Tools, Resources and Budget Overviews

In February 2023, CURB’s #CloseCAPrisons campaign released a Prison Closure Roadmap. This roadmap offers a decarceral just transition framework, whereby California can support any city or town with a prison in shifting the local economy and community away from a perceived reliance on incarceration, and toward healthy and life-affirming investments in services, infrastructure, and high road jobs. The roadmap offers ten state-owned prisons as priorities to be named for closure by 2025 based on input from 2,386 systems-impacted people representing every prison in the state. 

In light of recent closure announcements, cost-savings from prison closure, ongoing projected declines in the incarcerated population, findings from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), continued harm caused by prisons reported by those inside, this roadmap comes at an opportune and critical juncture.

This report — informed by public health research alongside interviews and survey responses from people currently and formerly incarcerated in women’s prisons — exposes the catastrophic health harms of incarceration in women’s prisons and provides evidence in support of investments in health-promoting social determinants of health instead of incarceration.

The state of California invests $405 million a year in its women’s prisons. Instead of perpetuating a system that overwhelmingly works against public health, the state has the opportunity to invest that money in health-promoting support systems that people can access in their own communities. These public safety investments would not only support reentry after incarceration, they would also help to prevent harm from occurring in the first place, creating the conditions that would make women’s prisons obsolete.

This language guide is meant to be used as a resource for conversations about people in prison, the construction of prisons, and the circumstances of imprisonment. Language shapes the ways we think about people and the world. A lot of the language we have adopted as a society serves the colonial, capitalist, and carceral agendas of the systems we are dismantling. This guide intends to: uplift the humanity of folks that are typically dehumanized (by centering people first language); call things what they are (ex. jails are jails not correctional facilities); and decolonize language around incarceration. 

Repositioning the way we speak and write not only changes our own perspectives but shapes those who are on the receiving end of the message. Shifting our language informs the ways we can imagine the new world we are building. Our movements, analyses, and frameworks are iterative, ever-growing, and intersectional. So is our language. 

WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVES TO PRISON CAMPAIGN?

We know that it can be hard sometimes to talk to loved ones and neighbors about the need to #CloseCAPrisons, but these eye-catching graphics are a great place to start!

The time is now to impact the narrative on prison closure through sharing these eye-catching posters. These colorful images articulate that providing care, resources, and support is what true racial justice, public safety, health, and environmental justice looks like.  "Alternatives to Prisons" posters spread awareness about the need to dismantle prisons, and encourage imagination of the possibilities for communities once prisons are dismantled.