On any given night, approximately 40% of San Francisco’s jail population identifies as homeless. Many of these vulnerable individuals will face jail time again after their release. A fraction will cycle in and out of the criminal justice system anywhere, between eight and 23 times in a single year.
“Arrest is not an inevitable result of homelessness,” said Jake Segal, vice president of advisory services at Social Finance, a nonprofit that mobilizes capital across the public and private sectors to improve social outcomes. “But stable housing with appropriate support can provide a strong buffer against future jail stays.”
If people have access to assistance immediately after their release — if they’re connected to housing support services and a case manager, for example — they’re less likely to end up incarcerated for another offense. Knowing that, last year Social Finance partnered with the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department and Tipping Point Community, a local philanthropic funder, to pilot a program that refers inmates to housing and other social services upon their release.
“Social Finance got its start working in criminal justice. Increasingly, much of our work focuses on homelessness, and this project is a natural intersection of the two,” Segal said of the San Francisco Jail Discharge Planning Project.
Much research was needed before the program could launch and for the Sheriff’s Department, time was of the essence. “We were building the airplane as we were flying it,” said Ali Riker, director of programs for the Sheriff’s Department. “We wanted to get [the program] up and running because there was such an overwhelming need, but the biggest question we had was, ‘Discharge to what?’ It’s fine to tell people, ‘This is where the shelters are,’ but we really needed more resources to offer, particularly for those familiar faces coming in and out of our jail cells.”
To help them assess and learn from other jail-discharge programs across the country, Social Finance turned to GLG. The world’s largest knowledge marketplace, GLG connects professionals from across sectors with more than 700,000 subject-matter experts — a vast network of expertise representing nearly every industry, market, and issue area. By enlisting GLG’s help, Social Finance was able to quickly and accurately examine trends and best practices among discharge and reentry programs.
“We wanted to find programs that focused on comprehensive, community-based collaborations with the intention of driving impact on recidivism and housing,” Segal said.
GLG tapped into its extensive database to identify the right experts, including former prison officials, community leaders and policy experts, and arranged phone calls with each within 48 hours.
Because of GLG, “we were able to get a more comprehensive understanding of the key factors we needed [to focus on] for the program,” said Segal.
For example, it can be surprisingly difficult to identify the most frequently arrested inmates within the jail system and effectively intervene. Their jail stays may be short — the result of minor violations — and they may be released in the dark of night. With the guidance and advice of GLG’s experts, the Sheriff’s Department and Social Finance set up a database to better locate those who need help and ensure they’re matched with high-quality housing and support services the moment they leave jail.
Segal and his team learned other best practices too, such as the importance of collaboration between jail staff and community partners; robust screening and assessment criteria of a client’s needs; and giving case managers a key role.
“Successful reentry starts with risk assessment while the client is still in custody,” said Segal, adding that caseworkers are really the “glue” of the project. “They can make sure vulnerable people get to where they need to go.”
One year after its launch, the San Francisco Jail Discharge Planning Project has helped some 200 people transition more smoothly from jail. If GLG hadn’t played a part, “we wouldn’t have had the same knowledge about what makes a great program,” Segal said.
Citing their positive experience, Segal and his team at Social Finance have already decided to draw on GLG’s experts for help with future projects. “It’s become an incredibly important part of our research,” he said.
This article was paid for and produced in partnership with GLG. GLG Social Impact delivers the power of GLG’s platform to the social sector.
Tag: prison reform
This Program Is Like Airbnb, but Only for the Formerly Incarcerated
*Last name has been removed to protect privacy
After a person leaves prison, they face a new set of challenges. Are they able to contact their family? Can they find a job? How are they going to eat?
And perhaps most urgently: Where will they sleep that night?
Many formerly incarcerated individuals don’t have a support network to turn to, which can make finding a place to live post-release an insurmountable task. Affordable housing can be costly and difficult to obtain, and landlords frequently won’t rent to formerly incarcerated individuals. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, former inmates are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.
“For people getting out of prison, the penalty hasn’t ended and re-entry is its own obstacle course that everybody has to navigate,” Alex Busansky, a former prosecutor and president of Impact Justice, a nonprofit that works in justice reform, told NPR. “And housing is essential to being able to get through that obstacle course. If you don’t have a place to sleep, to shower, to keep your things, it’s very difficult to think about doing anything else.”
