Our Statement of Support for The Breathe Act
The Women’s Council supports the Breathe Act as a vision of societal well-being and safety, based on community self-determination, peer support, and self-care. The Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives, which developed the Breathe Act, asks us to reimagine a new paradigm for public safety based on social work values (care, compassion, transformation, restoration, and recovery) while acknowledging our historic reliance on violence and lethal force. The task of reimaging is complex but crucial to human well-being. It requires the suspension of assumptions based on long-established paradigms in order to freely explore new paths toward social justice.
“History is clear that we cannot achieve genuine safety and liberation until we abandon police, prisons, and all punishment paradigms.”
The Breathe Act calls for the development of a framework that will shrink the overall size of the State and/or local adult and juvenile criminal-legal systems, as measured by budgets, staffing, and other resources allocated, and ultimately defund these systems entirely.
This demand is often expressed with the slogan “defund the police”. In order to do this, the Breathe Act proposes a process of shrinking resources allocated to criminal-legal systems with the eventual goal of eliminating funding entirely (once new systems are available as a replacement). Current defunding demands begin with a thoughtful and gradual dismantling of police budgets, focused on those line items which inflate police budgets for functions that could/should be more effectively performed by community-based non-carceral agencies. As funds are redirected to the community-based services which are foundational to the new imagining of public safety, old systems will become obsolete. Impacted communities suggest that a safe and vibrant community would eliminate much of the deprivation, trauma, and neglect that lead to potentially violent emergencies. Funds will be redirected to address basic human needs (hunger, housing, and health), to support programming and infrastructure that offer cultural, educational, and recreational experiences, and to make services available to address emotional and mental health issues (e.g. addiction, anger management, intimate partner relationships, mental illness, self-esteem).
Concurrently the lens through which communal and interpersonal crises/emergencies/violence is viewed is shifted from criminal justice (identifying and punishing) to public health/social work (prevention/the person in environment).
The Women’s Council supports the Breathe Act, based on its acknowledgment of the dysfunction of current criminal-legal systems. It provides an alternate vision of public safety which is consistent with social work values. We ask our professional organization, the National Association of Social Workers, to join in supporting the Breathe Act.
