Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide

In These Prisons, Former Offenders Find Healing in Theatre Arts

Posted on by robbie

Omar Williams is an actor — a deadly one, he jokes. Having spent 21 years in prison for kidnapping and attempted murder, the Fishkill Correctional Facility inmate says he’s been acting his whole life to get what he wants.
“I know exactly how to play you,” he tells me from one of the counseling offices at the prison, which is located about 60 miles north of New York City. “I could tell you anything to bullshit you, to rob you, to kill you. I’ve been acting my whole life.”
Minutes later, Williams — known as “Sweets” to his fellow inmates — stands in a classroom and recites lines to the 19th-century French play Cyrano de Bergerac.
In the scene, de Bergerac joins his friend Le Bret — played by Williams — among sleeping soldiers and talks about how he just cheated death, again. The director, Charlie Scatamacchia, stops the scene halfway through to give Williams a basic lesson in being a thespian: You gotta emote.
“You’re just reading the words,” Scatamacchia tells him. “Actually say what they’re saying.”
As the scene starts up again, Williams is animated and expressive; his whole body is in movement. It’s not exactly a Tony Award-winning performance, but Scatamacchia approves. He nods emphatically. Williams is nailing it.
The rehearsal is part of a program run by volunteers with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a New York nonprofit that provides workshops and classes in a myriad of disciplines, from theater and music to creative writing, painting and dance, in men’s and women’s prisons around the state. The goal: to facilitate the social, emotional and cognitive skills needed to succeed on the outside.
Similar art-as-therapy programs are found only in a handful of states, despite the fact that they’ve been proven to be effective in reducing disciplinary infractions and improving anger management. One 2012 study found a nearly three-fold increase in inmates pursuing college-level academics after participating in RTA. Inmates have also shown enhanced speaking skills and self-esteem. But perhaps most impressive: RTA boasts a nearly 5 percent recidivism rate, meaning almost 95 percent of people who go through the program don’t reoffend after their release. That’s a genuinely remarkable percentage, as the national recidivism rate is close to 77 percent after five years.
Unfortunately, arts programs are also usually the first to be cast aside when a prison has a need for more beds or security. And not everyone is a fan, either: Critics, including corrections officers and victims, claim that “cold-blooded” killers and hardened criminals don’t deserve prison-arts programs. But the flip side, argue prison-reform advocates, is that, eventually, most will be released back into their communities, and so it’s to everyone’s benefit that they be rehabilitated in whatever way works before that happens.
“Do we want them to be better criminals when they get out, or to make better choices,” asks Craig Cullinane, director of programming for RTA. “These people who commit crimes, they should have the ability to go back to the world better than when they come in. Isn’t that what we want?”

OUT OF THE DARKNESS

Fishkill’s prison is a visual tease. The all-male medium-security prison boasts a prepossessing Gothic façade set against the bucolic backdrop of the Hudson Valley’s lush greenery. In early spring, a mist envelops the grounds, making it impossible to see that the prison is surrounded by over 20-foot-high chain-link fences wrapped by barbed wire.
Every day at 6 p.m. the men weave their way through the complex, walking down paved streets in between fences and buildings for their allotted nightly recreation time. Twice a week the dozen or so men that participate in RTA meet to go over lines, stagecraft and scene construction.
For those who have bad days — and there’s no denying there are a lot of those in prison — RTA is a welcome escape.
“The first thing we do is we go around and share one word about how we feel that day. I want them to share honestly, but in reality they’re dealing with a lot of crap,” says Scatamacchia, who has been directing plays with RTA for two years as a volunteer.
Williams had one of those bad days about two and half years ago. His twin children were stillborn. Out of rage and sorrow, he threatened to stab another inmate in the neck.
“I could’ve killed someone that day. Thank God for RTA at that moment,” he says. “They really helped me through it.”

Inmates at Fishkill Correctional Facility practice their performance as part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts.

The program is not intended to remake prisoners into professional actors. It’s not designed to help them find a career in the arts after release. Rather, says executive director Katherine Vockins, who founded RTA in 1996, it provides inmates the opportunity to tap into emotions and develop the soft skills that can help them deal with tough situations.
That’s not to say it’s easy.
“We are all looking for the ‘fix’ that will take people — often badly damaged by life experience — and put them through some magical program that washes, dries and folds, ending with neatly functioning citizens,” says Vockins, adding that progress is hard to measure in terms of before and after. “Deep, lasting change in cognition and behavior does not work that way.”
California was one of the first states to bring the arts to correctional facilities. In 1977, the Prison Arts Project, a program run by the nonprofit William James Association, was introduced at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. A few years later, its success led to a new administrative office, Arts-in-Corrections, within the California Department of Corrections.
The University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), launched in 1990, started out by teaching painting to less than 50 female inmates. Today the program is available at every prison in the state, and PCAP hosts one of the largest prisoner-art exhibitions in the world.
“For the incarcerated, the fact that somebody on the outside is reaching out to make connections and to see people beyond their prison numbers, in itself, has value,” says Elaine Chen, PCAP’s events and exhibits coordinator. “Even just to connect with people without a reason or a shield of social justice — just to do art together — brings a lot of therapeutic value.”
Research into Michigan’s program has shown that inmates who take part in the arts report an 86 percent higher quality of life while in prison than before they joined PCAP, and 93 percent self-reported learning new and better ways to express themselves, according to Chen.
“We can transform our lives, even in here,” says Ronald “Bach” Jarvis, a Fishkill inmate and RTA participant who has been serving 17 years for manslaughter. “[RTA] helped me find myself. It’s easy to get lost in here in the mist and darkness. But to find that light? That’s what this program is for me.”

A FUNDING FAILURE

Despite numerous studies showing that arts education works inside of prison — as well as outside, in terms of reoffending once released — programs continue to be cut from state budgets across the country, with more expected in the next few months.
California’s Arts-in-Corrections, for example, was almost eliminated in 2003 when the state was in the depths of a financial crisis. The program was saved by private investors, including members of California Lawyers for the Arts, who donated heavily to the program.
Other state-run arts-rehabilitation programs might not be so lucky. In the Trump Administration’s latest budget proposal, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which only makes up less than 1 percent of the national budget, would be cut from $150 million to $29 million. The NEA funds, in part, almost every prison-arts program in the country.
Though RTA does not receive direct funding from NEA grants, it does get money from the New York State Council on the Arts, which has received over $3.5 million from the NEA since 2013, according to the endowment’s archives. Money from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is also at risk.
“The shakiness of the economy has affected the NYS budget,” Vockins says. “[We have been told] that while the DOCCS budget is huge, the allocation to programs is quite small. Even vocational programs have been severely cut.”
Outside of funding, there is also a problem with capacity. RTA, for example, operates in five prisons throughout New York but relies almost wholly on volunteers.
“Until a year ago, we [had been] four people for 20 years,” says Cullinane, the director of programming. “It comes down to leadership and what [our state leaders] care about. We get very little from the state; we raise almost all our money ourselves.”

THE MEN BEHIND THE BARS

“Cyrano is an interesting choice of a play,” Scatamacchia says. He’s sipping coffee at the NoMad Library Bar in Manhattan, telling me about his background in theater and how he came to volunteer with RTA.
The task of teaching the art of acting to prisoners wasn’t something that he expected to be so fulfilling, he says, adding that, initially, he was afraid of what he would encounter. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised at how easygoing and intelligent the men were.
“It’s totally different from television,” he says of his experience.
The participants in the program get to decide which play to put on — for his first RTA gig, Scatamacchia directed them in The Odd Couple — and the choice of Cyrano de Bergerac set him aback. “It’s not like we teach theory or anything like that, but there is an interesting lesson to be taken from this play. You can’t look at [the character of] Cyrano and know everything about him,” he says.
The feeling of constantly being judged is something that many of the men at Fishkill experience. They say that those on “the outside” just don’t care to know about the lives of people on the inside. It’s easy to feel forgotten.
But RTA has helped them feel remembered and recognized, even in a small way.
“This makes me feel special,” says Jarvis. “Attention is positive. If I can strike people positively in this form, it makes me feel human again.”
October 8, 2018 3:20 p.m.: This story’s headline has been changed.

