Illinois Community Justice Project

We're developing a new resource that is going to make our work stronger. It’s an online site that will allow us to share our efforts, and to harness each other’s good work. This site will be transparent, participatory, and collective. And that’s why we’re writing for your help.

We’d like you to help us identify and archive key knowledge about the Illinois justice system. By collecting this knowledge in one online place, we hope to generate shared understandings, new initiatives, and more possibilities to connect our vital efforts.

Please take a moment to read through this call, and to think through the materials that have helped to inform your work. Think about materials that you would be willing to share with other folks working on justice issues.

Submissions will become a part of the wiki-site we are developing, and will be a significant resource for activists, community members, students, teachers, and movement workers across Illinois NOW and for years to come. No submissions are too old or too new. We welcome resources from other organizations and websites, from personal memories, and from institutional archives. Once it’s fully developed, this site will also have the capacity for posting "needs and wants" and for calls to immediate action.

We are asking for:

• Reports that share key information on the workings of the Illinois justice system
• Stories of how the system has changed across the decades (e.g. 1970¹s, 1980¹s)    
• Histories of Illinois prisons, detention centers, and other system agencies
• Documentation of campaigns; Information on projects and initiatives to change the way different aspects of the system work
• Personal testimonies
• Web-based videos that illuminate a vital aspect of the Illinois system
• Maps of key system locations and/or impacted neighborhoods
• Relevant essays and articles that can be posted online, and that deal directly with Illinois
• Links to resources for people working to transform the justice system in Illinois; Links to organizations working for justice
• Curriculum that addresses prisons, detention, incarceration
• Web-based audio files that tell important stories about the justice system in Illinois
• Art projects and practices that help to raise awareness of the Illinois system and its impacts
• Information, resources and/or campaigns linked to marginalized populations within the PIC  (people with disabilities, LGBTQ populations, women, undocumented populations)
• Other resources that you believe could an important contribution to this web-based project
  

We welcome submissions that deal with all aspects and angles of the Illinois system: juveniles or adults, prisons and their effects on neighborhoods, immigrant detention, the parole system, restorative justice, and oppositional political campaigns.

Please submit materials and questions to ilcommunityjustice@gmail.com  by March 30, 2010.