Back in 1997, Helena Huang joined Open Society Foundations to oversee grants to groups pushing to overhaul the nation’s criminal-justice system. There was lots to change, she thought.
Congress had enacted a punitive crime bill that included mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders, expanded the number of federal crimes eligible for the death penalty, and curbed funding for college education for prisoners. President Clinton had “escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier,” Michelle Alexander would later write in The New Jim Crow, a book about mass incarceration. Some people predicted — erroneously, it turned out — that a new breed of young, violent criminals with no sense of right or wrong, who were labeled superpredators, would spread fear on the streets of urban America.
“It was really depressing and so very bleak,” Huang says.
To challenge the narrative, Huang and her colleague Nancy Mahon, who founded and led the criminal-justice grant-making program at Open Society, needed allies. To that end, they rented a bus during a conference of philanthropists in San Francisco and invited them to visit the California State prison in nearby San Quentin to talk with experts and inmates.
“Nobody came,” recalls Huang. “Not one funder.”
It’s hard to overstate how significantly the philanthropic landscape has shifted since then. These days, as the project director of the Art for Justice Fund, a $100 million fund created by the art collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund, Huang says that hardly a week goes by when she doesn’t hear from a donor interested in working to curb mass incarceration.
Huang, who is 54, is one of a handful of foundation executives — others include Laurie Garduque of MacArthur, Tanya Coke at Ford, and Timothy Silard at Rosenberg — who have worked on criminal justice since the early days. She has watched the issue move from the fringe to the mainstream, gathering support from conservative as well as liberal donors. “We’re in this moment of great opportunity,” she says. “But these moments don’t last forever.”
Huang has learned firsthand that there are no guarantees in philanthropy. After five years at Open Society, she joined the JEHT Foundation, a New York grant maker that was then the largest private foundation working to shape criminal-justice policies. Among other things, it underwrote ambitious state government efforts in Kansas and Michigan to help prisoners re-enter society, while funding such well-known nonprofits as the Vera Institute of Justice and the Innocence Project. But JEHT, whose name stood for Justice, Equality, Human Dignity, and Tolerance, was forced to shut down in 2009 because the father of its founders, Jeanne Levy-Church and Kenneth Levy-Church, had entrusted the family’s money to Wall Street fraudster Bernard Madoff. Pew Charitable Trusts, which collaborated with JEHT, made a statement at the time noting that its “sudden collapse rocked the criminal-justice reform community.”
When JEHT folded, Huang consulted for foundations and led a statewide coalition of community groups in Oregon until Tanya Coke at Ford hired her to get the Art for Justice Fund up and running in 2017. Gund, a prominent art collector, sold a painting by Roy Lichtenstein to provide seed money for the fund, recruited other collectors to join her, and persuaded Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, to assign his staff members to manage the fund. Housed at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the fund aims to reduce the prison population by at least 20 percent in states with high rates of incarceration and to strengthen opportunities for people leaving prison.
So far, the fund has committed about $60 million, with most of that money going to well- established causes including groups working to change the bail system, enhance prosecutorial accountability, and rethink juvenile sentencing policies. “We’re the only nation in the world that would send a young person to prison for life,” Huang says. The fund plans to spend all of its money by 2022.
In keeping with its roots in the art world, the fund also seeks to “turn art into action” by supporting artists and organizations that will bear witness to the injustices of incarceration and put a human face on the people caught up in the system.
“There’s no greater tool than art to help create the empathy we need to advance the public policies that we need,” Huang says.
So, for example, the fund supported a young artist named Jesse Krimes who designed a corn maze in rural Lancaster County that is intended to be disorienting and difficult to escape, like prison. “Every time you think you’re about to exit the maze,” Huang says, “there’s another barrier.” The dead ends tell the stories of prisoners or former prisoners.
Krimes himself served time in state and federal prison on cocaine-related charges. He is one of a number of formerly incarcerated people who have emerged as artists, writers, or leaders of the movement to curb mass incarceration.
Huang is encouraged by the changes to the criminal-justice system brought about by philanthropy, but she notes that “the numbers [of people in prisons and jails] are not going down like we need them to.”
“We have to be ever vigilant,” she says. “This is a long-term effort.”
