Tagged With "california prisons"
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From Convict to College Student (theatlantic.com)
California’s public universities are starting to embrace a program that helps transition people from prison to campus. A program at San Francisco State University has quietly been helping former prisoners earn college degrees for decades. Now, it’s gaining wider attention as schools around the state begin to look for ways to help formerly incarcerated men and women gain access to higher education. In 1967, John Irwin, who had been incarcerated before becoming a sociology professor at SF...
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From Prison Back to School (ssir.org)
Alex Diaz’s story would not surprise anyone familiar with the effects of generational urban poverty. Born and raised in Dorchester, a lower-income neighborhood in Boston, Diaz grew up without a father and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He joined a gang and committed a series of misdemeanors and felonies, including armed robbery and kidnapping, which eventually landed him in the South Bay House of Correction, a local prison. He spent eight years behind bars and was released four...
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Grassroots Organizations Are Leading the Way on Criminal Justice Reform (psmag.com)
Across the country, jails are, all too often, used as holding pens for people who can't afford to pay bail. The Workhouse in St. Louis is no exception to this phenomenon. In July of 2017, almost all of the 836 inmates were awaiting trial, with only a handful having actually been convicted. Given that, historically, criminal justice reform has only rarely come from the city's prosecuting attorney , community members have taken matters into their own hands. These local-led efforts are part of...
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Healing A Mother’s Pain By Forgiving A Killer (kpbs.org)
At 1:30 in the morning in May of 2012, Bevelynn Bravo was woken by a knock on the door. Two detectives had come to tell her that her son was dead. Her 21-year-old son, Jaime Bravo Jr., was stabbed and left to die as he walked out of friend’s house in City Heights. As a volunteer first responder for the San Diego Compassion Project since 2010, Bravo had become accustomed to dealing with tragedy at a crime scene. She offered emotional and administrative support to the families of homicide...
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How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever [themarshallproject.org]
Lori Lynn Adams was a mother of four living in poverty when Hurricane Floyd struck eastern North Carolina in 1999, flooding her trailer home and destroying her children’s pageant trophies and baby pictures. No stranger to money-making scams, Adams was convicted of filing a fraudulent disaster-relief claim with FEMA for a property she did not own. She also passed dozens of worthless checks to get by. Adams served two year-long prison stints for these “blue-collar white-collar crimes,” as she...
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How Prison Changes People [BBC News]
Longer and harsher prison sentences can mean that prisoners’ personalities will be changed in ways that make their reintegration difficult, finds Christian Jarrett (author). Day after day, year after year, imagine having no space to call your own, no choice over who to be with, what to eat, or where to go. There is threat and suspicion everywhere. Love or even a gentle human touch can be difficult to find. You are separated from family and friends. If they are to cope, then prisoners...
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How prison disproportionately hurts the health of minority children [CenterForHealthJournalism.org]
The idea that locking up parents can have baleful effects on their children’s health isn’t exactly new. I have written before about research that found links between the incarceration of parents and learning disabilities, developmental delays and behavior problems, even after other variables were taken into account. But a new paper published Thursday in the British journal The Lancet makes clear just how unequal the effects of incarceration can be on families in the United States, which...
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How solitary confinement drove a young inmate to the brink of insanity (chicagotribune.org)
With his mental state deteriorating as he sat in the crushing isolation of solitary confinement, a desperate inmate named Anthony Gay saw a temporary way out. Sometimes it came in the form of a contraband razor blade. Occasionally it was a staple from a legal document or a small shard of something he had broken. Each time he harmed himself, he knew that, at least for a little while, the extreme step would bring contact with other human beings. Therapists would rush to calm him. Nurses would...
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How The Juvenile Justice System is Failing Girls [yr.media]
By Susie Armitage, YR Media, October 16, 2019 When Bree was booked into a juvenile detention center as a teen, they were subject to a strip search. “The staff had to take off my clothes and started patting me down, touching me, and making me feel uncomfortable,” said Bree, who asked that their last name not be used for privacy reasons. As a youth advocate with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, Bree recounted their experience of incarceration in a report. “I felt violated, like I...
