2007 Activities

The Open Society Institute’s U.S. Programs embarked on an ambitious plan in 2007 to develop a range of new funding initiatives that will build on current work and introduce new strategies to address the formidable challenges facing open society in the United States. A new Transparency and Integrity Fund will unite under one umbrella OSI’s past support for advocacy on the independence of the judiciary and the media, election systems reform, and the depoliticization of government science policy. The fund will include support for restoring integrity in key executive agencies, revitalizing Congress’s oversight role, building the capacity of independent oversight (or watchdog) organizations, and addressing the impact of the growing privatization of government functions.

The new Democracy and Power Fund will expand on OSI’s successful efforts to mobilize youth, immigrants, and communities of color. It will provide capacity-building support to organizations that are engaging critical constituencies, nurturing new leaders, and generating new ideas and innovative solutions to address threats to democracy.

In addition to these long-term funding initiatives, U.S. Programs is embarking on two special cross-program campaigns that will provide expanded resources to address urgent threats to democracy and human rights: a Campaign for Black Male Achievement and a Campaign to Restore Human Rights and Promote a Progressive National Security Policy.

These new funds and campaigns will complement ongoing work within U.S. Programs. OSI’s work on criminal justice and equality has long been and remains a core priority of U.S. Programs and will continue through a Criminal Justice Fund and the Equality and Opportunity Fund.

Repairing Democracy

Across the nation, voter participation has declined over the past 20 years, ranking the United States 20th out of 21 established democracies in participation rates. This reality to a great extent reflects how many Latinos, African Americans and other people of color, new Americans, and low-income and young voters are disproportionately refraining from taking part in elections. OSI grantees are working to ensure that as many of these citizens as possible exercise their right to participate in the democratic process.

Following the failure of policymakers to secure fair and comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2007, immigrants’ rights advocates stepped up their engagement efforts among their diverse constituencies. The We Are America Alliance, an unprecedented collaboration of community-based, immigrants’ rights, and faith-based organizations, and other OSI grantees, including the Arab American Institute Foundation, Democracia U.S.A., and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, are galvanizing the immigrants’ rights community to work for the full engagement of new Americans in the democratic process in 2008 and beyond.

OSI recognizes that efforts to engage all Americans in the democratic process will be effective only with the repair of the United States’ failing election system. Indiana’s law concerning voter-ID requirements is the most restrictive identification law in America. Now that it has been upheld by the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the law threatens to exclude many eligible voters from participating in the election process and is likely to lead other states to enact similar laws that suppress access to the franchise.

The Brennan Center for Justice, along with other OSI grantees the Advancement Project, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Demos, and Project Vote, are monitoring these developments and working at the grassroots level with individual advocates, community leaders, and elections officials to help guarantee full participation and the free and fair conduct of elections.

OSI grantees in 2007 played an important role in engaging and mobilizing young people through grantmaking and convenings. In November, 5,500 young activists from across the nation gathered at the University of Maryland in College Park for “Power Shift 2007,” a conference designed to stimulate the effort to fight global warming. Organized by OSI grantee Campus Climate Challenge, a partnership of more than 40 leading youth, racial justice, environmental, and other social justice organizations, and with the help of Americans for Informed Democracy, Campus Progress, Camp Wellstone, the Ruckus Society, and Young People For, the conference’s participants shared experiences and strategized about efforts for action in their home states, communities, and schools.

Supporting a Fair Justice System for All

U.S. Programs has been a leader in the fight for equal justice and to end the nation’s overreliance on incarceration and harsh punishment. OSI supports a range of criminal justice reforms to end racial profiling, felony disfranchisement, and capital punishment and to promote sentencing alternatives and progressive reentry policies and practices. Support for justice reinvestment provides a practical strategy for safely shifting the nation’s massive investment in prisons toward the rebuilding of schools, health care facilities, parks, and other public institutions in neighborhoods devastated by high levels of incarceration. OSI grantees also work to eradicate structural racism in law and public policies, to restore due process protections for noncitizens, and to advance the rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Several milestones for this work in 2007 included the following:

Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparities

For more than 20 years, federal sentencing laws have applied much tougher sentences for crack cocaine offenses than powder cocaine offenses. Distribution of just 5 grams of crack carries the same mandatory minimum five-year federal prison sentence as distribution of 500 grams of powder cocaine. This sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine results in African Americans spending substantially more time in federal prisons for drug offenses than whites; while they make up 82 percent of the defendants sentenced for crack offenses, African Americans comprise only 33 percent of all crack users.

