Mail Donation Checks To:
Fair Fight Initiative
2831 St. Claude Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70117

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

News:
Young People Say They’re Beaten and Maced at Adult Louisiana Jail
Louisiana moved detained children from the infamous Angola prison to an adult lockup in Jackson Parish. They say the abuse has continued.

Children in the former death row unit at Angola, one of the nation’s most infamous prisons, have been locked in solitary confinement, shackled while they eat and play, and attacked by guards.

The Fair Fight Initiative seeks to level the playing field by supporting those most in need, advancing racial justice, racial equality, and lasting criminal justice reform in the United States. Fair Fight protects and legally defends individuals and families who are trapped by the United States’ broken system of justice. We do this at no cost by crowdfunding donations from people who want to send a message and change the system.

Fair Fight Initiative’s Mission: Through awareness, education, advocacy, and litigation, the Fair Fight Initiative empowers, legally defends, and protects those directly affected by our broken criminal legal system with a vision to end mass incarceration and the systemic racism that drives America’s addiction to jails and prisons.

Your Donation Today Goes Directly Towards:

Understanding Our Broken System of Justice in the United States

The popular image of Lady Justice in a blindfold, signifying that she doesn’t see race, ethnicity, or religious creed—and thus, cannot discriminate—is a vital symbol of our justice system. While Lady Justice is an ideal, actual justice in the United States has never been blind.

Deeply embedded into the structure of our justice system, implicit bias and unequal systems of protection have eroded this ideal since our nation’s founding. To many, these biases are camouflaged as just part of “the way things are,” but they falsely distort the notion that our American system is one of fairness and justice. By allowing discriminatory policies to remain in place, and reinforcing the unjust structures behind them, they rob citizens of opportunities and resources based on little more than the color of their skin. These systemic biases promote massive disparities in the dispensation of justice, as well as in the severity of sentences and the treatment of people once detained and incarcerated, all along racial lines.

Taken alone, these biases would be compelling evidence of a broken system. But these biases are integrated and self-sustaining when you add in the increased reliance on arrests and excessive force by police; a bail system in our courts designed to criminalize poverty; and a political system that sustains itself on contributions from private interests that profit from building and maintaining the components of the machine. This machine serves a status quo that places capitalism over humanity, and it is running efficiently: America incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on Earth. The industry built around sustaining this system creates many billions of dollars in revenue each year. Fixing it will not be a simple matter of passing “feel-good” legislation. These inherent biases must be pulled up by the roots. These are not issues that sprang up overnight, having been written into our code of government over generations. This machine cannot simply be switched off, and many powerful interests don’t want it to.

Please download this infographic that explains our broken system of justice in the United States.

To fix this system, we must confront each individual component of this machine and litigate accountability for:

• Police who brutalize Black people, and police departments who adopt warrior mentalities against the communities they are supposed to serve and protect.
• Communities who use cash bail to prosecute poverty, from the judges who set the bail amount to the prosecutors who use cash bail as a cudgel to extract plea bargains from people desperate to get out of detention.
• Local governments, who fund prosecutors’ offices at dramatically higher levels than public defenders’ offices.
• Jail and prison workers, who work in a system that punishes, rather than rehabilitates.

Elected leaders, who advocate “tough on crime” policies that destroy lives, families, and communities. Backstopping each of these components of criminal injustice is a civil process heavily stacked to protect them: insurance companies, corporate lawyers, and qualified immunity that shields law enforcement from accountability. The Fair Fight Initiative, a non-profit 501c3, was created specifically to challenge the civil protections guarding this broken criminal system. We connect experienced civil rights litigators to cases that can affect systemic change. We pay for the onerous litigation costs that discourage qualified attorneys from taking civil rights cases. Your donations make this battle a fair fight.

We back up this effort with awareness-driven education, advocacy, and legislative work with a unified goal to achieve racial equality and justice in this country.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

We urge you to join this fight. Together, we can take action that ends centuries of violence, corruption, and suffering directed toward black and brown communities. We can litigate a level playing field, one in which Lady Justice might finally be blindfolded to racial bias, her focus solely on fairness.

When you make a tax deductible donation to the Fair Fight Initiative, you help educate the public on these inequalities. You become part of the reform that truly creates justice for all. And you help bring experienced litigators to take the cases that can fix a broken system.

Where Do My Donations Go?

Our efforts rely on crowdfunding from supporters like you, either as a one-time or recurring tax-deductible donations. With your help, we defend those victimized by unjust prosecution or cash bail. We provide representation to families whose loved ones died while in police custody or prison—not to seek a big payoff, but to get accountability and pursue lasting change. We raise awareness that moves this country away from mass incarceration and into mass rehabilitation. We form grassroots alliances at the community level, bringing together citizens from all walks of life in pursuit of justice.

We aggressively accelerate reforms at multiple levels of the criminal justice system by:

• Providing representation for people who are at risk in our inherently racist system, such as the bail and bond system, sentencing guidelines, probation, parole and overworked, underfunded public defenders’ offices.
• Fighting inequitable practices of law enforcement, from police, to sheriff’s offices, to prosecutors.
• Litigating cases of brutal treatment of detained and incarcerated people, from mental health care to general law enforcement excessive use of force and prison conditions.

The Fair Fight Initiative focus also includes:

• Systemic/Institutional Racism Reform
• Police Reform
• Sheriff Reform
• Mental Healthcare Reform
• Prison Guard Reform
• Bail & Bond Reform
• Healthcare Reform in Jails and Prisons
• Juvenile Justice Reform
• Prosecutorial Reform
• Sentencing Reform
• Prison Condition Reform
• Public Defender Reform
• Probation and Parole Reform
• Public Defender Reform
• and more

We can only make these changes with your help. Through your donations, we can create a fair fight for all.

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