Race, Criminal Justice, and Alternatives to Mass Incarceration - A Conversation with King Downing

Description

King Downing engages the Champlain College audience in charting a historical progressin leading to the incarceration numbers in our prisons and status of the justice system in America.  King Downing, the founding director of the Human Rights-Racial Justice Center, brings a profound understanding of the intersection of race, class and criminal (in)justice in America honed during his forty years of work as an activist, community organizer, policy advocate and civil-rights attorney. Throughout his career he has fought for the rights and lives of those impacted by criminal justice on many issues including mass incarceration, the school to prison pipeline, and the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. Most recently, he directed the Healing Justice Program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) where he worked on issues related to mass incarceration, including solitary confinement, prisoner advocacy and conflict resolution. The program goals included striving to increase reliance on transformative, healing forms of justice rather than punitive practices that damage body or spirit, as well as to end racial injustice in all justice practices. Downing also worked to build up the AFSC Alternatives to Violence Project, teaching at-risk youth alternative forms of conflict resolution and setting up dialogues and creative projects between men and women who have committed and suffered violent crimes.
Before joining the AFSC, Downing served eight years as national coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union's Campaign Against Racial Profiling, with a focus on policing and incarceration. One primary focus area was the then emerging awareness of the school-to-prison pipeline. While with the ACLU, Downing worked with the organization’s affiliates and partners to identify and end racial disparities in policing on the federal and local levels. In this work, he was helping to support and coordinate their various efforts, whether crafting legislation, setting up Know Your Rights Workshops and trainings, conducting media outreach, offering public education projects on police and incarceration practices, and engaging in community organizing.

Co-Sponsored by the Institute for Global Engagement and the Office of Diversity & Inclusion
 

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