Promise is a 'decarceration' startup that was created by Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Diana Frappier to tackle the issue of mass incarceration, and which raised over $3 million from partners as diverse as Jay Z's Roc Nation, First Round Capital and Kapor Capital. There are close to 2.3 million people incarcerated in America overall and approximately 4.5 million on probation or parole. 12 million people cycle through local jails every year, more than 70% of whom are incarcerated pretrial - meaning they have not yet been convicted of the charge for which they were arrested. The vast majority of those remain in jail simply because they cannot afford to pay for their release.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins spent most of her professional life working on social justice issues - leading groups like the AFL–CIO Labor Council, Working Partnerships USA, and the anti-poverty organization Green For All. Diana Frappier worked in the criminal justice space for over 20 years, both as a defense attorney and as the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. She has spent most of her career fighting against injustice and working to help people who have been harmed by the criminal justice system. After working together at the home care startup Honor, Ellis-Lamkins and Frappier wanted to harness the power of tech, human-centered design, and innovation to address an issue that has plagued their communities for decades - an overgrown criminal justice system known as mass incarceration.
Ellis-Lamkins said, "We wanted to introduce tech solutions to the public sector with the overall goal of reducing the number of people who were incarcerated and empowering governments to make better decisions around public safety. Promise works with government agencies to support individuals being released from custody both pre-trial and post-conviction. Promise provides tools for the individuals being released, for the government workers interacting with those individuals, and for government leaders who need data to make better-informed decisions around incarceration and public safety."
[For more on this story by Afdhel Aziz, go to https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...ration/#7e28bd541e19]
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