Panel participants (left to right): Ana Yáñez-Correa, Ryan King, Juan Cartagena, and Sara Totonchi. Photo credit: David Y. Lee for Public Welfare Foundation.
At a forum held at the Public Welfare Foundation, a panel of experts explored the importance of understanding how criminal justice policies impact the Latinx community and what can be done to ensure that those policies become less, rather than more, onerous and harmful.
The experts, all Public Welfare Foundation grantees, spoke about different ways that the criminal justice system affects Latinx families and communities.
Ryan King, Senior Fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, talked about the importance of pushing the federal government and the states to collect accurate demographic data throughout the criminal justice system. Juan Cartagena, President and General Counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, related some current practices, such as excessive policing, racial profiling, and over-prosecution of drug crimes to a history of segregation and violence toward Mexicans that often paralleled the treatment of African Americans. And Sara Totonchi, Executive Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, examined how criminal justice policy intersects with immigration policy.
Ana Yáñez-Correa, the Foundation’s Program Director for Criminal Justice, served as moderator.
Mary E. McClymont, President and CEO of the Foundation, gave welcoming remarks.
To see the Facebook stream of the event, click here.
