Positive Policy #8: Justice
3 min readOct 24, 2020
Lightning round on Biden’s justice policies!
Environmental Justice:
- A new Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the DOJ, prioritizing litigation against polluters in vulnerable communities. (If you need a simple definition of what “environmental justice” focuses on, look no further than the finding that 70% of contaminated Superfund sites are near public housing. People without resources bear the brunt of toxic environments.)
- Creating tool to “identify communities threatened by the cumulative impacts of the multiple stresses of climate change, economic and racial inequality, and multi-source environmental pollution” and assist them.
- Enforcing safe drinking water standards. (The Flint crisis is the highest-profile, but by no means the only one.)
- Creating a strategy for equitable disaster risk-reduction and response, including special attention to the needs of children, the elderly, people with disabilities, and poor communities. Fifteen years on, Katrina is still a clear antecedent for the danger of unpreparedness in an environment made more volatile by climate change.
Criminal Justice Reform:
- A state grant program to encourage shifting focus from incarceration to prevention; federal funding for mental-health, substance-abuse rehab, and social services to assist those who need help before they encounter the criminal-justice system.
- Expanding USDOJ oversight and intervention against systemic misconduct in policing, reforming the use of consent decrees, and funding community-oriented policing and de-escalation training.
- Decriminalizing marijuana, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, investing in public defenders, eliminating the death penalty, and ending cash bail.
- Enhancing resources for rehabilitation and re-entering society post-incarceration (to minimize recidivism); post-traumatic resources to support victims of crime, including another plan to fight domestic violence and its effects.
Gendered Justice Issues:
- Prioritizing the reauthorization of VAWA, full stop. The current Senate (yes, that one) has let it lapse.
- Improving the housing services and FMLA access for available to survivors of domestic violence.
- Strengthening legal requirements and training for educational institutions; confronting online abuse and harassment; and ending mandatory arbitration which hides documentation of patterns of harassment & assault from public record.
…and a great deal more.
There is way too much to dig into here with any pretense of completeness. This is a campaign that sees many many avenues for this country to improve upon its vaunted promise to provide justice for all. This is the aspiration America needs.
