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On Tuesday February 10th, 2015, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new $75M initiative to reduce over-incarceration in America’s jails. This new Safety and Justice Challenge intends to “change the way America thinks about and uses jails.” A comprehensive report by the Vera Institute of Justice, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” revealed that not only has jail population tripled since 1980, but the cumulative expenditures related to building and running jails increased nearly 235 percent. This initiative hopes to ameliorate those very real human and financial costs.

Yesterday, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, released a harrowing new reported entitled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” This comprehensive study of twelve Southern states documents the names of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” from 1877 to 1950.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has created an interactive online database of on-going punishment, aka “collateral consequences,” for each U.S. jurisdiction. This state-by-state resource compiles all laws and restrictions about on-going punishments imposed on people because of past convictions.

A Dec. 16 opinion piece by Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western in The Boston Globe suggests that recent instances of police brutality in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and elsewhere across America, are just a symptom of a much larger problem that is the modern U.S. system of criminal justice.

#ThisStopsToday is calling for eleven days of action – one day for each of Eric Garner’s cries of “I Can’t Breathe” before he died – across NYC starting Wednesday, Dec 10th ending on Saturday Dec 20th. During these 11 days, #TheStopsToday is continuing the call for accountability and justice for Garner and all other victims of police brutality and violence.