We Are All Criminals (WAAC)

The organization is embedded in Minnesota’s left-of-center criminal justice policy network. Its principal program operates in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Corrections; its advocacy page directs supporters to left-of-center criminal justice groups including the Drug Policy Alliance, the Sentencing Project, the Prison Policy Initiative, the Equal Justice Initiative, and JustLeadershipUSA; and a former Democratic-Farmer-Labor state legislator sits among its officers. Its institutional funding has come from Minnesota taxpayers through state arts appropriations and from left-of-center grantmakers, including the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation and the Bush Foundation. ^{3 4 5 6 7 8}

Background

We Are All Criminals began in 2012 as a documentary project underwritten by a leadership fellowship from the Bush Foundation, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based private foundation that finances left-of-center advocacy in the Upper Midwest. The project incorporated as a nonprofit in 2013 and received tax-exempt status in 2015. ^{5 2 9}

The group’s early output was an online archive of anonymous interviews, which it expanded into traveling photographic exhibits displayed at universities, law firms, and cafes across Minnesota, and into a book issued under the organization’s name in 2018. ² In 2018, the group held a residency at the Weisman Art Museum’s Target Studio for Creative Collaboration at the University of Minnesota, where it solicited additional accounts from visitors. ¹⁰ It has since installed two exhibits inside the Science Museum of Minnesota’s RACE: Are We So Different? exhibition. ¹

The organization has remained small throughout its existence. Its annual revenue had not exceeded $170,000 as of 2025, and in 2020, 2021, and 2022 it reported no salaries or wages beyond executive compensation. ⁹

Activity

The central claim of We Are All Criminals, repeated in its presentations and its book, is that roughly one in four American adults has a criminal record while four in four have a criminal history. Executive director Emily Baxter has characterized a conviction as an indefinite civil penalty, telling a Minnesota audience that offenders are “sentenced to a lifetime of checking a box” rather than to a fixed term. ^{11 2}

The group stages presentations and exhibits aimed at employers, landlords, school administrators, prosecutors, and law enforcement agencies. It has shown its work in museums, colleges and universities, parks, houses of worship, and state capitol rotundas. ^{1 2}

The organization’s advocacy page instructs readers to lobby policymakers, hire and rent to people with criminal records, and expand restorative justice alternatives. The reading list on that page is drawn almost entirely from left-of-center authors and includes prison-abolition literature such as Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; the same page links readers to the Drug Policy Alliance, the Sentencing Project, the Prison Policy Initiative, the Equal Justice Initiative, JustLeadershipUSA, and All of Us or None. ⁷

Funding

In 2019, the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundation, the largest community foundation in Minnesota, awarded nearly $40,000 to the SEEN project. ⁴ In fiscal year 2025, the Minnesota State Arts Board awarded We Are All Criminals $35,000 from the state’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, a Legacy Amendment appropriation, to film museum exhibits of incarcerated artists’ work and to stage presentations by formerly incarcerated artists. ³

The Bush Foundation supplied a 2012 leadership fellowship to founder Emily Baxter that financed the project’s development. ⁵

Leadership

As of August 2026, Emily Baxter has led We Are All Criminals as executive director since its founding. She previously worked as an assistant public defender for the Regional Native Public Defense Corporation, representing indigent members of the Leech Lake and White Earth Bands of Ojibwe, and then as director of advocacy and public policy at the Council on Crime and Justice in Minneapolis, where she worked on Minnesota’s “Ban the Box” law and on expanding the state’s criminal-record expungement statutes. She held a fellowship at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice from 2013 to 2015. ^{12 13}