This panel will analyze Bay Area initiatives to provide indigent Californians with legal counsel for eviction and other housing proceedings. Panelists will compare housing court outcomes in areas with and without a right to counsel and discuss the successes and shortcomings of the various local initiatives currently implemented.

Panelists will explore the experiences of young people in the criminal legal system. They will discuss the impacts of different initiatives on young people’s ability to move past their early involvement with the criminal legal system, and to avoid system involvement in the first place. Panelists will include people with experience working in the system, researching it, and living through it while incarcerated.

Dr. Clarence B. Jones, personal attorney and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, Jr., will share stories from his decades of experience working to further civil rights for marginalized communities.

A panel on the intersection of criminal law and environmental activism today. How do land defenders and water protectors balance their safety from police violence and incarceration with the needs of earth and communities? Should the movement to combat the climate crisis embrace more radical measures, including destruction of private property involved in carbon extraction? What can legal practitioners do to support those on the front lines of our global fight against environmental destruction? Join us for a discussion of these questions and more.

The panel will involve a discussion with activists and formerly incarcerated folks about the impact of the carceral system, envisioning a world without prisons, and what restorative justice looks like. Panelists will discuss how the work they do touches on these different topic areas as well as their own beliefs when it comes to moving towards abolition and decarceration.