ABOUT JUSTICE COLLECTIVE

Lara Möller leads Justice Collective’s research on racism in the criminal legal system and racist policing. She is interested in abolitionist perspectives on state violence and seeks strategies for action to stop the organized abandonment and punishment of marginalized communities. Lara studied Social Justice and Community Action at the University of Edinburgh and is interested in movement structures and political strategies in anti-racist and abolitionist struggles. As an activist, Lara is involved in various campaigns against the expansion of police powers and criminalization. She advocates for non-reformist reforms with the goal of making punishment obsolete.

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 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).

Mina Ji Young Strian (she/her) manages social media and public relations for Justice Collective. Through her work, she seeks to challenge the mainstream populist narrative that conflates migration and crime, and to amplify abolitionist ideas that reveal how criminalization and punishment reproduce social exclusion and deepen injustice. She is currently completing her master’s degree in philosophy of science. By curating accessible content and sharing insights into the work of the Justice Collective, Mina hopes to encourage critical reflection and reach people who want to resist systemic injustices.