history

Beyond the Bars began as a small volunteer network: six women with incarcerated loved ones and roughly a dozen men incarcerated inside local jails. We met weekly to identify urgent issues and organize collective responses, often amplifying petitions circulating inside the jails as COVID-19 exposed widespread medical neglect and inhumane conditions.

We initially organized through a jail-centered, structure-based model, mapping out incarcerated people and building leadership cell-by-cell. We operated a jail hotline, helped circulate demands from inside, and worked to bring public attention to conditions behind the walls.

That model became increasingly difficult to sustain. Incarcerated organizers faced retaliation, including solitary confinement, while jail administrators imposed new rules to restrict communication. At the same time, many of our original members were coming home, and the challenges of reentry became increasingly urgent. In response, we shifted into a community-based organizing model, focusing on neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County most impacted by arrest and incarceration.

As Beyond the Bars expanded beyond jail-based organizing, we shifted to street-by-street neighborhood organizing in cities in Miami’s northwest corridor (Opa-Locka, Miami Gardens, North Miami, and Hialeah), communities in Miami-Dade County heavily impacted by arrest, incarceration, and economic exclusion.

We trained impacted residents to participate in and serve on key local decision-making bodies, including police oversight boards and Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) boards. This work paired grassroots organizing with policy advocacy focused on the economic harms experienced by incarcerated people and their families.

During this time, we  secured landmark victories in Miami-Dade County, including:

>> Reduced jail phone call rates from 14¢ per minute to 5¢ through executive action (news link, Nov. 9, 2021)

>> Made all jail calls in Miami-Dade County free, saving families $6 million annually (ordinance link, Apr. 5, 2022)

>> Eliminated more than $100 million in outstanding jail debt (ordinance link, May 3, 2022)

>> Ended over $10 million in house arrest fees, medical and dental co-pays, clothing costs, and other basic needs charged during incarceration (ordinance link, Apr. 2, 2024)

These victories delivered immediate relief to tens of thousands of Miami-Dade residents and demonstrated the power of organizing led by people impacted by incarceration.

As state leaders used preemption laws to block local reforms, local organizations like ours hit new limits on what municipal policy alone could deliver. At the same time, our members were coming home from incarceration and running head-first into a broken job market. Stable work was out of reach.

By the end of 2023, we made a deliberate shift into worker organizing. Through thousands of conversations, we learned that most people with records were being funneled into temp agencies, not by choice, but by discrimination and the constant demands of probation and surveillance. Under these conditions, temp work becomes the default.

In 2024, we backed this up with field research across South Florida, visiting 89 temp agencies, 58 reentry and workforce organizations, and surveying job seekers at reentry job fairs. Most relied on temp agencies and earned at or below minimum wage.Guided by our members’ lived experiences and movement analysis like NELP’s Worker Power in the Carceral State we began organizing where our members already were: on the job, at temp agencies.

Guided by our Economic Freedom Agenda, we organize impacted workers to break the link between punishment and poverty, by raising standards in the temp industry and expanding access to stable, union jobs for workers with records. Our work connects labor organizing, economic justice, and the fight to end mass incarceration.