With just over a month before the general election, Democratic congressional candidate for the 14th District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-hosted a town hall at Parkside Houses focusing on criminal justice reform. Ocasio-Cortez spoke on ending cash bail, closing Rikers, and ways to turn activism into governance alongside activists and community leaders.

“I don’t want us to do what I believe happened in the aftermath of the Obama presidency,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We were like amazing, hope, change… he’s going to take care of it. It doesn’t work like that. We have to have each other’s backs.”

The event was the first of a series of town halls she will host in the run-up to the general election. On Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez will participate in town hall on immigration policy in Jackson Heights. At the event on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez spoke on criminal justice reform with much of the same tone and tenor of the activists around her.

“In our lifetime we will see the end of cash bail in the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We will stop wealth-based incarceration because it is wrong, it is classist, and it perpetuates the injustices that have always existed in America.”

The forum doubled as a campaign-style rally, with Black Lives Matter of Greater New York president Hawk Newsome praising Ocasio-Cortez as one of the few politicians in the Bronx that walks-the-walk of criminal justice reform. Newsome’s Black Lives Matter chapter was one of the first endorsements Ocasio-Cortez secured.

“She has inspired me in so many ways because now I know that real people can go in and crack this system open and gut it and rebuild it,” said Newsome.

Newsome called for “the cavalry” of Bronxites upset with the criminal justice system to get involved in the political process. And progressive activist Michael Beltzer, a member of Bronx Progressives, which co-hosted the event with Ocasio-Cortez, called for more Bronxites to get involved with county committees, community boards, judicial nominations and district attorney elections.

Newsome called out Mayor Bill de Blasio, Public Advocate and state Attorney General Democratic nominee Letitia James, and Bronx politicians – except for Assemblyman Michael Blake — for doing little in the aftermath of the police-related deaths of black Bronxites like Andrew Kearse and Deborah Danner. Kearse died in the back of a cop car in Schenectady after repeatedly asking for help because he could not breathe. Danner, a 66-year-old black woman living with schizophrenia, was fatally shot by police in her apartment in 2016 after police say she attempted to hit an officer with a baseball bat. The police officer who shot Danner, Sgt. Hugh Barry, was acquitted of manslaughter in February.

“The cops filled the courtroom,” Newsome said. “I didn’t see the electeds, who held a press conference the next day. I didn’t see the Bronx Borough President [Ruben Diaz Jr.], who tweeted about it.

Abolishing cash bail was one of the main focuses of the town hall, with many speakers having a personal connection with the process. One of the speakers was Akeem Browder, the brother of Kalief Browder, a Bronx man who spent three years on Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford to pay his bail and whose suicide in 2015 sparked a movement to close the prison.

“The judge actually said, you have a bail, to my brother, of $3,000,” Browder said. “We live in the Bronx. Where are we getting that $3,000?”

A new initiative dubbed MassBailout looks to reduce prolonged pre-trial incarceration by covering bail, according to Wade McMullen, managing attorney for the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, which created the initiative.

“Because the judge and the prosecutor have asked and set bail that [incarcerated people] cannot afford, they are sitting in a cage,” McMullen said. When an audience member shouted out that bail should be gotten rid of altogether, McMullen continued: “That’s the solution. The intervention that is needed right now is to bring people home immediately.”

McMullen said that cases are dropped at a much higher frequency if the subject of the case is out of jail. He also spoke on how the prisons system will severely and negatively impact individuals the longer they are imprisoned, a sentiment echoed by other speakers.

“The reason we said ‘shut down Rikers’ was not because the walls and floors killed my brother,” Browder said. “No, it’s because the culture of violence on Rikers, is not just Rikers. It’s every jail in New York. It’s every jail period. Where’s the rehabilitation?”

Rehabilitation could have benefited the mother of Shanequa Charles, an activist who was first to speak that evening.

“Had my mother been given treatment, instead of a jail cell, for her addiction, she might still be alive,” Charles said. “We’re supposed to be the most progressive state in the country and we have the most regressive speedy trial laws in our country.”