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
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.
Prisoners who copy “arguably inflammatory” or “incendiary” passages from the books they check out from a prison library or are allowed to purchase are not entitled to rely on the First Amendment to protect them from disciplinary punishment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held on August 2, 2012. In dismissing Wisconsin
In the last week, several intriguing articles and editorials have been published concerning the Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright and the fundamental Sixth Amendment right to counsel in criminal proceedings. The New York Times ran the story “The Right to Counsel: Badly Battered at 50,” and USA Today ran both the
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.
By Mike Brodheim and Alex Friedmann With seven facilities that house from 15,000 to 18,000 prisoners, Los Angeles County’s jail system is the nation’s largest – and, arguably, among the most dangerous in terms of staff-on-prisoner violence. The jail system, operated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), is facing an investigation by the
By Kelsey Davis
The learning experience is as life altering for the professors as it is for the pupils when the classrooms are set in prisons across central and northern Alabama.
Seeds for The Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project were planted in 2001 when Kyes Stevens, founder and director, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to begin the program. Photo courtesy family.auburn.edu
After Stevens received the grant, she began teaching poetry in a correctional facility, and quickly developed a passion for her incarcerated students.
“Just think to yourself, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?” said Stevens. “Would you want to be measured by that for all of eternity? That’s not the sum total of who you are, it isn’t for all of these people.
“They’re mothers, they’re fathers, they’re brothers, they’re sisters. They like Christmas, they want to be at their kids’ birthdays, to go to their mother’s funeral, to be around their family. They want the same things we want. They’re not different.”
The New York Times recently published an editorial piece in their Sunday Review entitled “Unfair Punishments: Denying ex-offenders food stamps and welfare encourages dangerous behavior like prostitution” (Sunday, March 17, 2013). The editorial discussed the link between restricting food stamps and welfare from felons and their engaging in high-risk behaviors like prostitution in an attempt
By Dianne Frazee-Walker Sherriff Joe Arpaio is a controversial public figure known for his “tough on crime” policy. Many folks are not fond of Sheriff Joe, but despite that every year he is reelected by the people of Maricopa County in Phoenix, Arizona. The reason for Apraio’s unpopular status with a portion of the population
Prison can be a dangerous place, even in the best of circumstances. For inmates convicted of sex offenses, an ever-growing population within the Federal Bureau of Prisons, unique challenges and pitfalls exist beyond those experienced by the prison population as a whole. Introduction: Convict Stratification Prison is a society unto itself. Inside the walls, as