The Justice Department announced, in a press release, that they are awarding $57 million in grants to “support criminal justice reform and advance racial equity in the criminal justice system.”
The grants are being administered by the department’s Office of Justice Programs.
“Equal justice is not a self-executing proposition — it takes work to make it real — and it will take a collective commitment from all of us at the federal, state and local levels to bring that ideal to life,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “These investments make good on a pledge by the Justice Department to promote public safety and realize the promise of a just society that recognizes the dignity and humanity of everyone.”
According the press release, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) is awarding eight million dollars under the Field Initiated: Encouraging Innovation program, designed to “support new and innovative strategies that better enable criminal justice systems to prevent and respond to emerging and chronic challenges, including strategies that will increase opportunities for diversion, reform pretrial processes, build police-community trust and promote restorative justice and racial equity.”
Another three million dollars will be awarded BJA under its Reimagining Justice: Testing a New Model of Community Safety initiative, “which will fund the development and testing of a new or innovative approach to improving community safety and trust that is an alternative to traditional enforcement mechanisms for neighborhoods experiencing high rates of less serious and low-level criminal offenses.”
The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) is awarding two million dollars to Ujima to support the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community, which will “provide microgrants to victim-serving organizations run by/for the communities they serve with the overarching goal of increasing the number of victims accessing services in historically marginalized and underserved communities.”
The National Institute of Justice is awarding almost $800,000 under the Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System: A Study of Existing Evidence and Public Policy Implications program, “which will support a comprehensive evidence-based analysis of existing evidence to examine how observed racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system might be reduced through public policy.”
Read the full list of awards here.