Make Music, Change Lives

Posted on by robbie

Since 2013, New York-based Building Beats has been cultivating the next generation of passionate leaders though digital music production. Founded by DJ and music enthusiast Phi Pham, the nonprofit introduces low-income students in grades 3 and up to digital music production using free cloud-based software.
The goal of Building Beats is two-fold. On one hand, it aims to fill the music education gap that affects many New York City schools. At the same time, the class doesn’t just teach young people hip-hop in a vacuum; Pham sees these workshops as an opportunity to inspire in students universal skills like problem-solving and collaboration.
“We want to empower young people with the technology they have available around them,” Pham says. “The 21st century is all about remixing different tools, different products together, and we think music is a good starting point to teach students those fundamentals.”
In the five years since it began, Building Beats has partnered with over 50 schools in the New York area to serve upward of 3,000 students. Watch the video above to see some of Building Beats’ young producers at work.

A Prescription for the Doctor-Patient Language Barrier

Posted on by robbie

Even if you’re a native English speaker who’s lived their whole life in the U.S., the healthcare system can be a nightmare.
Labyrinthine call systems are only the start. You’ve also got to find a doctor you trust; figure out the care you need; decipher what your insurance will cover; learn how and when to take (or refill) prescriptions; and remember to make follow-up appointments. If you’re a parent, you’ll need to repeat the exhausting process for each of your children. And if you’re employed full-time, you’ve also got to find the time to juggle your healthcare before, after or in between work hours.
Now imagine navigating that same confusing terrain without being able to speak fluent English.
For the millions of Americans who don’t, ConsejoSano (translation: “healthy advice”) is here to help. The Southern California-based telehealth startup offers the only health platform tailored to address the needs of multicultural, non-English-speaking patients.  
Most of the clients ConsejoSano works with are health plans, employers, government programs and at-risk providers who are united by a common cause: Motivating the people most likely to fall through the cracks of the U.S. healthcare system learn how to master it — in their own language. Through a suite of technological solutions, including multi-channel messaging and data analytics, along with a cadre of bilingual employees, ConsejoSano helps the marginalized and underserved access the care they need now and improve their overall health literacy.
The company’s initial focus was on helping Hispanic patients. Services are free, around-the-clock and help tackle issues related to costs, language barriers and immigration status.
“In the U.S., nearly 60 million people speak Spanish; 20 million of those only speak Spanish. Another third can only manage basic communication in English, like ordering food at a restaurant,” explains Abner Mason, ConsejoSano’s founder and CEO. “Ask them to explain — in English — that they have a piercing pain in their lower back, and they don’t have the tools. Or if a doctor wants to explain to them, also in English, why their 12-month-old baby needs vaccinations, they won’t get the full understanding.”
Although Hispanics make up over 17 percent of America’s population, “Spanish-speaking doctors represent only 4 percent of our physicians,” notes Amon Anderson, director of Acumen, an investor in ConsejoSano. “In four short years, ConsejoSano has quickly expanded its reach across Southern California … escalating thousands of cases to healthcare providers and ensuring Hispanic patients receive the care they need.”

ConsejoSano healthcare
ConsejoSano founder Abner Mason says it’s his mission to never leave any patient behind.

Today, ConsejoSano also provides services to speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Armenian and Tagalog, among other languages. Currently, the company counts about 300,000 users and hopes to see that number climb to 1 million by the end of 2018.
But ConsejoSano does far more than translating a generic automated call into a different language.
For starters, initial communications from ConsejoSano to patients are likely to happen via text.
“One thing all cultures have in common across the board is text messaging,” says Mason. “Many communities have loved ones and friends in other countries, so they’ve become accustomed to using WhatsApp or other platforms. It’s just how people communicate now.”
The next step: calling a patient and talking to them in their own language, with an emphasis on their cultural background. (ConsejoSano’s multilingual employees follow a script that has been reviewed and approved by the company’s medical director.)
“Say you’re going to convince a mom that her baby needs vaccinations,” says Mason. “If you use the same message in Spanish to communicate with a mom in San Diego as you do with a mom in Miami, you won’t get the same results. One culture comes from Mexico, the other may be someone who comes from Puerto Rico or Cuba. They don’t have the same traditions or culture.”
Patient content is consciously tailored too.
“Often people design materials for English speakers, then translate it into other languages. But because they’re not starting with culture, just hitting Google Translate, the signal it can send to the patient is, ‘Who I am doesn’t really matter. This message isn’t really for me,’” says Mason.
Dr. Alfredo Ratniewski is executive chief medical officer for Borrego Health, a ConsejoSano client whose 23 locations serve Medicaid patients in California’s San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. He’s seen firsthand how ConsejoSano campaigns have coaxed parents to bring their children in for wellness checkups, encouraged women to have annual mammograms and convinced older adults to agree to colonoscopies so they can be screened for colon cancer.
“That cultural approach makes all the difference in the world,” says Ratniewski.
Before launching ConsejoSano, Mason founded the Workplace Wellness Council of Mexico, which is now the leading corporate wellness company in that country. He also served as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and was the founder and executive director of the AIDS Responsibility Project.
What causes people to ignore their healthcare is a puzzle he tries to solve every day. And every day, the answer is different.
“If an Arabic woman needs to come in for a pap smear, you need to build a trusted communication channel not just with her, but for [her] family,” Mason says by way of example. “If someone needs a prostate exam, the reasons why need to be explained and in a way that also deals appropriately with their culture.”
Our current political climate can make that tricky. Many people don’t trust “the system.”  They worry loved ones may be taken away by ICE. In other words, says Mason, “they don’t feel equal.”
Because of that, “we’ve got to get the culture right, the language right, the mode of communication right — and all that has to be built on a foundation of trust,” Mason says. “We get responses all the time, from patients who say, ‘This is the first time someone’s treated me like a first-class citizen.’”

For Some Families of Murder Victims, Help Comes Only With a Fight

Posted on by robbie

Tyrisha Robinson tenses up whenever she has to remember the day she ended her child’s life.
In April last year, her 23-year-old son, Tyree, was shot in the neck in a street shooting. Complications from his injury later landed him on life support at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, where his mother lived.
“I didn’t want him to suffer anymore,” she says. “So I watched my boy transition from life to death.”
After his funeral, Robinson filed for financial help through the victims’ compensation office in Delaware, the state where Tyree was shot. The disbursement of such funds is something that every state offers as a result of a 1984 law that made restitution available to those affected by violent crime. The amount granted to victims or their families varies by state. But to help recoup expenses that directly result from a crime, such as funeral and burial costs, crime-scene cleanup and lost wages, total reimbursement can range anywhere from $10,000 all the way up to $100,000.
Robinson asked for $6,000 to cover a portion of her son’s funeral and the loss of earnings from her job as a medical claims specialist. She was denied.
Delaware’s victims’ compensation board had ruled that she was ineligible for the money. Her son had violated his probation (Tyree had previously been in prison for selling drugs), and because of that, they said, he was partially responsible for his own death.
Robinson didn’t have thousands of dollars stashed away. The denial was not only a blow to what little savings she did have, but also to her dignity.
“Him violating his parole had nothing to do with him being shot, nor me burying him as a result of his injuries,” she says. “I just don’t feel it’s fair that they made this decision based on his [prior] actions.”
Though states’ compensation funds dole out millions of dollars each year, there is a litany of reasons why families of homicide victims can be turned away. One of the most controversial is based on what’s known as “contributory conduct,” which allows a state to deny funds to a victim’s family if homicide detectives find that the person killed was in some way responsible for their own death.  
And while a victim’s actions at the time of death can be helpful in catching the killer, rarely are they ever used in court as evidence for the perpetrator’s motive. Contrast that with claims to victims’ compensation funds, where the behavior of the deceased is a primary driver of whether a family member will receive money.
An investigation by NationSwell looked at county data in six states — Arizona, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas — which showed that thousands of families are denied compensation each year because of the contributory conduct clause. Many of them suspect that their race is a factor, but police and state officials flatly reject that assertion.
Regulators who process claims say they are just following federal law. But one victims’ services group in Philadelphia, the city with the highest number of compensation claims filed each year in Pennsylvania, is helping families navigate the system and fight for their right to fair treatment.

