Reparative Justice: Incarceration’s Impact on the Racial Wealth Gap
Authors: Joi Edwards, Manager of Storytelling and Insights
The data is clear: Effective rehabilitation requires economic policies, practices, and systems that prioritize people over profit.
To expedite support and move capital toward the solutions for justice-involved individuals and communities, we invited a panel of experts to help us reimagine reentry for economic dignity, safety, and belonging.
Hosted by Suzy Salamy, Director of Social Work at The Innocence Project, this panel also featured two organizations that participated in Common Future’s 2024 Accelerator program.
Rokki Bonner and Asegedech Kumnegere, Co-Founders of Fit to Navigate, are leaders in reentry support and economic empowerment for formerly incarcerated women. Kavita Pawria-Sanchez, CEO of Cannabronx, is utilizing New York’s cannabis industry as a vehicle for reparations to communities affected by the war on drugs.
Fit to Navigate and Cannabronx is building waterways to equip communities with the tools they need to build holistic systems of care, help restore justice, and advocate for the economic future we deserve.
Racial Capitalism and Systemic Barriers
Falsehoods and fables about who is deserving of safety, dignity, and belonging, trace back to America’s inception. Despite the overwhelming evidence that investing in communities solves the problems that policing them only exacerbates, the United States spends upwards of $270 billion a year penalizing communities we’re well-equipped to support.
With more prisons than food banks, affordable housing units, or schools, the United States is more likely to punish vulnerable communities than metabolize solutions to strengthen them. Of the 2 million people incarcerated in the thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems, a disproportionate number of those sentences are a direct consequence of racial caste.
Black men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men; Latino men are nearly three times as likely; and Native Americans are incarcerated at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
Today, the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world. Over the last 50 years, incarceration rates have grown by 500%. Research by The Sentencing Project shows this uptick is not a remedy for rising crime, but an outcome of political greed.
From the War on Drugs and the Convict Leasing Era to the Civil Rights-Black Power era, to over-policing, racial profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline, the “slavery clause” and mass incarceration, it’s clear that systems haven’t changed, they’ve just evolved.
Packing prisons has never been about public safety—it has always been about power.
And the impact of incarceration is costly. On average, people who have been to prison see their annual earnings reduced by 52%. The significantly higher rates of financial insecurity in Native, Black, Latino, and other communities of color are exacerbated even further by the lower wages and lost income they experience more often post-release.
Cannabronx is tipping the scales of power to help communities impacted by the war on drugs get the reparations they are owed. After cannabis was legalized in New York, Kavita says founding Cannabronx was truly a matter of meeting the moment.
“We're a community organization, mostly grassroots, working to get real reparations for black and brown communities that were impacted by the war on drugs through the opportunities that were created by the legalization of cannabis in New York state a few years ago. So we were founded in the wake of the passage of that law, seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for building real community wealth and reparations for all of the harms that were caused to our communities through tax revenue that will be generated in the Millions of dollars and poured back into our communities.”
—Kavita Pawria-Sanchez
Outside of the prison system, women in America already lack economic security and safety. Inside the system, those inequities only compound. Since 1980, the number of women in incarceration has multiplied by almost seven—a growth rate twice as high as men. According to this 2024 report published by the Prison Policy Initiative, women entering incarceration are increasingly less likely to ever leave it. An alarming number of women who are incarcerated are not even convicted. What’s more, their release is most likely stalled because they can’t afford to pay for it.
A tragic number of the 190,600 women and girls incarcerated today enter the prison system having been pushed through a pipeline that targets them as girls. For a disproportionate number of Black, Native, and Latina girls, the impact of adultification and criminalization is a heartbreaking tale of a girlhood completely erased.
Today, Native girls have the highest incarceration rate, and Black girls are the fastest-growing portion of the juvenile justice system.
