Media Fact Sheet

 

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice is a research and advocacy organization dedicated to the advancement of New Jersey's residents and urban areas. NJISJ uses a three-step approach to address the root causes of social and economic disparities in order to build opportunity for New Jersey's urban residents:

Step 1: We identify barriers to social and economic success by gathering data directly from urban residents and public and private leaders.

Step 2: We analyze those barriers through legal, social science and political lenses and search for best practices or model solutions.

Step 3: We attack the root causes by applying our research and analysis to implement cost-effective advocacy and demonstration programs.

To achieve this mission, the Institute operates both advocacy and direct service programs, as we believe that each informs the other, and engaging in both expands our impact. Applying our comprehensive approach, NJISJ has accomplished the following results and outcomes that build opportunity for New Jersey residents:

 

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and REaching for Opportunity (4 Rs)

 

• Awarded a grant from NJ Department of Labor to pilot WomenBuild, a program designed to open nontraditional career opportunities in the skilled trades for hard to employ.  The skilled trades offer earnings opportunities up to 30 percent higher than other ‘pink collar’ fields traditionally populated by women, and these additional earnings mean a better life for women and their families as well as an expansion of the tax base. 

 

• Created the Greater Newark Brownfields Remediation Program, supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to ensure that local residents will be at the forefront of the higher wage workforce needed to safely remediate properties in the greater Newark region and the tri-state area.  Individuals completing this training will receive nationally recognized credentials including asbestos removal and lead abatement licenses.

 

• Implemented Project Connect, in partnership with Jewish Vocational Services to expand the reach of One-Stop Career Centers to underserved populations.  The Institute offers training for other training agencies wishing to prepare their clients for careers in the environmental and green industries, construction and the utility industry.

 

• Brought together representatives of the public sector, construction trade unions, and the vocational education system to develop the Newark/Essex Construction Career Consortium (N/ECCC), an innovative, nationally recognized pre-apprenticeship program through which nearly 450 minorities and women have successfully entered the trades.  N/ECCC graduates experience greater wage growth after training:  about $5,000 more in the first year and about $8,000 more in the second year according to an independent evaluation of the program conducted by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

 

• Developed and implemented the New Careers Project, an innovative employment program assisting ex-offenders returning to Newark following incarceration to find and keep jobs.  Partnering with the Greater Newark Conservancy, the program provides up to eight weeks of temporary work experience combined with case management to address a variety of barriers to employment.  This year, the Institute has served over 200 clients and placed more than 86 participants in permanent jobs at an average wage of $10.23 per hour.  

 

• Created a New Truck Driver Training Program in collaboration with the Newark Alliance, the Motor Carriers Association, and others to offer specialized counseling and intermediation to assist graduates of local Commercial Driver’s License programs to become truck drivers.  Despite the current recession, the Institute, working together with the Newark One Stop Career Center, has successfully helped Newark residents secure jobs in the trucking industry. 

 

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Urban Asset Protection and Creation Initiative

• Developed, in partnership with the courts, an innovative “License Restoration Program,” by which people with fines in multiple localities are accorded consolidated payment plans and conditional licenses.  This program breaks the “can’t drive because can’t pay, can’t pay because can’t work, can’t work because can’t drive” cycle by training attorneys and social service providers statewide to help drivers get back on the road and into the workplace. Over 400 people have requested assistance from the Institute in this matter. In 2009, the Institute provided technical assistance to Passaic County to establish a similar program.

 

• Trained over 500 service organizations and agencies statewide on how to help their clients restore suspended driver’s licenses by using our license restoration manual ‘Getting Back on the Road,’ developed together with attorneys at the law firm of Lowenstein Sandler. 

• Advocated for specific protections for homeowners facing foreclosure, which resulted in the passage of the Mortgage Stabilization Relief Act in 2009.  The Act included a number of the measures proposed by the Institute, including incentives for loan modification and support for community stabilization efforts.

 

• Partnered with New Jersey Citizen Action and the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey to draft the New Jersey Homeownership Preservation Act. The Act contained provisions to protect homeowners and reduce the impact of foreclosures on communities.

 

• Spearheaded an advocacy effort that led to New Jersey’s anti-predatory lending legislation, The Home Ownership Security Act.  The Act was ultimately supported by both consumer and industry groups, to curb abusive lending practices while also ensuring access to responsible forms of credit.

 

• Authored ‘House Rich, Pocket Poor’ detailing challenges faced by urban communities with aging housing stock regarding home financing and access to credit.

