The People’s Justice Guarantee: One Year Later, Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Resolution Remains The Blueprint For This Nation’s Third Reconstruction

The People’s Justice Guarantee: One Year Later, Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Resolution Remains The Blueprint For This Nation’s Third Reconstruction

The People’s Justice Guarantee: One Year Later, Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Resolution Remains The Blueprint For This Nation’s Third Reconstruction By Kirsten West Savali ·December 11, 2020December 11, 2020

On the one-year anniversary of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) introducing the People’s Justice Guarantee, a sweeping criminal-legal reform resolution created to dismantle a racist system that disproportionately targets, incarcerates, and kills members of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, Pressley sat down with Kirsten West Savali, ESSENCE executive producer of News and Politics, to discuss her vision for the nation, the Black Lives Matter’s mandate for the incoming Biden-Harris administration, and why The People’s Justice Guarantee will fundamentally redefine what justice looks like in America. 

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Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) is a woman on a mission—a mission to serve, to lead, and to radically reimagine a new world in which justice for all is more than just an echo of a reality that never was. And she has remained focused on that mission with laser sharp precision since being elected to serve the people of Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District in 2018.

Her commitment to justice, freedom, liberation, and healing for Black people and other marginalized communities that have been oppressed since this nation’s inception is evident in every line of The People’s Justice Guarantee, a resolution she introduced in 2019 that is rooted in five guiding principals: shared power, freedom, equality, safety, and human dignity.

“The criminal legal system is racist, xenophobic, rogue, and fundamentally flawed beyond reform,” Pressley said when she unveiled the resolution. “It must be dismantled and radically transformed through a large-scale decarceration effort.” 

Since that time, she has demanded that this nation, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “be true to what it said on paper.” From partnering with local advocates in Massachusetts to call for COVID-related decarceration at state prisons, to fighting to ensure incarcerated individuals  are able to access the stimulus payments, to introducing a bill in 2019 to abolish the death penalty and calling for the repeal of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pressley is not just a disruptor, she is a builder who understands that it’s not just important to “get things done” in Congress.

What gets done matters.

“The People’s Justice Guarantee, which I introduced one year ago, is a radical re-imagining of our criminal legal system, one which centers the humanity and dignity of people and one which decriminalizes low level offenses and substance use and homelessness and mental health,” Pressley tells ESSENCE. “These are not abstract things for me. I’m just like one out of four children in my district that I represent—and one out of 28 children in our country—who have an incarcerated parent, loved one or caregiver.”

Pressley shares that her father, who struggled with problematic drug use, can be counted among the number of people who was criminalized and incarcerated when he should have been treated with dignity and care.

“My father cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for some 14 years, so I know intimately the destabilization of that on a household, the stigma of that,” Pressley said. “He should have been met with on-demand culturally competent treatment, not incarceration.”

“So much of what we have criminalized in society is born out of people doing things for their mere survival—and we have to tell the truth about that,” Pressley teaches with conviction. “We have a legacy in this country of treating trauma with trauma, but I do believe that another world is possible.”

The congresswoman knows that the country is on fire with righteous rage sparked in large part by the state-sanctioned and orchestrated killing of Black people, but also because of the U.S. government’s decision to divest from and under-resource Black communities.

We have a legacy in this country of treating trauma with trauma, but I do believe that another world is possible.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley

“One of the bills that I introduced to support the tenets of the People’s Justice Guarantee is called the Counseling not Criminalization in Schools Act and another bill is called

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