every six Black men in their thirties will be in prison or jail. At the same time, Blacks and Latinos comprise more than half of the population of drug offenders serving time in state prisons, despite drug use being roughly consistent across racial and ethnic groups.
Next week, voters will elect more than a thousand local prosecutors, and in doing so will decide how justice is carried out in this country.
This inequality is not inevitable. Next week, voters will elect more than a thousand local prosecutors, and in doing so will decide how justice is carried out in this country. That is, if we bother to read that far down the ballot. It will always be true to a cable news pundit that the most important election in history is the next one. The outcomes of high-profile, national-level races will have very real consequences, but for many — especially people of color—the less sexy business of electing prosecutors is just as important.
Why prosecutors?
Last year, Threespot began a partnership with Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, to design and build a digital platform to empower activists to organize for equal justice. Specifically, Color Of Change’s criminal justice team had been an early contributor to a movement whose goal is to bring attention and accountability to the actions of prosecutors, local officials who oversee how laws are carried out in the thousands of judicial districts across the country.
Also known as district attorneys, prosecutors are public officials who within the criminal justice system wield broad influence over how—or if—justice is served in their jurisdictions. And, although the vast majority of prosecutors in the United States are elected by popular vote and their decisions have direct and immediate impacts on the lives of their constituents, they are rarely held accountable for their performance. Historically, most elected prosecutors have run unopposed. Freed from the political consequences faced by most elected officials, many prosecutors have had no incentive to upset the status quo, and policies that result in racial disparities in arrests, charging, sentencing, and bail have been allowed to continue.
Color Of Change’s theory of change is that by raising awareness of the power that prosecutors hold, and providing a framework, tools, and resources to hold them accountable, practices that perpetuate injustice will end. This movement has already resulted in a handful of high-profile electoral victories in major metros like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas, where recently-elected progressive prosecutors are making meaningful change on issues like ending cash bail, increasing transparency, and holding cops accountable for their actions. It’s just the beginning.
Winning Justice
Color Of Change came to Threespot with two primary goals: to inform and inspire activists to join prosecutor accountability movement, and to provide the guidance and resources required to make change happen. To achieve this, they needed to compile their content, resources, data, and expertise and deliver it to their community in a compelling and accessible package.
Meet Winning Justice.
Working closely with Color Of Change’s brand and storytelling staff, Threespot developed a visual language that conveys the movement’s key attributes of urgency, action, success, and community. The core aesthetic challenge was to figure out what a movement that is both urgent and fun, both high-stakes and winnable looks like. Building from Color Of Change’s existing brand, Threespot introduced a broad-spectrum color palette and used combination of geometric and organic patterns and a distinctive iconography system to create a look-and-feel that would be familiar to the Color Of Change community and also distinctly separate.
The user experience of the Winning Justice site was designed to promote the movement’s early successes, offer pathways to find existing or organize new activist groups (or “Squads”) within a user’s local judicial district, and deliver actionable resources. One of the primary features Threespot developed for Winning Justice is an interactive, searchable database containing basic information about every judicial district and prosecutor in the country. Not only does it provide demographic and electoral data for each district, the platform allows users to contribute relevant information back to the database for the benefit of other organizers.
Central to Color Of Change’s organizing is The Six Demands, the list of policies whose adoption could bring about a significant transformation in the criminal justice system’s treatment of people of color. The demands are the standards by which incumbent and candidate prosecutors are evaluated, and crowdsourced scorecards in the Winning Justice database outline every prosecutor’s position on the demands.
What can we do?
Next week’s election will be a pivotal event for criminal justice reform. Whether victory is won by an incumbent promising to uphold the stats quo or a newcomer running on promises of reform, the district-by-district movement for prosecutor accountability will carry on. Here’s how to stay involved.
Vote. This should go without saying. But before you head to the polls, use Winning Justice’s database to find our who your local prosecutor is and whether they’re up for election this year. If they are, find out where they stand on Color Of Change’s Six Demands for prosecutors.
Pay Attention. The prosecutor movement doesn’t stop after election day. Whether it’s a new prosecutor taking over or an incumbent prosecutor keeping their job, they must be held accountable to the communities they serve. We need to pay attention and make sure prosecutors use their considerable power to do what’s right.
Learn More. Criminal justice reform will happen when voters understand the issue and the stakes. Join Color Of Change’s mailing list, and then check out the Sentencing Project, Vera Institute of Justice, and ACLU for more information.
