Grants totaling $475,000 will allow three community-focused organizations to expand their work in justice reform, landlord accountability, and structural barriers in housing, while also dispelling myths about who these issues affect.
The funding is a result of an initiative of Community Foundation of Greater Memphis (CFGM) to tackle housing reform and inequities, and marks a “radical reimagining” of its grant making process.
The grantees are The Greater Memphis Housing Justice Project ($165,000), Just City ($100,000), and Memphis Interfaith Coalition For Action and Hope (MICAH) ($210,000).
Aerial Ozuzu, director of community impact for CFGM, said the organization went through a rigorous consulting and strategic planning process from January to April of 2023. As a result, the organization’s consultants touched on themes of funding equity, exploring collective impact, and property usage of community data to name a few, Ozuzu said.
“The committee decided early on that they didn’t want to take a Band-Aid approach and offer short-term relief,” Ozuzu said. “While meeting the immediate needs of our community will always be essential, it tends to be a safe and conventional method that only leads to incremental change at best.”
CFGM decided to tackle these issues, which resulted in its Reforming the Housing and Justice Systems grant initiative. The committee reviewed applications in late 2023, and considered solutions that would lead to “a more fair, thriving, and resilient region for all.” Out of 66 applicants, the grantees were narrowed down to the three organizations.
“These are organizations that are uniquely addressing root cause issues of housing injustice,” Ozuzu said. “They are taking an unconventional approach to making change in our community. They are also organizations that hold community trust.”
Ozuzu said since this is a new approach for CFGM, they are on a learning journey with their grantees. However, she added that they are investing in these organizations to do the work they’ve been doing for a majority of their existence.
Gisela Guerrero, lead organizer of MICAH; Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City; Jamie Johnson, Memphis Public Interest Law Center; and Shirley Bondon of the Black Clergy Collaborative of Memphis met to discuss their work and how they plan to tackle their respective issues during the Community Foundation Annual Meeting and Grant Panel in May.
Ozuzu mentioned that while certain systems are important, they can sometimes pose “inequities and problems” due to the way they have operated for years. Part of the work that these agencies are doing to tackle these inequities are by specializing in specific sectors such as court and policy.
Bondon added that the government systems are failing both the city and county and Spickler emphasized the failures of the justice system. Guerrero emphasized MICAH’s focus on tackling justice and equity regarding education, economics, and race and class.
“It feels like there are so many things that are happening,” Guerrero said. “There are so many systems that could be better, that could be improved and are creating so much harm, but we believe is if we can narrow it down, or focus on a few, we can make some better progress that way.
The participants also discussed certain misconceptions about their approach to their work such as the idea that Just City “refuses to acknowledge that some people should be taken out of society,” and that MICAH and The Greater Memphis Housing Project “are against property owners and anti-development … they all just aim to agitate without providing solutions.”
“I have a lot of confidence that years from now, we’re going to find out these were the right decisions,” Spickler said regarding Just City’s work. “We’ve got to be very careful in these days ahead that we don’t undercut some really important rights, and that’s what we’ll be working on over the next few years.”
Bondon said the misconceptions they hear the most is that “renters are all bad” and “landlords are all bad.” While she said this isn’t true, she acknowledged that there is an imbalance of power.
“There is this perception that ‘good enough’ is fine for the poor,” Bondon said. “It’s not … You have to understand the imbalance, and we hope to balance those scales. We want renters and landlords to balance — want equity.”
Ozuzu said the organizations have received their first year’s funding. She added that while this is a new way of doing things, it provides a different way of looking at how to implement change in Memphis.
Shelby County’s first Democratic district attorney in decades, Steve Mulroy, recently crossed the 100-day mark of being in office, following a campaign that promised to bring progress and change to the criminal justice system.
On the campaign trail, Mulroy prioritized tackling violent crime and reforming the cash bail system, among other efforts to restore public trust in the criminal justice system.
Still, Mulroy seemed to remain firm in his commitment to reform the criminal justice system while keeping violent crime as his top priority. One case highlighting a stark difference between Mulroy and his predecessor is the recent release of Courtney Anderson, who’d been sentenced to 162 years in prison for multiple counts of theft and forgery, an excessive sentence. After serving 25 years, he was recently released after a Shelby County criminal court judge brought the case to Mulroy’s office. “We never could have set the sentences straight if Amy Weirich was still in office. She was the original prosecutor on the case,” said Judge Paula Skahan.
The People’s Checklist: Shelby County resident’s top priorities for DA Mulroy
So, we’re taking a quick look back at what he’s accomplished so far and revisiting some of the people we talked to see what they think of Mulroy’s promises and actions.
