Today, Campaign Zero is launching Labeled for Life: a national campaign to end gang enhancement laws and dismantle the databases that sustain them. 

Across 37 states and Washington D.C., people can spend decades in prison not for what they did, but for who police say they are. Gang enhancement laws allow prosecutors to pile on years — sometimes entire lifetimes — based on clothing, tattoos, social media posts, or neighborhood ties. These laws rarely require proof of organized criminal activity.  

The consequences are devastating and racially targeted. Enhancements can add anywhere from 1 to 99 additional years to a sentence, and in California, 92% of gang enhancement convictions involve Black or Brown defendants. Gang labels don’t just affect sentencing — they follow people into employment, housing, and immigration proceedings. Federal authorities have used gang databases to deport people based on designations applied without due process by local police. Research consistently finds these laws do not reduce violent crime. What they do is pull resources away from community investment, violence interruption, and youth opportunity.

Our campaign launches in five priority states — California, Illinois, Georgia, Maryland, and Washington — and centers on the Harm Index, an interactive tool scoring every state’s gang enhancement laws on sentencing severity, breadth of gang definitions, and due process protections. A justice system that punishes people for who they are, not what they did, is not justice.