DeAnna Hoskins Speaks at Inaugural Aspen Justice Network Convening

“In September of 2022, criminal justice experts and community leaders came to Aspen, CO for the inaugural Aspen Justice Network (AJN) Convening. The community leaders—including city and county council members, educators, health care workers, lawyers, police officers, and more—are all part of the Justice and Governance Partnership’s (JGP) Local Justice Collaboratives established in three communities: Grand Rapids, Michigan; Birmingham, Alabama; and 17 rural counties in South Carolina. The AJN Convening connected local leaders, presented pivotal reform ideas, and gave each community the time and space to have conversations about how they want to implement justice reform and create public safety locally in their own communities. …

“For Wednesday’s closing plenary, [Dr. Douglas E. Wood, Director of The Aspen Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative (CJRI)] moderated a conversation between Erica Bond, Vice President of Social Justice Initiatives at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and DeAnna Hoskins, President and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA. One particularly influential moment was when Dr. Wood asked, ‘What’s needed for us to have a different approach when it comes to supporting communities that have overlapping inequities and spacial concentrations of high rates of incarceration?’ Hoskins responded, ‘The most oppressed and marginalized communities don’t have the four institutions that stabilize the community: education, grocery, hospital, and financial. […] A lot of times you don’t have the financial institutions that invest back in the communities where they sit.’ This closing discussion captured the essence of AJN and the purpose of the first gathering of JGP’s partner communities.”

Read the full recap on the Aspen Institute website.