Policy Recommendations
It’s time to roll up our sleeves. We need to keep resisting and fighting back against bad policy that gets thrown our way, like the attempts to roll back the much needed Affordable Care Act. We must also keep persisting in advocating for solutions-oriented policy that lifts everyone in our country, like advancing fair pay and paid family/medical leave for everyone. The following pages are your resource to do exactly that.
As we do this, we need to remember two things: First, that sometimes the best defense is a solid offense, which in this case is a great list of proactive policies and a movement behind them to make them viable. Second—and this is even more critical—it’s important to always hold a long-term vision of proactive change that will allow us to adapt our public policies to best support our always-changing communities, economy, workforce, and lives.
If we’re doing democracy right, we’ll always be proactively updating our policies to match our constantly changing worlds. Democracy isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. Change in our communities, workforce, and economy happens no matter what happens in the halls of legislative power, so it’s on us to use the levers of democracy to keep our public policies current with the world we all live in together. It’s also on us to try to leave our world a little bit better than we found it.
Wondering what specific solutions-oriented policies would boost women, families, and our economy? Looking for a proactive list of good policies that will move our nation forward? Or need a menu of to-dos to choose from when you contact elected leaders? In this section, you’ll find lists of specific solutions-oriented policies, grouped by each chapter, that you can use as a road map for your advocacy at the city, county, state, and federal levels.
This is by no means a comprehensive list. There could be an entire encyclopedia of solutions-oriented policies that will lift our country, and policy proposals constantly change in real time, but this list does reflect important priority policies at the time this book was written. So feel free to add to this list, scratch out the ones that don’t work for you, and use it to help change our worlds for the better! Whatever you do, never forget that together we’re an incredibly powerful force for good.
Chapter 2: The Benjamins
Support and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would help to close the wage gap by eliminating loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, helping to break harmful patterns of pay discrimination and strengthening workplace protections for women.
Promote bans on salary history requirements. The administration and Congress should also work to ensure that employers are barred from requiring job candidates to disclose previous salary histories, which contributes to the wage gap over time.
Raise the federal minimum wage and include tipped workers. Raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour or higher for all minimum wage workers, including tipped workers, and index the minimum wage to inflation.
Audit salary reviews for gender bias. The administration and Congress should conduct their own agency reviews and audits of salaries to ensure that gender bias is being rooted out and eliminated and continue to highlight, as models, private companies that are doing the same.
Use multiple approaches to close the wage gap. Closing the wage gap and ending discriminatory pay practices isn’t as simple as passing one single piece of legislation. Studies show that passing family economic security policies—like paid family/medical leave, affordable childcare, sick days, and a living wage—all help lower the wage gap. In addition, pay transparency and nondiscrimination policies help close the wage gap, too.
Raise the overtime threshold. Raising the overtime threshold so more people receive overtime pay for working extra hours, in addition to benefiting families, is likely to strengthen the economy overall. A higher overtime threshold could lead employers to hire more employees or increase the hours of part-time workers. To the extent that more workers receive overtime pay, these increased earnings could lead to increased consumer spending and stronger economic growth.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Glass Ceilings
Advocate for full enforcement of federal laws that protect people from harassment, knowing that harassment (including from unwelcome sexual advances and verbal and physical harassment of a sexual nature) is a form of employment discrimination that violates several federal laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In addition, state and federal enforcement programs need to be fully funded. More information on this area of the law, including how to file a discrimination claim, can be found at the website of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission1 and at LegalMomentum.com.
Check to see if your state has robust anti-harassment laws. Some states do, but not all. Check in to see if your state needs one. There are sample policies at StopStreetHarassment.org.
Stand behind bills that combat sexual harassment at the state and federal levels, like the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act, and more.
Advance the policies listed under the “Women against Violence” chapter.
Advance policies that help break the glass ceiling, including pay transparency (Fair Pay Act) and family economic security policies (paid family/medical leave, sick days, and affordable childcare), and more.
Chapter 4: Sound the Alarm
Raise the wage. Raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour or higher for all minimum wage workers, including tipped workers, and index the minimum wage to inflation.
Expand the Fair Labor Standards Act. Cover all workers, including domestic workers and farm workers, under the Fair Labor Standards Act at the federal level and at the state level with a domestic workers bill of rights.
