There are no solutions. Only tradeoffs,
- Thomas Sowell |
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Community
Who Will Fix Our Broken System?
Do you find it difficult to know where you can improve our broken criminal justice system? Fortunately there are many ways to get involved to improve reentry success and greatly reduce recidivism.
Can you teach a class? Perhaps you could organize a book drive to send books to prisoners? Maybe you could lend some time to building the Fair Shake resource directory which is seen and used in offline formats in prisons all around the country? We need to think about the kind of citizens we are, and which we wish to have as neighbors in our communities and deeply consider what our prison system is doing to promote community building and active citizenship. (Answer: “nothing”.)
The time for hoping that an elected, appointed or corporate hero will swoop in and fix the system is over. We’ve heard – for more than 40 years – about the “evidence-based” programs, plans, job training, algorithms and behavioral interventions that the government, philanthropists and even non-profits have insisted is what we need. What we never hear about is the real evidence: that their ‘programs’ and ‘interventions’ have a 17% success rate! That’s right “an estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.” according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It’s not that nothing works, it’s that what they are doing doesn’t work. The same way that what is being done in our nation’s schools doesn’t work.
The ‘Corrections’ system is not working for anyone. When will we stop this madness? Who benefits? Not just the private prisons, that’s for sure. We can do better than this, but we need to ask hard, honest questions. We need ‘all hands on deck’ to repurpose this ‘old ship’.
Fair Shake is my answer. What is yours? Can we merge our answers together? I’d love to hear from you!
Reaching Out | Reaching In
Community Building From Inside.
Just because our citizens are out of our sight does not mean they are disconnected. Some ambitious people find ways to stay quite connected to us to provide a glimpse of the prisons and the preparation for release from them that we are all responsible for.
Check out the following pages to learn more about our returning citizens:
Learn more about our Criminal Justice System
Consider as many dimensions of the system as you can:
Center for NuLeadership: Transforming the practice of public safety, justice and accountability from criminal to human.
https://www.nuleadership.org/human-justice/
PEW report Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect
Some pages we’ve created: Media,Facts,Statistics and Links
Things you can do where you are, right now:
Support the Ban The Box movement!
NELP staff introduced the Fair Chance – Ban the Box toolkit to help advocates launch their own fair chance, “ban the box” campaigns locally. Check out the new, comprehensive toolkit at https://www.nelp.org/publication/the-fair-chance-ban-the-box-toolkit/.
To find out more visit our Ban the Box page!
Heroic Imagination Project (http://heroicimagination.org/)
The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) provides knowledge, tools, strategies, and exercises to individuals and groups to help them to overcome the social and psychological forces which can keep them from taking effective action at crucial moments in their lives.
Build Community Assets!
The Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD)
Understanding Asset-Based Community Development (4 pg. booklet)
ABCD its affiliated faculty have created a library of community building workbooks, published scholarly articles, books, and chapters oriented to an array of audiences. Community assets are key building blocks in sustainable urban and rural community revitalization efforts. These community assets include:
- The skills of local residents
- The power of local associations
- The local history and culture of a neighborhood
- Public, private and non-profit resources
- Physical space and infrastructure
- Economic resources and local potential
https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/Pages/default.aspx
https://www.abundantcommunity.com/
We need our neighbors and a community to be healthy, produce jobs, protect the land and care for the elderly and those on the margin.
Citizen Schools
http://www.citizenschools.org/
There is a critical gap in education. But it isn’t an “achievement gap” as the media often describes it. It’s an opportunity gap. We can close this gap, and help these three million students discover and achieve their dreams, by connecting students who want to learn and adults who have something to teach…families with big dreams and volunteers with big hearts…visionary school leaders and a non-profit with a proven model…citizens and schools.
Here’s more great stuff from Dr. Philip Zimbardo of the Lucifer Effect and the Stanford Prison Experiment
Prisoner Visitation and Support
(http://www.prisonervisitation.org/)
Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS) is the only organization authorized by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Defense to visit any prisoner in the Federal and Military prison systems. The primary focus is on seeing those prisoners with an acute need for human contact — those prisoners without regular visits, those serving long sentences who are far from home, those in solitary confinement and on death row, and those who are frequently transferred from prison to prison.
In addition to making monthly visits, our visitors also have the opportunity to connect with one another through their correspondence with our national office, meeting with other visitors in their geographical area, as well as participating in our annual training conferences. Through this interaction, visitors support one another, share experiences, and offer guidance.
Ubuntu philosophy
Ubuntu: a southern African (sub-Saharan) philosophy which means “I am who I am because of who we all are.” We learned how to be a person through others…everyone is our teacher and has shaped who we are today.
Desmond Tutu on Ubuntu: “There is no such thing as a solitary individual. A person is a person through other persons.”
An Ubuntu Lesson:
There was an anthropologist who had been studying the habits and culture of a remote African tribe.
He had been working in the village for quite some time and the day before he was to return home, he put together a gift basket filled with delicious fruits from around the region and wrapped it in a ribbon. He placed the basket under a tree and then he gathered up the children in the village.
The man drew a line in the dirt, looked at the children, and said, “When I tell you to start, run to the tree and whoever gets there first will win the basket of the fruit.”
When he told them to run, they all took each other’s hands and ran together to the tree. Then they sat together around the basket and enjoyed their treat as a group.
The anthropologist was shocked. He asked “Why did you all go together when one of you could have won all the fruits for yourself?”
A young girl looked up at him and said, “How can one of us be happy if the others are sad?”
Desmond Tutu again (in a different video): “Africans have a thing called ubuntu. We believe that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I dehumanize you, I dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. Therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in community, in belonging.”