HELP COMES WITH A CATCH

When Congress first passed the Victims of Crime Act of 1984, it was an anomaly at a time when entitlement spending was being slashed by the Reagan administration. The allocation of federal funds to create state offices gave access to tens of millions of dollars to victims and victims’ rights organizations every year, primarily through restitution payments imposed on convicted offenders.
State offices, which are responsible for handling and managing claims, are reliant on federal grants to pay victims as well as fund victims’ advocate services. Delaware, where Tyree Robinson was shot, received over $6 million in federal grants last year, according to the national Office for Victims of Crime.
Nonprofits also rely heavily on federal grants to offer services for victims of various crimes, such as sex trafficking or mass shootings. In 2017, for example, $4 million in federal funds went to victims or their families of the 2015 San Bernardino, California, mass shooting that killed 14, not including the two shooters.
For mother-daughter team Victoria Greene and Chantay Love, who together run Every Murder Is Real Healing Center (EMIR) in Philadelphia, keeping their organization afloat means working with Pennsylvania’s Office of Victims’ Services.  
“We receive funding through that office,” Love, EMIR’s program director, says. “Which makes some of our advocacy, well, complicated. We want the state to create policies that allow victims to heal without judgment.”
The two are on the ground almost daily visiting the families of homicide victims — sometimes within hours of a murder — to try to get them into therapy, and also help them navigate the compensation process.
The latter is integral for hundreds of families in Philadelphia, where the gun murder rate increased 15.8 percent in 2017 despite a drop in overall shootings, according to police records shared with NationSwell. Of the nearly 1,400 murders recorded in the city since 2012, most have been of young black men. In 2015, they accounted for close to 60 percent of homicides.
Surviving family members overwhelmingly live in poor neighborhoods and often do not have the immediate resources to pay thousands of dollars for an unexpected funeral.

The headquarters of Every Murder Is Real Healing Center in Philadelphia.

“Families are living day-to-day simply trying to figure out how to keep food on the table,” says Love. “Once the tragedy of a homicide occurs, survivors are gasping for air. A funeral is not in the budget.”
Between 2010 and 2015, Pennsylvania’s Victims’ Compensation Assistance Program (VCAP) shelled out over $77 million to victims of all crimes, including assault and homicide. But, Love says, the problem is not with claims being paid, but in the hundreds of denials that are handed down each year.
Data provided by VCAP shows that the state issued 780 denials between 2012 and 2015 based on contributory conduct, making up 37 percent of total denials. And though that number is just over 2 percent of the tens of thousands of claims the office received within the same time span, families affected say it’s unfairly punishing them for crimes they had no part in. The system has lost its original purpose, they say, and now instead of helping victims’ families, it’s criminalizing them.
In an email exchange, VCAP manager Jeffrey Blystone said the office is only following the law and that determinations shouldn’t reflect on the family.
“A denial of a claim is in no way an attempt to further punish a family,” he said. “VCAP is governed by the Crime Victims Act, and the Act requires VCAP to determine whether the victim’s conduct contributed to the victim’s injuries. The Act also requires that VCAP’s award or denial be based upon that determination.”
But of the states studied by NationSwell, Pennsylvania doesn’t have the worst record when it comes to denying families’ claims for reimbursement. In neighboring New Jersey, 60 percent of all denials were due to contributory conduct in the same time period, according to data from the state’s Victims of Crime Compensation Office.
Other states have additional regulations that specify if a person committed a felony within a certain time period before their death, their family is also ineligible for reimbursement.
In Louisiana, for example, NationSwell found that nearly 70 percent of denials between 2010 and 2015 were based on contributory conduct, which included whether the victim had committed a felony in the five years prior to their death.
This, advocates argue, is obverse to the point of jail and prison.
“When you commit a crime and go to jail, you are paying for your crime in lost time of your life,” says Amy Albert, a lawyer who helps families in Jersey City, New Jersey, navigate the legal bureaucracy of reimbursement. “So to deny a family reimbursement despite the fact the [victim] had already served their time makes no sense. You’re punishing them twice.”
New York, however, has the lowest denial rates for contributory conduct, despite having more claims than most other states analyzed by NationSwell. Between 2010 and 2015, less than 2 percent of denials cited contributory conduct.
The state has a sliding scale for reimbursement when contributory conduct has been determined. The family of a person who trades gunfire on a New York street, for example, and then dies as a result would be ineligible for compensation. If that same person was involved in a bar fight, however, and traded insults but not punches, and then dies as a result of a beating, their family could get a small sum of money as opposed to nothing.
“The classic 100-percent conduct-contributing denial is where I point a gun at you, and you shoot me. I can’t claim to get compensation, because I caused you to shoot me,” says Elizabeth Cronin, director of New York’s Office of Victim Services.
“If a person is a known drug dealer and gets hit by a drunk driver, they’re still a victim. That has nothing to do with whether they’re a perpetrator in another kind of case,” she says. “It’s not fair to use that person’s history to eliminate their eligibility.”

RACE AS A FACTOR?

Many families interviewed by NationSwell allege that denials are happening primarily to families of color. But despite recent reporting, which anecdotally backs up that claim, NationSwell found no empirical evidence to support it.
A source at the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) — which oversees the Office of Victims’ Services — said that any perceived correlation is likely just a numbers game. For example, Philadelphia is the state’s largest city and also has the most homicides, which happen to primarily affect black men; a high number of compensation claims would logically result in a similarly high rate of denials within the group applying.
And Blystone, the VCAP manager for Pennsylvania, said that denials based on race are unlikely, as only half of all claimants opt to include their race on their application.
That logic aligns with NationSwell’s findings. According to county data in all six states analyzed, the largest percentage of denials are in counties with larger cities and higher crime rates, which would naturally result in more filed claims.  
In Texas, for example, both Bexar and Dallas counties encompass two of the state’s largest cities: San Antonio and Dallas. In 2015, the two counties had a higher rate of claim denials than other counties in the state at 29 and 25 percent, respectively. But they also had more violent crime that year compared to Texas counties with smaller populations.
There is, however, a noticeable relationship NationSwell found between the proportion of nonwhite residents and the average percentage of reimbursement denials. Lafourche Parish in Louisiana, for example, had a 23 percent nonwhite population, according to the 2010 census, and a 6 percent denial rate for the years between 2013 and 2015. In the same time period, Orleans Parish, which includes New Orleans, had a 69 percent nonwhite population and a 16 percent denial rate.
This was a consistent finding in all six states examined, using both public documents and records requested by NationSwell.

A NationSwell investigation found a relationship between a county’s percent of nonwhite residents and its percent of reimbursement requests denied.

To be clear, this does not prove race is a mitigating factor in deciding reimbursement claims, but it does raise eyebrows for people like Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Angus Love (no relation to Chantay Love of EMIR), who has worked on victims’ compensation cases with EMIR and is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project. In his view, there’s simply too much of an anecdotal correlation between homicide reimbursement claims, black victims and the police who conclude that contributory conduct was in play.
“It seems to me that race is entering into the decision-making,” Love says. “I’ve seen too many articles about young black kids in the ghetto, and it’s simply assumed that they’re involved in illegal activities. To make a blanket response is a stereotype and not necessarily what the facts would dictate.”
But Capt. Sekou Kinebrew, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Police Department’s public affairs office, says homicide detectives have little to gain from assuming victims are involved in a crime when they are killed.
“You’re relying on the words of other people to solve a crime, and in the case of a homicide you rely on family cooperation. Why on earth would the detective do something to diminish that or sabotage their own efforts, especially when we know that the availability of [victims’ compensation] funds relies on this,” he tells NationSwell. “I just don’t see any benefit in a detective doing that.”

