Achieve Transformative Justice

The inequities that define America's criminal punishment system are no accident. Structural racism and white supremacy plague law enforcement in this country, from the prison industrial complex to police brutality. Our criminal punishment system ravages our most vulnerable communities while for-profit prison executives get rich off cheap prison labor. Despite the mass protests in summer of 2020, police continue to target and abuse Black communities. Families are driven to financial ruin by exorbitant cash bail requirements, and many low-income Americans are pressured into taking unjust plea deals because they don't have the resources to adequately defend themselves in court. 

Mckayla is intimately familiar with the myriad ways in which the legal system fails working class people of color. As a teenager, grieving the loss of her aunt, she faced juvenile detention instead of counseling and support. As a young adult, she fell into a vicious cycle: When she couldn’t afford to pay traffic tickets, her license was suspended, despite the fact that she needed to drive to get to work to pay off the tickets. And during the protests over George Floyd's murder, she took to the streets, demanding transformative justice. It's time to take those demands to the halls of Congress.

 
transformative justice

Mckayla supports:

  • Redirecting funding from bloated police budgets to social services and infrastructures of care that will help prevent the root causes of crime.

  • Demilitarizing and disarming police forces.

  • Ending "qualified immunity," which shields police officers from liability for abusing civilians. 

  • Abolishing the federal death penalty. 

  • Abolishing mandatory minimum sentences. 

  • Prohibiting the use of cash bail. 

  • Prohibiting government contracts with private prison companies. 

  • Prohibiting any prison labor that pays inmates less than a $15 minimum wage. 

  • Directing the FCC to prohibit the use of predatory prison phone rates, freeing individuals to call family members in prison without severe economic costs.

  • Legalizing marijuana on the federal level and expunging all marijuana convictions.