When people commit crimes, we send them away from their families and communities to become better by locking them in cells. That idea really starts to fall apart when you consider the number of people who abuse drugs , people with mental illness, and people of color in the prison system. Sometimes society's most egregious myths are right in front of our faces. Thankfully, as a society, starting to take a second look at the parts of our criminal justice system, especially prisons, that might...

We make the case that the conditions that foster violence and the conditions that perpetuate poverty are interconnected and reinforce each other; we further show the traumatic effects of violence -- and how trauma drives both poverty and violence. We then examine how violence has been used to enforce systems of racial oppression and how communities of color are disparately impacted by violence today. The conditions that perpetuate poverty and the conditions that foster violence often...

#WARonSlavery

There are various forms of emergency preparedness for natural disasters. From an early age, one learns how to put out a fire, board up their home if a hurricane or tornado is coming, or drop under a desk if an earthquake hits—but low-income communities of color have little to no response to more frequent incidences of state violence in the streets and inside of jails. The Justice Teams for Truth and Reinvestment will be the local rapid response networks inside of eight different counties...

With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big...." And then she says, “I think that’s crap.”

By Scott Hochkiss, April 6, 2020, Men’s Health I had no idea how much it would change me. When I was five, my parents divorced. Shortly after, my father met Sandy, first at a cocktail party and then again at a tennis league for single 30-somethings around Portland, Maine. She was brilliant, anxious, fast-talking, and from old Chicago money. They were engaged within two years. Sandy was a perfectionist and held us, her family, to the same standards. She placed yellow Post-it to-do lists...

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.

By bringing victims and perpetrators together, she’s helping repair harm and turn lives around. Meet restorative justice expert sujatha baliga. A graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe, baliga completed her law degree at the University of Pennsylvania and became a public defender, but she says the legal system began to feel like it was designed to not get at the truth. She began to look for a path to justice that “excavates from the deepest level who has been harmed, what do they need, and whose...

I absolutely loved this article and cannot thank you enough. I loved it so much, I posted it to my nonprofit's FB page for everyone to read and be blessed, along with sending it to my son. Keep writing; you're gifted and amazing!

"In my campaign for president, I made it very clear that the moment had arrived as a nation, as we face deep racial inequities in America and systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long. I said that over the course of the past year that the blinders had been taken off the nation, the American people. What many Americans didn't see or had simply refused to see couldn't be ignored any longer." Today, President Biden spoke to these issues in straightforward language before...

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...

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...

HEAL HISTORICAL TRAUMA & Iya Affo PRESENT: The Historical Trauma Specialist Certification- Level 1 is a comprehensive understanding of Historical Trauma from a multicultural lens. The training is designed for participants serving, leading, advocating and working with people of color. It is the perfect training for people in a variety of disciplines as well as multicultural families and for anyone with the desire to understand the impact of slavery, genocide and colonization. The course...

Being Trauma-Informed means that we are Culturally Attuned. Heal Trauma Global is a sister company to Heal Historical Trauma and was cultivated to fill a wide gap in stress science & trauma training. The trauma-informed movement is beautiful! It's wonderful that as a society we are moving in a direction that honors an individual's past as part of the driving force behind current behaviors. Yet, time and time again, I have attended trainings that are labeled as Trauma-Informed only to...

By Elaine Miller-Karas MSW, LCSW Building Resiliency to Trauma Psychology Today, September 30, 2022 Mental health can suffer after extreme climate events. KEY POINTS Mental health conditions exacerbated by natural disasters include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. After a disaster, the number of people needing assistance from the mental health systems strains or exceeds community capacity. There are simple strategies helpers can use to help survivors restore...

Strengthen your understanding and practice of gender-responsive, trauma-informed interventions at this national conference.

Emancipation Day, Richmond, Virginia, circa 1905 (Photo source: Library of Congress) To read more of Antwann Lamont Johnson's article, please click here. We use the holiday to reflect on the resilience of our Black ancestors. I didn’t learn about Juneteenth until after I came to prison. Being incarcerated made me want to learn more about the history of slavery in this country. Most of what I’ve learned is sad, but it’s helping me understand the present better. Juneteenth celebrates the...

The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...

Presented by Clifford Beers Community Care Center, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and KPJR Films, Healing the Generations is a two-day conference which brings together trauma-informed authors, leaders, and changemakers whose work focuses on resilience, trauma, and anti-racism. REGISTER HERE Collectively, we recognize the health implications that grief, loss, political unrest, and racial trauma have on the human body. We are convinced that in our families, communities, and ancestors,...