‘IN THE EYE OF THE SHITSTORM’

Regardless of fault, EMIR’s Love and Greene are actively trying to shift the narrative around homicide victims. That’s because they know firsthand how the bureaucracy of victims’ compensation, coupled with the acute trauma of losing a loved one, can affect a family.
In 1997, the two lost a brother and son, Emir Greene (from which their organization gets its name). His murder received front-page coverage in Philadelphia’s City Paper and launched the mother and daughter, along with Love’s sister, to take on the task of helping families that were going through the same process.
“One of the things we noticed immediately was families were not taking care of themselves,” says Love. “They forgot to eat, drink water, the basics. So we initially started as just trying to feed families.”
Though the murder rate in Philadelphia has gone down considerably since EMIR first formed, the number still hovers around 300 homicides a year, according to annual reports. EMIR responds to just about every one of them.
“Our first course of action is simple: Get families access to services, let them know we’re here and make sure they take one minute at a time and then 15 minutes at a time,” Love says.
When families call Love, which happens almost daily, she always ends the conversation with advice on self-care: breathing techniques, drinking enough water and eating enough food.
Over the past decade, EMIR has taken on more roles within Philadelphia, specifically by offering counseling and family services to children or parents. Their office has teen, children’s and family rooms where volunteers — almost all of whom have experienced a murder in their own families — offer support and lend a hand in working through trauma or grief.
The organization soon became seen as invaluable to the community — and to the police department.
“They are one of the first entities that touches families right in the wake of a tragedy. And they truly focus on the healing part,” says Kinebrew, who has worked side by side with EMIR on community-policing strategies. “They put themselves in the eye of the shitstorm.”

‘APPEAL, APPEAL AND APPEAL’

Beyond providing healing services, EMIR has advocated for victims’ rights for over a decade by helping families file reimbursement claims and pushing the state to remove the denial barrier for families touched by homicide.
“You have given the killer all the power in that situation, because not only have they taken away your loved one, but then [VCAP] legitimizes their death and victimizes you in the process,” Love argues.
Recently, the group successfully resolved a case with the help of Angus Love, the civil rights lawyer. In 2016, high school senior Zion Vaughan, 18, was gunned down near his home. The investigating officer wrote on the victims’ compensation claim filed by Zion’s grandfather, Thomas Vaughan, that the teen had been dealing drugs.
Vaughan was confused: How could they know if his grandson was selling drugs, when they hadn’t even found the person who killed him? How could they know he was doing something wrong, especially when he was shot in the back and could have been running away?
He refused to believe drugs were involved.
“I was shocked,” Vaughan says. “I can’t say that Zion didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke reefer. But I know he wasn’t selling.”
Through appeals, Vaughan, with the help of EMIR, was able to get the decision reversed. This is uncommon in Pennsylvania, where only a handful of appeals has ever led to an administrative hearing and a reversal of an earlier decision, according to PCCD. Vaughan’s case, which determined that the police’s claim of drug involvement was unfounded and hearsay, was one of the first.
“It was such good news, because it’s the first time something like this has ever said that the police report should not have been used to deny Mr. Vaughan’s claim,” Love, the lawyer, says. “That’s a huge step for us.”
And it gives hope to the frustrated family members of victims, like Robinson, the mother whose son was fatally shot in Delaware, to keep on fighting. For families caught in a similar situation, she has a few words of advice.
“Do your research on why you were denied. Make sure you ask plenty of questions, and never give up,” she says. “Appeal, appeal and appeal.”

——

This story is the first in a multimedia series on states’ victims’ compensation practices. In the second installment, a NationSwell mini documentary further explores the issues families of victims face when applying for reimbursement. You can watch the video here.
Additional data reporting by Malorie Hughes. To read about how NationSwell found and queried the data for this story, visit our writer’s GitHub account, where you can also download the data sets.
A previous version of this story included incorrect population data for counties in Louisiana. We regret the error.

Our Bail System Isn’t Working

Posted on by robbie

For the past few years, states have been slowly making progress on reforming their criminal justice laws, including throwing out past marijuana infractions, ending solitary confinement for juveniles and recommending significantly less jail time for nonviolent crimes.
Now, bail reform is getting its time in the spotlight — or in the hot seat, depending — as New Jersey marks its one-year anniversary of ending the practice that requires defendants to pay their way out of jail before a trial. (Currently, the state releases low-level offenders to their homes, while others are held for 48 hours; during that time, prosecutors put together a criminal profile that determines if a person will be kept in prison.)
Many lawmakers are taking up similar reform strategies, as overhauling the nation’s bail system also makes for smart across-the-aisle politics in a time of heightened partisanship. Senators Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., last year introduced a bill that would incentivize states to end or reform their money-bail programs.
Bail was originally intended to motivate defendants to show up for all of their hearings; if they do so, their money is given back to them once their trial is over. But studies have found that posting bail — which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the crime — is no guarantee that someone will return to the courtroom. In the meantime, defendants arrested for a low-level offense and can’t afford bail often sit in jail for days or weeks, costing them time away from family and their jobs, and costing taxpayers an average of $38 million every day.
Data from a 2016 study conducted in Pennsylvania by Columbia University researchers found that there was no correlation between being released on bail and returning to court. What the researchers did find, however, is that those who couldn’t afford their bail and thus remained in jail were more likely to commit future crimes by almost 10 percent. The study also found “significant evidence of a correlation between pretrial detention and both conviction and recidivism.” In other words, our current money-bail system is one in which a minor offense often leads to more offenses, entrapping low-income people in a cycle of incarceration simply because they’re unable to pay.
What’s more, the Bronx Freedom Fund in New York City, which bails out people without requiring reimbursement, has found that nearly all of the defendants they sponsor do return to court, despite not having a financial incentive for doing so.
“We know that bail does not make people return to court in greater percentages,” says Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge for the New York Court of Appeals and current chair of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. In fact, he says, “The people who return to court are absolutely at the percentages of those [who weren’t required to post] bail at all.”
Lippman, among others, has been a supporter of using algorithms, or risk-assessment models, to decide whether bail should be mandated for a defendant.
Judges in more than half of the nation rely on these models in some way. Inputting data, such as whether a defendant has a criminal record and the zip code where they live, is used to determine how likely it is that the person will later show up in court.
But risk-assessment tools aren’t a perfect panacea, say critics, and their widespread use can still lead to racial or economic biases.
A recent class-action lawsuit filed in Harris County, Texas, concluded that those with money are given preferential treatment when calculating data; for example, the risk-assessment tool used to determine whether or not someone would return for trial gave the same weight to being poor as it did to having a prior offense.
“Under the County’s risk-assessment point system … poverty indicators (such as not owning a car) receive the same point value as prior criminal violations or prior failures to appear in court,” a federal appeals court decided. “Thus, an arrestee’s impoverishment increased the likelihood he or she would need to pay to be released.”
Richard Berk, who created the algorithm currently used in Pennsylvania’s risk-assessment tool, says that it’s a fool’s errand to think that algorithms would create a perfect environment.
“The question is not whether the algorithms are accurate and fair, but whether they are more accurate and more fair than current practice,” Berk said in an email. “So we can reduce errors and reduce bias, which does not mean that the accuracy is perfect and that all possible bias is gone. As they say, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
But as more states take on reforming their bail practices, a uniquely American institution is at risk: the commercial bail-bond industry.
Bail-bond offices put up money for a defendant while typically keeping 10 percent. If defendants don’t show up to court, the bond office gets fined, and a bounty hunter is dispatched to find the missing person.
Though the bail-bond services industry grew by almost 3 percent between 2011 and 2016 and brought in $2 billion in revenue, it’s now facing increasing pressure as some jurisdictions have done away with the need for bail bondsmen altogether by eliminating cash bail.
In New Jersey, for example, bail-bond shops have seen a dramatic reduction in business and are operating under threat of closing. Last summer, reality TV star Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman stood outside a New Jersey courthouse and claimed that the elimination of bail bonds were “killing people.”
But for bail-reform advocates, Chapman’s argument is stale. And like it or not, that reform is coming, as New York, Delaware and California are all looking to eliminate — or at least reconsider — their money-bail practices.
“You have a lot of research to show that bail is harmful. Those points need to be disseminated,” says Zoë Towns, the director of criminal justice programs at the bipartisan advocacy group FWD.us, in response to how reform might affect bail-bond business owners. “Our position on bail reform and justice is looking at how we can drive down incarceration rates, and that may mean that structures within and outside the system need to be changed.”

