Participatory Defense Comes to Western Mass
Decarcerate Western Mass formed in response to the pandemic and the lack of protections provided to people who were detained pretrial in our county jails and incarcerated in the county houses of correction. The original members of Decarcerate pursued a range of strategies both to pressure county officials to implement public health measures that would reduce exposure behind the wall and also to release people, knowing that carceral facilities were the least safe places during a pandemic.
Because it is difficult to hold county officials accountable, we decided to focus our efforts on posting bail as a tangible way to get people out of jail. By posting bail for people held pretrial in Hampden County, the second largest jail in the state, we were able to move in the direction of decarceration as jails refused to release people who had not been convicted or sentenced for a crime.
Since we began posting bail in February 2021, volunteers with Decarcerate have been exploring ways to expand our work, from supporting state and local campaigns that are abolitionist or align with our principles, to increasing our political education programming and creating reentry supply kits for people we post bail for. We also wanted to identify a way for us to remain in contact with the people we post bail for that is not focused on reentry. (We have no ambitions to become service providers, and there are plenty of groups already doing this important work!)
After many discussions as a group, in 2024 we decided to launch a participatory defense hub in western Massachusetts that both allows us to remain in community with people we post bail for and to provide a mechanism for positively impacting the outcome of their case. Participatory defense is a community organizing model that brings together loved ones of people who have open cases to understand and dissect court procedure, identify points of intervention and develop defense strategies, participate in court watch so that prosecutors and judges know that there is community support for their loved ones, and develop socio-biographical packets that concretely show the community support they have.
Participatory defense is focused on “time saved” instead of “time served” and can be used during pretrial and post-conviction. According to Raj Jayadev from Silicon Valley De-Bug, the founders of participatory defense,
We saw charges get dismissed. We saw sentencing enhancements which would have committed a person to die in prison get removed. We saw people who had substance or mental health needs get treatment and care rather than fall deeper into a criminal punishment system that would have only harmed them further.
The purpose of participatory defense is to get charges reduced or dismissed while building up the knowledge and leadership skills of directly impacted people. The hub is not a service, but is about building community power in the courtroom.
As part of the process of launching a hub, we hosted a two-day training with facilitators from Silicon Valley De-Bug at the Northampton Center for the Arts in mid-December. Volunteers with Decarcerate came together to learn about the model, go through the different tactics used by hubs, and to learn how to make the socio-biographical packets. We came out of the training more committed than ever to launch this project in 2025.
Although we still have a ways to go, we are excited to expand our work and build out the participatory defense hub in collaboration with directly impacted members of our community. As of January 2023, participatory defense network hubs have saved 25,869 years of incarceration. We know how pretrial detention and incarceration harms not only those who are incarcerated but also their families and communities, and we are looking forward to taking the fight to the courts as part of our overall commitment to decarceration.