Protect the safety net. Make investments to lift women, families, and the economy; protect the social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, WIC, SNAP, TANF, Medicare, and childcare assistance that low- and moderate-income families are boosted by; raise revenue by requiring the richest Americans and big corporations to pay a fair share of taxes; and cut wasteful Pentagon spending.
Ensure the national budget boosts women, families, and our economy. Any national budget and tax plan must protect key programs like Medicaid, Medicare, WIC, SNAP, child nutrition, TANF, Head Start, childcare assistance, and housing assistance, which stimulate our national economy and that women and their families depend on to improve their health, obtain quality childcare and higher education, and help them meet their basic needs during difficult times and as they age. More than just ending the sequester and protecting these programs, we must also invest more in critical domestic appropriated programs. The budget must also adhere to the (at one time) bipartisan principle that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or income inequality.
Advance tax improvements. Advance tax improvements that help boost working families and our economy. This includes increasing the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for families with younger children, as well as starting refundability with the first dollar of earnings and improving the credit for low-wage families with children. Positive improvements should be made to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to make it refundable, increase the credit rate for low-income families, expand the sliding scale, increase the allowable expenses, and index the expense limits and income levels for inflation to help make childcare more affordable to more families. Additionally, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) should be expanded to low-income workers not raising children in the home. The CTC and EITC are two of the best tools our government has to help reduce poverty. Childcare costs more than college tuition in most states, leading to financial restraints among many families with small children. Improvements can and should be made to our tax system to assist those families most in need, while at the same time boosting our economy and making sure wealthy corporations and individuals pay their fair share.
Ensure access to healthy food and nutrition for all kids in schools. Ensure all kids and families have access to safe and accessible drinking water through investments in infrastructure, testing, and remediation efforts. Ensure parents and families can make healthy choices by limiting the presence of marketing in schools, child-directed advertising, and more. Promote a healthy school day through robust implementation and protection of achievements, including healthy school meals and snacks, and wellness policies.
Advance universal family-care policy. Move forward one social insurance framework that creates a portable, flexible, and universal benefit allowing all working families to receive support for childcare, eldercare, and paid family/medical leave, including a benefit for family caregivers and stay-at-home moms as proposed by Caring Across Generations (a campaign led by Ai-jen Poo and Sarita Gupta).
Chapter 5: The Maternal Wall
Advocate for paid family/medical leave insurance. Congress should prioritize the swift passage of a national paid leave insurance program that covers all people—employers and employees—attached to the workforce, including self-employed people, for at least twelve weeks of job-protected paid family/medical leave they can use when a new child is born, adopted, or placed through a foster care system; when a family member faces a serious health condition and needs care; when workers themselves face a serious health condition and need treatment or recovery time; or when a military family needs time to address the exigencies of deployment or to care for a wounded service member. This proposal must provide adequate wage replacement of at least two-thirds of workers’ typical wages, preferably with higher levels of wage replacement for lower-wage workers, and should include a broad definition of the kinds of family relationships permitted for family caregiving. Most important, this system must include an adequate and sustainable revenue stream to ensure the strength and integrity of this program now and for generations to come, and to make paid family/medical leave available to employees of both smaller and larger businesses in affordable, sustainable ways. State paid family and medical leave programs provide a strong model, as does the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (known as the FAMILY Act) introduced in the 113th and 114th Congresses.
Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The FMLA was an important start, but the law has significant gaps that leave 40 percent of all workers ineligible for FMLA leave, and it currently provides only unpaid leave. In addition, the law also fails to recognize that, in today’s families, workers are caring for siblings, grandparents, and other close relatives—individuals who are not covered by the FMLA. Those workers left out include workers in businesses with fewer than fifty employees; part-time workers (an increasing portion of workers, as businesses reduce their hours); and workers who need time off to care for seriously ill domestic partners, children of domestic partners, or many types of seriously ill elderly relatives (especially problematic as the population ages). Parents also need to be able to attend meetings with their child’s teachers and school administrators without risking their job or disciplinary action at work.
Modernize paid leave for the military. Issue directives to the Department of Defense (DOD) and urge Congress to modernize paid leave for the military by equalizing the duration of leave for mothers, fathers, and adoptive parents and work with Congress to expand paid leave for DOD personnel to include family caregiving as well.
