Our friends over at PrisonerAssistant.com have recently launched a new venture called the Reentry Reform Roundtable. This website is designed to be the go-to forum for prison reform advocates the world over. Here users can create profiles for themselves and their organizations, share the work they’re engaging in (via blogs and forums), and connect with
Oklahoma has a women problem, but not the kind of problem one may contemplate. The problem is more women in Oklahoma are incarcerated than any other state in the country. In fact, the number of women incarcerated in Oklahoma is almost double the national average. For a state that as an overflowing correctional system, 2,700 women is quite an exorbitant figure, especially when 67% of these Oklahoma women are locked-up for nonviolent crimes. Only about 16% of these women committed violent crimes. Regardless of the offenses for which Oklahoma women are spending time in prison, these dire statistics are costing the state $26,000,000 a year.
Oklahoma also has a children problem. Three percent of Oklahoma children have at least one parent incarcerated. The problem with that is children with at least one parent in prison are five times more likely to be arrested as a juvenile and end up in prison as an adult.
Even though most of Oklahoma’s incarcerated women are serving excessive sentences for non-violet crimes, they are branded into one group of degenerates by society. Local community members are ignorant about the circumstances that led up to these women ending up in prison and believe they should be locked away from the rest of civilization. Regarded as a different species. Isolate them. They did the crime, so we don’t care about them. The attitude of local Oklahomans concerning the reason for the high rate of female incarceration is: “Oklahoma has mean women.”
The goal is to get people to view them as real people with feelings. They want to see their families.
By Joseph Dole
Many are aware of the dire fiscal state that Illinois currently finds itself in. One of the main causes of this has been years of passing laws without any consideration of the financial burdens of their enactment, and one of the most egregious examples concerns Illinois’ Truth-in-Sentencing law.
Truth-in-Sentencing in Illinois requires that nearly all violent offenders serve 85 to 100 percent of their criminal sentences. Prior to the current Truth-in-Sentencing law’s 1998 enactment, offenders served, on average, 44 percent of their sentences. For more than a decade Illinois resisted enacting a Truth-in-Sentencing law when other states rushed to do so. Instead, Illinois increased sentencing ranges for violent crimes. The State didn’t pass its Truth-in-Sentencing law until after the federal government monetarily incentivized Truth-in-Sentencing legislation. Although this legislation was enacted in Illinois over a decade-and-a-half ago, not a single comprehensive cost/benefit analysis has been undertaken to determine what monetary effect enactment has had on the State.
Other states that enacted Truth-in-Sentencing legislation adjusted for it by reducing sentences so the average imposed sentence was about half of what it was before enactment. That way prisoners ended up serving around the same amount of time in prison and didn’t cost the state additional money. Illinois, on the other hand, failed to make such an adjustment. Instead, Illinois judges actually increased average sentences imposed or continued issuing similar criminal sentences, which resulted in longer terms of incarceration due to the newly mandated Truth-in-Sentencing good conduct time provisions. With the sentencing ranges having already been increased, Illinois taxpayers have continued to be hit twice as hard: once for the existing sentencing scheme and effectively again due to the Truth-in-Sentencing legislation.
AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER, ATTORNEY, AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND MASS INCARCERATION THOUGHT LEADER MATTHEW PILLISCHER, ESQUIRE TALKS TO IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD PHILADELPHIA, PA (USA) – 24 January 2014 – Through his award-winning, riveting, and provocative film documentary, “Broken On All Sides: Race, Mass Incarceration & New Visions for Criminal Justice in the United States,” Matthew Pillischer, Esquire has become
By Dianne Frazee Walker
If you dare to watch the video featured in an online kit made for child advocacy groups and prison programs for children of incarcerated parents, be prepared with a box of Kleenex handy.
Sesame Street producers have done an extraordinary job of animating a puppet character that perfectly portrays a dejected child who misses his dad because he is in prison.
Alex is a Muppet with a face shaped like a football, who wears a grey hoodie and has spiked blue hair. His eyes are drooped in sadness. “My dad is locked up in jail,” Alex mutters in disgrace. “I miss him so much,” he snuffles with his head to his chin. Alex’s human teacher, Sophie, consoles Alex by telling him she understands because her father was in prison, too, when she was little.
The chances are pretty good there would be at least one person who can relate to having a parent in prison because one in every 18 children have a parent incarcerated.
A retired school teacher explained she realized this social disaster is a sign of the times when she overheard her students comparing what color jumpsuits their daddies wore in prison.
Leave it to the long-running children’s television series Sesame Street to initiate a workshop for children with incarcerated parents. “Little Children, Big Challenges” is an online tool kit intended to help kids with a parent in prison find support and comfort. The videos provide families with strategies and tips for talking to their children about their struggles with having a parent in prison.
As its website attests, the Lionheart Foundation “provides education, rehabilitation and reentry support to incarcerated men and women in prisons and jails throughout the United States.” Their prison-based initiatives are one of the cornerstones of this foundation, but Lionheart also supports youth-at-risk programming as well as programming for teen parents. The hub of the program for prisoners is based upon the book The Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom and is the basis for many teaching and mentoring initiatives for in-prison populations. Image courtesy linkedin.com
Reduce Recidivism and Change Lives for the Better
The Lionheart Foundation is not the only prison education initiative in the country. However, it is unusual because it is not focused merely on one region as many state-based initiatives are and because it is so closely connected to a book–a manual for a better life as some have dubbed it. According to the foundation, hundreds of prison teachers, volunteers, and chaplains rely on Houses of Healing to help inmates focus on positive change and to embrace new opportunities like education. The book is at the heart of the foundation’s National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners and there are now more than 130,000 copies in circulation.
