WHAT WE DO
Prism Reform creates projects and initiatives that recalibrate normative perceptions of justice-impacted people and communities and advance commonsense, transformative justice reform. All projects build cross-sector partnerships, leverage existing resources, and have integrated entrepreneurial components.
FEATURED PROJECT
Chords That Bind
Chords That Bind pairs incarcerated parents with Storyteller & Music Instructors to create a unique song for their young child. A recording of the parent singing is inserted in a stuffed animal and delivered to the child.
The stuffed animals are made by formerly incarcerated men and women in Sewing Workshops that teach entrepreneurial and professional skills.
Prism Reform is working with the NYS Department of Corrections & Community Supervision (DOCCS), and with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Community Resources & Re-Entry Bureau, to run a pilot of the program.
LEARN MORE HERE
MORE PROJECTS & INITIATIVES
Home For Good
Home For Good Craft Workshops teach critical life and market-driven professional skills through craft-making. The program teaches participants to make marketable furnishings, fashions, and accessories from salvaged and donated materials, and to sell their products direct to consumers. Revenues from sales go to compensate participants and support the program. Prism Reform is currently working with two Tribal Nations to develop Home For Good Workshops based on the tribes’ traditional crafts. LEARN MORE HERE
Spatial Justice Project
The Spatial Justice Project features public exhibits that set a traditional Jewish Sukkah next to a Confinement Sukkah — a reproduction of a solitary confinement cell. The juxtaposition of the two structures, coupled with interactive programming, demonstrate how designed spaces impose status and identity. The public exhibits facilitate safe, constructive dialogue about how to create more equitable spaces for ourselves and others. LEARN MORE HERE
JusticeConnects
The ambitious JusticeConnects project aims to build a national membership association for justice that provides access to top-rated programs, best practices, and fellowship forums for all stakeholders in the greater justice community. The proposed design includes dedicated portals for: 1) Justice-impacted and their families; 2) People and organizations that in work in justice; 3) Businesses, civic groups, and academic, cultural & religious institutions. The project includes membership benefits, an e-commerce platform selling goods and services from businesses owned and operated by justice-impacted people, a job listing site, and more.
LEARN MORE HERE
A Show of Hands
A Show of Hands is an art-based, team-building activity designed to develop empathy, trust and inclusion. The project invites people from different and often oppositional communities to paint and imprint their hands on reclaimed pieces of wood, homemade paper, and other materials. The only criteria is that participants cannot paint their own hands, but must place their hand in another's, and take another's hand into their own. LEARN MORE HERE
FEATURED
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
CALL FOR A
NEW LEXICON
FOR JUSTICE
Institutionalized language in the American vernacular imposed indelible negative identities that promote indignity and second-class citizenship.
Prism Reform calls for new universal standards for justice-aligned language that conforms to America’s foundational ideals.
MORE THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