Create more transparency and accountability
In August, Earle Fisher was among those calling for increased transparency from Mulroy. Now, Fisher says, the marked difference between Mulroy and former DA Amy Weirich is his commitment to open and honest public engagement: “[Mulroy is] not running from accountability, and I think this is one of the more fundamental things that you can ask for and demand of people in elected office,” said Fisher, founder of Up the Vote 901 and senior pastor of Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church in Whitehaven.
While remaining cautiously pragmatic and optimistic, Fisher believes Shelby County residents are still growing accustomed to Mulroy as the new DA and learning about his values and priorities in office.
Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy speaks with workers ahead of a press conference speaking out against this year’s campaign against Amendment 1, a right-to-work bill that passed despite efforts to stop it by workers and labor organizations. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50
Tikelia Rucker, political organizer with Memphis for All and a member of the Justice and Safety Alliance, is excited to see Mulroy taking steps to restore trust in the community. Like Fisher, Rucker believes Mulroy’s openness with the Shelby County community is the first step to reform. More representation and transparency are what the community wants to see happen sooner rather than later, she said.
Establish a Conviction Review Unit
The new Justice Review Unit, launched Dec. 1, is one of the newest offices in Tennessee to take a look back at wrongful convictions and sentences, and officer-involved shootings. The Davidson County District Attorney’s Office in Nashville established a Conviction Review Unit in 2017, making it the first and only unit of its kind in Tennessee at the time.
Now, five years later, Memphis follows, but with one major difference — an additional review of wrongful sentences (Nashville’s office only reviews convictions), which will be a high-focus area for the JRU, Mulroy said. Also, the Economic Crimes Unit, revamped and launched Nov. 4, will focus on worker exploitation, an issue Mulroy says is rampant in Shelby County.
Rucker considers the new Justice Review Unit a major accomplishment so soon in the DA’s term. Still, she’s also critical of how information about the unit and its application process will be regularly shared inside prisons. The JRU application is available online and by mail only to incarcerated people and their attorneys.Some prisons don’t have internet access or may encounter issues receiving mail.
William Arnold served on Mulroy’s transition team and was a member of the Justice Review Unit working group. Mulroy’s commitment to establishing the JRU shows it wasn’t “just a campaign promise, but a piece of hope,” said Arnold, a formerly incarcerated person who was exonerated in 2021 after a wrongful conviction in Nashville.
Arnold wants to see Mulroy continue to enlist the voices, opinions and actions of regular people in the community while taking an objective, humane and case-by-case approach to prosecution.
“In Tennessee and in a lot of Southern states, we have politicians who say they’re tough on crime, but they’re really tough on people,” Arnold said. “Take into consideration that a person’s sentence may not match the crime and that locking them up and throwing away the key is not always the answer.”
Fundamentally, Fisher wants to see fewer people being prosecuted and incarcerated for petty crimes that reflect a need for mental health services, educational engagement and other social safety net services. Fisher said that he hopes to see Mulroy take his public service role as DA and prioritize public safety, not increase the heavy hand of law enforcement and incarceration.
Based on Mulroy’s campaign promises and professional background, Fisher believes in Mulroy’s ability to address violent crime comprehensively but knows the change he wants to see will take much longer than 100 days to accomplish.
“Structural change is very rarely implemented immediately,” Fisher said. “They are still adjusting and adapting to what it means to try to be a progressive prosecutor, if there is such a thing.”
The top priorities Rucker wants to see Mulroy approach are decreasing crime, continuing to restore trust and creating different avenues for the community to work with the DA’s office. She hopes to see more partnerships between the DA’s office, law enforcement agencies and city and county leaders that center restorative justice and holistic solutions to violent crime.
“It has to be a collaborative effort in order for us to really, really move the needle,” Rucker said. “It does give a sense of hope like Memphis is moving in the right direction, and that’s what this year has been about: progress. Just baby steps to build and move forward in a progressive manner.”
Arnold hopes Mulroy changes this and, instead, approaches each juvenile crime on a case-by-case basis, looking at the root causes of crime and offering diversion programs in the form of job training and educational opportunities.
“What else can we do versus locking them away and allowing them to develop in that horrible place,” Arnold said, “because you’re not going to get anything good from it.”
Mulroy says he remains committed to decreasing the number of youth transferred to adult court and plans to partner with the newly elected Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon to implement more restorative justice and early intervention practices among juvenile defendants.