—–

An earlier version of this story identified FWD.us as a left-leaning organization, not a bipartisan one. We regret the error.

In Atlanta, Affordable Housing Boosts School Performance, Tenant Health

Posted on by robbie

Among the rolling hills and dense pine canopies east of Atlanta’s I-285 bypass, down the street from a halal meat market, two Buddhist temples and Good Times Country Cookin’, sits the Willow Branch Apartment Homes. The complex is tucked behind a flapping “Welcome” flag, which is emblematic of Clarkston, a small but famously global suburb that has been coined “Ellis Island South” and “the most diverse square mile in America.”
Built in 1971, Willow Branch looks like any other aging metro-Atlanta apartment building and dozens around Clarkston, save for its unique mansard roofs. But after school one warm afternoon in February, what used to be the pool house transforms into another thing that sets Willow Branch apart: a banner-bedecked classroom where a circle of refugee children, representing more than 30 ethnicities, sit squirming and giggling. The kids, all of whom are residents, play a clapping game, each contributing another word to a growing sentence they pass around the room like a hot potato: “Valentine’s. Day. Is. About. Moms. And. Dogs.” The last word sparks hysterical laughter.
“A lot of them, their parents don’t speak English and can’t help with their [school] work,” says Allie Reeser, the program director of the nonprofit Star-C, which runs the afterschool program at Willow Branch. “Socially, it’s a great place for kids to go.” Nearby, 8-year-old Elizabeth Mawi, who emigrated with eight siblings from Burma, concurs in a mousey voice: “It’s good, because we can share, and we help people.”
Held for four hours each weekday afternoon, the Star-C afterschool program is one part of a dynamic model — piloted here at the 186-unit Willow Branch, where the residents’ average income of $18,750 is well below the U.S. poverty line — that’s showing how affordable housing can boost performance in local schools, increase resident health and even quell crime.

For young Willow Branch residents, many of whom are not native English speakers, afterschool enrichment programs are an essential tool to succeed in school.

Alongside its fundraising arm, 3Star Communities, Star-C was founded by Marjy Stagmeier, 55, a successful manager of commercial and residential real estate around Atlanta. Her model, supporters say, is basically a three-way win for residents and investors in blighted apartment complexes in that it boosts social and environmental aspects for tenants and generates greater profits for landlords. Stagmeier’s research has uncovered no other program in the U.S. that combines wraparound services of housing, education, and medical care in the same way, though Yesler Terrace Apartments (operated by the Seattle Housing Authority) and Eden Housing (a California nonprofit housing developer and property manager) have similar components.
“If I had 10 more Marjy-run properties in Clarkston, there’s no doubt that our crime rate would drop even more, test scores would go up even more, and our community health and connections … would increase,” says Clarkston Mayor Ted Terry. “She’s creating a long-term, sustainable paradigm in multifamily housing that will pay dividends to our community for years to come.”
And Willow Branch’s successes, Stagmeier says, could be only the beginning in metro Atlanta — where recent studies show a deficit of more than 80,000 affordable housing units — and beyond. 

ENTREPRENEURIAL GENES

Philanthropy wasn’t always in Stagmeier’s heart — entrepreneurship was.
She grew up just two miles from Willow Branch in Stone Mountain, the middle of three daughters whose parents were serial entrepreneurs investing in everything from pig farms to electrical- and mechanical-supply companies (all three girls would eventually own businesses). After studying accounting at Georgia State University and passing the state’s CPA exam, she worked in banking and real estate for a decade, socking away her money and publishing a revered book in 1994, “Real Estate Asset Management: Executive Strategies in Profit Making.” Managing a portfolio of $500 million by the mid-1990s, she teamed with a German investor and started her own company to buy and manage workforce housing, including Willow Branch in 1996.  
Complexes with early versions of the afterschool program and stable rents stayed roughly 95 percent occupied, eliminating costly turnover and transiency, which drags down student performance. (What’s more, parents who knew where their children were after the final school bell could work longer hours, earning more rent money). A blighted apartment community in the northwestern suburb of Marietta provided Stagmeier’s “a-ha!” moment, she says, as she began to see how a single complex can drastically impact the schools it feeds.

Entrepreneur Marjy Stagmeier developed a unique model that combines housing, education and healthcare to revitalize struggling communities.

By 2014, Stagmeier had sold her other properties to focus on honing the Star-C model at Willow Branch. In order for the program to work, she says, the purchasing price of any new complex has to be less than $40,000 per unit, which allows rents to stay affordable and thus turnover low. (At Willow Branch, tenants pay an average of $615 a month.) She channels $3,000 monthly into the Star-C program, which employs three full-time people, with fundraising covering the rest of costs. Word has spread, and volunteers from throughout the region, primarily church groups and students, log nearly 8,000 hours at the complex each year.
Now, Star-C’s academic results are a particular source of pride, for both Stagmeier and the parents of the 300 kids under age 10 who call Willow Branch home.
As recently as 2013, neighboring Indian Creek Elementary School was the second worst-performing school in Georgia. Following a partnership with Star-C, the elementary has been named a “Platinum Performer” — the highest classification awarded by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement — three years running. Nearly 90 percent of students passed the Georgia Milestones assessment test last year and have average GPAs of 3.25.
“That’s impressive,” says Stagmeier, “considering English is new to most of these kids.”
In addition to the free education component, Star-C has partnered with a nearby health clinic to offer residents dentistry, primary care and OB-GYN services at $50 to $70 per visit. If residents are still unable to pay, the nonprofit will cover their visits out of its fundraising proceeds.
Another healthy facet of life at Willow Branch: a community gardening program, which costs residents just $20 a year (this covers the cost of deer-netting). In 40 tidy gardens that consume about an acre, Hispanic tenants grow peppers, Asian residents cultivate roselle hibiscus, and religiously significant marigolds are popular with just about everyone. Along with the recently erected fences that keep out the neighborhood’s gang members, the gardening initiative gives residents reason to be outside and has all but eliminated crime, Stagmeier says.
Statistics that paint an accurate picture of crime in the immediate area are tough to come by, as residents often don’t call police because of language barriers and mistrust. But hundreds of people — including what Stagmeier describes as “harsh gangs,” which twice attacked a security officer, periodically flashed guns on the property, and stole from residents — formerly cut through Willow Branch to access a commercial district. “That’s all gone away since we put up the fence and started the gardens,” says Stagmeier. “Grandma in her garden won’t put up with that type of behavior.”
Savings on food, healthcare and rent have had cumulative, positive effects. Of the 39 families who moved out of Willow Branch last year, 16 were able to buy their first homes.
“That’s going from poverty to mobility,” Stagmeier says. “That’s what we do here.”
Marjy Stagmeier (left, in purple) with a group of Willow Branch residents.