Urge Congress to prioritize passage of the Healthy Families Act. The Healthy Families Act would allow workers in businesses with fifteen or more employees to earn up to seven job-protected paid sick days each year to be used to recover from their own illnesses, access preventive care, provide care to a sick family member, or attend school meetings related to a child’s health condition or disability. Workers in businesses with fewer than fifteen employees would earn up to seven job-protected unpaid sick days each year to be used for the same reasons, unless their employers choose to offer paid sick days.
Protect and enforce previous executive actions. The administration must also work to protect and enforce the executive actions and regulations put in place by the previous administration to expand coverage of earned paid sick days to federal workers and federal contractors as well as instruct agencies to study the impact of earned paid sick days to determine the impacts of cost savings to businesses and to our economy.
Support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Congress needs to pass and the president needs to sign into law the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to make the same sorts of reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions that they already make for disabilities, ensuring pregnant women can continue to do their jobs and support their families. These accommodations are simple things like being able to sit down or having a water bottle on shift.
Support the Supporting Working Moms Act. Federal law currently provides nonexempt employees (hourly wage-earning and some salaried employees exempt from overtime) reasonable break time to express milk in a private, non-bathroom location, for one year after the child’s birth. While this provides protection and support for the most vulnerable workers, this distinction in the law was unintentional and is causing confusion about who is covered and how to implement it efficiently and fairly in all worksites. The Supporting Working Moms Act will ensure a fair and uniform national policy by extending the existing federal provision to cover approximately 12 million additional salaried employees, including elementary and secondary school teachers. Twenty-eight U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia also have state legislation to support breastfeeding in the workplace.
Support the Friendly Airports for Mothers Act. The FAM Act requires all large and medium hub airports to provide a private, non-bathroom space in each terminal for mothers to express breast milk. The space must be accessible to persons with disabilities, available in each terminal building after the security checkpoint, and include a place to sit, a table or other flat surface, and an electrical outlet.
Support the Fairness for Breastfeeding Mothers Act of 2017 (H.R. 1174). Introduced in February 2017, this law would require that certain public buildings provide a lactation room, other than a bathroom, that is hygienic and available for use by members of the public to express milk. The lactation room must be shielded from public view, be free from intrusion, and contain a chair, a working surface, and (if the building is supplied with electricity) an electrical outlet.
Support the Schedules that Work Act. Congress should curb abusive scheduling practices and give working people the right to request schedule predictability and flexibility by passing the Schedules that Work Act.
Chapter 6: Saving Lives
Ensure a strong Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provide health care coverage for more than one half of our nation’s children and are essential to our nation’s health and well-being. Medicaid is the foundation of the expansion of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Therefore, MomsRising opposes proposals that arbitrarily cut Medicaid, make structural changes to the program (for example, a cap or block grant), and shift a fiscal burden to the states. Ultimately, these proposals would transfer the burden to seniors who depend on the program for long-term care, people with disabilities, children, and families. We also oppose all harmful cost shifting such as converting the program to a block grant, imposing a per capita cap or any cap on Medicaid spending that inevitably would result in drastic cuts to patients and health care providers who rely on Medicaid, and any other proposal or waiver that would cut or otherwise undermine Medicaid and CHIP.
Protect the improvements and gains in coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The passage and implementation of the ACA has brought the percentage of uninsured people in the United States to a record low. In addition to increasing the availability of coverage, the ACA drastically improved the coverage options available for families not offered health insurance through their employer, as well as eliminating many harmful practices by insurance companies like annual or lifetime caps on coverage and discrimination based on preexisting conditions. The ACA requires that all new health insurance plans offer ten essential health benefits, including maternity care, prescription drugs, and mental health care. These new protections and improvements have ensured that families no longer have to claim bankruptcy due to a major medical illness and that they have the coverage they need, when they need it. Therefore, we oppose all efforts to roll back or cut these measures such as repealing and replacing the ACA with a less robust plan that would result in a larger number of uninsured people in the United States, or that allow states to opt out of provisions of the plans, or any other proposal that would otherwise diminish the expansion of and improvements to health care coverage.
Ensure that every woman and family has access to quality, affordable health care coverage. Health care is a right—not a privilege. We support policies that will further the goal of reaching universal, quality health care coverage for every family.
Chapter 7: The Choice Is Ours!
Fight for quality, affordable reproductive health care. Ensure that every woman and family has access to quality, affordable health care coverage that includes comprehensive reproductive health care coverage, including birth control.
