Northeastern Law’s Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration (CPIAC) has been awarded a $2.5 million Impact Engine Grant from Northeastern University to expand its Cradle-to- Prison Pipeline Project (C2P Project) over the next four years. The C2P Project is a collaboration between the Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration, the College of Art, Media and Design, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Cradle-to-prison pipeline, a term first popularized in 2009 by Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, refers to a web of legal and social systems that is rooted in structural racism — beginning before birth and persisting through the teen years — and diverts youth, especially those of color, toward juvenile and adult incarceration. To dismantle the cradle-to-prison pipeline, CPIAC argues, the interplay of systems contributing to this injustice must be comprehensively addressed. The C2P Project is a Massachusetts model of interdisciplinary data collection, mapping, analysis and original research that illuminates the web of systems shaping the pipeline.

Over the next four years, the C2P Project will collect and analyze data regarding the family regulation system, housing and homelessness, and health (including mental health) disparities. In addition, faculty and staff will conduct original research to fill the gaps in the available data and analyze the ways in which these interconnected structures lead to disproportionate representation of marginalized youth in criminal and other punitive systems.

“By making this critical data and research tool accessible to advocates, policymakers and the public, we hope to identify structural interventions that will enable us to dismantle the pipeline and to create a model for developing similar interventions in other states,” said Professor Lucy Williams, faculty director of CPIAC.