FUTURE OUTLOOK

As of this writing, Stagmeier was under contract with her second property for the Star-C model, a 244-unit community called Summerdale Commons just south of downtown Atlanta. It’s among the city’s top 10 worst complexes for crime, and it’s next door to another low-performing elementary school, she says.
Through the course of 170 meetings with everyone from homeless people to Atlanta’s mayor, Stagmeier has grown determined to work within Atlanta city limits, where government is supportive of her efforts and an inclusionary zoning ordinance was adopted in January to boost workforce housing. It’s also where Stagmeier lives in tony Ansley Park with her husband, John.
“We’re buying the roughest properties that have the highest crime that the neighbors are sick of,” she says. “Luckily, we’ve got the city behind us.”
Beyond Summerdale Commons, Stagmeier is eyeing three or four other properties. She’s also starting to recruit younger partners, in hopes of breathing more life into the nonprofits and, eventually, bringing her successes to a national level.
“I think her model will catch on the more that elected officials and compassionate investor groups learn about it,” says Terry, the Clarkston mayor.
Back at Willow Branch, a group of teens from the philanthropy club at Atlanta’s Benjamin Franklin Academy arrives one afternoon. They’ve collected four boxes of books representing a variety of cultures.
The high schoolers are eager to read to the kids. But first, Stagmeier has a question. “Do you know what’s going on here?”
Blank faces.  
“Do you want me to tell you what’s going on here?” she asks. “What the goal is?”  
Nods.
She launches into a primer, pointing to the community garden and the filled-in pool, which now serves as a mini soccer arena. And she mentions the part about families buying their own homes, essentially graduating toward their American dream.         
“That’s incredible,” says sophomore Zach Arais. “I had no idea about the level of this project. I mean, it’s really impressive.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly said Yesler Apartments in Seattle is operated by Catholic Community Services, not the Seattle Housing Authority. We regret the error.

A Dream Curriculum for Immigrant Students

Posted on by robbie

Searching for a better life, Miguel Gonzalez’s family brought him to Dalton, Ga., from Guerrero, Mexico, as a child.
“My whole life in this country has been uncertain as far as my immigration status,” says Gonzalez.
Despite this, Gonzalez thrived. He attended college, landed a job as a teacher, and in 2012, became a “Dreamer” through the Obama administration’s establishment of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
Now, Gonzalez tries to help kids from similar circumstances through the Newcomer Academy, an English language program for Spanish-language students grades six and up.
As politicians negotiate the future of DACA, these children need a place to process their feelings about their immigration status. Watch the video above to see how the Newcomer Academy and teachers like Gonzalez go beyond simply acclimating immigrant children to the American school system by creating an environment where they can feel successful and thrive.

On Tap at the Local Microbrewery: Economic Opportunity

Posted on by robbie

Throwing one back may be the key to job growth in America.
Yes, really.
Between 2002 and 2013, the percentage of Americans who consumed alcoholic drinks grew by 8 percent to almost three-quarters of the population, according to a 2017 study in the journal JAMA. This increase has coincided with a surge of interest in craft beers and local liquors. To meet the demand, the number of jobs in the alcohol manufacturing sector have more than doubled in the past decade for breweries, alone.
Microbreweries, specifically, are something of a Cinderella story. Thirty years ago, less than 100 independently run breweries were in operation nationwide. By 2016, there were more than 5,000, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group that analyzes and represents independent U.S. breweries.
Likewise, production from independent brewers has increased — growing from 35,000 barrels in 1981 to more than 24 million barrels in 2016, according to the Brewers Association.
“I call the entire craft beer movement the 30-plus-year overnight success story,” says Julia Herz, craft beer program director for the Brewers Association. “But the reason is, first and foremost, we’re still a beer-loving nation.”
Actually, that’s just part of the (t)ale. Another prevailing theory is that Americans have become punch-drunk by fancy food and drink. Just like evolving tastes have fueled a surge of fast-casual eateries and pour over coffee places, our palates have become more refined when it comes to what we drink at our neighborhood watering hole as well.

In the last decade, U.S. brewery jobs have more than doubled.

Between 2006 and 2016, approximately 61,000 beverage manufacturing jobs (such as bottling, sales, etc) were created. Breweries accounted for almost 33,000 of those new positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly a quarter of all beverage manufacturing jobs can be traced back to brewers.
In contrast, soft drink manufacturers — which hire a significant portion of beverage manufacturing workers — have reduced their workforce during the same time period by double digits.
Craft brewers use local, high quality ingredients and artisanal techniques to make their brews — meaning that manufacturing jobs must be created nearby and can’t be outsourced to a foreign manufacturer. In comparison, large-scale, commercial beermakers mass produce their lagers and IPAs in various manufacturing facilities using the most cost-effective methods and ingredients.
“Craft brew is very inefficient,” says Herz, explaining that the production of craft beer is more hands-on. “Because they’re so inefficient compared to big beer, they need more jobs to brew the beer.”
And it isn’t just beermakers that are getting fat off the proverbial hops. Small businesses are, too. Herz calls this the trickle-up effect, where, for example, craft-beer-only bars and retailers have opened near an existing microbrewery, creating even more jobs.
“The beer category over time has evolved. You have more beer towers at restaurants, more expanded beer menus at restaurants,” says Herz.
Cities are thirsty to be a part of the booming craft beer industry. In an effort to grow its local economy, one town in Oregon has even offered financial incentives to a craft brewer opening a new business in its community.
Craft distilleries have also experienced a boom — albeit on a much smaller scale.
For the past decade, the number of brick-and-mortar independent distilleries has grown by the double digits every year, according to a study financed by the American Craft Spirits Organization. The report also found that the amount of liquor distributed increased by 18.5 percent annually.
Interest in craft distilled liquors may have helped local business owners, says Celebration Distillation Founder James Michalopoulos. His distillery in New Orleans is the first craft distillery in the U.S. to bottle rum, supplied by the large amount of sugar cane that grows nearby.
“It piqued my interest that there was so much sugar cane, and not one distillery in Louisiana — or the even the U.S.,” Michalopoulos says.
His company has been able to grow its operations from two to 18 employees — an increase of 800 percent — with most of its hiring occurring during the past decade, a time period during which Louisiana experienced a doubling of its unemployment rate after Hurricane Katrina.
But anecdotally, Michalopoulos says, the market is more volatile than many make it seem. The barrier of entry for distilling includes steep prices and stiff competition against larger companies — all unfavorable conditions for small business owners.
“If you want to truly characterize the marketplace, it’s pretty skewed,” he says. “What there is are small businesses with people working very hard on a local level, and rightfully getting a certain interest in the product. And they’ve taken a very tiny sliver of the market and working it, but with limited success.”
Nonetheless, growth continues within the industry, primarily in states such as California, New York, Washington and Colorado, which house more than a quarter of all distilleries in the U.S.
If craft distilleries maintain this upward trend — much like craft breweries have — there’s tremendous potential for more jobs to be created within the sector. Cheers to that.
Homepage photo by Eddie Hernandez Photography/Getty Images.

