Climate Action Pursuit 2021

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Because of the racist history of incarceration in the U.S., racial justice, and racial equity investing, are impossible without dismantling the prison industrial complex, one that systematically targets thousands of primarily poor Black and Indigenous communities for disenfranchisement while making billions for corporations and shareholders every year. Doing so will require going beyond private prisons, which hold less than 8% of all incarcerated people in the country. This session will offer an opportunity to learn some of that history and what it means for environmental justice and investors. You will hear directly from a lawyer and activist formerly with the Mecklenburg County Public Defenders' office, with first-hand experience inside the penal system due to the protests last summer, and learn how to begin taking action from pioneers in racial equity and prison free investing.

Some key takeaways from this session:

• Slavery didn’t end with the 13th amendment - it just evolved, and we see slavery today in the operations of the prison industrial complex. In fact, the United States has nearly 25% of the world’s prison population despite making up under 5% of the global population. Mass incarceration not only impacts the individuals in prison but their families, communities, and our entire society - it’s hurting us all. Investing in a financially profitable prison industrial complex in the short term is never the answer when we can invest directly in people and their success.
• Corporations often don’t want to know if they have prison labor in their supply chains so investors will need to educate themselves, in order to push portfolio companies to look into the use of prison labor and disclose that information.
• All of us, including investors, are complicit in upholding oppressive systems and we need to understand how in order to start operating differently. But these systems were created - they're humanmade, not natural and so we absolutely can dismantle them. And since we have the power to do that, each of us can be part of the solution as much as, and even more so than, we are a part of the problem.