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'I Can Be Free Again': How Music Brings Healing at Sing Sing [psmag.com]
"Never ran, never will!" is the gangster-bravado motto that people use to explain Brownsville, Brooklyn, with its blocks and blocks of low-income housing projects. Even the grungiest hipster artisans, who've pretty much invaded Brooklyn in recent years, still stay away from Brownsville. Growing up there in the crack era of the 1980s, Joseph Wilson was surrounded by crack dealers and addicts. His mother was an addict, so his grandmother wound up raising him—and teaching him to love music. She...
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'I Can Be Free Again': How Music Brings Healing at Sing Sing [psmag.com]
"Never ran, never will!" is the gangster-bravado motto that people use to explain Brownsville, Brooklyn, with its blocks and blocks of low-income housing projects. Even the grungiest hipster artisans, who've pretty much invaded Brooklyn in recent years, still stay away from Brownsville. Growing up there in the crack era of the 1980s, Joseph Wilson was surrounded by crack dealers and addicts. His mother was an addict, so his grandmother wound up raising him—and teaching him to love music. She...
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I Did It Norway [themarshallproject.org]
In August, when the solar eclipse passed over South Boise Women's Correctional Center in Idaho, the officers held lunch early, handed out protective sunglasses, and invited the women outside to watch the sky. At the Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut, a few prisoners and officers recently played cards together; the warden seemed a little stunned when describing the scene. John Wetzel, who runs the prison system in Pennsylvania, has noticed a shift in tone at annual gatherings...
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'I'm looking for a fresh start,' say ex-cons attending job, resource fair in Anaheim (ocregister.com)
Austin Barry stood outside of the Honda Center on Tuesday looking for a little redemption and a job. Just eight days out of prison for a robbery conviction, the 24-year-old Mission Viejo resident was among 200 former offenders who attended the Orange County Re-entry Resource Fair, which connected felons with employment opportunities, legal advice and drug-treatment programs. “I’m looking for a fresh start, which is kind of hard for any person with a record,” said Barry, who served a 2...
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'I took someone’s life — now I am giving back': In California's prisons, inmates teach each other how to start over (latimes.com)
Corrections officials said the growing emphasis on rehabilitation and helping offenders re-enter society has led to a prison culture shift. Inmates at facilities with the most opportunities seem less inclined to break the rules, officials said, showing a greater interest in group sessions, completing college applications and learning work skills. California plans to release 9,500 offenders over the next four years under Proposition 57, part of the state’s strategy to comply with a federal...
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In Chicago, Another Public Housing Experiment: Prisoner Reentry [CityLab.com]
For the past several years, three residents of St. Andrew’s Court, a halfway house on Chicago’s west side, have waited patiently for a spot in Chicago’s public housing system. Bobby Flowers, Jimmy Edwards*, and John Stamps are among the nearly 282,000 Chicagoans who registered for affordable housing assistance when the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) waitlist last opened in November 2014. In past waitlist cycles, these men would not have had a shot at CHA housing because all three are...
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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...
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Incarceration, Addiction & Homelessness: The Problem with the U.S. Foster Care System
I was recently asked to be on the Incarcerate US podcast that is hosted by Dante Nottingham, an inmate who has been locked up since the age of 17. As you may know, incarceration in the US is at extreme levels and touches a wide variety of social issues, topics and dilemmas. At Incarcerate US, they believe that the solutions to our incarceration problems reside within the minds and hearts of the people. So the aim of our Incarcerate U.S. podcast is to interview a wide array of people across...
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Initiative connects Oregon inmates with their children (Wilsonville Spokesman)
By Jake Thomas, January 24, 2020, for Oregon Capital Bureau Portland nonprofit and Oregon Department of Corrections say effort would improve visitation areas and support families. Portland inmate Irvin Hines says visits from his children can be stressful. The father of three children ages 5, 14 and 21, Hines is in custody at Portland's Columbia River Correctional Institution . He described the thin mat he and his young son had to sit on in a corner of the facility's cafeteria. He also talked...
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Inmates can't afford to communicate with their children or families - Another example of an unjust justice system
In an oddly placed story, the Arts and Entertainment section of the Star Tribune in Minnesota covered the cost of phone calls for inmates after the FCC decided that it would not support caps on cost for inmates to make calls. The article starts out talking about the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, but this issue isn't fiction, it's impacting families all over the United States. In criminal justice reform this issue could easily get lost when larger issues like mental health are so...
