not incarceration and punishment, that will make communities safe and secure. Origins Critical Resistance (CR) was formed in 1997. Angela Davis, Rose Braz, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other activists founded CR to address issues of mass incarceration and policing. On September 25–27, 1998, Critical Resistance held its first conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Over 3,500 participants attended, including former and current prisoners and their families, activists, academics, religious leaders, homeless people, policymakers, and members of the LGBT community. This conference challenged what it called the prison industrial complex (PIC). Critical Resistance says that the government has commodified prisons as desirable and, in return, has gained public support to expand prisons. CR's initial international conference put the term "prison-industrial complex" on the national agenda with the goal of convincing the American public to stop mass incarceration. CR's mission statement supports abolishing the PIC, and promotes the idea that capitalism profits from incarceration, particularly the incarceration of people of color, women, and the poor. The conference encouraged different organizations to engage in activism. In particular, the "Schools Not Jails" initiative and the Youthforce Coalition began to combat what they called the "criminalization of youth of color" after the conference. Campaigns and projects Critical Resistance holds conferences as a strategy to open discussion about prisons, gain insight from different activists and participants, and spread information to different parts of the United States. CR hosted more conferences through Critical Resistance South in New Orleans and Critical Resistance East in New York. Critical Resistance has been working on numerous campaigns and projects to abolish prisons locally, nationally, and worldwide. The Prisoner Mail Working Group in CR receives letters from prisoners regularly in order to stay connected to them and understand what is happening in prisons. CR says it is crucial that the voices of diverse communities are heard, especially prisoners, in order to create a collective dialogue that can expose the reality of prisons. CR has worked on campaigns to overturn California's Juvenile Crime Initiative (California Proposition 21) and to stop the California Department of Corrections from building a 5160-bed occupancy prison with the cost of $335 million in Central Valley. In 2001, CR filed a lawsuit against the CDC that generated significant media coverage. CR worked with the California Prison Moratorium Project in bringing together a coalition of environmentalists, farm workers unions, Latino and immigrant advocates, and prison abolition activists. The courts