Without economic safety, young girls of color are thrice marginalized and then subjected to the violent thrash of intersectional inequalities designed to keep it that way. When resources are out of reach, and cries for help go ignored, girls are left without the support they’re worthy of, or the tools they need to thrive.
Rokki, Co-Founder of Fit to Navigate says that witnessing the systemic erasure of women in her community through the prison pipeline motivated the organization’s founding. Informed by a history of justice work, Rokki grounds her “why” in the knowledge that we are all so much more than our mistakes.
“What brought me to this work is seeing so many women in my community being vacuumed up in the pipeline to prison, and knowing that I'm not the sum of my mistakes, and being able to activate healthy re-entry as well as impact women who have been justice-involved.”
—Rokki Bonner
For incarcerated women and girls, reentry is impacted by a multitude of factors. Incarcerated women are more likely to enter the prison system as survivors of abuse, chronically poor, ill, or unemployed, and are more often placed in jails that lack the systems, services, and supports that women need most.
If women and girls received the support they need (or the same access to resources as incarcerated men), that support could help women receive shorter sentences and support their return home.
When a woman serving a life sentence wrote several proposals for a wellness program inside the prison system, Asegedech says it’s what led to the creation of Fit to Navigate in Ohio.
“What we like to say is, this work chose us. In Ohio, home to one of the largest women's prisons, we learned about mass incarceration. We learned that two-thirds of our prison population end up back in prison, a phenomenon known as recidivism, and through restorative practices and collaborating with our state prison system, what we've been trying to foster is a program that focuses on wellness first.”
—Asegedech Kumnegere
Re-Entry Reimagined for Dignity and Belonging
Finding balance in today’s world is hard enough, but successful rehabilitation directly challenges nearly every dimension of wellness. Communities impacted by incarceration need continued investment in holistic reentry programs and services that help to mitigate systemic harm.
Creating the conditions for a dignified re-entry starts before re-entry begins. Fit to Navigate and Cannabronx are advancing the economic dignity and belonging that women most impacted by incarceration deserve and currently seek: The Fit to Navigate program has a 0% recidivism rate, and 90% of the constituents of Cannabronx were Black and Latino men. Barriers to social and emotional wellness include untreated mental illness, inaccessibility to resources, and the lack of support to develop healthy coping skills. Fit to Navigate sees the role of social enterprises as meeting people where they are and providing holistic support.
“There's one thing for you to have workforce development and to get a job, but if you can't show up for yourself, how long are you going to be able to show up for that job? How can we build more navigators in the community that are credible sources, that are able to start their own businesses or have the tools to be able to take care of themselves?”—Asegedech Kumnegere
Barriers to vocational wellness include a lack of job opportunities and limited pathways to entrepreneurship, and Fit to Navigate sees “wellness entrepreneurship” as a restorative and sustainable option for income that gives women and their families more room to breathe.
Barriers to financial wellness include acquiring financial literacy, accessing capital, and the need for support in creating business plans. Kavita of Cannabronx shared that supporting financial literacy can help create business plans and improve access to capital.
“A lot of the work that we're having to do, that there isn't public money for yet. Connecting folks with resources, and learning ourselves as activists how to navigate capital and and win in capitalism, which is also not a thing we're taught. That is actually part of what we're trying to do—turn capitalism on its head. But also to make that benefit our communities in ways that it's not meant to necessarily, and that is through ownership.”—Kavita Pawria-Sanchez
Reparative Investing for a Just Future
To advance justice, we must invest in solutions that repair, restore, and rebuild communities most harmed by systemic violence. Policymakers, non-profits, and financial institutions have a crucial role to play.
Enterprises and corporations can support re-entry by putting people first. By offering fair wages, helping set up savings accounts, and providing holistic support, organizations can provide opportunities for community collaboration and dismantle the systemic barriers often driven by profit. Policy-makers can support re-entry by holding institutions accountable. Policy-makers can shift power by providing technical assistance, non-extractive capital, and investing in community-owned solutions for systemic barriers.
