New York Advocacy Group Unveils Plan to Increase Voting Among Family of Incarcerated
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NEW YORK — The Alliance of Families for Justice revealed a yearlong project on Wednesday, aimed at educating those who are incarcerated or have incarcerated family members on the importance of voting. Over the last year, the organization partnered with The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)’s Making Policy Public project to create a large foldout poster.
“When you receive our poster, you'll see that we focus on all aspects of the elimination of felony disenfranchisement so that someone's engagement with the criminal justice system should have no bearing on whether or not they get to exercise the franchise,” said Alliance Executive Director Soffiya Elijah.
The Alliance of Families for Justice (AFJ), which works to end human rights violations inside prisons and jails and build communities and families who are affected, worked with graphic designers Tahnee Pantig and her teammate to create the poster.
The poster’s design is intentionally different from the way anti-mass incarceration and social justice work are usually shown, Pantig said. “Like a lot of the images that we see, representing these communities are often shown from a light that can be very dark, very oppressive, and also one-sided, and we thought it was really important to demonstrate the resiliency, the agency, the activeness of these communities, that is already there,” she said. The designers also wanted the communities to see themselves in the illustrations.
Elijah said the organization made 20,000 posters and hopes to share them across the state.
AFJ has a multilayered plan to challenge felony disenfranchisement, she said, beginning with getting family members impacted by disenfranchisement registered to vote. Parolees in New York state, through an executive order by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, can now register and vote.