Continue to fund Planned Parenthood. Defunding Planned Parenthood would cut off health care—including birth control, cancer screenings, and other essential health services—for millions of low-income women, many of whom have no other health care provider. One in five women visits a Planned Parenthood clinic in her lifetime for health care.
Chapter 8: Women against Violence
Invest in ending domestic violence and sexual assault. Provide sustained services such as shelter, crisis intervention, advocacy, legal services, children services, and specialized services for specific populations—so every survivor can access help and safety.
Prevent sexual abuse and assault. Encourage investment in prevention efforts to disrupt harmful social norms and the acceptance of violence against women, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault, and to prevent teen dating violence. Similarly, invest in programs that address gender bias in institutions and systems such as law enforcement, legal and court settings, housing, health care, child welfare, workplaces, education, as well as culturally competent responses to violence against women.
Ensure economic justice for survivors. Support equal pay, a living wage, and affordable childcare, as well as strengthen and expand social safety nets—TANF, SNAP, SSDI, unemployment insurance. Expand eligibility for EITC and CTC tax credits. Support paid sick and safe days, including for doctor/hospital treatment and for seeking a restraining order or testifying in court. Include domestic violence survivors in employment nondiscrimination protections, since many domestic violence victims have been fired because of their abuse. Support workplace assistance for survivors of domestic violence. Support unemployment insurance for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors who must leave a job due to the abuse and violence. Preserve access to health care, including comprehensive health and mental health plans.
Support immigrant survivors. Strengthen existing protections for immigrant survivors. Strengthen the U visa program for immigrant victims of violence by increasing the number of available U visas. Support survivor self-sufficiency and remove vulnerabilities to further victimization (e.g., provide assistance to achieve legal status, work authorization, and protect and increase safety net benefits). Prohibit penalties for organizations helping to feed, house, and protect undocumented immigrants. Support protections for detainees who have applied for U, T, or VAWA self-petitions. Ensure no separation of survivors and children in immigration enforcement actions.
Support housing for survivors. Support funding for safe, affordable housing and shelters. Support stronger protections against discrimination against domestic violence victims in public and private housing and prohibit harmful “nuisance ordinances” relating to victims of domestic violence.
Support students and youth in preventing dating violence and sexual assault. Enforce Title IX. Support continued access to school disciplinary processes for survivors. Support robust prevention education and services for children, youth, and college students.
Support tribal survivors. Support access to services and justice for Native American survivors by investing in those services and affirming tribal sovereignty to address crimes.
Protect women against online attacks. Support robust protections against the use of spyware to abuse, as well as protection against the online posting of nonconsensual intimate images.
Protect our families and communities from gun violence. Guns kill ninety Americans every day. Mass shootings like the ones at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida; and the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, are recurring reminders of our gun violence epidemic, which claims more than 33,000 lives a year. With around 90 percent of Americans in favor of stronger background checks on gun sales, we have virtually universal agreement that there should be some reasonable limits on gun ownership. The solution to America’s gun violence epidemic is wholesale cultural and policy reform that prioritizes public safety, including:
Universal background checks on firearms sales.
Bans on military-grade assault rifles and on high-capacity magazines.
A strong federal anti–gun trafficking law with stiff penalties to discourage straw purchasing.
Investment in evidence-based community antiviolence programs that have proven to reduce the risk of gun violence in highly impacted communities.
Rolling back Stand Your Ground laws, common in many states, which facilitate racial profiling and casual gun culture, and are a huge step backward for civil rights.
Closing loopholes that allow stalkers and abusive dating partners to access firearms, requiring states to adopt effective firearm surrender and removal protocols for use in domestic violence cases, requiring the FBI/ATF to notify local law enforcement when a domestic violence offender attempts to acquire a firearm, and notifying the victim of the prohibited purchaser through the VINE system.
Supporting gun violence restraining orders that allow family members and law enforcement, with a court order, to temporarily prohibit a person from possessing a firearm.
Investing in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System for more streamlined and comprehensive record collection.
*A big thanks to the National Network to End Domestic Violence for their help with this policy list.
Chapter 9: Maternal Mortality
Advance measures to improve maternal health. The United States has the highest rate of maternal deaths during labor and delivery than any other nation in the developed world. Support the Maternal Health Accountability Act of 2017/Preventing Maternal Deaths Act of 2017. Support the improvement of hospital protocols relating to all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth.
