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PACEs in the Criminal Justice System

Discussion and sharing of resources in working with clients involved in the criminal justice system and how screening for and treating ACEs will lead to successful re-entry of prisoners into the community and reduced recidivism for former offenders.

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Yoga helping inmates transcend jail cells [KEYT - Santa Barbara]

An ancient spiritual practice is helping rehabilitate men and women at the Santa Barbara County Jail. Prison Yoga Santa Barbara (PYSB) invites inmates to practice yoga, meditation and mindfulness during incarceration at no cost to taxpayers. Ginny Kuhn is the force behind the non-profit staffed by volunteers. The program is modeled after The Prison Yoga Project which was started yogi James Fox at California’s San Quentin State Prison 15 years ago. Kuhn's motto for PYSB is 'Working Freedom...

Childhood Researchers Study Health Effects Of A Parent Behind Bars (sideeffectspublicmedia.org)

Having a parent behind bars can poorly impact a child’s behavioral, emotional and even physical health. A new community-led research project in Indianapolis seeks to understand that link more clearly. The research project is a partnership between a community leader Shoshanna Spector, executive director of the Indianapolis Congregational Action Network (IndyCAN), and two academic researchers, Tomlin, who is the director of the Riley Childhood Development Center at the Indiana University...

Exploring Mass Incarceration as a Societal Problem [PSMag.com]

Activists and policymakers often rattle off figures to get Americans to care about their country's mass-incarceration problem : More than two million people are locked up in prisons and jails in the United States. In state prisons, African-American men are imprisoned at a rate around five times higher than that of white men. The U.S. accounts for a little over 4 percent of the world's population, yet holds 21 percent of the world's prison population. But PBS's new documentary The Prison in...

LA to receive $36 million for programs to keep people out of jail (scpr.org)

Nearly $36 million will flow into L.A. County to fight recidivism over the next few years, money all saved by sending fewer people to prison for drug and property crimes. California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014, downgrading many drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, meaning offenders would no longer go to state prison. The authors of the initiative promised that it would yield savings from the state an that the money would be reinvested in programs designed to cut...

At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard (latimes.com)

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. Gov. Jerry Brown ’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding...

Why Jails Are Booming (citylab.com)

A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative shows that the populations of local jails are swelling for reasons that have little to do with crime. State prison rates have come down modestly overall, reports the Sentencing Project , and some states can boast double-digit decreases since the turn of the century. City and county jails, meanwhile, have been bloating. Roughly two-thirds of states have seen jail populations at least double since 1983 a dozen have seen jail populations triple.

Addressing Social Justice with Compassion (dailygood.org)

Professor Rhonda Magee is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco law school, an expert in contemplative pedagogy, the President of the Board of the Center for Contemplative Minds in Society, and a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers and law students. She has spent her career exploring the interrelationship between law, philosophy, and notions of justice and humanity. Having grown up in a segregated North Carolina, Magee developed an early...

Banning in-person jail visits is foolish and needlessly cruel (latimes.com)

As a movement has taken hold to get California’s jails and prisons to operate more efficiently while releasing inmates who are better able to successfully reenter society, there have been occasional steps in the opposite direction. One of the most destructive has been a trend to ban in-person visits by family and friends. Some county jails have gone as far as eliminating visitation rooms, where higher-security inmates speak on phones to their visitors while seeing them, face-to-face, through...

Zuckerberg-Backed Data Trove Exposes the Injustices of Criminal Justice (wired.com)

AMY BACH WAS Â researching her book about the US court system when she met a woman named Sharon in Quitman County, Mississippi. One July day in 2001, Sharon said, her boyfriend took her under a bridge and beat her senseless with a tire iron. Sharon passed out numerous times before her niece intervened and stopped the man from killing her. In photos from the emergency room after the attack, Sharon's brown, almond-shaped eyes are swollen shut. She reported the crime to the police, who wrote up...

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) speaks out about Community Violence and Introduces TIC Bill [chicagodefender.com]

It is noteworthy that in his press conference to introduce his new bill, The Trauma Informed Care for Children and Families Act, Senator Durbin (D-IL) speaks out about the impact of community violence. “As we work to address the root causes of violence, we need to focus on the impact that community violence and other traumatic experiences have on Chicago’s children,” said Durbin. “During a visit to the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center last year, I learned that more than 90 percent of...

Montana Prison Report: 7 out of 10 female inmates committed non-violent crimes [KXLH.com]

Women are being incarcerated at a higher rate than ever in Montana and across the nation and most of them are serving time for non-violent crimes. Twila Johnke, 36, has been in and out of prison since 2001 for crimes of forgery, drug possession, and distribution. Like most of the inmates at the Montana Women’s Prison, Johnke is serving time for a non-violent crime. In fact, a 2017 Montana Corrections report revealed that seven out of 10 women, compared to three out of 10 men, are locked up...

In Photos: A Mother Adjusts to Parenting After Prison [YesMagazine.org]

When Kendra Wright was incarcerated for drug-related offenses at Oregon’s only women’s prison, her then-6-year-old daughter, Selene, was placed in the care of Wright’s grandparents. Prohibited from speaking to Selene, Wright cherished what little contact she had: Wright’s grandmother would call her while Selene was in the same room. “It was the only way I could hear her little voice,” Wright said. But in 2013, Wright was accepted to the Family Preservation Project, an initiative then run by...

A Modern-Day Harriet Tubman (nytimes.com)

She was 4 years old when her aunt’s boyfriend began to abuse her sexually. Then at 14, she had a baby girl, the result of a gang rape. Soon she fell under the control of a violent pimp and began cycling through jails, prisons, addiction and crime for more than 20 years. Yet today, Susan Burton is a national treasure. She leads a nonprofit helping people escape poverty and start over after prison, she’s a powerful advocate for providing drug treatment and ending mass incarceration — and her...

Dr. Ross Greene, Educated & Kids Who Have Been Traumatized

The Educating Traumatized Children Summit had Ross Greene, Ph.D. as the keynote. He was interviewed by Julie Beem of the Attachment Trauma Network (ATN). Dr. Greene is the author of The Explosive Child and Lost at School, Lost & Found and Raising Human Beings . He's the originator of the Collaborative and Pro-Active Solutions (CPS) model . I’d heard his name from some of the teachers in my life, but I’d never heard him speak. I’ve summarized, paraphrased and quoted a few of the things he...

Trauma-informed training for Lancaster County corrections and parole officers seeks less use of force [LancasterOnline.com]

Police in a northwest Pennsylvania town responded about six years ago to a disturbance at a mental health center. The officers confronted an upset client. When he became combative, he was cuffed and spent five years in prison, said Audrey Smith, a psychologist in Meadville, Crawford County. Not long ago, the man returned to the center and became agitated. Back came the police. But this time, officers took a gentler approach. “They let the guy have a smoke,” Smith said, “and got him to an...

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