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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind [nytimes.com]
There’s an anecdote that Ruth Wilson Gilmore likes to share about being at an environmental-justice conference in Fresno in 2003. People from all over California’s Central Valley had gathered to talk about the serious environmental hazards their communities faced, mostly as a result of decades of industrial farming, conditions that still have not changed. (The air quality in the Central Valley is the worst in the nation, and one million of its residents drink tap water more poisoned than the...
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Jail & Prison Resources
Addressing Correctional Officer Stress: Programs and Strategies Source: NCJRS Description: A guide to assist corrections administrators is addressing employee stress. Link: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/183474.pdf Art Behind Bars...
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James Fox and the Prison Yoga Project (dailygood.org)
James Fox M.A. is the founder and director of the Prison Yoga Project , (PYP), an organization dedicated to establishing yoga and mindfulness programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers worldwide. Since 2002, Fox has been teaching yoga and meditation to prisoners at San Quentin Prison as well as other California State prisons. The Prison Yoga Project helps incarcerated men and women build a better life through trauma-informed yoga with a focus on mindfulness . It helps prisoners make...
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Job center at women’s reentry facility opens (workforce.org)
Opened in October, the center, managed by grant sub-recipient Second Chance, started enrolling participants, with the goal of offering trauma-informed reentry services to 400 women pre-release and to 100 of those 400 post-release. Enrollment of voluntary participants is based on three criteria. The individual must: be a resident of the facility be within 180 days of release have not been convicted of a sexual offense other than prostitution Though the goals are similar for both men and women...
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Kamala Harris Went to Prison So Others Won’t Have To [MotherJones.com]
Democratic up-and-comer Kamala Harris visited just about every corner of California during her successful 2016 campaign to take over Barbara Boxer’s seat in the US Senate, and she’s kept it up somewhat since taking office. But on a recent, sweltering July afternoon, I accompanied Harris to a place where no senator has set foot for at least a decade. The Central California Women’s Facility, which houses nearly 3,000 inmates, is tucked amid the farmlands of Chowchilla, about three hours from...
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Kelly Orians: Getting Out and Staying Out (dailygood.org)
Kelly Orians is a staff attorney at The First 72 Plus , a New Orleans nonprofit founded by six formerly incarcerated people to help other formerly incarcerated men and women navigate the first 72 hours of their release. She is also the co-founder of Rising Foundations , a partner nonprofit that provides pathways to self-sufficiency for formerly incarcerated people, with an aim to stop the cycle of incarceration in low-income communities through small business development and home ownership.
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Kids Under 12 Can No Longer be Sent to Juvenile Hall for Most Crimes Starting in 2020 [capradio.org]
By Steve Milne, Capital Public Radio, December 20, 2019 One of the last pieces of legislation from former California Gov. Jerry Brown’s final year in office would end the prosecution of pre-teens who commit crimes, other than murder and forcible sexual assault. Right now, California has no minimum age for sending children to juvenile hall. Beginning in the new year, counties will no longer be allowed to process kids under 12 years old through the juvenile justice system. Instead, they will...
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Kids with Families in Prison/Jail (www.sesamestreetincommunities.org) & Note
Cissy's Note: One of the things that worries me about technology is that parents might not be watching so much Sesame Street anymore. As a parent with a whole lot of ACEs, I find the gentle and warm tones of adults on Sesame Street so soothing, On especially hard days this gentle warmth can make an actual difference. When my daughter was young, we'd cuddle on the couch and watch together. The content is always so basic and clear and because it's geared towards and for kids, I never felt...
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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...
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Law Enforcement & Corrections Resources
Cops, Kids, and Domestic Violence Source: National Child Traumatic Stress Network Description: Law enforcement training DVD and support documents (which can be used independently). Link: Video – ...
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Life After ‘17to Life [nytimes.com]
STOCKTON, Calif. — In California, known for decades as one of the nation’s most avid jailers, the trajectory of law and order is shifting. Through litigation, legislation and a series of ballot initiatives, the state’s prison population has dropped 25 percent over the past decade. The photographer Joseph Rodriguez has been documenting crime and punishment in California for years and recently focused his gaze on the migration home, in Stockton — a barren outpost in California’s Central...
