Red Hook community court is a success: study

“Two million people with mental illness are booked into jails every year.” Mental health courts, would take into accounts a person’s illness, rather than solely focusing on the crime.

U.S. courts are offering war veterans who face jail time the choice of rehabilitation. This helps them adjust to civilian life and reduces repeat offences.

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.

Kenya's overcrowded and poorly maintained prisons offer some educational and rehabilitative programs to inmates, but the nuns of the Dimesse congregation provide something else to try to transform the lives of those who committed crimes: religious instruction, with a side helping of basic humanitarian supplies. Along with food, underwear, and sanitary pads, the nuns use regular visits to men's and women's prisons to hand out bibles and give faith-based instruction aimed at reintegrating shunned citizens once they return to their communities.

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.

The Ohio Reformatory for Women is a prison that offers inmates a chance to enroll in Tapestry, an inpatient drug treatment program that tries to delve into the deeper causes women turn to drugs. It also believes in connecting women who are addicts with one another because “on the outside there’s not enough support.” The 18 month program is “about healing mind, body and spirit.”

While still a relatively new field, restorative justice is providing a way for some sexual assault survivors, and perpetrators, to make amends. Restorative justice is an approach to dealing with crime that involves the person that committed the offense to admit his or her actions and ask for forgiveness, then go through a set of actions to repair the crime, such as community service. Some victims and offenders are finding this a much more productive process than going through the criminal justice system. A peer-reviewed study “reported high rates of satisfaction with the process."

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.”

Activists, and lawmakers have been proposing ideas for prisoner reentry, or supporting former prisoners by finding work, housing, and healthcare, in order to reduce the trend of prisoners being released, committing another crime, and returning to prison. Philadelphia, which has a high recidivism rate, is one of the cities that is already implementing solutions.

An in-depth study of Texas youth crime records helped them find a path forward on juvenile criminal justice reform, but they still struggle with limited resources and a culture stuck on incarceration.