Tagged With "california prison reform"
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Re: Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them (nationswell.com)
Agree completely! Prison is not rehabilitating and more incarceration DID NOT equal less crime over the past 20 years. States are looking for innovative ways and resources for improving reentry success rates. Since reading this, I already forwarded the article to one of our Assistant Commissioners of state corrections.
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Re: Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them (nationswell.com)
That's fantastic, Becky! Thank you for forwarding to one of the Assistant Commissioners of state corrections! Please consider inviting them to join our ACEs in Criminal Justice community on ACEs Connection. With so many solutions shared in many communities and criminal justice systems (such as, the most humane prison in our world - Norway prison system ), learning from so many innovative approaches, and community-driven solutions, the site would also benefit profoundly from the Assistant...
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Re: Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them (nationswell.com)
While awaiting 'Job Offer Approval', I received an unexpected visit from a 'few folks-one of whom was the State Program director for VISTA [domestic 'Peace Corps']--who informed me that in spite of 'my incarceration', I'd passed an FBI/NCIC Record Check (I'd been 'Adjudicated' a 'Youthful Offender', supposedly 'No Criminal Record') and he'd flown up to to the prison from N.Y. City to let me know that I could 'serve my country' as a VISTA Volunteer-with the agency the other two 'visitors'...
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Re: “BECOMING MS. BURTON: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women” by Susan Burton and Cari Lynn
As a former "Adjudicated Youthful Offender", I'd been assured I had no "Criminal Record"--in spite of 'seeing the inside of Attica' as a 'registered guest' in late 1970/ early 1971, before another 'youthful offender' I'd known and respected, was killed. On the 40th anniversary of that Attica event, the SUNY-Buffalo Law School hosted an anniversary conference... and a New Hampshire Historian, Teresa Lynch, did a presentation there on the Telephone transcripts of then President Richard Nixon's...
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Re: California's 'ban the box' law to help ex-felons find jobs after release (vcstar.com)
When I first wrote "The Prisoner's Employment Assistance Brochure for N.Y.S."-which listed organizations in each N.Y. county that help prisoners get jobs to be eligible for 'employed-parole', in the early 1970's, I wasn't expecting my fellow inmates at the Attica Prison Print Shop to want to reprint it, but after they did that, the warden of Comstock Prison who saw the reprinted version from Attica, asked me for permission to reprint it there at Comstock....
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Re: Pipeline to Prison May Start with Childhood Trauma
Hi Emily, Thank you for your critically imperative post. So important that we (society) are well informed and engaged in transforming our systems to focus on bringing hope and healing to whom we serve cross-sector in a socio-ecological model, please find a link to an exemplary School to Prison Pipeline prezi with the glaring statistics of the reality and just as importantly, all the solutions on transforming this punitive pipeline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmI5nROpbqc if...
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Re: Immigrant Prisons • BRAVE NEW FILMS (14 minutes)
Perhaps the "National Moratorium on Prison Construction" which was jointly sponsored by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and the Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee, could be 're-activated' with other allies to address this situation. More recently, the "For-Profit Prison" companies have compiled a 'dismal record' in how they house 'convicted felons' and 'juveniles', too, especially when taxpayers foot the added bill of 'rescuing' under-staffed prisons from riots, etc.
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Re: Confused
Hi Ed, First of all, you are amazing for sharing your story. I currently work in the prison system with adults about to be released, and would be happy to talk to you more about this topic. Feel free to email me kingtj134@gmail.com and let me know how I can help! And, welcome home.
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Lifelines: How Yoga is Helping Women at N.H. State Prison Manage Trauma During COVID-19 [nhpr.org]
By ALEX MCOWEN & PETER BIELLO • MAY 7, 2020, NHPR.org Because of COVID-19, the New Hampshire Department of Corrections suspended all visits and volunteer services at the state’s prisons on March 16, more than 7 weeks ago. Nicole Belonga has been serving time at the New Hampshire State Prison for women in Concord for 11 years. She says these efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus have cut off almost all contact with the outside world, making stressful prison life even more so.
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Will the Coronavirus Make Us Rethink Mass Incarceration? (newyorker.com)
For decades, community groups have pointed out the social costs of mass incarceration: its failure to address the root causes of addiction and violence; its steep fiscal price tag; its deepening of racial inequalities. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed another danger of the system: its public-health risks. In April, the American Civil Liberties Union worked with epidemiologists and statisticians to show that, without protective measures in jails and prisons, including rapid reductions in...
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"How to talk policy and influence people": a Law and Justice interview with Fritzi Horstman
In this "How to talk policy and influence people" interview with Fritzi Horstman, founder and CEO of the Compassion Prison Project (see http://compassionprisonproject.org/), we discuss childhood trauma, the significance of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science, offending behaviour, addiction, violence and the fact that the men and women who end up in prisons are often among the most traumatized members of any society. We talk about the power of the "Step Inside the Circle"...
