Prison Policy Initiative — General Support (2017)

[Criminal Justice Reform] Published: March 2017 The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $66,000 to the Prison Policy Initiative for general support. The Prison Policy Initiative creates reports on criminal justice reform data and provides data and research support on criminal justice reform campaigns to the advocates it partners with around the country. It plans to use this grant to keep a fellow on its staff to drive policy research and writing. This is a discretionary (formerly called "no-process") grant. For discretionary grants, the grant investigator (in this case Chloe Cockburn, our Program Officer for Criminal Justice Reform) can recommend the grant without needing to go through our normal process of providing their reasoning, discussing with the team, and providing input on and review of our public page. These grants are limited to a relatively small proportion of our grantmaking, and some other stipulations apply to what types of grant are eligible. The overall aim is for us to be able to move forward on relatively small and low-risk grants, based purely on the judgment of a single staff member and with minimal delay.