Enter the Homecoming Project: an Airbnb-like program for former inmates in Alameda County, California.
Impact Justice launched the Homecoming Project pilot in 2018. This program pairs people recently released from long-term incarceration with homeowners who have bedrooms to spare.
After a lengthy screening process for both the formerly incarcerated and their hosts, the Homecoming Project sets up potential roommates. By pairing like-minded people (think cat vs. dog lovers, night owl vs. early bird, clean vs. messy), the hope is to create a positive living situation with the potential for friendship. Before moving in together, the pair meets to discuss rules, preferences and if it feels like a compatible match or no. If yes, the host receives a subsidy of $25 a day and the former inmate gets a room for up to six months.
While the project is still in its pilot phase, as of this past April, 10 former inmates have been matched with hosts, and program officials hope to double that figure by the end of this year. The first former inmate has successfully left his home and moved to his own place.
For DeLora*, she gained more than just a place to rest with the Homecoming Project.
After serving eight years for conspiracy to distribute heroin, the 32-year-old had no job or stable shelter. Then she found the Homecoming Project and was welcomed into Sabina Crocette’s home.
“I just saw her as a dynamic young woman who could come back into the community and be a great resource to others,” Crocette told KPIX. “You have to recognize people’s humanity. People are not the thing that they have done. That is not who they are.”
Since arriving in Crocette’s home, DeLora has been mentored by Crocette, and in return, DeLora has mentored Crocette’s daughter.
“We didn’t know that the hosts were going to be serving — by proxy — as a role model, showing them what it’s like to live in the community,” Homecoming Project coordinator Terah Lawyer told KPIX.
Just as Airbnb has expanded across the globe, leaders at Impact Justice hope to create the same ripple effect in this compassionate twist on the sharing economy.
“[The Homecoming Project] says you’re a person and we’re going to treat you like a person and give you the footholds and the scaffolding to be able to come back home and to be a full member of society just like anybody else,” Busansky said.
If you live in Alameda County and have a room to offer or are in need of a place to stay, visit the Homecoming Project.
More: People in Prisons Are Learning to Code — and It Might Alter the Course of Their Lives
10 Outstanding Solutions of 2018
While it’s fair to say that this year was a tumultuous one, not all news hit below the belt: For many people working for change in their communities, it was a year of hard-won progress, as well as continued hope for a brighter future. Here, we present our favorite solutions of 2018, and highlight the achievements of those working to make America a better place.
Thousands Are Missing or Dead Along the Border. Meet the People Trying to Find Them
NationSwell’s multimedia series “Aid at the Border” explores the impact of humanitarian efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the fourth and final installment in the series, we meet some of the people determined to save lives or recover the bodies of would-be immigrants who vanish in the desert.
At This Prison, Puppies and Inmates Give Each Other Purpose
Puppies Behind Bars is a nonprofit with one mission: Providing the incarcerated with a sense of responsibility and self-worth by allowing them to train service dogs for veterans. A woman from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility explains how it helped give her life purpose.
A Vision of Healing, and Hope, for Formerly Incarcerated Women
Topeka K. Sam met Vanee Sykes while they were both incarcerated at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. Now out, they’ve dedicated their lives to helping other women reintegrate into society by providing them with shelter and food, in the form of “Hope Houses.”
How to Stop Human Trafficking, Through the Eyes of a Trucker
There are close to 2 million truckers on America’s roads and highways. One organization, Truckers Against Trafficking, is teaching some of them how to spot and stop sex trafficking in its tracks.
For Some Families of Murder Victims, Help Comes Only With a Fight
A 1984 law makes restitution available to anyone affected by violent crime…unless you are “responsible” for your own death. One organization, Every Murder Is Real (EMIR), is trying to shift the narrative around such homicide victims, by helping families file reimbursement claims and pushing the state to remove the denial barrier for families touched by homicide.
Beyond Hot Wings: How Architecture Is Helping Buffalo Make Its Comeback
A century ago, Buffalo, New York, was known as The City of Light. Then the bottom fell out of the local economy. After decades of stagnation and urban blight, Buffalo’s architecture and cultural offerings are bringing people back in unprecedented numbers.
