About the Campaign

The Carceral state encompasses three behemoth sets of structures: criminalization, policing, and confinement. Within each structure are subsets of institutions, ideologies, that make up our society, as defined by carcerality. Carceral is the root of incarceration, the phrasing of carceral state attempts to outline the vastness of incarceration both in and far beyond prison walls.

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The 1 in 2 campaign is a narrative organizing project cultivated by Foundation for Liberating Minds' Free Our People Initiative (FLM). FLM is a community organization working to disrupt the root causes of oppression and marginalization through transformative education. FLM’s Free Our People Initiative is an abolitionist education pillar that raises awareness around the harms of the prison industrial complex (PIC), advocates for communities and people impacted by the criminal punishment system, builds alternatives to this system, and works through narrative change, political education and the project of dreaming radically to create a just world of safety and accountability for all people.

This campaign is named based on research from Equal Justice Initiative and Fwd.us which found that 1 in 2 American adults have an immediate family member who has been in jail or prison.

As scholars note, “To understand the full breadth of the criminal legal system we must look at the entire spectrum of this system’s impacts on our society.

“Contact with the criminal justice system incurs substantial social and demographic consequences, including restrictions on employment, housing, voting, and welfare receipt, as well as long-term effects on physical and mental health.”

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