Lorenzo Jones.
For Lorenzo Jones, co-founder of the criminal-justice reform Katal Center, there is a big difference between being an advocate and being an organizer.
One strives for progress, the other for revolution.
“You measure community organizing in changing systems,” Jones said on the latest edition of WNHH radio’s “Criminal Justice Insider” program with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant. “You measure advocacy in reforms that you succeed at securing. As an organizer, you can get reforms, but that’s not organizing. You’ve got to go to the next step, where the system is operating differently as a result of you engaging with it.”
Jones is the co-founder and co-director of the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice, a Hartford-based not-for-profit that focuses on ending mass incarceration and dismantling the war on drugs and its disproportionate criminalization of black and brown communities throughout the country.
Katal’s primary areas of concern include reducing jail populations, achieving bail and speedy trial reform, and promoting pre-arrest diversion programs that connect low-level drug offenders with social service providers rather than with law enforcement. (Click here to learn about a new pre-arrest diversion program that New Haven recently launched with the support of Katal staffers from Albany, New York.)
Founded in February 2015, Katal works primarily in Connecticut and New York, though Jones and his co-founders gabriel sayegh and Melody Lee increasingly find themselves traveling the country to share their knowledge on how to build stable, effective, locally-led progressive movements.
For that is the promise and the very mission of the organization: to achieve systemic change in the world of criminal justice reform by training local leaders, advocates and organizers to fend for themselves.
“The example used to describe us,” Jones said, “is the infantry unit that shows up, creates a base camp, sets up all the medical stuff, and then they’re gone.”
Harry Droz Photo
Jones at WNHH FM.
Jones said that the primary role of a community organizer is to make sure that leaders are prepared with the necessary information, resources and wherewithal to achieve the change that their communities are calling out for. Organizers work behind the scenes, as opposed to at the front of any given movement.
“I’m the man sitting next to the man sitting next to the man with the plan,” Jones said with a smile.
Katal’s first major initiative as professional criminal justice reform consultants and organizers came through their involvement in the #CLOSErikers campaign, a grassroots movement to close a notorious New York City jail complex that has been routinely criticized over the past few decades for the physical abuse suffered by inmates at the hands of the jail’s correctional staff.
Katal worked with JustLeadershipUSA, a New York-based not-for-profit that encourages formerly incarcerated people to take positions of leadership in the criminal justice reform movement, to come up with an effective strategy for getting the city to promise to close down Rikers once and for all.
Jones said that his colleague Melody Lee ran the field operation for the campaign, supervising staff for both Katal and JustLeadershipUSA. She, Jones and sayegh coordinated rallies, held protest training sessions, and generally provided guidance on how to craft clear and affecting calls to arms that would get people in the community engaged with the movement.
“The idea was that JustLeadership is the center of the universe,” he said. “Our job as Katal was to make sure that the center of the universe had capacity.”
Sure enough, by the spring of 2017, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s official position on the issue was now that Rikers Island should be closed. Jones said that Katal has stepped back from most of the day-to-day activism around Rikers since the announcement, and that they are now planning on how best to ensure that the city and the state of New York follow through on the mayor’s promise.
Born and raised on the south side of Chicago, Jones first moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1984.
He started dealing drugs as a teenager in Hartford’s Asylum Hill neighborhood, but after becoming involved with a local organizing group called the Asylum Hill Organizing Project (AHOP) in the early 1990s, he decided that he actually wanted to spend his life fighting for tenants’ rights and working towards ending punitive drug policies directed towards minority communities.
In 1994, he joined United Connecticut Action for Neighborhoods (UCAN) as a professional community organizer, and from 2005 to 2016 he served as the executive director of A Better Way Foundation, where his advocacy and organizing helped usher in Connecticut’s decriminalization of marijuana as well as the passing of a medical marijuana bill; the establishment of state racial and ethnic impact statements in criminal justice legislation; and the end to mandatory minimums.
“There’s not a [criminal justice reform] project in Connecticut, non-profit or social justice [movement], that don’t have my fingerprints on it over the years,” he said.
With the Katal Center, Jones said, he and his colleagues are now looking to build a regional and national organization that can provide necessary support to groups like A Better Way Foundation that are working on ending the war on drugs and rebuilding the social safety net at the local level.
But for Jones, Katal also represents a new opportunity to embrace a strategy for achieving criminal justice reform that is gritty, laborious, and, to him, incredibly satisfying.
“We are cantankerous, old, callous-hearted organizers,” he said. “We want to be like old, sawdust-on-the-floor organizers and advocates who walk in the room and people don’t clap for you.”
Previous “Criminal Justice Insider” articles:
- Female Ex-Offenders Band Together
- German-Inspired Reform Calms Prison
- Son’s Arrest Helped Shape Porter’s Politics
“Criminal Justice Insider” airs every first and third Friday of the month on WNHH FM at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Listen to the full interview with Lorenzo Jones by clicking on the audio player or Facebook Live video below.
“Criminal Justice Insider” is sponsored by Family ReEntry and The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
Oh! You gotta listen to the podcast for all the laughter! This was a fun and lively conversation. I so enjoyed Lorenzo! He certainly speaks truth to power! The real deal out here in these social justice streets!
Thanks Tom Breen for listening and capturing all the good stuff!