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Looking toward restorative justice
Last week, many community members spoke up for stopping expansion of prison infrastructure. We met with success! Thank you https://www.nonewwomensprison.com/ https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/
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Making Prison Visitation Programs Trauma Informed
While reading the Trauma Informed Oregon newsletter I came across Shannon's story - so powerful! Please read ... From Shannon Turner, MSW, LCSW At the time of writing this blog, there are two million, two hundred-twenty thousand, three hundred adults currently incarcerated in the US. In thirty-five states analyzed in a study, one in every ten inmates has served at least ten years in prison. My brother is one of the over two million inmates currently incarcerated in the US. Outside prison...
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Study: About 4 Percent of Women Are Pregnant When Jailed (nytimes.com)
About 4 percent of women incarcerated in state prisons across the U.S. were pregnant when they were jailed, according to a new study released Thursday that researchers hope will help lawmakers and prisons better consider the health of women behind bars. The number of imprisoned women has risen dramatically over the past decades, growing even as the overall prison rates decline. But there had been a lack of data on women's health and no system for tracking how frequently incarcerated women...
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Suicides in California Prisons Rise Despite Decades of Demands for Reform [sfchronicle.com]
By Jason Fagone and Megan Cassidy, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2019 The suicide rate inside California prisons, long one of the highest among the nation’s largest prison systems, jumped to a new peak in 2018 and remains elevated in 2019, despite decades of effort by federal courts and psychiatric experts to fix a system they say is broken and putting lives at risk, a Chronicle investigation has found. Last year, an average of three California inmates killed themselves each month...
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Suit: A federal jail in Philly is stopping kids from seeing their dads (philly.com)
Marie Gottschalk, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and author of the 2014 book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics , said that the courts have typically given prisons wide berth to adopt restrictive policies in the name of security. " There's a broader trend across the country of making it more difficult to visit people who are incarcerated," she said. "We're seeing greater use of videotaping rather than letting people come visit. It's part of...
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System Changes Could Improve Relationships between Incarcerated Mothers and Their Children [chapinhall.org]
By Amy Dworsky, Colleen Schlecht, Gina Fedock, et al., Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, March 2020 The dramatic increase in the number of women in state and federal prisons in recent decades has led to calls for gender-responsive policies and practices that address the needs and circumstances of incarcerated women and recognize the central role that motherhood plays in many incarcerated women’s lives. This brief describes the results of a project undertaken by researchers from...
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Taking on the Private Prison Industry’s Corporate Backers [BillMoyers.com]
In the months since President Trump took office we’ve heard a lot about crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and the return of law and order. In fact, as The Atlantic recently reported, the administration is scaling up use of high-tech methods of tracking down what it deems the criminal immigrant class . In addition, the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has walked back an Obama-era vow to step down use of private prisons, and his “ four-sentence memo rescinding...
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Teaching in America’s Prisons Has Taught Me to Believe in Second Chances [jjie.org]
In 2007, I gave someone a second chance. I was in Danbury (Conn.) Federal Correctional Institution recruiting women for a new program for people returning from prison that I was running in New York City. A woman approached me and handed me her portfolio. It was basically a detailed resume of her accomplishments, skills and goals for the future. Over a two-year period before this, I had visited at least six female facilities in New York and Connecticut and met hundreds of women looking to...
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The case for capping all prison sentences at 20 years [vox.com]
America puts more people in jail and prison than any other country in the world. Although the country has managed to slightly reduce its prison population in recent years, mass incarceration remains a fact of the US criminal justice system. It’s time for a radical idea that could really begin to reverse mass incarceration: capping all prison sentences at no more than 20 years. It may sound like an extreme, even dangerous, proposal, but there’s good reason to believe it would help reduce the...
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The law said an ex-felon couldn’t be a nurse. So this single mom got the law changed. (washingtonpost.com)
When Lisa Creason was a 19-year-old single mom, she robbed a Subway shop. Or, at least, she tried to. One evening in 1993, she walked in without a plan, without an ultimatum, and demanded money from the cash register. When she was denied, she took off. That spontaneous decision, which she said she made out of desperation to provide for her baby girl, would cost her for the next two decades. But it never defined her. On Thursday, Creason, now a 43-year-old mother of three and a nursing school...
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The Most Successful Prison System in the World is Also the Most Radically Humane (wake-upworld.com)
“Every inmate in a Norwegian prison is going back to the society. Do you want people who are angry — or people who are rehabilitated?” ~ Are Hoidel, Director of Norway’s Halden Prison. A Revolutionary Model While the typical prison in the U.S. relies heavily on concrete, coils of razor wire, barren land free of any trees or plant life and lethal electric fences, along with towers manned by snipers, a maximum security correctional facility two hours north of Oslo, Norway has stunned...
