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Fighting the Incarceration and Detention Industrial Complex

Public Justice fights to defend due process. Access to the courts is a pillar of our nation’s history and values.

Access to justice is especially difficult for the two million people locked up in state and federal prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities across the country. Built on the foundation of white supremacy, mass incarceration and immigrant detention are forms of structural violence that target and dehumanize people of color, queer, and immigrant communities. People that are incarcerated are subject to harsh and inhumane conditions that violate their basic human rights, including overcrowding, lack of access to medical care, abuse by staff, forced labor, solitary confinement, and separation from families and support networks. The effects of mass incarceration and immigrant detention spill out and impact entire communities, perpetuating cycles of poverty, trauma, and oppression.

Carceral institutions are held up not just by government actors, but also by a network of corporations that profit from the incarceration of human beings. This includes companies that run private prisons and detention centers, as well as medical care and food service providers. It also includes financial service providers, telecommunication companies, surveillance and corrections technology vendors, corporations that contract cheap prison labor, and private probation companies.

Fighting to

defend due process

We do this through litigating high-stakes civil rights appeals and developing novel legal theories that will help hold prisons and detention facilities—and the many corporations that profit from mass incarceration—accountable.

What Public Justice is Doing

Public Justice’s Access to Justice Project is dismantling immunity doctrines and other procedural barriers that deny incarcerated people access to justice. By making the civil justice system more accessible for incarcerated people and their families, we aim to mitigate human suffering, to make working with carceral facilities unprofitable, and to support a new vision of criminal justice that prioritizes restoration and healing over punishment and violence.

We do this through litigating high-stakes civil rights appeals and developing novel legal theories that will help hold prisons and detention facilities—and the many corporations that profit from mass incarceration—accountable.

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