 

• Helped establish a Home Repair Loan Program to address the need for affordable credit products for responsible homeowners in collaboration with the city of East Orange and Hudson City Savings Bank.  These loans provide an alternative to the high-cost loans prevalent in urban areas.  The program has enjoyed repayment rates that mirror the performance of the bank’s portfolio as a whole, even during the worst recession in decades.

 

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Equal Justice

 

• In 2010, the Institute played a central role in the passage of landmark prisoner reentry legislation that expands access to public benefits, ensures individuals will leave prison with the literacy equivalent of a high school education, and guarantees that individuals will have important identity documents critical to obtaining employment in hand at the time of release.  This legislation was passed despite the budget crisis and challenging political environment. The New York Times called the legislation a “model for the nation.”

 

• Conceptualized and implemented the “New Jersey Prisoner Reentry Roundtable,” a year-long series of discussions among over 85 state leaders in the public, business, academic, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors that succeeded in putting the profound needs confronting ex-offenders squarely onto the state policy map.  The Roundtable resulted in statewide and municipal crime plans focused on reentry, greater public and philanthropic investment in reentry employment programs, and was the catalyst in passing the 2010 landmark legislation.

 

• Secured a grant from the Victoria Foundation, matched by an anonymous foundation, to bring Operation Ceasefire, a strategy proven in seven cities to reduce gang-related violence and drug trade, to Newark. Rutgers University will be the lead implementing organization and will work with the City of Newark, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Newark Police Department to execute the program.

 

• Created the Second Chance Campaign of New Jersey, the first and only statewide prisoner reentry coalition engaging a wide range of over 50 organizations from Camden to Newark, calling for reform on the prison phone surcharge, felony drug ban, in-prison education, collateral sanctions, and other issues that led to the legislative victory described above.

 

• Prepared the most comprehensive analysis of New Jersey’s juvenile waiver statute ever conducted.  The report, produced in collaboration with Yale alumnae and the Public Catalyst Group, will be used to advocate for juvenile waiver reform with recommendations based on new developments in adolescent brain research and new data on waiver filings, juvenile crime rates, and the effect of waiver laws. 

 

• Catalyzed the creation of New Jersey’s only youth court in Newark. This court allows middle and high school students to prosecute, defend and render verdicts on youth alleged to have engaged in minor offenses.

 

• Reframed the state policy conversation regarding the challenge of youth and gangs by both producing an authoritative white paper, “Do No Harm,” and widely viewed documentary film, “Moral Panic.”  This film, based on the Institute’s report on gangs and prisoner reentry, has been shown before government agencies, national think tanks and local community audiences—with record attendance—comprised of gang members, law enforcement, funders, law students, families, school children and government officials.

 

• Founded ReLeSe (Reentry Legal Services), the only program in the country that pairs ex-offenders with pro bono counsel to address the multiple civil legal needs attendant to reentry.  ReLeSe is a network of 250 trained volunteer attorneys who have served 1,200 clients to date, many of which involve expungement.

 

• Helped to bring the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) to Essex County, New Jersey’s most urban and populous county. The program serves as a national model: JDAI has reduced the average number of children in custody per night by more than half (from 240 per night to fewer than 100).  Children have been productively engaged in local community programs, after school activities, service work and academic remediation.  

 

 

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Legal Advocacy

 

• Principally authored a widely acclaimed, 243-page statewide child welfare reform plan, the implementation of which has improved the lives of countless of New Jersey’s most vulnerable children and families.

 

• Helped to bring New Jersey’s first Community Justice Center to Newark. This Court serves as a model community court for the state to stop the revolving door of low-level offenders by combining reasonable punishment with community and social services designed to address the social realities underlying criminality.  These efforts were achieved with the collaboration of the Center for Court Innovation and Newark Municipal Court.

 

• Secured a unanimous victory in the New Jersey Supreme Court that precluded juveniles arrested on status offenses from being locked up – a practice both illegal and demonstrably counterproductive.  Status offenses are those for which there is no adult criminal analogue (e.g., truancy or curfew violation).

 

• Secured a unanimous victory in the New Jersey Supreme Court that approximately doubled the pool of criminal defendants eligible for our state’s drug court program, which has a proven record of success in markedly reducing recidivism—14%, as compared to the 67% state record—by breaking the cycle of addiction and criminality.

 

• Argued successfully on behalf of an elderly low-income homeowner and victim of predatory lending in the New Jersey Appellate Division, resulting in the first appellate opinion in the United States holding predatory lending to be a civil rights violation.

 

• Defended handgun control and local government innovation.  Participated as amicus in the Appellate Division and Supreme Court, defending Jersey City’s One-Handgun-per-Month local law against a state preemption challenge.  The litigation helped catalyze the adoption of a statewide statute with the same provision.