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Mass Decarceration, COVID-19, and Justice in America [ssir.org]
(Free to be collage by Ekua Holmes/www.ekuaholmes.com) By Deanna Van Buren & F. Javier Torres-Campos, Stanford Social Innovation Review, June 9, 2020 With the highest incarceration rate in the world, US prisons and jails are drivers for the catastrophic outbreak of COVID-19. Because of dense living conditions, limited soap and hand sanitizer, poor access to quality healthcare, and an increasingly elderly population, the outbreaks we’ve seen so far may be just the beginning. It’s no...
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Proposition 47 and Racial Disparities in California [ppic.org]
From Public Policy Institute of California, June 16, 2020 About the Program While the COVID-19 pandemic has required changes to law enforcement and correctional policies, widespread protests over the police-involved deaths of African Americans have intensified concern about racial and ethnic disparities in our criminal justice system. In recent years, California has implemented significant reforms that, while not motivated by racial disparities, are narrowing them. PPIC researcher Brandon...
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California jail population plummets during the pandemic. Could this lead to long-term change? [sacbee.com]
By Jason Pohl, The Sacramento Bee, May 27, 2020 California’s long history of altering its criminal justice system — from requiring life in prison for third-strike offenders to reducing the punishment for hundreds of crimes — is having another moment that could dramatically alter how the state locks people up. In a seismic, almost overnight shift, California has jailed 21,700 fewer people — nearly one-third of its daily population — in county lockups since the new coronavirus hit the state.
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Barton: Address childhood trauma for criminal justice reform (The Times)
By Kevin Barton, July 1, 2020, The Times. 'By the time a crime is committed and a victim is harmed, the root causes of that crime may have occurred long ago.' It is impossible to work within our American criminal justice system and witness the events over the past several months without asking whether there is a better way of doing things. The disparities that we see throughout society in areas such as education, housing and healthcare are even more apparent when viewed through the lens of...
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New episode of Transforming Trauma! Compassion Prison Project: Bringing Trauma-informed Care into the Prison System with Fritzi Horstman
Transforming Trauma Episode 017: Compassion Prison Project: Bringing Trauma-informed Care into the Prison System with Fritzi Horstman In this episode of Transforming Trauma, our host Sarah Buino is joined by Fritzi Horstman, Founder and Executive Director of the Compassion Prison Project . Through her work, Fritzi aims to bring trauma-informed care to a population in high need of trauma healing and not likely to receive it: men and women in prison. Sarah and Fritzi discuss Adverse Childhood...
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Newsom to release 8,000 prisoners in California by August amid coronavirus outbreaks [sfchronicle.com]
By Jason Fagone, Megan Cassidy, and Alexei Koseff, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 2020 Gov. Gavin Newsom will release approximately 8,000 people incarcerated inside California’s prison system by August, in a move that comes amid devastating coronavirus outbreaks at several facilities and pressure from lawmakers and advocates. The releases, which were announced just before noon Friday, will come on a rolling basis, and they’ll include both people who were scheduled to be freed soon as well...
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California reaches milestone with ACEs initiatives pulsing in all 58 counties. Next: All CA cities.
Karen Clemmer, the Northwest community facilitator with ACEs Connection, was already deeply interested in the CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study when she and a colleague from the Child Parent Institute were invited to lunch by ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens in 2012. But that lunch meeting changed everything. Karen Clemmer “Jane helped us see a bigger world,” says Clemmer. “She came with a much wider lens. She didn’t look only at Sonoma County, she...
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Police Reform Should Include Implementing ACEs Science
When I first learned about ACEs science, I was working for the local police department as the Director of a crime prevention program. This program was aimed at reducing drug related and violent crime by strengthening community partnerships. Our efforts yielded 19 crime prevention programs implemented by 35 community agencies. Together we reduced crime by 40% in one neighborhood, and pioneered a first probation program of its kind in Tennessee to reduce recidivism. At the end of the grant in...
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HEALING TRAUMA: HARPUR ALUM, INTERNS WORK TO STOP THE PIPELINE BETWEEN PRISON AND SCHOOL (binghamton.edu)
By Jennifer Micale, August 12, 2020, Binghamton.edu. Education should lead to opportunity: a proud walk down the aisle during graduation, followed by a job, college or specialized training, and then a rewarding career. But for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, school can too often present a narrowing set of options. Problems at home or in their neighborhood can spark behavioral issues in the classroom, and a punitive response by the school can lead to long-term suspension or...
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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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LA County’s new probation chief is known for San Diego County juvenile justice reforms (dailynews.com)
Adolfo Gonzales began work Monday as Los Angeles County’s chief probation officer, overseeing a system that supervises more than 40,000 juveniles and adults and managing an annual budget of over $1 billion. A former San Diego County probation chief, Gonzales brings 43 years of law enforcement experience to his new position, including being chief of the National City Police Department and assistant chief with the San Diego Police Department. Gonzales was appointed to the position last month...
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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...