One Couple’s Long, Bumpy Road From Opioid Addiction to Sober Living

Posted on by robbie

It’s just before 7 p.m. in Huntington, W.V., and the street lights have turned on for the night. The east side of the city is illuminated by a deep orange that cascades over the roads and trickles onto the large lawns of two-story homes that line these streets.
Justin Ponton sits with his girlfriend, Jami Bamberger, on the stoop of Newness of Life, the recovery home Ponton runs. Both finish cigarettes (they smoke Newports) as they talk about the homemade cooking — much of it deep fried — they missed by not attending church that Sunday.
Ponton sports skinny jeans, a tight-fitted “Kanye West for President 2020” shirt and black sneakers that are impeccably clean. His arms are tattooed into sleeves of crosses, roman numerals and cartoonish lettering. His bombastic, urban style is very much out of place. Ponton knows — and doesn’t care.
“From where I stand, the skinny jeans make me stand out,” he says.
In front of the couple, a group of five men wearing baseball caps and baggy pants slip out of the shadows and walk side by side in the street. Ponton raises his hand and gives a wave.  
They acknowledge him with nods, but continue walking.
“Probably have a meeting or something they need to get to,” Bamberger says as the men walk into Recovery Point, a drug addiction and alcoholism recovery center, at the end of the street.
Bamberger should know. At the time, she was the coordinator for another Recovery Point location about 35 miles away in Charleston, W.V. It follows the same schedule, though that facility is all women.
“Everybody — news outlets, politicians — keep coming to Huntington and talking about how bad it is here. It kills me that Huntington has been reduced to a city that has this dark side to it,” says Ponton. “Dead-ass, we have a problem, but there is so much recovery in Huntington. And nobody ever talks about that.”
In August 2016, Huntington was thrown into the international spotlight when 26 people overdosed on heroin within a five-hour timespan. Since then, a barrage of news outlets have trekked to Huntington — a small city in a rural state that’s experienced the demise of its main industry — to tell the story of how it became the poster child for the nation’s opioid epidemic, nicknaming it the “Overdose Capital of America.”
Residents and public officials resent that moniker. When asked to speak with NationSwell, both the mayor’s office and Huntington Police Department declined to be interviewed, with one member of the mayor’s administrative staff saying that, “even good press is bad press at this point.”
But with a number of options for recovery that are giving thousands of addicts a second chance at life, including peer-mentor models like the ones that Ponton and Bamberger operate, locals have come up with a different moniker for their city: The Recovery Capital.

The Argument for Abstinence

Ponton’s recovery home is well known in Huntington for its underdog  approach to recovery. Newness of Life doesn’t turn anyone away; most of its male residents don’t have any money, and many don’t have stable employment. They are exactly how Ponton was when he was in rehab years earlier.  
Today, community leaders embrace the 33-year-old former addict. But when he was just 10 years old, Ponton was slinging drugs and living on the streets of a Washington, D.C., suburb.
“There’s something about Justin,” says Kim Miller, a close friend of Ponton’s and director of corporate development for Prestera Center, a rehab clinic. “People just gravitate toward him, and they trust him.”
In and out of prison and rehabs for over a decade, Ponton found himself in Huntington at a faith-based recovery center where he turned his life around.
“I was actually kicked out for selling drugs within the rehab,” he says. “But I came back, got clean and started working for the program. And that’s when I wanted to go out and go on my own.”
Newness of Life is an abstinence-only halfway house that operates out of two houses located next door to each other on the eastern side of Huntington — not far from Marshall University and the local hospital. Setting it apart from the numerous other two-story dwellings in the neighborhood: The vending machine dispensing Monster Energy, a heavily caffeinated drink, sitting on the front porch.
Residents are required to stick to a regimen. Morning chores and attendance at 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a weekly house get-together are mandatory. No one is allowed visitors, and everyone must have a job.
“I came to Newness and didn’t have anything, didn’t know how to take care of myself or my family,” says Matthew Thompson, a former resident at Newness of Life. “Yeah, it was tough, but with Justin’s help, I was able to get back on track.”
And being tough is exactly what Ponton wants.
“We don’t want you getting too comfortable,” Ponton says. “The point is to become a productive member of society, pay for your child’s bills and get a real home.”
Most importantly, it’s mandatory that every individual living at Newness remain sober — even medically-assisted treatment (MAT) like methadone or Suboxone, which prevents users from suffering withdrawal symptoms like nausea or severe cramping, is not allowed.
MAT is considered the gold standard for recovery treatment. The Centers for Disease Control, The National Institute of Health and dozens of other medical leaders support the use of MAT, and multiple studies have found MAT has reduced opioid deaths from relapsed users by more than half.
“The importance of offering a variety of medication assisted treatment modalities is really that we’re keeping people alive,” says Miller.
But many former addicts reject it.
“You’re just swapping methadone or whatever you’re given for the original drug,” says Ponton. “But not to throw shade on [MAT]… We like to say that not one solution is for everyone.”
In warmer months, Ponton may see only a dozen guys at a time taking shelter at Newness. But once the cold sets in, Ponton usually has a full house, with almost 35 men staying at the facility.
Typically, inpatient rehabilitation centers can cost up to $6,000 a month for residents. Ponton charges just $100 a week for people to stay at Newness of Life, but most of the time, people can’t even afford that. As a result, Newness operates primarily in the red, as Ponton’s mantra is “never turn anyone away, even if they can’t pay.” The houses are in desperate need of maintenance, and shoestring budgets aren’t enough to keep the electricity from being turned off on occasion.
“Somehow, he figures it out. Every single month, the guy has no cash, and he is still able to get those guys heat and water and a roof,” says Ryan Navy, a close friend and executive pastor of New Heights Church, which provides religious counseling for many of the guys at Newness of Life.  
“Everyone in the church knows about Newness and Justin, and they’re right alongside them every Sunday,” he says. “They’re willing to help, which kinda shows you what this community has been doing since the news has come out on the problems here — how we’ve tried to address it.”

How Heroin Took Hold

Huntington’s decline is no different than other towns in the Appalachian region of America. Once filled with miners and coal workers, the city found itself struggling in the early 2000s as the clean energy and technology industries decreased the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and highly-educated Millennials flocked to urban centers along both coasts.
It’s easy to blame the economic downturn for why people started using drugs. But that’s leaving a key point out of the narrative: How the drugs found their way into Huntington in the first place.
Workers’ compensation claims over the past two decades have fueled an increased use of opiates nationally, and West Virginia has been flooded with pain killers at a higher rate than other states, according to an investigation done by the Gazette Mail. Since Huntington is a former city of industry, a significant number of its residents incurred injuries on-the-job. Initially prescribed drugs for legitimate pain management — surgery, injury rehabilitation — many later turned to a cheaper alternative, heroin, as states began cracking down on unnecessary  prescriptions.
“You had this situation where you had large numbers of people abusing prescription opioids and then we took measures to reduce the availability of those pills,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center in Morgantown, which studies opioid use in the region. “At the same time, heroin traffickers were looking to these places and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve saturated the urban markets, let’s start going into these smaller markets.’ And what they had was a population that was looking for a cheaper, more available opioid for the pills they were using.”
Bamberger, Ponton’s girlfriend, was one such person. At 21, she was prescribed Oxycontin after undergoing surgery for a sports injury.
“[Prescription] drugs did save my life, at first. They did. Honestly,” she says. “I had knee surgery, but from there — and that’s how it started — it only took about five months, and I was already using a needle.”
Originally from Tennessee, Bamberger excelled in staying clean at Liberty’s Place, a rehab in Richmond, Ky. That success led her to the Charleston, W.V., Recovery Point location, which houses close to 100 women fighting for their sobriety without MAT.
The opportunity to work at a rehab center was something Bamberger, 24, always wanted to do. Before falling into addiction, she was attending school to be a drug counselor.
A tour of Recovery Point Charleston reveals that the women live a militaristic lifestyle. Beds are perfectly made, and there’s a limit on personal items. Residents are confined to the building, strictly monitored and have a schedule that includes daily chores, classes and “trudging” — a practice that requires the women to walk miles each day.
Bamberger explains the practice as, “If we could walk for our drugs, we’re going to walk for our recovery.”
Success is rewarded with a paid gig as a peer mentor, a position that pays minimum wage. Recovery Point claims that more than 60 percent of its former residents remain clean. That number is controversial, however, as critics argue that the organization cherry picks data from its alumni events.
“This program, when you come in, they start you from the bottom and you work your way up. You’re taught responsibility, you get jobs, you have to wake up, you have to you know, do a chore here, you go to classes, you learn a lot more,” says Hailey Miller, 24, who is one of Bamberger’s close friends and a resident at Recovery Point.

