Tagged With "california prisons"
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Pandemic slows legal voting from California jails (calmatters.org)
Jose Armendariz, 30, has never been able to vote. Sentenced to 90 years to life in prison at 16, Armendariz is barred from casting a ballot by California’s felony disenfranchisement laws. But after learning that many of those behind bars can cast ballots, he has become an inside organizer for Unlock the Vote , an American Civil Liberties Union project aimed at registering voters in Southern California jails. Armendariz goes cell-to-cell at Orange County’s Theo Lacy Jail, educating people...
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PROP 17: Restores Right to Vote after Completion of Prison Term. Legislative Constitutional Amendment (votersguide.sos.ca.gov)
Yesterday, millions of CA voters approved Proposition 17, restoring the right to vote to over 50,000 Californians who have completed their prison terms. Together, we have freed the vote for our community members on parole! We know how important the voices of these citizens are and we’re grateful that Californians across this state voted to include them in our democracy. Our democracy now includes more of US! For more information, visit, votersguide.sos.ca.gov by clicking HERE.
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FREE Event: Trauma-Informed Correctional Design with Boston Architectural College!
Join us on December 8th for this discussion on Transforming Correctional Design for Justice Reform! Work in corrections or youth justice? Engaged in the social justice movement? Are you a designer or architect? This is one talk you can't afford to miss! Christine Cowart, of Cowart Trauma Informed Partnership will join Janet Roche, faculty member and Alumni Council member of Boston Architectural College (BAC), in alive-broadcast event, to discuss the implications of trauma-informed principles...
Ask the Community
Articles on ACEs in the criminal justice system
Hi, My name is Jónína and Im new to the ACE community, I am finishing my first semester in my master program in clinical psychology at Reykjavik University in Iceland. I stumbled upon this site and thought it might be a good idea to start a small discussion where we could share knowledge about ACEs in the criminal justice system. For my masters thesis I am going to write about ACEs in prison population in Iceland and look into quality of life and substance use. I am just starting to dig into...
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UC to Launch Its First Bachelor's Program in Prison [kqed.org]
By Vanessa Rancano, KQED, December 15, 2020 UC Irvine and the state prison system have reached a deal to create the first University of California bachelor’s degree program behind bars. Since California opened the door for community colleges to teach in prisons in 2014, some 2,000 incarcerated men and women across the state have earned associate degrees, said Brant Choate, director of rehabilitative programs for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But opportunities...
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Fritzi Horstman of, Compassion Prison Project, Interviews Dr. Vince Felitti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-VAUnGV1Vs ( Editor's note: This interview is close to 1 1/2 hours. YouTube provides a timeline of the topics covered if you click on "More" in the description.)
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Where Incarceration Isn’t the Answer (yesmagazine.org)
Progressive voices long ago characterized America’s penal system as a failure. However, in recent years, even a few button-down conservative, law-and-order types have grudgingly acknowledged the need for change. Of course, they don’t sign on to so-called “bleeding heart” concerns about human rights. But they do express alarm about the dollars and cents required to warehouse human beings with no financial return. Texas lawyer Marc Levin, who helped establish the organization Right on Crime...
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Oregon law to decriminalize all drugs goes into effect, offering addicts rehab instead of prison (msn.com)
In prison six years later, Gullickson was contemplating joining an intensive recovery program when a “striking, magnetic gorgeous Black woman walked in the room, held up a mug shot and started talking about being in the very chairs where we were sitting,” Gullickson remembers. There was life on the other side of addiction and prison, the woman said. But you have to fight for it. Gullickson believed her. “I remember thinking, I may not be able to do all that, be what she was, but maybe I...
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Now Available Online! Transforming Correctional Design for Justice Reform!
Did you miss our talk on Transforming Correctional Design for Justice Reform? Based in the irrefutable facts of the biological effects of trauma, this talk is now available for you to stream!
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NDRN Applauds Ending Contracts with Private Prison Companies
NDRN Applauds Ending Contracts with Private Prison Companies - https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndrn-applauds-ending-contracts-with-private-prison-companies/ On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, the Biden Administration announced that the Department of Justice will not renew any existing contracts for private prison operators in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). There are currently 12 privately-run prisons in the BOP, several of which had already been shut down or are pending transfer to government...
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uncuffed.org (Radio Station within San Quentin and Solano Prisons in California)
KALW , an NPR member station in San Francisco, has led classes in audio production inside San Quentin State Prison since 2012, and Solano Prison since 2018. Since then, KALW has aired over 80 stories produced inside the walls. Radio producers from KALW visit the prisons to teach classes in audio production, and to help edit the stories. Audio engineers at KALW do some final polishing before it goes out to the world. KALW’s classes in prisons are supported by the California Arts Council's...
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Prison Food
Community manager, Adrienne Markworth was interviewed for this piece (but not quoted) on the costs of poor quality food in prisons and how farm to table practices can help improve outcomes for the incarcerated and their families. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opinion/prison-food-farming-health.html?searchResultPosition=4
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After rampant COVID cases and mass vaccines, is California’s prison system nearing ‘herd immunity’? (eastbaytimes.com)
A precipitous decline of coronavirus cases in state prisons has transformed California’s correctional system from a cautionary tale of mass incarceration in the time of a plague to something more unexpected: an intensely monitored field study that could help scientists develop strategies to defeat the pandemic outside prison walls. Highly effective vaccines distributed in the prisons combined with the lack of reinfections among inmates and staff previously diagnosed with COVID-19 appear to...