The Open Society Institute–Washington, D.C., led a coalition of grantees, including The Sentencing Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, Break the Chains, Drug Policy Alliance, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, that worked to draw media and public attention to this disparity. In May, the U.S. Sentencing Commission proposed an amendment to the federal sentencing guidelines to reduce sentencing ranges for offenses related to crack cocaine. In December, the Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to make the crack amendment retroactive—applying it to prisoners sentenced before November 1, 2007. Sentences could be reduced by an average of 27 months for approximately 19,500 federal prisoners over a 30-year period.

With the same group of grantees submitting amicus briefs, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Kimbrough v. United States that judges may, at their discretion, depart from federal sentencing guidelines in cases involving crack cocaine.

New Jersey Death Penalty

On December 17, 2007, Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey made history by signing the first state law repealing a death penalty law since 1976. This decision was in part based upon policy recommendations presented by the bipartisan New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission and endorsed by the County Prosecutors’ Association of New Jersey.

A set of OSI grantees, led by Equal Justice USA, has been engaged since 2001 in the campaign to abolish the death penalty in New Jersey and provided critical support in the creation of the commission. Other OSI grantees presented testimony before the commission, including Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, the Innocence Project, and New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty.

The historic decision in New Jersey capped off an eventful year in the effort to end the death penalty in the United States. The United States Supreme Court brought executions to a halt with its decision to review a case presenting the question of whether Kentucky’s lethal-injection protocol violates the Constitution because it imposes unnecessary pain and suffering. The number of executions dropped to its lowest number in more than a decade.

School Integration

On June 28, 2007, the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, and McFarland v. Jefferson County Board of Education limited the explicit use of race as a means to integrate public schools. As a result of the ruling, hundreds of school districts across the country must review their voluntary integration plans. Challenges to these plans have already emerged. Some school districts are unable to address the legal challenges and meet their diversity goals without significant support from organizations and individuals with integration expertise. U.S. Programs supported the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles, The Opportunity Agenda, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. They form part of a growing network of organizations working directly with school districts to promote diversity and halt the erosion of civil rights in school systems.

Justice Reinvestment in Wichita, Kansas

The Council of State Governments, an OSI grantee, is spearheading Justice Reinvestment, a national bipartisan initiative to downsize state prisons and reinvest savings to revitalize communities to which most people return after prison. The council provides nonpartisan research and technical assistance to state policymakers and criminal justice officials. For example, the Kansas legislature, with overwhelming bipartisan support, enacted comprehensive legislation that will enable the state to avert projected prison population growth, saving the state $80 million in prison spending over the next five years alone. Instead, Kansas will reinvest $7 million in drug and alcohol treatment and make targeted reinvestments to revitalize communities, focusing initially on Central Northeast Wichita, a neighborhood to which a disproportionate number of people leaving state prison return.

OSI-Baltimore

Building on OSI-Baltimore’s three-year effort in grantmaking and public education to raise awareness about the harm incurred by excessive use of suspension and expulsion, the Baltimore City Public School System in 2007 completed a new version of its school discipline code that is expected to provide many more positive behavior interventions. The earlier code allowed principals to suspend children for over 30 offense categories, including truancy, dress-code violations, and minor disagreements. Further bolstering OSI’s efforts to reduce the number of suspensions, the school system’s new chief executive, after reviewing the data, embraced the philosophy that suspensions should be used as a tool of last resort and that every effort should be used to keep children attached to school.

In response to a fundraising challenge by George Soros to engage the Baltimore community in its work, OSI-Baltimore has successfully raised funds totaling over $10 million from venture capitalists, civic leaders, established foundations, and individuals toward a $20 million goal.