How to Build a Better Jail
A prison sentence used to mean inhumane treatment of inmates and subpar working conditions for both prisoners and guards. But these architects are reimagining prisons as community hubs, thus reducing the stigma of incarceration and easing the transition back into society.
Born Into Rehab: Giving Life to West Virginia’s Tiniest Opioid Victims
Huntington, West Virginia, has been called America’s opiate capital, and in 2016 the number of babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) — a disease caused by exposure to opiates in utero — was 16 times the national average. Lily’s Place is dedicated to weaning babies off of opiates, as well as studying the long-term effects of NAS, so that all affected children can live healthy lives.
This Photographer Is Shining a Light on the Dignity of Indigenous Women
A shocking 84 percent of indigenous women will face physical violence in their lifetimes, and are 10 times more likely to get murdered. This photographer, a resident of the Yakama Tribe in Toppenish, Washington, hopes to encourage awareness of and action against the issue through her work.
Butterflies Without Borders
The monarch butterfly population has declined by 90 percent over the last two decades. To help save them from extinction, places like San Antonio, Texas, have become “champion cities,” thanks to their efforts in eliminating pesticide use, planting pollinators and educating locals and visitors at the annual Butterfly and Pollinator Festival.
Rape Behind Bars: Stopping the Cycle of Violence
Nicole Wolfe was just two months into her life sentence for attempted murder when she says a lieutenant at the Central California Women’s Facility began raping her. About six months later, in the fall of 1998, a nurse at the prison also began sexually assaulting her.
It was hell for Wolfe, who was assaulted continuously for a year while she was at the California prison.
In 2000, Wolfe was transferred to a different prison. There, she met with a counselor and for the first time was able to process all of the abuse she’d faced over the years. She says the counselor, Debora Heaps, changed her life — because Heaps believed her story.
“She was just so open and receptive and gentle and understanding, and had so much information, too,” Wolfe tells NationSwell. “She made me feel like a human… It was like she opened up a path to recovery for the first time in my life. I could see my life could be different, and better.”
Wolfe is hardly alone in having experienced sexual assault while behind bars. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that four percent of adult inmates in jails and prisons had reported a sexual assault, and about half of those instances of assault were from corrections staff. Mapping that data over the total incarcerated population of the U.S., it’s estimated that 200,000 imprisoned people endure sexual assault each year.
Through the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which passed in 2003, detention facilities are partnering with their local rape crisis centers to provide support services to incarcerated populations. Those services can take the form of access to a rape crisis hotline, the ability to write letters to rape crisis centers or receive in-person counseling, much like Wolfe was able to receive from Heaps. And counselors like Heaps can accompany inmates to forensic exams if they decide to report an assault.
AN AMBITIOUS BILL
When President George W. Bush signed PREA into law, it was intended to curb the thousands of reported cases of sexual misconduct — a problem that advocates describe as an epidemic — and to establish grants for nonprofits to aid in eliminating rape in prisons.
PREA, though ambitious, was an aspirational piece of legislation that required deep and time-consuming analyses of inmate conditions. And so prison rapes continued: Four years after the bill was passed, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that an estimated 70,000 people were abused in prisons the previous year.
In 2013, the Department of Justice updated PREA with a set of standards that required prisons and jails to provide inmates with access to outside counseling or emotional support services. Private and public prisons, local jails, juvenile detention centers, immigrant detention centers, and community corrections facilities must now provide access to outside emotional support services to any inmate who is sexually assaulted in prison and to inmates who experienced past sexual assaults.
Women who face sexual harassment in detention have often faced it before: 86 percent of women in jail report experiencing sexual violence prior to incarceration, according to a 2016 study by the nonprofit research and policy organization Vera Institute of Justice.
But women often don’t come forward about their assaults.
In 1995, only a quarter of U.S. women reported incidents of sexual abuse to police. And even though that number increased to 59 percent in 2005, reports dropped dramatically back to 1990s levels by 2010, according to a 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
Karin Stone, director of client services for Women’s Center High Desert, says people who experience sexual abuse as children or repeated sexual assault usually turn to crime as a coping mechanism.
“If you start to, we call it ‘peel the onion,’ you discover those layers of trauma,” says Stone. “It amazes me sometimes that they’ve survived as long as they have.”