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The Prison Psychiatrist Who Knows There Are Some Inmates He Just Can’t Help [NYMag.com]
John, 61 Prison psychiatrist Los Osos, California I moved to California from Texas at the behest of my wife, who pretty much said, “I’ve had it — I wanna move to California.” I’d planned to set up a private practice when I got here. It’s a lot more varied and a lot more gratifying. But it also tends to be all-consuming. I needed some cash flow, and I started working at a men’s prison. I found that it was a lot easier: I didn’t have any overhead. I wasn’t on call every night. I had paid...
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The prison that gives inmates the KEYS to their cells: 'Knock-first' policy is aimed at creating a 'respectful' environment for offenders [Daily Mail]
Inmates at Britain’s first ‘respectful’ jail have been given the keys to their cells – with prison officers having to knock before entering. Wrexham’s HMP Berwyn, the largest prison in England and Wales, says the move is a ‘rehabilitative’ approach to offenders. Prisoners have been given more privacy, with the ability to come and go from their cells as they please – as well as being able to lock themselves in at any time. The ‘knock first’ policy is aimed at creating a respectful environment...
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The Problems With California’s Broken Bail System Are Vividly Illustrated As A 26-Year-Old Pregnant Mother Is Bailed Out Of An LA Jail For Mother’s Day (witnessla.com)
Since its inception in May 2017, the #FreeBlackMamas program has spread to an impressive number of cities across the nation. According to program organizers, in slightly more than one year, over 14,000 people have donated to bring nearly 200 mothers home to their families and communities in the cities of Oakland, Los Angeles, St. Petersburg, Montgomery, Memphis, Durham, Atlanta, Houston, New York City, Little Rock, Charlottesville, Charlotte, Kinston, Birmingham, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St.
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These prison inmates are saving the Earth as they serve their time (upworthy.com)
Efforts like this are possible through Washington's Sustainability in Prisons programs. It began in 2003 as a pilot project between Cedar Creek Corrections Center and Evergreen State College . Cedar Creek was looking to go green, and had already launched gardening, compost, and recycling projects. Around the same time, a professor at Evergreen, Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, was looking to work with inmates to study forest mosses, which desperately needed to be replenished. The two projects crossed...
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These puppies have a ‘magical’ effect on a state prison. Can they help inmates change? (sacbee.com)
A program called Tender Loving Canines is among the new and restored rehabilitation courses popping up in California state prisons since Gov. Jerry Brown began emphasizing programs that help inmates prepare to reenter society. Hector Amezcua The Sacramento Bee Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article111664572.html#storylink=cpy When a pair of puppies stepped into a state prison’s highest security yard on a scorching summer day, dozens of felons...
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This Nun Found a Way to Save Prisoners' Lives - All by Spelling 'God" Backwards (nationswell.com)
Sister Pauline Quinn says it was a German shepherd who saved her life. After running away from an abusive home and being shuffled between different institutions throughout her adolescence, Quinn was released onto the streets at age 18. Quinn would visit dogs in kennels as a way to cope with her mistreatment. When she eventually adopted a German shepherd named Joni, everything began to turn around. With the confidence Joni gave her, Quinn started thinking about how she could use dogs to help...
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Throwaway Kids: 'We are sending more foster kids to prison than college’ (kansascity.com)
For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html#storylink=cpy
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Top Trends in State Criminal Justice Reform, 2019 [sentencingproject.org]
From The Sentencing Project, January 2020 The United States is a world leader in incarceration and keeps nearly 7 million persons under criminal justice supervision. More than 2.2 million are in prison or jail, while 4.6 million are monitored in the community on probation or parole. More punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, have produced this high rate of incarceration. Ending mass incarceration will require changing sentencing policies and practices, scaling...
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Top Trends in State Criminal Justice Reform, 2019 [sentencingproject.org]
From The Sentencing Project, January 2020 The United States is a world leader in incarceration and keeps nearly 7 million persons under criminal justice supervision. More than 2.2 million are in prison or jail, while 4.6 million are monitored in the community on probation or parole. More punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, have produced this high rate of incarceration. Ending mass incarceration will require changing sentencing policies and practices, scaling...