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Scholarship Winner Not Afraid To Try Anything

May 3, 2013 No Comments

On a nippy spring morning in April, I arrived at Trinidad State Junior College in Alamosa, Colorado, a little shy of 8:00 am. The cosmetology students were anxiously awaiting my arrival. The purpose of my visit was to demonstrate Tammy Taylor’s famous 12-step process for doing a full set of acrylic nails in one hour

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A Second Chance at Curt's Cafe

May 2, 2013 No Comments

By Dianne Frazee-Walker

Susan Trieschmann, a northwest Chicago café owner took a big leap of faith when she renovated her for-profit business into a non-profit reentry program for young adult ex-offenders. The second chance café is an experimental restorative justice restaurant. Initially the neighbors were skeptical about offenders pouring their morning coffee.  But it only took the community three weeks to trust the stigmatized employees to serve them the blue plate specials. Today you will find customers on Central Street lined up at the counter during the noon hour waiting for lunch to be served by the transformed ex-offenders.  Curt’s Cafe / Photo courtesy ecowren.net

Curt’s Café is a solo act in a city that only provides reentry programs for juvenile offenders. Chicago has hundreds of coffee shops, but only one restorative justice café that gives ex-offenders a second chance. The innovative reentry program requires the employees to form a restorative circle at the end of each eight hour shift to check on each other’s personal development and work skill progress.

Trieschmann’s idea for her restorative restaurant originated from a passion to help offenders reenter the workforce with employable skills. She emotionally explains that she doesn’t think it is fair how difficult it is for ex-offenders to become productive citizens when they re-enter the working world with a criminal record lingering in their past.

When the employees first started working at the café they barely knew how to make a cup of coffee and had difficulty making it to work on time. The ex-offenders have come a long way since they first began working at the café. They had many challenges to overcome, but persistence has paid off.

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Non-Violent Communication Course Helps Chaffee County Detention Center Inmates

May 1, 2013 No Comments

By Dianne Frazee-Walker

In 2004, I was falsely accused of a crime. I did not foresee how this unfortunate situation was going to morph into changing many lives in a positive way. In 2006, I founded Full Circle Restorative Justice in Chaffee County Colorado, which is a 501 c 3 non-profit   organization committed to facilitating victims and offenders to reconcile crimes and minimize involvement  with the legal system. The goal of the process is to lower the recidivism rate.   Image courtesy cartertoons.com

 I was introduced to the Non-Violent Communication founded by Marshall B. Rosenberg Ph. D. in 2007.  Patty La Taille, who is the current Executive Director of Full Circle Restorative Justice, and I initiated a bi-monthly Non-Violent Communication study group. We used Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, A Language of Life 2nd edition and the companion workbook as our guide. We appropriately named our group meeting Compassionate Listening Study Group.  I recognized the value of this innovative approach to mediation and communication skills and had a vision of incorporating it into the justice system.

Patty La Taille has taken Non-Violent Communication to a higher level in Chaffee County. She has attended two of Marshall Rosenberg’s (NVC) intensive workshops, and brought her newly acquired skills back to Salida, Colorado. La Taille facilitates NVC study groups at the Salida Middle School and Chaffee County Detention center. She, along with board member Karen, Latvala is educating students about new ways to resolve conflict with their peers.

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Speaker Gives Hope To Oregon Inmates

Apr 26, 2013 No Comments
By Cara Pallone
  
Mitchell S. Jackson / KOBBI R. BLAIR / Statesman JournalMitchell S. Jackson has crossed the yard at Santiam Correctional Institution many times, but never as a free man until Friday.
 

When he did so last week, the 37-year-old was nervous and excited. Just the day before, his mother had texted him this message: “Every decision you’ve made has brought you to this moment.”

Jackson has not been proud of some of those decisions.

But when he walked into the recreation room at the minimum-security prison in Salem and saw that every seat in the house was occupied by a body in a blue “Oregon Department of Corrections INMATE” shirt, he swelled with pride.

The prisoners in the room did not have to be there to listen to him speak. Jackson knew that from experience.

“It’s hard to describe a moment like this,” he said to his audience, “but it has to be one of the most proud moments of my life.”

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What Happened To Prison Education Programs?

Apr 25, 2013 No Comments

Analysis: Marlene Martin THE 1960s were turbulent years; social change was in the air. Jim Crow  segregation was dismantled, and the civil rights movement brought  questions of racial and social justice into every household–and also  into every prison. As people sought to change society on the outside, so did prisoners on the inside. The Attica

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Support for Inmate Education

Apr 25, 2013 No Comments

By Torrey Sims

Photo courtesy correctionalnews.comPercy Pitzer, along with wife Jeanine, founded the Creative Corrections Education Foundation. Often the public looks at correctional facilities as a final stop for punishment for those convicted of crimes, but now many are realizing that correctional facilities can be better utilized as a place for rehabilitation and learning.

There have been many programs implemented by different states as a way to ensure the success of inmates while they are behind bars in order to give them the skills they need to be a valued member of society upon release. In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback is an advocate for the state’s Mentoring4Success program, part of the nonprofit Brothers in Blue reentry program at the state’s Lansing Correctional Facility.

“Our goal is to reduce the rate of inmates returning to prisons,” Brownback said in a statement. “The men and women involved with the Brothers of Blue reentry program at Lansing are great examples of the tremendous impact a mentor can have on the life of an inmate. They are deeply involved with their mentees who are making great progress as they prepare for their release. We need more like them.”

Mentoring4Success was launched in July 2011 as a way to bring education and support to the state’s incarcerated men and women. Currently, the program has more than 1,150 mentors across the state, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections. Inmates become eligible for the program when they have six to 12 remaining months left on their prison sentences. The hope, according to a statement by Kansas Corrections Secretary Ray Roberts, is to be able to have a mentor for every inmate in Kansas.

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Blogging Poetry from Behind Bars

Apr 23, 2013 No Comments

By Jean Trounstine

Prisoners have long written poetry from inside the prison walls. For incarcerated men and women—as for all who have the urge to write poetry—Robert Frost’s words ring true: the poem “begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Poetry is the need to express what’s locked up inside, and for the prisoner, the bars are real.  Photo courtesy of cain.ulst.ac.uk

Sending a poem into the blogosphere is, however, a relatively new way for prisoners to find their voice. Boston University’s Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, says in an interview on Big Think that prisoners serving a life sentence often write the best poetry since they have a lot of time to reflect and read. While many poems by prisoners wouldn’t make it past your high school English teacher, some talented jailed New England poets are emerging online. 

The Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild publishes poetry once a month from those first published in its Mass Dissent magazine. The power of poetry is what helped Douglas Weed, incarcerated at MCI Norfolk, to dig deep into his crime and his subsequent remorse is not unlike Raskolnikov’s soul searching in Crime and Punishment. Here is Weed’s Ode to a Prison Prophet from October 2012:

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Innovative Prison Program Teaches Man and Dog

Apr 16, 2013 No Comments

By Dianne Frazee-Walker

At Wakulla Correctional Institute in Crawfordville, North Florida, inmates and man’s best friend both get a second chance. Inmates locked up for various serious offenses are transformed by training canines that they have something in common with. Both inmates and dogs had behavior problems that removed them from society. The dogs were facing euthanization for not conforming to the rules. The inmates were facing time behind bars for breaking the law. Both inmates and dogs had a future that looked bleak.  

Susan Yelton and Cathy Sherman, members of Citizens for Humane Animal Treatment, Crawfordville, NF, are responsible for initiating an innovative dog training program at Wakulla Correctional Institute in Crawfordville, Florida. Their idea originated from a program in Texas, Paws for Prison. 

When Yelton and Sherman decided to ascertain whether a dog training program would work in North Florida, their first challenge was convincing Russell Hosford, warden for Wakulla Correctional Institution that it was a good idea to bring misbehaved mutts from the humane society to live with inmates for two months. Hosford’s initial reaction was, “You have to be kidding me; do you mean dogs will be living in the prison barracks with the inmates?”

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Finding Meaning as an Inmate Instructor

Apr 15, 2013 No Comments

By Andrew Chen

As an inmate tutor at a federal prison, I get one of three responses when I answer another inmate’s inquiry as to where I work.  In order of increasing frequency these are: first, a shrug and a nod — a somewhat reluctant acknowledgement that being a tutor is probably a commendable thing to be doing; second, a “Why would you want to do that?  I would not have the patience to attempt to teach a bunch of half-wits who don’t want to learn anyway”; or, third, by far the most common response, “For real?  I really need some help with my math and essay writing.” 

So why did I choose to become an inmate tutor, and was it a good decision?   The answer is one that requires some context.  It took me three years to move through the U.S. judicial system from arrest to arrival at my designated federal prison facility; three years of being confined to a succession of wholly indoor, steel and concrete cell blocks with perhaps a hundred other anxious federal inmates and a couple of televisions for company; three years during which there was no opportunity to do any meaningful work, or to participate in any educational or vocational courses.

It’s fair to say that I’m not a typical inmate.  I’m a workaholic with two doctorate degrees, and an almost compulsive drive to always be doing something meaningful.  Watching TV and playing cards all day really didn’t cut the mustard for me.  Thankfully, I was able to find enough suitable books through the prison book carts and from friends outside, to study literature and history, two subjects I had never really had the time for since leaving school.  Still, it felt like a rather self-absorbed pursuit, and I yearned to do something that would allow me to make more meaningful contributions to my newfound community, the federal prison community.

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