Over the past 6 years, the Detroit Justice Center has held onto our foundational belief that we must remedy the impacts of mass incarceration to create truly just cities. With our three-pronged approach of defense, offense, and dreaming, DJC has offered direct services to community members, helped change legislation for wider imapct, and shifted narratives around divesting from the carceral system and investing in community care. Back in 2018, during the inception of DJC, our Community Legal Advocates (CLA) team was launched to assist Detroit homeowners with appealing their property tax assessments in the highly overtaxed city. Since then the CLAs have been dedicated to democratizing the law and making it accessible to everyone, especially those most vulnerable to punishment from the legal system. Between the CLA’s and our attorneys, we have offered direct services including record expungement, legal defense against unjust landlords, assistance setting up co-ops and Community Land Trusts (CLTs), defense against water shut offs, and assisting Detroit homeowners with property tax assessment. At its inception, DJC worked closely with Namati, an international legal organization that has pioneered the use of community paralegals in 160 countries, to devise the community legal worker pilot which over time grew into...
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