More community involvement and a diverse staff reflective of Shelby County demographics in the DA’s office
The district attorney’s office is on the eighth floor of the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center. Photo by Brad Vest for MLK50
Mulroy’s focus during the first few months in office has been on hiring for the understaffed team he inherited. Of all new staff hires, 50% are people of color, compared to 30% people of color in the previous administration’s staff makeup, and 40% of newly hired attorneys are people of color, compared to the previous 15%, Mulroy told MLK50.
“You want [staff] to have cultural competence and a real understanding, both of the defendants and the victims, in order to make good decisions,” Mulroy said. “But it’s also just as important as a matter of public trust.”
At just a few months into his eight-year tenure, Mulroy said he’s pleasantly surprised at how open and welcoming the DA’s office staff is to change under his leadership.
In addition to hiring more staff and increasing staff diversity, one of Mulroy’s first action items as DA was to issue instructions to his staff to deprioritize prosecuting marijuana possession — which disproportionately affects Black men — and reprioritize prosecuting non-fatal shootings in efforts to address violent crime. Mulroy said he took these steps in an effort to restore public trust in the fairness of the criminal justice system.
“We need to restore public confidence so we can get the community cooperating with law enforcement — providing tips, reporting crimes, serving as witnesses,” Mulroy said. “That really is the only way we’re going to bend the curve on violent crime.”
The coming years of Mulroy’s tenure as DA will be marked by reform through continuously hiring diverse staff that can make new decisions and lock in change for years to come, which will, in turn, slowly reshape the criminal justice system.
“A lot of the change that’s occurring right now is happening in a hundred or a thousand different little decisions that are being made by assistant district attorneys. That’s happening gradually, little by little, without much fanfare,” Mulroy said. “I want to hardwire reforms and bake in change that will last beyond my tenure.”
Hardwiring change
Mulroy walks the fine line of being a progressive DA while addressing crime in a city that’s experienced an increase in property crime and an increase in major violent crime. At this start of his term, the Eliza Fletcher and Ezekiel Kelly cases — both major violent crimes allegedly committed by formerly incarcerated people released early from prison — struck a dissonant chord between Memphians who believe in reform and those who believe in a “tough on crime” approach.
As DA, Mulroy is committed to being “smart on crime,” as he described it, instituting swift and certain punishment: “For decades, our approach to violent crime [has been] to lock more people up and to lock them up for longer. It’s demonstrably not working.” The metrics for progress, Mulroy said, will reflect not in the conviction rate or the years of sentences, but in the rate of recidivism, or “criminal acts that result in rearrest, reconviction or a return to prison,” according to the National Institute of Justice.
Now, the DA is focused on answering the question, how do you hardwire change? Aside from focusing on reforms that can be implemented quickly, Mulroy’s long-term focus is structural change, like expanding restorative justice opportunities. Deep change like this takes time, funding and resources, Mulroy said.
Mulroy plans to hire staff who will be devoted to animal abuse and neglect cases. He also plans to hire a staff member who can coordinate the different treatment programs and rehabilitative services, like drug and mental health court, so they can be incorporated into plea offers.
“This [public office] is the one that has the greatest potential for making a difference. Because the DA has such broad discretion, one person can just really completely change the direction of the criminal justice system — not overnight, but certainly within eight years,” Mulroy said.
Steve Mulroy (Photo: Steve Mulroy, Shelby County District Attorney Elect / Facebook)
Once again, I have no opinions to share professionally. So I’m learning instead.
Steve Mulroy is set to be sworn in as Shelby County’s next district attorney general next week, after winning the seat in this month’s election and naming his transition team last week. Folks are chattering and wondering about what some of Mulroy’s “progressive” ideas on criminal justice will look like off the chalkboard and applied every day in Shelby County. I wanted to know, too, so I asked for professional help.
Josh Spickler, executive director of the criminal reform advocacy group Just City, is a member of Mulroy’s transition team. He has seen firsthand how the system works now and how we might see some of Mulroy’s ideas applied in the real world.
Memphis Flyer:What will some of the changes look like in reality?
Josh Spickler: The first thing to note is what’s not going to change. Steve is going to prioritize public safety and he is going to prioritize violent crime in this community. Steve campaigned on that, and everything he is doing and saying since the election is about that.
In terms of reforms and some of the day-to-day, visible changes, I think you’ll very quickly see, because of some good fortune and some timing, a bit of a different approach in pretrial detention with regard to the use of money bail. Steve campaigned on his willingness and desire to reform that.
Last week, the [Shelby County General Sessions Criminal Court] judges signed a standing bail order, which is really big news. I’m a bit biased, but it’s one of the best standing bail orders — definitely in Tennessee, maybe in the country. A standing bail order is a plan put in place and agreed upon by all judges in a jurisdiction. So, all of our General Sessions judges — who are the ones, mostly, in charge of how bail gets set — they’ve agreed to significantly change the way they do it. They agreed to have meaningful hearings any time unaffordable bail is being considered as the only means of protecting the community and ensuring the appearance of someone accused of a crime. They have agreed to have attorneys for both the state and the accused present at those hearings.
