Community plays a role in helping ex-prisoners

Minnesota’s Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) program takes a restorative, rehabilitative approach to sex offender re-entry and has lowered the risk of recidivism by 88%. The initiative provides participants with a group of volunteers that help them with emotional support, job finding, and challenge and shift the attitudes and behaviors that led to the committed crime. The rise of the #metoo movement has given way to the complexity of sexual assault, restorative justice, and rehabilitation – making programs like CoSA both more necessary and challenging to sustain.

Connecticut is attempting to reduce prison recidivism by changing parole practices. Changes to the system are allowing parole officers to foster relationships with parolees and counsel them as people, not as cases.

For first-time youth criminal offenders, the traditional American jury falls short in encouraging behavioral change and may even set the juvenile on a course for repeated crimes. Washington, DC’s Youth Court is a jury that tries juveniles for minor non-violent offenses and offers peer pressure to prompt positive behavioral change. The DC Youth Court is one of many in the United States that reduces crime and future court costs.

The organization Southerners on New Ground is helping reform the criminal justice system in the south. Activists won a small victory in Atlanta, where the mayor and city council approved a resolution that replaced cash bonds with signature bonds for misdemeanor offenses. They also raised money to help people pay their cash bails as part of a larger event called the National Bail Out collective, which bailed out 147 Black women in 26 cities this year.

For Redina, and others suffering from addiction, it is hard to break the cycle. 'Women Working for a Change' is a program that tries to change addicts' thinking in order to prevent a relapse.

In the Inside-Out Exchange program half of the students are college students, and the other half are prison inmates. The program has “expanded to about 150 correctional institutions across the globe” but the biggest takeaway is the effect it has on people. Students were “ engaged in a way they never had been in the classroom. For the inmates, suddenly their opinions mattered.”

Two, separate coalitions in Philadelphia, whose aim is to lower recidivism rates, joined into one. Aviva Tevah, the director of the coalition, will have to merge the vision and goals of the 80 plus members. “We set new targets, a new organizational structure and focused on what it would look like to build the infrastructure for deeper collaboration in the future.”

In the United States, the incarcerated feel like they have no voices and their mistakes that led them to jail go unacknowledged. A documentary film spotlights the IF Project, a writing program that encourages female inmates and recently released felons to write down what they would have done to change the path they went on. With police and teachers as mentors, the convicted have support transitioning into society and can reflect on what they can do to change their lives for the better.

In a conservative upstate town in New York, an early advocate of what is now known as restorative justice pioneered the idea of finding alternatives to incarceration that address root causes of crimes and offer victims larger roles in the process. He did this by engaging different people across law enforcement, the community and social services. That built broad support, but the programs have struggled to maintain these innovations or make them permanent after the departure of the visionary founder.

Healing Justice brings exonerees, crime victims and family members from a variety of cases together to share stories, play games, connect and heal together while facing the traumas of wrongful convictions. Since 2015, Healing Justice has hosted 17 retreats, where exonerees and crime victims gather for three days to work through their traumas together.