Stanford Decarceration Collective

The Stanford Decarceration Collective (SDC) is a community for students to explore different pathways of abolitionist social change through projects that connect us to criminal justice organizations and directly-impacted people. SDC was born in 2020 out of a desire to use our privilege as Stanford students to support abolitionist organizations and changemakers. We work on various projects, such as creating policy memos and conducting data analyses for our abolitionist advocacy partners to further their missions. We engage in campus organizing, invite prominent abolitionists to come speak with us, discuss books and articles, counter carceral and dehumanizing narratives through journalism, courtwatch, and more. Most of our work happens in support of community partners embedded in abolitionist struggles for real people in the real world. SDC organizes our projects around the skills we each bring to the table as activists. We have researchers, organizers, data scientists, artists, proto-lawyers, and lots of people in between. We are devoted to educating ourselves about the harms of the criminal legal system. We are actively building community at Stanford centered around a desire for decarceration and a hope for a future absent of systems of oppression.