That’s where Steve’s office comes in right from the beginning. When he takes office, he is going to have a new responsibility with regard to setting bail. Steve has said in his campaign that he believes fewer people should be held on unaffordable money bail. So, if Steve and his assistant DAs follow through on his campaign promise, we’ll begin to see that in those bail hearings. Fewer people will be held in our jail simply because they can’t afford freedom. That’s a big one.
So someone commits a crime, is held in jail until an arraignment hearing, and is just released — with no bail — until their court date?
It will be based on what is best for the community and what a judicial commissioner decides is best for that person at the time. That will be determined after a hearing, which is something we don’t do currently. Currently, we are not considering all of the required factors and are defaulting to bail — a seemingly arbitrary dollar amount — almost 76 to 77 percent of the time in this current system when state law says the first thing that should be considered is release.
What other reforms will we begin to see IRL?
Steve has also committed to a Post Conviction Justice Unit. He won’t call it that [because] … he’s not just going to look at convictions … looking for wrongful convictions, like looking to overturn something [perhaps] with DNA, for example. Steve has pledged to also look at sentences that may be inappropriate, that might be far too punitive.
Anything else?
On racial disparities, he’s pledged to not only build an office that looks more like Shelby County, but to also understand why it is that outcomes continue to be different for people of color versus white people.
These areas will be his focus. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that all of that leads to safer, healthier communities, and that’s the ultimate priority. Hopefully, any DA’s priority is to keep us safer, and that’s what Steve is going to do.
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Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris spoke out against racism and advocated for criminal justice reform during a county COVID-19 task force update Tuesday.
Harris said the murder of George Floyd “tears back the veil of racial injustice, an issue that seems to worsen by the day.”
“African Americans have been too often racially profiled, pulled over, surveilled, and put in handcuffs,” Harris said. “I understand the pain and frustration of these experiences because I have had all of these experiences. All of us feel the echoes of 1968. However, history has shown that we can do unimaginable things in this community and in this country. We can face down COVID-19, we can restore our economy, and we can turn the page on racial injustice.”
Harris said racial injustice has to be addressed with a unified effort. Everyone has a role, the mayor said, noting that his administration will continue to push an “aggressive criminal justice agenda.”
“People of color, particularly African-American men, are too often caught up in a criminal justice system that tags them for life,” he said “The system devastates the ability of too many African-American men to ever fully enjoy the benefits of living in the greatest country on Earth.”
Harris said his administration has worked with the district attorney, judges, court clerks, and the sheriff to implement bail reform, which has “made a difference in hundreds and hundreds of lives of non-violent offenders who would otherwise spend months in detention.”
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Pre-COVID-19, Harris said the Shelby County detention numbers were the “lowest the county has seen in years,” passing an “ambitious goal” for bail reform set by Just City.
“We will do even more to change this system,” Harris said, noting that he will go before the Shelby County Commission this week to advocate for “Ban the Box,” which will help those with criminal history get jobs.
“Too often African-American men with criminal histories have been held back and kept from getting jobs,” Harris said.
The mayor added that he is prepared to meet with any activists or protesters to take a step toward “real action that will drive real change.”
“In Shelby County, we’ve had hundreds of protesters demand to be heard and who have lifted up important concerns,” Harris said. “I hear you. In fact, leaders across the state hear you.”
Tennessee’s incarnation rate is 10 percent higher than the national average, its female prison population rate has exploded, spending on corrections has surpassed $1 billion, and the state has the fourth-highest violent-crime rate in the country.
That’s all according to researchers with the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI), who presented their findings Wednesday to members of the Tennessee House Judiciary Committee. Those researchers were tapped to join a task force last year and charged by Gov. Bill Lee to review the state’s criminal justice system.
The task force released its findings in an interim report in December. That report recommended lawmakers review criminal sentencing, reduce sentencing times for some parole violations, and more.
State Capitol building
CJI staffers Maura McNamara and Alison Silveira presented some of the information to lawmakers during what could be a two-year overhaul of some of the state’s criminal justice policies meant to reduce the prison population.
The presentation and hearing was one of the first times legislators were able to dig into the data and ask questions about the study.
