Tagged With "Justice in America"
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7.25+
I have spent over a decade working at the intersection of mental health and social/criminal justice systems, but it wasn't until recently when I started collecting ACE scores with the inmates I work with in county jails. Prior to working in the jails, I worked in the state prison system, where I did mental health intake evaluations at the state prison where all offenders in Minnesota enter through. So often, in the back of my mind, was the thought that "if only these guys had the right...
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A Criminal Justice Revolution
Newly elected Philadelphia DA, Larry Krasner, is on a mission to tear down the City's "bigoted and patently unfair systems of mass incarceration," writes Shaun King in his article for TheIntercept.com, titled: " Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He's Exceeding Expectations ." Quoting some of the highlights of King's article: So far, having been in office less than three months, he has exceeded expectations. In his first week on the job, he fired 31...
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Action steps using ACEs and trauma-informed care: a resilience model (link.springer.com)
The prison system is an example of the ways undigested trauma from early childhood experiences can join with the conditions of harshness and violence in many of our U.S. prisons and contribute to reinforcing a cycle of reactivity in both Correction Officers and prisoners. The correctional system is rife with challenges to the health and well being of Correction Officers (COs) as well as prisoners. Suicide rates of COs are more than double that of police officers as well as for the national...
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Breaking the cycle: County jail programs guiding inmates toward better choices [Parkrapidsenterprise.com]
Hubbard County, MN Christina Day, Hubbard County Jail Programs Coordinator is finding success with new support groups, classes and programs in the correctional facility as well as stronger support systems outside the facility. “Day and her team of volunteers are proponents of the power of positivity, empowering people to set goals, believe in themselves and make better choices.” “That's where I feel our role, as far as myself and the other volunteers and instructors that come in and even...
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Bryan Stevenson Wants the U.S. to Face Its History [nytimes.com]
Last month, Congress passed the First Step Act, a prison-reform bill intended to reduce recidivism. Do you think this bill will actually change the realities of mass incarceration? It’s important but insufficient, in terms of the actual number of people in jails and prisons. We’ve gone from 300,000 people in jails and prisons in the 1970s to 2.2 million people today. We have to radically reorient ourselves and start talking about rehabilitation, restoration and how we end crime. And if we do...
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Building a Resilient Community (United Way of East Central Iowa)
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...
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Crime and Punishment in America
This book--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--is for readers interested in the criminal justice system and how poverty, abuse, and neglect early in life shape our future citizens and can predict, in part, whether or not they will become the perpetrators of violent crime. According to author Elliott Currie, to prevent violent crime and create a more peaceful society, the first priority is to address the roots of violence and invest resources in the prevention of child abuse and neglect. He...
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Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence, and Trauma (issuelab.org)
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...
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“Disgraceful” Disparities In School Discipline Funnel Kids Into Justice System [witnessla.com]
By Taylor Walker, Witness LA, November 11, 2019 Research and the national conversation around racial disparities in school discipline have largely remained focused on the outsized disparate treatment that black students receive when compared with their white peers. Yet Native American youth face much the same disciplinary treatment in schools that black students do, according to a report from San Diego State University and Sacramento Native American Higher Education Collaborative (SNAHEC)...
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Dr. Melissa Merrick Explains CDC's Vital Signs/ACEs Report [Prevent Child Abuse America]
Dr. Melissa Merrick, president & CEO of Prevent Child Abuse America, provides four key takeaways from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Vital Signs/ACEs report , of which she is the lead author. Merrick also identifies several practical solutions for creating the conditions for safe, stable and nurturing relationships and environments for all children, families and communities, which are fundamental to preventing ACEs. Among these solutions is strengthening economic...
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Mothers in Prison (www.nytimes.com)
Excerpt 1: TULSA, Okla. — The women’s wing of the jail here exhales sadness. The inmates, wearing identical orange uniforms, ache as they undergo withdrawal from drugs, as they eye one another suspiciously, and as they while away the days stripped of freedom, dignity, privacy and, most painful of all, their children. “She’s disappointed in me,” Janay Manning, 29, a drug offender shackled to a wall for an interview, said of her eldest daughter, a 13-year-old. And then she started crying, and...
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NFL Athlete Lawrence Phillips: The Broken Kid
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...
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Oprah Looks At How California’s Infamous Pelican Bay Prison Is Leading The Way In Reforming Solitary Confinement [witnessla.com]
On Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast Oprah Winfrey reported on the use of solitary confinement in American prisons. She talked about how California is leading the way to reform of the practice, with changes in the state’s Pelican Bay Prison, which Winfrey called the most notorious state penitentiary in America. It is a story that is very much worth watching. “Designed and built as a ‘supermax’ facility,” Oprah began, referring to the 1989-constructed prison, “it’s been used for nearly 30 years...
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Part 1 (of 3) Do you want an answer to ACEs?
I am sitting on it. Really. Not just me, but a corps of some 5000 people around the world. We have been fostering recovery from ACEs and Trauma for over 40 years – long before the ACEs study developed the term. We have served over half a million people worldwide – but almost no one knows we are here. Like you, many of us have been angry and frustrated that it has taken decision makers and policy setters over 20 years to learn about ACEs and incorporate trauma informed care into practice and...
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Pipeline to Prison May Start with Childhood Trauma
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...
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Presentation to Philadelphia Defenders Association
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...
