Australia:
Victoria
Centre for the Human Rights of Imprisoned People
The Centre for the Human Rights of Imprisoned People is a project promoting access to justice and human rights for Victorian prisoners through individual legal services, legal education, community development, campaigning, and policy work, that is fundamentally informed by a social justice and decarceration framework (work to prevent people going to, returning to prison).
Victoria Legal Aid
Victoria Legal Aid helps people with their legal problems. They focus on protecting the rights of socially and economically disadvantaged Victorians in areas of criminal law, family law and some civil law matters.
Darebin Community Legal Centre
Darebin Community Legal Centre is a community-based organisation established by the people of the Northcote area. Their work recognizes the important role individual community members play in educating other members of the community about the law. Enhancing people’s understanding of the law enables them to take control of the problem they are experiencing. Darebin Community Legal Centre provides legal advice to those who live, work or study in the city of Darebin. The centre also has a paralegal-run legal information telephone service for prisoners detained in Victorian prisons.
Queensland:
Sisters Inside Inc.
Sisters Inside Inc. is an independent community organisation, which exists to advocate for the human rights of women in the criminal justice system, and to address gaps in the services available to them. Sisters Inside work alongside women in prison in determining the best way to fulfill these roles.
International:
Critical Resistance
United States based, Critical Resistance is a national organization dedicated to opposing the expansion of the prison industrial complex. CR is committed to ending society’s use of prisons and policing as an answer to social problems.
Prison Activist Resource Centre
PARC is an Oakland based prison abolitionist group committed to exposing and challenging all forms of institutionalized racism, sexism, able-ism, heterosexism, and classism, specifically within the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). PARC believes in building strategies and tactics that build safety in our communities without reliance on the police or the PIC. PARC produces a directory that is free to prisoners upon request, and seek to work in solidarity with prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends and families. PARC also works with teachers and activists on many prison issues. This work includes building action networks and materials that expose the continuing neglect and outright torture of more than 2 million people imprisoned within the USA; as well as the 5+ million who are under some form of surveillance and control by the so-called justice system.
Justice Now
Justice Now is an Oakland (USA) based organisation, working with women prisoners and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons. Justice Now’s mission is to end violence against women and stop their imprisonment. They believe that prisons and policing are not making out communities safe and whole but that in fact, the current system severely damages the people it imprisons and the communities most affected by it. Justice Now promotes alternatives to policing and prisons and challenges the prison industrial complex in all its forms.
The Sentencing Project
The Sentencing Project is a U.S. organisation working for a fair and effective criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing law and practice, and alternatives to incarceration. The Sentencing Project was founded to provide defense lawyers with sentencing advocacy training and to reduce the reliance on incarceration. Since that time, The Sentencing Project has become a leader in the effort to bring national attention to disturbing trends and inequities in the criminal justice system with a successful formula that includes the publication of groundbreaking research, aggressive media campaigns and strategic advocacy for policy reform. The Sentencing Project is dedicated to changing the way Americans think about crime and punishment.
Convict Criminology
In the late 1990’s, Convict Criminology emerged when ex-convict professors of criminology and criminal justice began sharing their frustration with the misrepresentations and poor science they found in their academic disciplines. Having personally experienced arrest, conviction, and confinement in jail and prisons, they felt that many academic publications about the criminal justice system were flawed, ideal type discussions, and thinly veiled administrative mythology. The ex-convict professors found many corrections textbooks portraying a prison system that does not exist. For example, reading many of the books commonly used in introductory courses on prisons, students might actually think that prisoners have their choice of excellent vocational and educational programs at their disposal. Convict Criminology provides for a more informed empirical perspective, informed by the experiences of the people processed through the criminal justice machinery. It analyzes the failed social policies that continue to be practiced and still dominate the criminal justice debate. Convict Criminology works to establish a research structure to identify, evaluate, and analyze criminal justice issues, and develop information for discussion, publication, and implementation from an insider’s perspective.