Promote equitable access to health care services before, during, and after pregnancy. Resist dismantling of ACA and Medicaid and expand access to health care. Promote the demand for transparency and data collection relating to pregnancy and childbirth.
Promote health equity and antiracism measures throughout the health care delivery system. Black women suffer the most with a maternal mortality rate four times that of white women. Ensure equal access to best practices and shared plans for childbirth emergencies for all doctors and hospitals, along with training. Women shouldn’t die in childbirth simply because they choose the wrong hospital.
Chapter 10: Lady Liberty
Reform immigration policy so there is fair treatment of women, children, and families. Pass comprehensive immigration policy reform legislation to establish a road map to permanent legal status that recognizes the contributions of women’s paid and unpaid work. Pass the Dream Act to provide a path to legal status to 1.8 million Dreamers, young people who were brought to the United States as children and have grown up in the United States. Ensure protection of family unity by creating pathways that would allow for mixed-status families to stay together legally in this country, without fear of separation.
Protect children. Provide clear protections for children’s basic rights, safety, and well-being, including access to government-funded legal counsel and advocates for children in immigration proceedings. End immediately the harmful practices of family detention, protect parental rights, ensure due process, and increase alternatives to detention. Advance policies and programs that keep families together, such as implementing administrative relief options to allow parents to live and work legally in the United States, halting deportations of parents, and reforming the family-based immigration systems to address the backlogs and reunite more families.
Offer equal opportunity to immigrant women. Provide equal employment-based migration opportunities and workplace protections so that immigrant women may safely pursue economic opportunity. End programs that discourage reporting crimes to law enforcement. Advance protections and expand programs like the Violence Against Women Act and U visas, which are set aside for victims of crime, women fleeing state and interpersonal violence, and victims of trafficking or exploitation. Ensure that immigrants and their children have access to the services and supports all people need to thrive, including health care, nutrition, and other critical programs and income supports.
Chapter 11: The Domino Effect
Increase access to high-quality, affordable early childhood education (including pre-K and childcare). High-quality early childhood education is one of the best investments we can make for the short- and long-term health of our children, our families, and the economy. Excellent birth-to-age-five programs more than pay for themselves by preventing achievement gaps and producing better outcomes in education (including home culture and language support), social emotional development, health, personal productivity, and economic vitality. Our young children don’t have enough affordable, high-quality early learning opportunities. The investments outlined below will go a long way toward fixing that.
Support national high-quality, affordable, universal pre-K for all three- and four-year-olds in a mixed delivery model, that focuses on whole-child development (including cognitive and social emotional development), offer bilingual classroom settings for all dual language learners, and practice alternatives to punitive and bias disciplinary practices like the use of suspensions and expulsions.
Provide childcare subsidies (on a sliding scale) for low-to middle-income families so that the cost does not exceed 7 percent of a family’s income.
Support increased investments in affordable, high-quality early learning opportunities (including significant investments for Child Care Development Block Grants) to ensure all children are ready and successful for school and life. This includes investments in supporting childcare providers to provide high-quality early learning environments, including excellent preservice training, professional development, and coaching that incorporates anti-bias education and racial equity and social justice lenses.
Support a livable wage for childcare providers with opportunities for continued professional development. Advocate for intentional investments in building and supporting the educator pipeline, and attracting and maintaining a diverse workforce that reflects the diversity of the children and families it serves. Encourage a specific focus on the bilingual educator pipeline (with supportive training) that follow two tracks: (1) designing alternate paths to licensure that are flexible about final credentials and recognize teacher candidates’ cultural language abilities as strengths, and (2) identifying where multilingual teacher candidates get stuck on traditional paths to licensure and providing resources to help them overcome obstacles.
Insist on regular and reliable disaggregated data on the achievement, development, absenteeism, discipline, and dual language learning. Data focused on dual language learners shows what early learners know and can do in both English and their home languages. Continue to collect data in this area to inform and strengthen policy and implementation.
Promote increased investments to continue robust funding for Head Start programs (including Early Head Start), including expansion to meet full-day, full-year requirements and the expansion of Early Head Start for infants and toddlers.
Strengthen the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). The CDCTC allows families to claim a credit if they paid expenses for the care of a qualifying individual that enabled parents to work, go to school, or actively look for work. To strengthen the CDCTC, Congress should make the credit fully refundable, increase allowable expenses, and increase the top credit rate, which is currently capped at 35 percent.