The pattern — abuse, trauma, crime — is one that Stone says will continue to repeat itself even after inmates leave prison if they never receive therapy or learn healthy coping mechanisms.
The quality of support services for incarcerated survivors varies widely across the U.S., but recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that the PREA may be having a positive effect in that more inmates are reporting sexual assault. In 2011, correctional administrators received 8,768 reports of sexual misconduct from inmates. In 2015, that number more than tripled to 24,661 reports.
“You would think that more reports [mean] a rise in incidents,” says Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, communications director at Just Detention International (JDI), an organization devoted to ending sexual abuse behind bars. “But in fact the most important thing that it tells us is that people are coming forward, which is what we want.”
“I WAS LIVING MY WORST NIGHTMARE”
Wolfe says she was first sexually assaulted by a family member when she was only 4 years old. She was assaulted again during her youth and also as a young adult. Part of the problem, she says, is that she grew up in a family where nobody knew what was going on behind closed doors, which is why no one tried to stop the abuse.
“I didn’t know anything different,” she says, adding that sexual abuse “was just a given” in her life.
But abuse tends to follow people throughout their lives.
In 1997, Wolfe says she felt trapped in an abusive marriage, and tried to kill her then-husband in what she described as a desperate act to escape the cycle of abuse. “I couldn’t get away,” she says. “I couldn’t see my way out.” She was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder. It was only when she was locked up behind bars that she says she finally felt safe.
But that feeling of safety wouldn’t last. Within her first year of incarceration, Wolfe says she was raped by a prison lieutenant. She was afraid to report him because he had power and influence over her life in prison. On Sundays, he ran the gate that inmates had to go through to see visitors, and he would assault her before she went through the gates before her visits. “I would go to my visits just…out of my mind,” says Wolfe. “I was afraid to say anything to anybody because I was serving a life sentence. Nobody ever believed me. Why [would] they believe me now?”
Wolfe felt like she couldn’t trust any of the psychologists who worked for the prison. When she did finally seek care, she was abused yet again by a nurse on staff. For six months, she was repeatedly assaulted by both the lieutenant and the nurse.
“I thought, I’m supposed to be here for the rest of my life, and is this the rest of my life?” she says. “I was living in my worst nightmare.”
Wolfe says the nurse who assaulted her was eventually caught by a prison official and convicted of sex with a confined person. Wolfe then took a risk and told a prison psychologist “in confidence” about the lieutenant, but the psychologist reported it to the prison, and another investigation began. Wolfe doesn’t know the outcome of that investigation.
NationSwell requested records for both the lieutenant and the nurse, but neither were provided by the time of publication. A spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) confirmed that the nurse worked for the prison, but said the department could not comment on any investigation. CDCR sent NationSwell the following statement regarding investigations into both the nurse and the lieutenant:
“We can’t speak to the specific allegations mentioned here, but staff sexual misconduct is an issue we take very seriously. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) maintains a zero tolerance for staff sexual misconduct, and thoroughly investigates all allegations. If an investigation proves there was wrongdoing, CDCR staff may face disciplinary action and/or referral for criminal prosecution.”
In 2000, Wolfe was transferred to California Institution for Women, a state prison. It was there where Wolfe met Heaps for the first time. Heaps, who is now the director of programs at Riverside Area Rape Crisis Center, was one of the first counselors sent into prisons to provide in-person therapy to inmates who had been sexually assaulted, and also to inmates who had faced sexual harassment prior to their incarceration.
“From the very beginning, it was like there was someone I could really be completely honest with and feel like I had complete confidentiality,” Wolfe says.
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE OF HELP
An increase in allegations doesn’t mean an increase in justice for survivors. Of the more than 24,000 allegations of sexual violence from inmates in 2015, only 1,473 were substantiated by investigations, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report released this past July.
“It shows that the investigations are failing,” says Lerner-Kinglake. “It’s simply not believable that the overwhelming majority of people are making it up or that there wasn’t enough evidence.”
Though there’s no research that proves access to counseling and emotional support helps incarcerated survivors of sexual assault, other rehabilitative programs in prisons and jails have proven to successfully reduce recidivism.
