Marisa and Neha advocate against inequities in the criminal justice system
By: Marisa Syed and Neha Suri
JEP’s mission is to empower Generation Z to advocate against the unjust policies and inequities in the US criminal justice system. We provide resources, activism, tools, and opportunities to directly help current and formerly incarcerated people (especially women and children). We aim to break down societal apathy surrounding the incarcerated population by bringing youth proximate to incarcerated people.
From our time in JEP, our focus and mission has changed so much. As it was when we both became Outreach Directors, JEP was only based in the US, spanning a few states with a member base that largely fluctuated. As we began our leadership roles in the organization, we implemented new strategies for expansion. Throughout our leadership as outreach directors, we were able to conduct interviews for our book “First Steps Into the Criminal Justice System : For Youth”. Alongside this we set up meetings with senators, national/government organizations, and other public officials, in order to better connect the youth with people on the front lines. We managed chapters all around the country, helping them expand and gain new members.
Progressing into co-Executive Directors, and the hopes of gaining more members, we expanded opportunities for advancement by adding leadership positions–such as a Chapter Coordinator and Project Manager, worked on canvassing to school counselors, and even expanded internationally. Our strategies to gain more members tended to initially have short-term effects while we hoped for a strong, steady stream. However, we have recently begun to see new surges in members through promotion of our monthly webinar series and particularly social media advocacy. By optimizing our promotion strategy for changes that have produced maximum engagement, such as utilizing reels on Instagram, we have seen upticks in interactions on our public posts. These have often led to increases in membership applications, thus allowing us to create more projects for our members. JEP is truly a volunteer based organization so the more support we have from our community, the more we can accomplish together.
Outside of increasing membership, we have instituted new intiatives, two for each of our six departments at the time, that were targeted at providing members with more specific work and immediate feedback with their progress, as oftentimes in advocacy work results take time and it is easy to feel disheartened with setbacks coming your way. These short-term and long-term initiatives gave members a great way to take on more responsibilities, make new connections with lawmakers, as well as help them educate, empower, and encourage individuals to fight for criminal justice reform.
On a larger scale, we also worked on writing a proposal for and beginning to create JEP’s second book on the intersections of AI and the criminal legal system. This exciting project will be an organiziation wide effort so if you are interested in helping write the book or would like to learn more, please visit our website! However, this book did not just come out of thin air. Based on two of our annual summits that we hosted along with the rest of our Board of Directors, this book concept has been brainstormed on for months and the byproduct of lots of work and hours of zoom meetings.
These larger, organization-encompassing projects were created whilst we continued our monthly newsletter, oversaw op-Eds, continued our weekly social edia posting schedule, updated our website, hosted weekly Board meetings, held monthly fundraisers to support incarcerated individuals, and became our own 501(c)(3). It took lots of agendas and talking but truly as co-Executive Directors is what I think allowed us to accomplish it all. Working as a team, we delegated project building, planning, writing, hosting, and so much more so we could work with a new monthly goal and focus each month, bringing that same passion we had the previous one.
Throughout our role as executive directors we had the opportunity to interact with hundreds of members throughout the world, all which had a similar mission in mind, to educate and learn about the criminal justice system in order to one day reform it. We had the opportunity to meet people such as grassroot organizations, public officials, and national humanitarian organizations and we learned and saw their love for community and their passion to create a just system that helps people rather than harms them.
As we pass the baton off to our successors, we will watch JEP continue to develop into a flourishing criminal justice reform organization with even more support. You can help JEP and support our mission by joining to become a member through our website or donate to assist in all of our reform efforts.