Advance the College for All Act at the federal level and push for affordable public college and university policies at the state level. Public college institutions—including community colleges, technical institutions, and four-year colleges and universities—should be accessible and affordable. It’s time to explore new policies like free public colleges and universities for students from households with family income under $125,000, tuition-free community colleges, major student loan rate cuts, increasing Federal Work-Study programs, public service loan forgiveness when people go into fields like teaching or medicine, and much more.
End the school-to-prison pipeline and advance model school codes. Avoid out-of-school suspensions and promote restorative justice. Integrate social emotional learning. Adopt discipline policies aimed at dignity in schools with a focus on:
Understanding and addressing the causes of behavior.
Resolving conflicts and repairing the harm done.
Restoring relationships.
Reintegrating students into the school community.
End the regular presence of law enforcement inside schools and increase the number of counselors inside schools.
Implement and reauthorize the Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA). Recommendations for the reauthorization of the ESSA include:
Mandatory data collection on school discipline from all schools, Accountability mechanisms for addressing discipline and implementing best practices in the lowest-performing schools.
Funding for restorative justice practices and school-wide positive behavior supports.
Parental involvement in developing school discipline codes.
Requiring states to describe how they will reduce suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and other actions that remove students from instruction.
Funding competitive grants for school partnerships with community-based organizations.
Raise the age. Move policies forward so that juveniles can’t be charged as adults for certain crimes, including the age in all states to twenty-one.
Chapter 12: An Unjust System
End mass incarceration. One million women, mostly mothers, are under criminal justice supervision in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of women are currently incarcerated. Two-thirds of the women in federal prisons are serving time for challenges related to nonviolent drug abuse. They need treatment and counseling, not incarceration. Our justice system is failing families, hurting our economy, and in need of some serious reforms. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, which is nothing to brag about. In fact, we are living in a time when more than 2.7 million children in the United States have an incarcerated parent, and approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. Harsh sentencing practices have done more harm than good. Strict penalties designed to combat the distribution of illegal drugs have done little to stem the drug trade; instead, the result has been a massive sweeping of people experiencing challenges related to drug addiction into an ever-expanding criminal justice system that directly fractures families and hurts our economy. We urge Congress and the next presidential administration to act on sentencing reform and to end mandatory minimums.
Support Federal Sentencing Reform. Advance the Sentencing Reform and Correction Act.
Advance sentencing and bail reform work at the state and municipal level. End the cash bail system.
Support the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act.
Pursue prosecutorial reform.
End the death penalty.
Advocate for police reform. In 2014, MomsRising launched our national racial justice and police reform campaign to push forward demands to bring greater independent oversight, transparency, accountability, and justice for victims of police brutality and misconduct. No family should have to suffer from their loved ones being injured or killed by guns, especially at the hands of those charged to protect them. More than nine hundred people were killed by police in 2016. Studies show that, even though white Americans outnumber Black Americans fivefold, Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed when they encounter the police in the United States, and Black teenagers are twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than white teenagers. Our campaign strategies include:
A fully resourced and rigorous civil rights and criminal investigation by the DOJ into discriminatory policing, excessive force, and death or injury by police in every state in the country.
A comprehensive, streamlined, public national-level database of police shootings, excessive force, and misconduct complaints, traffic and pedestrian stops, and arrests, broken down by race and other demographic data, with key privacy protections, the exclusion of personally identifying factors and information, and deportation immunity for civilians.
Mandating of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) commissions in every state and interstate coordination among all POSTs.
An executive order that creates a strong and enforceable prohibition on police brutality and discriminatory policing based on race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, and housing status.
Limit federal funding for police departments that demonstrate abuse of power, and move forward massive reinvestment in community-controlled and -based safety practices.
Support for the passage of the End Racial Profiling Act.
Streamlined national use of the force matrix and mandating that state and local police have clear and streamlined matrices.
Limits on asset seizure without due process and the transfer of any military equipment to local law enforcement under the 1033 program, guidelines that ensure that the equipment is not used on nonviolent protesters, and an end to the requirement that such military weaponry is used within a year.
Advocate for special prosecutors for police misconduct in states.
End the use of military-grade combat equipment in local communities targeting civilians. Support the passage of the Right to Know Act in New York City and similar local legislation in other jurisdictions.