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...

At this very moment, nearly 450,000 Americans are sitting in county jails not because they’ve been charged with a crime, but because they simply don’t have enough money to post bail. And, according to a new study , America’s money bail system isn’t just unconstitutional—it’s a fundamental engine of injustice in the United States. New data published by Columbia University researchers Arpit Gupta and Christopher Hansman and Ethan Frenchman from the Maryland Office of the Public Defender...

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...

Local high school students got a behind-the-scenes look at the county’s criminal justice system Wednesday as part of the Orange County District Attorney’s 17th annual Summer Youth Education Conference. The weeklong program gives students interested in a career in law enforcement a taste of what it’s like to be an attorney, police officer and judge. With educational workshops, the students are walked through the criminal system from the arrest and booking process to the courtroom, said Jose...

Rocky was raised in Stockton, California, on the far south side. "Further you go, the worser it gets. And we lived at the very end." Rocky’s father, Ronly Rontal, was a small-time hustler who drove a truck and often gathered with his friends to drink whiskey and play guitar on weekends. When he drank, he’d get violent. Rocky wasn’t the oldest or the strongest, but he was the bravest, and so the task of standing up to their father fell to him. It happened most often on the first and the 15th,...

(Image Credit: Michael Schlosser, director of the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois, offers new recruits training on interactions with minority communities. (L. Brian Stauffer) Michael Schlosser wants new police officers to understand one thing before they go out in the field: They’re influenced by racial bias. This strategy is a major component of a three-year-old diversity education course at the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois, where officers...

(Image Credit: shellyduffer.com) Restorative justice, which has been in the news lately , includes some interesting concepts about bringing criminals face to face with their victims to show them the impact of their crimes. The theory is that meeting those victims and hearing what they have suffered can lead to conciliation – or a coming to terms about what happened. When it works, restorative justice helps the offender take responsibility for his or her actions, possibly out of remorse or an...

“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...

In case any of you are not connected with the Correctional Educators Associations in your state you might want to get connected with them. The Ohio Correctional Educators Conference is Sept 12-14 and will focus on moving to trauma informed education in correctional environments. I am focusing the Wednesday keynote presentation on moving from stable maladaptive functioning to post traumatic growth. http://cea-ohio.org/conference.aspx Correctional educators are a fun group and I always have a...

Colby Itkowitz of the Washington Post just posted an inspiring story with a message of hope for communities struggling with tension between police and community members: Activist A.J. Bohannon had organized more than 1,000 Black Lives Matters protesters to march the streets of Wichita on Sunday. But then, days before, he received a call from the new police chief with a different idea. Instead of having an event that drew a hard line between protester and police, why not bring them all...

In May, NPQ reported that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe had issued an executive order to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 ex-inmates in time for the November election. Nonprofits and advocacy groups have been instrumental in educating and alerting ex-inmates about shedding their formerly disenfranchised status. However, Republican legislators pushed back on McAuliffe’s order almost immediately, and now they are taking the issue to the state Supreme Court to determine if the...

The philosophy of trauma-informed care is becoming more and more embedded in the philosophies and practices of child-serving agencies. When a child experiences a single traumatic event and is fortunate enough to be surrounded by supportive and nurturing adults, that trauma can generally be assessed and usually treated effectively with the help of parental support. When a traumatized child responds with internalized distress such as sadness, depression or anxiety, our systems appear to...