The researchers said the state incarcerates around 13,000 people each year. Admissions to prison have declined overall by 14 percent, they said, since 2009. However, while admissions have fallen in West and Middle Tennessee, admissions rose in East Tennessee by 500 from 2018 to 2019. (West Tennessee admissions fell from about 4,500 in 2009 to about 2,900 in 2018.) Crime and Justice Institute
The bulk of incarcerations (74 percent) last year were from what researchers called “non-person” offenses like drug and property crime, and vehicular offenses. The rest (26 percent) were violent crimes and sex offenses.
In all categories, the average length of time served by felons in Tennessee rose by 11 months over the last 10 years, from 48 months to 59 months, Silveira said.
“People released in 2019 are serving nearly a year longer behind bars than those in 2009,” she said.
The large amount of non-violent incarcerations drew the ire of Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), who called the figure “an indictment to us who sit on this committee.” He also noted that “I think our policies are causing some of these — if not all of these numbers — to be in the place that they are.”
However, Rep. Andrew Farmer (R-Sevierville) reminded the committee members that “all of these crimes are crimes against society.”
“We make laws up here not because we want to see people in jail, we don’t,” Farmer said. “We don’t make laws up here because we want to waste taxpayer dollars. We don’t make laws up here just to keep people in jail.
“We make laws up here to see those who violate out laws here in the state of Tennessee are pushed appropriately. We want them to become rehabilitated and we are doing the very best we can to do that.”
Lee said last year the task force’s main aim to reduce recidivism, the act of people being re-arrested after they’ve been released from prison. McNamara said nearly half (47 percent) of those released from custody here over the last 10 years, were rearrested within three years.
However, 40 percent of those are rearrested because they broke their parole on technical violations, not on new crimes, Silveira said. They’ll go backup prison because they moved and didn’t tell their parole officer, failed to pay a monthly fee, or failed to appear at a meeting or hearing.
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Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville is home to Tennessee’s death row.
“The reason a person usually goes back to jail has more to do with the challenges of returning home than a sign of criminal conduct,” Silveira said.
Rep. Joe Townsend (D-Memphis) wanted financial data, noting “the state is spending extraordinarily large sums of money to re-incarcerate people for technical violations.” He said if the state locks up about 13,000 people each year, and their length of stay has risen by about a year, “that’s like an additional 13,000 years.”
The state’s female prison population grew 41 percent over the last 10 years, from 2,364 in 2009 to 3,481 in 2019, the researchers said. Female felony offenses mainly involved drugs and property, they said, though didn’t offer detailed insight as to why the female prison population was surging.
Rep. G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) wants to learn more. “I am so disgusted that we are evidently not doing what we need to do to keep our women from choosing a life of crime and from being incarcerated,” Hardaway said. “I don’t know what the answer is. But I sure would like to find out and do something about it very quickly.” Crime and Justice Institute
A local organization focused on criminal justice reform is looking for volunteers to be “court watchers.”
Just City Memphis, which pursues a “smaller and more humane criminal justice system” in an effort to minimize the impact of the criminal justice system on people, enlists Court Watchers to sit in on Shelby County courtrooms and observe.
The goal is to encourage accountability, community participation in criminal justice reform, and primarily transparency, Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said.
“The legal system in our community is massive, and it operates largely out of sight from most people,” Spickler said. “We believe it is too large, often unfair, and sometimes inhumane, and our mission is to correct it. By introducing people to it — letting them see and hear for themselves how it works — we hope to introduce accountability into a system that doesn’t have much.
“The people who depend upon this system to keep them safe and deliver justice in their community should be able to see how it works. Court Watch offers an opportunity to do that.”
Just City kicked off the program at the beginning of the year and now has 80 trained volunteers. The group aims to have 100 court watchers by the end of the year.
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Court watchers are asked to track basic demographic information, such as race, age, and gender. Volunteers also take notes on judges, attorneys, victims, and defendants, recording their temperament, behaviors, and decisions.
Spickler said beyond that, court watchers are not trained to look for anything in particular: “We are very clear that Court Watch is not about catching anyone doing something wrong or embarrassing people, and we ask for respect and decorum above all else.”
For those interested in volunteering, Just City will host a training session this Thursday from 10 a.m. to noon at the Commonwealth Building (240 Madison Ave). Get more information and sign up here.
“In our training, we describe the primary actors in the system, explain generally how court works, and ask watchers to write down anything notable,” Spickler said.
After completing the three-hour training, participants are expected to volunteer for at least one three-hour shift each month.
Other requirements include:
• Weekday morning and afternoon availability
• Ability to keep legible notes and data
• Reliable transportation
• Professional attire for court
So far this year, 615 cases, totaling 75 hours have been watched. Below is data compiled by court watchers in September. Visit Just City’s website to see reports from previous months.
Crime and Justice Institute 
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