History of ACSP

Luci Harrell founded ACSP through a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2022. The initial goal was centered on decriminalizing poverty and dismantling police practices perpetuating the local homelessness crisis. Internationally, the term 'community support project' is often given to localized responses to acute crises or disasters. The crisis in Atlanta, characterized by a sharp increase in the number of people brought into the cycle of extreme poverty through repeated arrests and periods of incarceration in recent years, is one Luci felt demanded localized solutions.

So the effort, and the name, stuck. Early on, through participatory defense action mostly focused on city court cases, it occurred to the ACSP team that, although there are huge divisions in the type of work being done to assist unhoused folks on the streets of Atlanta and those who have been locked inside prisons across Georgia for decades, the struggles are much the same. With poverty and race-based oppression underlying all criminal system action – at all junctures – it became clear that the methods of legal and civic gatekeeping, resource restriction, and compounded discrimination were manifesting in very similar ways for people facing pedestrian citations and the death penalty, and everyone in between. This is not a coincidental phenomenon.

Due to rapid gentrification and a continued culture of negligence that makes it okay for lawmakers and police to criminalize our neighbors for just being, Atlanta has one of the highest poverty rates of any major U.S. city and the largest income gap. This crisis is exacerbated by the fact that slavery is constitutionally protected in Georgia (meaning folks are forced to work, sometimes for decades, for no pay while incarcerated), our state has more people under correctional control than any other, and discrimination against those who have a criminal conviction is legal. While these overt forms of racist oppression continue to disproportionately disrupt the lives of people of color, LGBTQ people, women, survivors of intimate partner violence, and veterans, the fact is that we are all affected.