A May 2018 White House report found that mental health programs and substance abuse programs reduce recidivism by 21 percent and 17 percent, respectively. And a number of reports have found that therapy reduces PTSD and anxiety for survivors of rape who aren’t incarcerated.
In lieu of empirical evidence, advocates also point to the experiences they’re having every day with survivors in detention.
Jennifer Jeanquart, a prison rape crisis advocate who works for Sexual Trauma Services of the Midlands in six men’s detention facilities in South Carolina, shared a letter she received from one of the clients she counseled.
“I don’t know where I would be if it was not for you. I can never thank you enough for the help you gave me,” the letter reads. “I’ll always remember you, Mrs. J. You have inspired me to help other people like myself.”
Jessica Seipel, program director at JDI, also wrote letters to a survivor named Joe Booth, who says he was raped by his cellmate. Booth later told Seipel that she was the first person who asked him his name. Staff at the prison had previously only called him by his inmate number. Seipel says she was just doing her job and supporting a survivor, but “little did I know that for this person…my letters were like a lifeline for him that saved his life.”
Heaps says none of her clients ever blamed other people for the crimes they committed, but that counseling helped them discover what led them down that path.
“Trauma is a very complex thing,” Heaps says. “If not processed through counseling and therapy, it can lead down a very dark path of vulnerability and victimization.”
Heaps and Wolfe worked together for more than a year, and Wolfe says that it completely changed her life. In 2013, she was released from prison after multiple appeals to the parole board. She says Heaps gave her the “tool box” she needed to break free of the cycles that led to her abuse.
“If I hadn’t been able to figure out how to live my life without being abused, and if I hadn’t found my voice, then I’d never be where I am today,” Wolfe says. “I could very easily be back in an abusive relationship, killed by an abusive man, or cowering somewhere, afraid of my own shadow. And I’m not.”
Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them
America’s criminal justice system currently houses more than 2 million people — that’s more per capita than any other nation on earth. Even worse: Many are repeat offenders who haven’t been offered the support or resources to get their lives back on track once released.
This, along with the stigma attached to a criminal record, has a devastating effect on their job prospects, with an estimated 60 percent still out of work one year after release.
A new initiative, backed in part by the singer John Legend, is hoping to reverse those dire statistics. Unlocked Futures is a joint project of the philanthropic fund New Profit, Bank of America and Legend’s own nonprofit, FreeAmerica.
Over the course of 16 months, the accelerator, which recently announced its inaugural class, will provide support, funding and mentoring to eight people chosen for their visionary prison-reform efforts. These social entrepreneurs have more in common than just a dedication to helping former inmates flourish on the outside: All of them have been either incarcerated themselves or impacted by the criminal justice system in some way.
“Too often are formerly incarcerated individuals locked out of job opportunities because of their past,” Legend said last spring, when Unlocked Futures was announced. “I have seen that entrepreneurship is a viable way for formerly incarcerated individuals to build sustainable livelihoods and contribute to their communities and neighborhoods.”
The initiative will support entrepreneurship as a powerful pathway out of the incarceration cycle, which costs America $80 billion a year in hard dollars and untold billions more in its negative impact on vulnerable families and communities. By amplifying organizations built by those whose lives have been rocked by the judicial system, Unlocked Futures also hopes to change public perception about the humanity and potential of people who refuse to be defined by their worst mistake.
The ventures founded by the first cohort of entrepreneurs and nourished by Unlocked Futures range from an app called Flikshop that lets people send photo postcards to loved ones behind bars to the Bronx, N.Y.-based Hope House, which provides transitional housing for formerly incarcerated women.
After spending a chunk of his teens and 20s in prison, Will Avila founded Clean Decisions, a commercial kitchen cleaning company that exclusively employs formerly incarcerated men in Washington, D.C., and its nonprofit offshoot, Changing Perceptions, which provides job training and reentry support to recently released inmates. Avila credits Unlocked Futures with validating his efforts and for giving him the confidence to inspire others.
“We are always waiting for someone to come tell us that we did something wrong, and as we get more success we struggle to know what to do because we don’t feel like we deserve it or that we belong,” says Avila. “This normalizes success ― others seeing us as actual human beings who can succeed even though we’ve gone to prison.”
