Baltimore Action Legal Team operates within the ancestral lands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock Nations.
In recognition of Maryland Day and its painful colonial settler origins, we encourage you to ponder the question, what could a more just Maryland look like?
The work towards change starts with imagination; setting a vision for what makes a better future in Maryland. The other half of the work is organizing with those who share in that collective vision.
Interrupting Criminalization offers resources to answer the questions that arise when we imagine a world where we address harm in our communities outside of courts: “Even if we restructured society so everyone’s material needs were met, conflict and harm will still occur. So what do we do about that? How can we imagine other ways of preventing, evaluating and adjudicating harm beyond criminal or civil courts?”
Interrupting Criminalization compiles and reports the following framework from organizers and activists to help us to imagine a Maryland:
Adjudication: Why have a process for dealing with harm when it happens?
Defining harm: Harm is the responsibility of the entire community, not an individual experience.
Accountability, responsibility and Consequences: How do we learn to take responsibility for when we cause harm?
Participation, labor: Who does the majority of the work land on? How can that labor be distributed?
All of us at BALT recognize that a people powered movement is the only way towards a more perfect Maryland.
“When you think of the role of law in achieving justice, a lot of people truly buy into that myth that through the law we can shift power because that's what's needed and I think a lot of people feel like it's a legal solution. The history has told us time and time again that that’s not right, it’s a people solution,” Iman Freeman, BALT executive director.
For BALT, a more just Maryland is one where Black people use their power to determine justice in their own communities. What does a more just Maryland look like to you?
