Kunde
The Decarceration Collective, Chicago
Beskrivelse
The Purpose of the Campaign
The Decarceration Collective is a group of female lawyers that have joined forces to help American men of colour. They fight to create awareness about The Third Strike Law – an unjust and suppressive legislation that sentence one to a life in prison after three minor offences such as possession of Marihuana.
The Concept
The sharing of the prisoners' personal stories created the foundation for the campaign. Instead of creating an argument based on statistics and numbers, we decided to speak to the recipients' emotions through the heart-breaking fate of the individual prisoner. We interviewed prisoners who served life in California in an attempt to grasp the reality they and their families are facing. The organisation didn't set out to question their innocence but the fairness of locking people up for offences that don't match up to the brutality of the sentence.
One of these prisoners, Ferell Scott, is a person the reality star and mega-influencer Kim Kardashian has worked to raise awareness about. Therefore, the editorial team chose to work strategically to build a campaign around his and similar prisoners' stories – to have Kim Kardashian share the message campaign wide and broad once launched.
By targeting interests and topics already on her radar, we created a campaign tailored to be shared.
The Result
The campaign site was launched on 19 July 2019, and the team started to share the content organically. This led to Kim Kardashian picking up the story and sharing it on her Instagram and Twitter account – a total audience of more than 220 million people.
In just a few hours, the campaign site had over 28,000 unique visitors as well as intensive attention around the campaign's social media profile – and lastly, the attention of the more traditional American press.
Following this massive coverage, Pusha T and Lauren Hill joined the campaign with the release of their single "Coming Home" – launched on a special campaign site in support of the Third Strike Campaign. Once again, a lot of attention and media coverage was created around the campaign.
Attention alone is not necessarily valuable. However, in this case, it was exactly what it took to make judges reconsider the cases that The Decarceration Collective were working on. And not only did the cases go to court again; two cases led directly to the release of two the men who were otherwise facing ending their life behind bars.
Receiving this news was, as you can imagine, an exceptional day to the team:
A while ago, you listened to me and another lawyer present arguments to the Judge about why Jabari Veals's life sentence should be reduced. Jabari is one of the 14 men featured on the Third Strike's website.
Today the judge agreed with us and reduced his life sentence. (See below) He's our first solid win from the site!
Please share this news with the team., and extend my deepest gratitude. I will try to arrange a call so Jabari can thank the team personally.
In solidarity,
MiAngel C.
And as 2019 came to an end, another piece of life-affirming news landed:
We recently learned that we won Chris McGee's case. He is another one of the prisoners Your work highlighted. He was our very youngest client – serving life for drugs that happened in his teens and early twenties. This is a shared victory! Please let the team know.
Many thanks and cheers to a New Year!