What Does the Lionheart Foundation Do?
Though the foundation greatly promotes its initiatives designed for “emotional intelligence,” it also conducts education workshops for the public to better inform people about the needs of prisoners and the need for communities to help support their reentry and rehabilitation. All of its programming is designed for at-risk populations like prison populations, juvenile delinquent centers, and teen parents in at-risk neighborhoods. Along with promoting the values of justice, excellence, competence, and generosity, the Lionheart Foundation is also involved with a major research project supported by The National Institutes for Health.
By Dan Froomkin
There’s a growing national consensus that, as Attorney General Eric Holder stated in August, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.”
When Holder proceeded to order federal prosecutors to stop triggering mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent drug offenders, that was big news. But where were the follow-up stories?
It’s a familiar cycle. Despite the heavy toll that mass incarceration exacts every day and in countless ways on many American communities, families and of course the incarcerated themselves, the topic attracts remarkably little consistent coverage in the mainstream media.
“Traditionally, the coverage of this has been crisis driven,” says Ted Gest, the founder of Criminal Justice Journalists, who also oversees a daily news digest for The Crime Report news service.
Recently, a hunger strike in California and other protests called renewed attention to solitary confinement as a human rights issue. And questions about oversight were briefly raised after Baltimore jail guards were busted in April for allegedly helping a charismatic gang leader, who impregnated four of them, run his drug and money-laundering operations.
David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, says he’s seen only a modest increase in news coverage of criminal justice reform despite his sense that the nation is starting to turn the corner on mass incarceration. “I’ve been doing this work since 1990 and there’s been no time that things have looked this hopeful for significant reform in the criminal justice system,” he says.
The aim of California’s Prison Education Project (PEP) is to reduce recidivism and encourage partnerships between the state’s colleges and prisons. Currently, PEP involves six prisons and about 2,000 prison inmates–both men and women. The program is delivered via 2,000 volunteers from regional colleges and community colleges. This volunteer-based outreach program is then complemented by the more formal Reintegration Academy that is a multi-part program that sees approved inmates enrolled in community college so they may attend courses upon their release. This multi-faceted project is set to expand; its goals are to reduce California’s rate of recidivism by at least 1% and save the state thousands of dollars in costs associated with the care and housing of prisoners. Image courtesy www.prisoneducationproject.org
The Prisons
Currently PEP is offered to inmates at the “California Institution for Men, the California Institution for Women, the California Rehabilitation Center, the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, and the Old Folsom Men & Women’s facilities.” The program asserts that there are now 300 volunteers associated with the project. Their role is to “expand” the educational opportunities available for prisons. In that light, this program is designed to complement other prison-based initiatives such as the Reintegration Academy which is also featured on the PEP website.
By Dianne Frazee-Walker
Most people can remember when Christmas meant getting up at dawn and running to the Christmas tree in our pajamas excited to see what was under the tree and in the stockings hanging on the mantel.
For children who have parents who are incarcerated, Christmas is not filled with visions of lollipops dancing in their heads; in fact, December 25th is just another day without their parents and can be even more depressing than any other day of the yeImage courtesy www.oklahomawomenscoalition.org ar.
Children who are missing a parent because they are spending time in prison are not only left to deal with loneliness they feel from having an absent parent, but also face ridicule and stereotyping. Many of these lost children are told they are going to turn out just like their parent that is incarcerated.
New Hope, a program created about 20 years ago by the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma is taking a more positive approach for addressing the needs of children who have at least one parent in prison. Instead of reminding children they have no chance of turning out to be productive citizens, they are encouraged to pursue an education. The children are led down a different path than their parents followed.
On Dec. 21, New Hope hosted a Christmas party at Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa. Children whose holidays would have been filled with sadness gathered around a table arranged with decorative trimmings and assembled their own wreaths.
The church hall was filled with fun, playfulness, and laughter. Toys, gifts, and food were plentiful. The kids were entertained by making their own reindeer and treats.
Jack Powers is an inmate in the federal Bureau of Prisons convicted of bank robbery and escaping from prison. He spent more than a decade in extreme isolation at the ADX where he amputated his fingers, earlobes, a testicle and his scrotum. He has tried several times to commit suicide. “The world outside is like another planet,” he wrote from ADX. “I feel like I am trapped within a disease.” Powers is a plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against the federal government regarding its use of longterm solitary confinement for the mentally ill. – S.G.
After 12 long, hard years at the ADX Control Unit Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado, I’m finally out and among the living. Oh, I’m not on the streets. I’m here among the general population of a federal penitentiary in the dry and dusty desert of Tucson, Arizona.
For a guy who has lived alone in a cement box for more than a decade, the transfer here was really something. First there was a bus and then air-service called “Con-Air” – big passenger jets flown around the U.S. by the Marshalls Service. I had the opportunity to speak with other prisoners and see a couple of cities both from land and air. It was a trip for me for sure.
When we pulled up at the pen, I was all prepared to go straight to the segregation where, once again, I’d be put into solitary confinement. Instead, a number of prison officials met me inside the door and told me that I’d be going directly into the population – into the best unit, in fact, where I’d have single cell. I was so shocked by this turn-around that I began to shed tears.
We have profiled every prison within the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Learn about each prison’s location, security level, educational and recreational offerings, and much more.
Elizabeth Franklin-Best P.C.
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