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Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them (nationswell.com)
These social entrepreneurs aren't just working to reform the criminal justice system - they're a product of it too. America's criminal justice system currently housed more than 2 million people - that's more per capita than any other nation on earth. Even worse: Many are repeat offenders who haven't been offered the support or resources to get their lives back on track once released. A new initiative, backed in part by the singer John Legend, is hoping to reverse those dire statistics.
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Real Resilience is now a PODCAST
Women who support an incarcerated loved one finally has a place to share their stories on the Real Resilience P.W.L. Podcast.
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Restorative Justice conference focuses on 'energy of healing' (thecalifornian.com)
With crime and its aftermath often rippling through Monterey County , more than a hundred residents gathered at Hartnell College on Saturday to talk about how victims, offenders and the community can transform the negative effects of crime into positive solutions. Restorative justice is a system of criminal justice that focuses on rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community at large. The “ Restorative Justice Conference: Justice that Heals ” was hosted...
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Serving Your Community: Pivoting a Social Enterprise to Meet Community Needs (aspeninstitute.org)
How can you tackle recidivism and serve your community at the same time? Civil Society Fellow Matthew Fieldman and the team at EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute is leading the way. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, EDWINS is ensuring their work bettering the futures of previously incarcerated individuals would not end due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but instead pivoted their model to meet the needs of their community. We spoke with Matt about the EDWINS model, what it took to pivot, and...
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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Spotlight on Restorative Justice (dailygood.org)
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...
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How Can America Reduce Mass Incarceration? [npr.org]
Julian Adler, co-author of Start Here, and Judge Victoria Pratt discuss alternatives to jail, including community service, social services and even personal essays. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Judge Victoria Pratt is known for having done her best to avoid sending people to jail by offering alternatives such as community service, social services and even writing a personal essay. She served as chief judge of Newark's municipal court and presided over...
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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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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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Incarceration Rates: A Key Measure of Health in America (rwjf.org)
Mass incarceration is a pervasive problem that undermines health and health equity for individuals, families and communities. That’s why we have included it in the 35 measures RWJF is using to track progress toward becoming a country that values and promotes health everywhere, for everyone. As coronavirus sweeps our nation it has brought deep-seated health inequities, including those linked to incarceration, to the forefront. Overcrowding and poor sanitation are putting prisoners at risk now...
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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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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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Surviving all the way to college: Pathways out of one of America’s most crime ridden cities [Journal of Interpersonal Violence]
photo: Daniel Case/ CC "The purpose of this study is to better understand the factors and processes related to resilience of youth who are among the most at risk for academic failure and involvement in the criminal justice system. To address the research questions about resilience and risk, in-depth interviews were conducted with a racially and ethnically diverse sample ( N = 146) from one of the “most dangerous” cities in America. To obtain an objective assessment of risk, crime data were...
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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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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 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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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...
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Violent Crime: A Conversation [themarshallproject.org]
Over the last two years, there has been a great deal of arguing about the prevalence of violent crime in America and how the national crime rate is changing. The president and attorney general say it’s soaring. Criminal justice reformers aren’t so certain. A Who’s Who of crime researchers and experts gathered to tackle the question at the Smart on Crime Innovations conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City last month. The panelists were Thomas Abt of Harvard’s...
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What’s Propelling Second-Chance Legislation Across America? [PSMag.com]
Margaret Love is a big believer in second chances. Since leaving her post as a pardon attorney for the Department of Justice, where she worked from 1990 to 1997, Love has been the executive director at the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, a non-profit with a focus on sentencing reform. (She also runs her own private practice .) At CCRC, Love has turned her attention to raising awareness around state-level forms of relief. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she says, explaining the need...
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Re: 7.25+
HI Zachary- thank you for the post and sharing the video. SO POWERFUL and hopeful. We need to change the systems that incarcerate rather than, as you say address what happened to them (and moving upstream, be asking kids this BEFORE they get into the system. (Note, this is the third time today that someone shared this video!)
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Re: 7.25+
Zachary, Thank you for sharing your work, this numbers you offer are critical for understanding the connection. You were on target in sharing the powerful video that we can pass along.
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Re: 7.25+
Thank you Zachary, Yes, I too saw this video posted on facebook last week. As a substitute teacher (nowhere near retired), I see my ability to use trauma informed practices is directly enhanced by my learning to address White Supremacy Culture. I'm happy my state education association recently publicly named that. I'm learning that all the many people who've been directly impacted by incarceration have so many practical solutions! Those of us nearer the decision-making (traditionally-- with...
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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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"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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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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Govenor Newsom Signs Brady's Bills into Law (ca.bradyunited.org)
We just received word that Governor Newsom signed microstamping bill, AB 2847! We'd like to thank Assembly Members Chiu & Gabriel, and coauthoring Assembly Members Bauer-Kahan, Gipson, Gloria, Muratsuchi, M. Stone, Ting, and Wicks. We'd also like to thank coauthoring Senators Jackson & Wiener, and of course, Governor Newsom. Congratulations to the thousands of Brady supporters who helped steward this lifesaving bill through the state legislature and onto the governor's desk. Your...
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Re: FREE Event: Trauma-Informed Correctional Design with Boston Architectural College!
I had trouble accessing the registration. Is there a problem with the link? Thanks! Pam Howard Administrator Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities/Early Intervention Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services P.O. Box 311 Norristown, PA 19404-0311 610-278-3625 phoward@montcopa.org<mailto:phoward@montcopa.org> www.montcopa.org < http://www.montcopa.org/ > [cid:image003.jpg@01D3F9C4.438BFBB0] Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message, including any attachments,...