The Mass Liberation Team of The People’s Lobby is proud to announce the organization’s endorsement Kim Foxx for reelection for Cook County State’s Attorney. Reelecting Kim Foxx is one of the most urgent and important things we can do in the next year to support the liberation of Black, Brown and poor communities in Cook County.
“Kim Foxx believes in our liberation,” says Rev. Lawrence Marshall, a leader with The People’s Lobby and pastor of Payne Chapel AME Church in Chicago Heights, Illinois. “Kim Foxx is co-championing our peoples’ visions by eliminating racist and prejudice practices from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and expanding restorative justice practices.”
At the same time, Black and Brown communities are envisioning new pathways to safety and justice that restore life and opportunity to our neighborhoods. These pathways include building political power that is strong enough to win government investments in health care, housing, schools and other necessities that are accountable to the people most impacted by over-policing and mass incarceration and to determine what businesses come into impacted neighborhoods and how they relate to community.
In this context, State’s Attorney Foxx is boldly:
- Standing up to the Fraternal Order of Police, who oppose all accountability and community oversight of police with deadly consequences for Black, Brown and poor communities.
- Reducing the number of people sentenced to incarceration. Kim Foxx understands that prison further harms and traumatizes Black, Brown and poor individuals and communities. Foxx is expanding alternatives to incarceration, including expanding restorative justice courts, diversion programs and probation as well as charging certain crimes — like driving on a suspended license or retail thefts of less than $1,000 — as misdemeanors rather than felonies. She also opposes cash bail, a system which incarcerates thousands of Black and Brown people before trial because they don’t have access to money. We can actually measure the outcomes: data shows that sentences of incarceration declined 19% during Kim Foxx’s second year! Thousands of people avoided prison because of her leadership, and we are eager to see how much more she’ll do in a second term.
- Dismantling the school to prison pipeline. Black children in Chicago Public Schools are routinely punished in ways that lead to incarceration, and Black girls are suspended and expelled at alarming rates. Foxx is organizing stakeholders to participate in a new diversion program, in which school officers refer students to a social service agencies for support, instead of arresting them.
- Changing the culture of the office from a focus on punishments of maximum sentences to valuing fairness, mercy and justice. Past prosecutors sought maximum sentences almost in every case, regardless of the trauma, poverty or oppression people experienced before they were charged. An astounding 90% of cases never go to trial, so when prosecutors’ main goal is to file maximum charges that send people to prison, they become one of the main drivers of mass incarceration!
- Overturning the convictions of and apologizing to dozens of Black folks whom Chicago Police tortured into confessing or falsified evidence in their cases.
Many trials and obstacles have been placed on the path to restorative justice, but we continue forward to bring our collective visions to life by holding ourselves accountable to moving people to the polls for Kim Foxx and holding her accountable to furthering reforms in her second term. Through this work we are building power to win justice, freedom and liberty for our communities.