Cohort 2024
Racine Interfaith Coalition
Collecting Court-Proceeding Data to Identify Racial Disparities
Racine, WI
Racine, Wisconsin, has consistently been ranked as one of the worst places in the country for Black Americans to live in because of poor social and economic outcomes, including achievement gaps between Black and white residents in education, health, and income, and disparate incarceration rates for Black residents. As a state, Wisconsin incarcerates Black people nearly 12 times more than white people, the second-highest Black-white incarceration ratio in the nation. For the systemic factors contributing to these racial disparities to be better understood and addressed, access to local data is needed. To this end, the Racine Interfaith Coalition’s Transformational Justice Task Force engages in court observation work, a critical source of data in efforts to identify racial inequities in the Racine criminal legal system.
With Catalyst Grant funding, and in partnership with UnBreakable LLC and court observers from local group Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development / Justified Anger (a previous Catalyst grantee), the Transformational Justice Task Force will train 25 community members as court observers and engage them in weekly data collection on legal proceedings related to bail, sentencing, and diversionary programs. This will enable the Racine Interfaith Coalition to better understand the factors contributing to racial disparities in these three components of Racine’s criminal legal system and increase the presence of court observers in legal proceedings.
