Over the last several years, UW faculty, students, alumni, and community members have worked together to implement programs based on principles of restorative and transformative justice in Washington state. Alongside incarcerated people, survivors of violence, and others, Prof. Katherine Beckett and Martina Kartman of the UWCHR and LSJ’s Rethinking Punishment project began work that has evolved into Collective Justice (CJ), an organization “harnessing the collective power of communities to build new pathways of accountability and healing.”

Mass incarceration is increasingly recognized as a major source of both inequality and human rights violations in the United States. The U.S. incarceration rate is now five to ten times higher than those found in comparable countries, and mass incarceration very disproportionately impacts young and poor people, particularly those of color. For example, an estimated

A new report from the UWCHR’s Unfinished Sentences project features the story of former Salvadoran political prisoner Rafael Segura, whose legal case represents progress for survivors of torture and arbitrary detention during the civil war in El Salvador.