JUSTICE COLLECTIVE IS A BERLIN-BASED PROJECT THAT ACTS:
To reveal how governments punish, including in ways that target people experiencing poverty and inequality, people of racialized groups, and people making a life for themselves in new places;
To build and connect international and internationalist movements — because while local contexts may differ, people in different places confront similar causes of carcerality; and;
To end societies’ increasing reliance on policing, punishment, and prisons. To build communities that choose justice over jails; care over carcerality.
PEOPLE
PAULA BENEDICT
Paula Benedict supports Justice Collective with legal research on the legalization of cannabis. Paula is also a research assistant at the Chair of Criminal Law at the Free University of Berlin, where she heads the Law Clinic Practice of Criminal Defense. She is doing her doctorate on whistleblowing supported by a scholarship by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She is also founder and board member of Fehlurteil und Wiederaufnahme e.V., which is committed to combating and researching wrongful convictions in Germany.
LARA MÖLLER
Lara Möller leads Justice Collective’s research on racism in the criminal legal system. She is interested in abolitionist perspectives on state violence and how to interrupt the systemic abandonment and punishment of marginalized communities. Lara aspires to create resources that empower communities to advocate for safety and transformative justice. Lara is currently completing her master's in Social Justice and Community Action at the University of Edinburgh. As an activist, Lara is involved in campaigns against the expansion of police powers and criminalization. She advocates for non-reformist-reforms, such as the right to housing, the right to move and the abolition of KbOs (Kriminalitätsbelastete Orte) to move towards a society in which punishment is obsolete.
MITALI NAGRECHA
Mitali Nagrecha is the founder and coordinator of Justice Collective. Mitali was also the co-initiator of the Coalition to Abolish Debtors’ Prisons in Germany, and is an active member of the coalition’s efforts to abolish debtors’ prisons, as a first step to broader transformative change. Prior to moving to Europe, Mitali founded and directed Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program’s Criminal Justice Debt Initiative. For over ten years, Mitali advocated against racist practices of raising revenue by charging people fees and fines in criminal cases. During her time at CJPP, Mitali published a number of reports and articles, including The Limits of Fairer Fines: Lessons from Germany. You can learn more about Mitali’s work and publications here.
ANTHONY OBST
Anthony Obst is a writer, researcher, and editor at Justice Collective. He is also a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Graduate School of North American Studies. His dissertation draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction as well as contemporary abolitionist theory and practice to trace abolition democracy as a conceptual framework in Black Marxist writing of the 1930s. As an activist, he is involved with Justice Collective and their coalition to end so-called substitute imprisonment in Germany (Bündnis zur Abschaffung der Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe).
ADVISORY BOARD
Vincent Bababoutilabo
Emmanuelle Debouverie
Anna-Rebecca Helmy
Daniel Loick
Manuel Matzke
Shaïn Morisse
Jorinde Schulz
Michèle Winkler
FUNDING
Justice Collective’s independent, critical, and responsive activism and research is made possible through individual donations. You can support our work here.
Justice Collective also has research funding for its racism in the courts project from the BMBF and has received financial support from Lush Foundation. For more details, reach out to us.