Take Action

MAJR Volunteer Actions – Get Involved/Take Action

  • Join our email list
  • Attend a MAJR General Meeting – See the calendar for the next one!
  • Join a MAJR Committee. Contact us with your interest.
  • Join a MAJR Committee: we have three of them:
  • Watch our calendar for other events
  • Learn about the issues
  • Consider participating with other advocacy organizations
  • Spread the word
  • Contact your Maryland legislators
    • Do you know who your legislators are? Find out here.
    • Most can be contacted by Facebook, Twitter, and email. Letters work too!
  • Track legislation in the Maryland General Assembly
    • The Maryland General Assembly website makes it easy to track legislation.
  • Vote!
  • Write a Letter to the Editor
    • Major newspapers like the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post frequently cover issues of criminal justice reform.
    • Perhaps more important is a letter to your local newspaper or daily.
  • Host a movie night
    • Incarcerating U.S. – “Incarcerating US tells the story of America’s broken criminal justice system through the eyes of those who created it, those who have suffered through it, and those who are fighting to change it. “
    • 13th (Netflix) – “In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom.”
    • Frontline: Locked Up in America – “Inside the raging debate over America’s fixation on mass incarceration.”
    • Voices of Hope (YouTube) – “American Friends Service Committee and Voices of Hope Productions joined forces to support community groups and policy organizations devoted to men and women returning home after incarceration. These three films are the result. A Failing System, No Where to Go and Healing Justice: Transformed Lives.”
    • The House I Live In – “The movie is an insistently personal and political look at the war on drugs and its thousands of casualties, including those serving hard time for minor offenses.”
  • Host a book group
    • Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson –  Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.
    • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander – “Legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
    • Just Mercy: A Story of Just and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson – “Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.”
    • Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Froman Jr. – “As James Forman, Jr., points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand why.”
    • Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World by Peter Enns – “This book delivers a substantial and important account of the influence of mass opinion on criminal justice policy over more than half a century.”
    • Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler – “The most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow . . . .”