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Prison Garden Program Goes to Roots of Offender Reformation

Physical, mental, and manual labor is good for your health in balanced circumstances. In Oakland, California, they are using physical work to provide job skills training to offenders and ex-offenders. By partnering with the San Quentin State Prison’s Insight Garden Program, the non-profit organization Planting Justice transforms prisoners’ lives through a connection to nature. The

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Department of Justice Finds Higher Recidivism Rates for State-Released Inmates

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has taken a new look at recidivism rates for inmates released from state correctional institutions; the new study found recidivism rates over longer periods of time are higher than previously thought. Its new analysis, “2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014),” essentially updates

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Not the worst, but not Norway: US prisons vs. other models

America is known for its overcrowded prisons and harsh penitentiary conditions, but how does it rank compared to some of the other prison systems around the world? America – the Supermax: How not to treat mentally ill patients One of the most notorious jails in America is the ADX. The Administrative Maximum Facility, aka the ADX Supermax in Colorado was

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Bureau of Prisons Seeks Software to Predict Post-Release Outcomes

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) hopes to find unrecognized patterns of adaptation and recidivism — which the agency terms “inmate reintegration into the community — by asking software developers to provide information about commercially available software capable of aggregating the various types of data the agency already collects. A request published by the agency

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Yoga and Meditation Improve Life Behind Bars and Beyond

Yoga and meditation have a host of benefits for prisoners. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that within five years of release, 76 percent of prisoners released in the U.S. re-offend. Breaking this cycle requires radical reforms in rehabilitation methods, and some surprising approaches are showing promising results —  downward dog and mantra chanting. Educational

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Youth Punished For Inability to Pay in Juvenile Justice System

Inability to pay for court-related costs, fees for mandated tests, fines, and other costs can mean youth will be denied bail and remain in juvenile detention. Lower-income and racial and ethnic minority youth are far more likely to face incarceration or probation because of an inability to pay debts imposed by the justice system, according

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Books Behind Bars Mean Better Outcomes

Prisoners who participate in educational programs have 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison compared to those who don’t.  Evidence is overwhelming, prisoners benefit in myriad ways when they have access to books and education. An increase in education of any kind is connected to reducing recidivism, as reported by the 2013 Rand Corporation

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Split Sentences to Cut Prison Numbers and Recidivism: Stanford Prof

Most jurisdictions struggle with how to relieve overcrowded prisons and jails, but at the same time avoid releasing inmates who are most likely to re-offend. After examining the experience of Los Angeles County coping with a California state policy that transferred many low-level felons from state prisons to county and city jails, Stanford University management

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