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A Farm in North Carolina Offers a Women's Reentry Program Unlike Any Other [dailyyonder.com]
By Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder, March 11, 2021 In recent decades, the number of women incarcerated in North Carolina has skyrocketed. In 2017, the state’s female prison population totaled 2,634, almost six times its 1978 number. In the early aughts, programming for women reentering society lagged behind growing incarceration rates, said Benevolence Farm Executive Director Kristen Powers in a phone interview. In 2008, social worker and Benevolence Farm founder Tanya Jisa put together a...
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Abolitionist Politics: The Case for a World without Prisons (nonprofitquarterly.org)
What is often called police and prison reform does not and has never worked for Black people. Measures to stem police violence and other acts of harm toward Black people, like hiring more Black police officers, community policing, modernized surveillance techniques, placing police outposts in under-serviced and marginalized neighborhoods, and starting sports camps run by police, among other programs, fail by their very nature because each is meant to further cement the position policing...
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Making Space for Restorative Justice (yesmagazine.org)
Over the past few years, statistics on how the U.S. justice system is failing its citizens have come fast and hard. With more than 2 million people detained in jails and prisons, we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world—a rate that’s increased 500% in the past five decades Possibly as many as 482,000 people currently held in local jails are there simply because they’re too poor to pay bail; they haven’t been convicted of a crime. African Americans are three times more likely to...
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ROBERT PRICE: The woman once known as W76337 is on a mission [bakersfield.com]
By Robert Price, Bakersfield.com, March 27, 2021 You might say Shawanna Vaughn got off to a bad start. Born in a California state women’s rehabilitation prison to a drug-addicted mother and assigned to the state foster care system as a toddler, her destiny must have seemed preordained. Books with first chapters like hers usually don’t end well. For a time, the arc of her young life had a hopeful trajectory. Her foster care experience in Bakersfield was fulfilling and positive, thanks mostly...
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Female imprisonment rates are increasing. So, too, are the number of children with incarcerated parents [spectrumlocalnews.com]
By Sabra Ayres, Spectrum News 1, April 12, 2021 When Nadia Kerr joined a program for incarcerated mothers a year into her 20-year prison sentence, she hoped it would help her maintain some kind of relationship with her two daughters while she did her time. At first, the visitations with her daughters, organized by Girls Embracing Mothers, a Dallas-based nonprofit, kept Kerr out of trouble in the Hilltop Unit Prison for Women in Gatesville, Texas. The visits allowed Kerr to hug and to talk...
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Prison Yoga Project Goes Behind Bars to Help Inmates Heal Their Trauma (Inside Edition)
By Inside Edition staff, February 8, 2020 Once a week, yoga teacher Chanda Williams walks through the gates at San Quentin Prison with her yoga mat under her arm to teach a class. She’s an instructor with the Prison Yoga Project, a non-profit organization that brings the ancient practice behind the walls of correctional facilities across the world to help inmates heal their trauma. Williams says it’s her way of trying to help break the cycle of incarceration many prisoners find themselves...
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We Don’t Need Prisons to Make Us Safer (yesmagazine.org)
The United States now has 2.3 million people behind bars of some form or another. These are not 2.3 million isolated individuals—their imprisonment sends reverberations into their families and communities. On any given day, 2.7 million children have a parent in prison. Incarcerating that parent removes a source of financial and emotional support for both children and adult family members. For families who are already in economically precarious situations, removing a parent can plunge them...
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(At Least) 10 Things Educators Can Do to End the Prison Industrial Complex (edliberation.org)
Education for Liberation requires bold critique, creative acts, and, particularly for teachers, a willingness to take risks outside the status quo. Below we offer suggestions based on the ways many teachers and other youth advocates are building the capacity to challenge the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). We know teachers are already practicing, generating and sharing other interventions. This is not a checklist of must-dos, nor is it an exhaustive list or intended to apply to every...
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Cheryl Canson
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Fritzi Horstman
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Carlos Benitez
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Ruth Salady
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Fred Goff
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Marie Tracey
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In Nation's Incarceration Capital, A New D.A. is Freeing People from Prison [theappeal.org]
By Katie Jane Fernelius, The Appeal, April 21, 2021 In recent years, prosecutors on a mission to challenge mass incarceration have been using their power to keep people out of prison, but now they’re beginning to turn their attention to those who are already locked up. Few have pursued this as promptly and publicly as Jason Williams, the new district attorney of New Orleans, who may be setting the bar for DAs nationwide. And this focus could be transformative in New Orleans, the largest city...
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Don A. Caballero
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Jónína Sigrún Birgisdóttir
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Dawn Muench
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Cynthia Armstrong
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Viki Lucas
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David M. Young
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Angelika Mueller-Rowry
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Elizabeth Seidl
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Jon Taylor
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Elle Morgan
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