Welcome to the 2024 NLADA Annual Conference! We are so excited to host you in Atlanta this year.
Session materials are available in the Learning Lab, where you can also claim CLE credit and provide session feedback. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to learninglab@nlada.org.
Participatory defense is a community organizing model that aims to empower people facing charges and their families to transform the landscape of power in the courtroom. Participatory Defense is guided by three principles: • FAMILY and COMMUNITY STRENGTH can play a pivotal role in stopping and reducing incarceration for a loved one and a community. • Families and communities can be even more powerful when taking the role of ORGANIZER AND AGENT OF CHANGE, rather than service recipient. • By working on individual cases, communities can BUILD THE MOVEMENT of directly impacted peoples to hold the actors of the court accountable, make systemic change, and ultimately end mass incarceration.
This workshop will focus on how communities can build partnerships with public defender offices that can lead to systemic impact well beyond individual cases. Participating in cases and being able to “look under the hood” of the courts shows where community power can also be flexed to change policies and bring loved ones home, whether that be wrongful charging practices, mandatory sentences or even ensuring that public defenders are given the budgetary resources to do what the community needs them to do.
In a slight pivot of perspective of who can be the systems changers and what they can do — the millions who face prison or jail and their communities, those waiting in line at court everyday — could shift from being fodder of the criminal justice system, to those fated to bring the era of mass incarceration to its rightful end.
