Everybody celebrates in a different way Enrique Bautista is an incarcerated person at Snake River Correctional Institution in Eastern Oregon. He is a periodic contributor to Street Roots. Dec. 22. It is the day after my birthday. I am now 35 years old. I am a 35-year-old man. Wow! It feels like only yesterday I was just another 18-year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder coming into the system. With 20-something years to serve, mad at the world, full of hate and frustration. Everything was...

  ACES: Building a Resilient Community Childhood trauma has affected the majority of people in our community.  Specific family problems as well as child abuse and neglect (summarized as Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACEs) have been shown...

As a middle aged, naive and wide eyed kid with a new mission, that of addressing the many behavioral issues we faced in our Alaska Native Community, I focused on what I referred to as restoring responsible fatherhood to families. As the son of an absent father, I believed that the simple act of re engaging fathers with their children could have immediate results. Well, as I discovered, nothing is easy, especially in the field of corrections. I did start a fatherhood initiative for Alaska...

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...

http://blitzweekly.com/lawrence-phillips-the-broken-kid/ http://www.thenation.com/article/who-killed-lawrence-phillips/ Today NFL athlete Lawrence Phillips' death was ruled a suicide by the coroner. His ACEs score (Adverse Childhood Experiences) was by all accounts extremely high. By all accounts, he did not receive treatment for this unrelenting childhood trauma and attachment disruption. Abandoned by his father, abused by his stepfather, removed from his mother, placed in group homes, and...

Leah Bartos - California Health Report - January 6, 2016 Pediatric patients giving their health histories at the Center for Youth Wellness, a health clinic in the impoverished Bayview Hunter’s Point area of San Francisco, are asked for more than the usual details about allergies and current prescriptions. Doctors there need a different kind of medical history: did their parents use drugs or have a mental illness? Were any family member in jail or prison? Have their parents divorced or...

On October 17th I gave a presentation to 70 + attorneys from the Defenders Association.  Several members of this group assisted me by sending me great information about ACEs and the criminal justice system for which I am grateful.  The 3...

In America alone, more than 2 million people are incarcerated, millions more on probation or parole, and tens of millions more with a criminal record. What distinguishes us from them? What if there were no 'us' and 'them' when it came to criminal behavior? What if we all had, at one time or another, fallen short of a perfect, law-abiding life? Would that realization make us more open to rehabilitation and less inclined to imprisonment as the first recourse? With her non-profit, "We Are All...

Every week, Daniel Westbrooks walks through a metal detector and several locked doors to visit teens at Nashville’s Juvenile Detention Center. He weaves through the shuffle of boys in matching blue polo shirts and gray slip-on sneakers, joking and chatting. Westbrooks says he knows what it’s like to be locked up. He cycled in and out of juvenile detention, jails and prisons for nearly two decades. All the while, he was holding in painful secrets from his past. It’s easy for Westbrooks to...

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...

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...

Have you ever had the experience of becoming the living embodiment of an illustrated children’s book character? Yeah, that’s happened to me. I am Froggy. The Froggy that goes to school Froggy. In the children’s story, Froggy feels anxious about his first day of school. His healthy and natural nervousness (the body’s stress response system is activated by novelty) manifests in his dream. In his dream, he misses the bus and shows up to class in his underwear. I am feeling “Froggy.” Two...

John Legend is an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award-winning entertainer, who recently kicked off a Las Vegas residency and just released a new single. But he's also a well-known activist and advocate for criminal justice reform and voting rights who has supported a number of Democratic candidates over the years. He's also throwing his support behind a number of progressive prosecutors who are running on a promise to reform a criminal justice system that they say is outdated and that...