Get to Huntington

Some states — including those outside the Appalachian region — have started to look at ways proactively to combat opiate addiction. For example, Washington, Colorado and Vermont have discussed legislation that would allow safe injection facilities where users could receive sterile injections while under supervision.
Those programs have come under fire for a host of reasons, including the assumption that they lead to endorsement of drug usage. But safe injection sites are known to be effective in curbing opioid use and overdose. In one study, their use lowered the number overdoses in addition to reducing the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C.
The research, though promising, is so controversial in America that even doctors have conducted studies in complete secrecy without federal approval.
For now, recovery homes and rehabs are the primary go-tos for people seeking help in Huntington. That’s primarily because the city has become very well-versed in triage, but not in prevention or identifying those who are currently in need of help.
“When you’re in the midst of what has been labeled an epidemic, you kind of get in emergency response mode,” says Prestera’s Miller. “What we’re doing is putting out fires a lot. We’re helping the people that we know are coming in seeking our services, and we’re throwing everything at them.”
The work doesn’t stop once someone is clean. Relapse is imminent for many; up to 60 percent of those in recovery will abuse drugs again, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, part of the National Institute of Health.
Miller says that there’s no “best solution” to solve for addiction or eliminate the chance of relapse, including MAT. In multiple instances nationwide, addicts placed into abstinence-only recovery programs by drug courts wound up dead because they started using again.
This is why Ponton doesn’t claim Newness of Life residents achieve success, only a chance at it. And it’s why he keeps fighting for others.
On the Sunday morning that NationSwell is with Ponton, he receives a call from an old friend who is using drugs again. The guy is high and called Justin in a moment of weakness, wanting to get help and come back into the program. It’s a phone call Ponton gets often — sometimes daily — he says.
“Alright,” Ponton tells the friend. “Get to Huntington.”
The friend arrived, as promised, but used again the very next day.

A Winter Gift

This past November, Ponton’s heating systems at Newness of Life were shot, and the guys were at risk of having to spend the entire winter with no heat — a scary prospect considering Huntington’s winters are brutal.
“I don’t know where we’re gonna get the money to fix this,” Ponton says under his breath as he analyzes a spreadsheet that reveals in angry red ink the thousands of dollars he’s behind on his bills.
Two days later, Ponton and Navy, the pastor, meet in the back of Lafayette’s, a cigar and wine shop located in downtown Huntington. Navy had news that could only be announced over a Romeo y Julieta cigar: An anonymous donation had been made to Newness in the form of a new heating system.
Less than a week later, the guys at Newness of Life were living in a warm place again.  They may still be battling addiction, but at least they wouldn’t be spending the winter in the cold.
Correction: A previous version of this video incorrectly stated that Ponton and Bamberger opened a new recovery facility in January 2018.
Homepage photo by Joseph Darius Jaafari for NationSwell.

Fighting Drugs With Drugs in West Virginia

Posted on by robbie

Justin Ponton hit the gas pedal and sped his Dodge Charger up a hill to the parking lot of Hurricane City Park, in rural West Virginia. It was November 2017, and he had just found out that a friend was using drugs. Again. Ponton feared what he’d find when he reached the man.
Ponton, 33, only had a few minutes to get there. He has been through this before. As the owner and operator of a sober-living facility in nearby Huntington, he knows all too well how easy it can be to accidentally overdose and die.
Ponton found his friend sitting in the passenger seat of a parked van — just high, not overdosing. Which was lucky considering Ponton didn’t have any naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug that he often carries with him for occasions like this. Had his pal actually overdosed, Ponton would’ve had to wait for the paramedics to arrive.
America’s heroin and opioid crisis killed more than 60,000 people in 2016, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. That’s twice the number of fatal shootings for the same year. Put another way, drug overdoses today kill more people each year than the HIV epidemic did at its peak in the mid-1990s.
States have scrambled to find ways to get users clean and halt the spread of heroin and, increasingly, the synthetic opioid fentanyl — a drug that can be up to 100 times more powerful than heroin. Prescription painkillers also remain problematic, especially in rural states.
But now another drug is working to reverse those statistics.
Breathing can slow down or stop completely when someone is overdosing. It’s in that moment when naloxone — more formally referred to by its brand name Narcan — binds to opioid receptors in the brain and reverses or blocks the effects of other opioids. The drug works in seconds to restore normal breathing.
Naloxone is relatively inexpensive. But as the demand for it has increased, so too has its price.
“This is absolutely an epidemic,” says Robin Pollini, associate director of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center, which studies opioid abuse. Her state has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of overdose deaths — 52 per 100,000 people, compared to 19.8 per 100,000 people nationwide. “Have we seen the worst of the drug problem? I don’t think any of us can say, because I don’t think we have a real handle on what’s going on out on the street or in people’s homes.”
Opioid abuse crosses state lines, of course, but recent coverage of the epidemic has put a spotlight on West Virginia — and Huntington in particular. In 2016, the city of just 49,000 made national headlines after 26 people overdosed in one five-hour span. The event launched a federal investigation by the CDC and a media firestorm that was quick to label Huntington as “America’s overdose capital.”
READ MORE: Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims
As director of outreach of WVU’s Injury Control Research Center, Herb Linn became curious about the effectiveness of take-home naloxone kits. During the heroin scourge of the 1990s, the kits, which typically contain two doses of naloxone, were distributed to drug users in major cities where heroin was prevalent, including New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore. Recipients administered the naloxone themselves when someone nearby overdosed.
Getting an opioid antidote in the hands of drug users in big cities — where you can pinpoint at-risk communities in dense areas and then focus on treatment and prevention — is easier than it would be in the rural environs outside of Huntington. “I became very intrigued about whether this kind of program could translate to a rural population … and whether it would be effective with abusers of opioid pain medicines.”
That’s a legitimate concern, says Pollini, who argues that it’s not enough to simply take a program that worked in a densely populated city and apply it to a remote town of 1,000 people.
“In rural areas, you don’t see [drug users] out in the open as much. There’s not a street scene like you might see in Baltimore or Philly,” she says. “And they’re not accustomed to outreach from harm reduction programs.”
And then there is the stigma of drug dependency, especially in small towns where it can seem like everyone knows your business. For addicts and their families, the fear of public shaming may deter requests for the life-saving kit.
In 2013, Linn published a brief on the effectiveness of naloxone when it’s made widely available in a community. He shared it with public officials in the state, and two years later, the legislature passed a law allowing physicians to prescribe naloxone to anyone who might have to use it — from drug users and their families to first responders answering an emergency call.
“What that did was open up the door to folks who were allowed under that legislation to start programs,” he says. For Linn, that helped local communities start distribution programs from late 2015 through 2016 and led to a collaboration with the state to distribute over 8,250 kits in 2017.
Among those receiving kits were emergency workers in Huntington. They began a pilot program that deploys a quick-response team whenever there’s an overdose. Not only do first responders administer naloxone to revive someone, but they also stay on the case by working to get the victim into a treatment program or a drug court.
Experts say the city has seen a dramatic turnaround in the number of people dying from overdoses.
“We have educated the community about what an overdose looks like,” says Kim Miller, director of corporate development for Prestera, a rehab clinic, and a clinical expert in opioid addiction. “In Huntington, we have allowed access to [naloxone], so that more people are carrying it than ever before. If you’re at a restaurant and someone overdoses in the restroom, for example, and you carrying naloxone, you could save their life.”
That belief has Ponton constantly scrambling to stock up on more of the kits. Currently, he relies on donations to keep a steady supply on hand at his sober-living home.
After the close call with his friend that night in November, Ponton asked the city’s fire chief, Jan Rader, for a kit she had on her.
“I hope we figure out a way to get more of these out there,” he said, before giving her a hug and heading back to his car.
Less than two weeks later, he used that same kit to revive someone else from yet another overdose.
Additional reporting by Kayle Hope.