In the nation’s capital, where Avila grew up, 71 percent of returning citizens were unemployed in 2015.
“There are a lot of reasons that’s the case,” he says, “but we all have felt that pain, as well as the pain of homelessness, substance abuse to numb this pain and anger that leads to violence. For this reason, when we do start our own enterprises, we want to give back. Entrepreneurship is a powerful cycle because almost every returning citizen I know is crafting a business that helps others who have served time.”
Amanda Alexander, founder of the Detroit Justice Center, which provides community lawyering services and economic opportunities to those in and around the prison system, asserts that there is a boldness to the group’s ideas, as well as a sense of urgency.
“Folks in the cohort are always talking about the brothers and sisters they left behind in prison and wanting to reach a hand back to them,” says Alexander, whose father was locked up during a portion of her childhood. “I was fortunate to have support through my dad’s incarceration, and that’s allowed us to have a lifelong relationship. I want the same for other families. My aim is to ensure that families caught up in the criminal justice system aren’t shut out of the city’s future.”
And, she adds, Unlocked Futures helps good ideas spread faster.
“Ultimately, it’s not about the eight of us and our work. It’s about movement building,” Alexander says. “Mass incarceration has touched every part of our society, so it’s going to take a broad movement to bring it down.”
As for Jason Cleveland, founder of tech platform Obodo, which helps nonprofits serving returning citizens streamline data and training systems, Unlocked Futures affirms what he’s long believed ― that there are real market opportunities within the prison-reform movement and that it is possible to both care and prosper.
“For too long, efforts to serve have been hampered by lack of access to capital and an outdated notion that to do good, a person or an organization needs to be impoverished themselves,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses; it is about seeing problems as opportunities. It is about seeing beyond the now to what is possible.”
Whenever Cleveland visits prisons around his home state of Missouri, teaching what he calls “the entrepreneurial mindset,” he encounters a glut of potential business leaders.
“Most people there do not understand that they are already entrepreneurs. They don’t see that they have been finding unique solutions to problems their entire lives,” Cleveland says. “Oftentimes, when these people are provided with a framework for making different decisions and given the tools they need to move forward, they do.”
Correction: A previous version of this article indicated that Amanda Alexander’s father had been incarcerated more than once during her childhood. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
How Today’s Street Artists Are Mobilizing Activists
Josh MacPhee grew up looking at art. His father was an artist, and the discipline helped him cope with his teenage years in the mid-1980s, when the DIY punk scene was gaining steam in the U.S.
“Some people were in bands, some people did ’zines and some people, like myself, did artwork,” says MacPhee, now a graphic designer and street artist in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I got involved in politics through that independent culture, using my skills to address the issues and communities I felt were important.”
That was more than 25 years ago. In the decades since, graffiti and street art has gone from underground movement to mainstream acceptance — it’s no longer rare for rogue wheat-pasted and spray-painted art to be sold at Christie’s auction houses, for one. Driving this change are artists like MacPhee, who is also a founder of the radical-art distribution project called Justseeds. Their visual representations of hot-button issues like climate change, immigration and civil rights are more in demand than ever.
There’s a long history of using art to make a political statement. Nearly a century ago, the antiwar Dadaists and painters like Diego Rivera, a dedicated Marxist who advocated for workers’ rights, were creating art meant to drive social change. Today that tradition continues, albeit in a different form. Thanks to the ubiquity of social media and the elevated profiles of world-famous street artists like Banksy, it’s easier than ever for artists to reach the public with their images of protest.
It’s also allowed collectives like the Seattle-based Amplifier to hit upon a unique niche: commissioning mission-driven artists to produce works that can be printed, for free, by activists and others agitating for change, both in the U.S. and around the world.
“I don’t think the world has ever seen an art machine like this: one that does not exist to make money,” says executive director Aaron Huey, who founded Amplifier in 2014. “We turn any money that does come in into more art and awareness. We build campaigns that can and do change the national narrative.”
Huey has friends in high places. He was able to recruit big names like Shepard Fairey — probably best known for his Obama “Hope” poster — and the muralist Mata Ruda to contribute art to campaigns ranging from voting rights to prison reform. Early last year, in the run up to the worldwide Women’s March protests, Amplifier launched a campaign called We The People, placing its artwork in full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times and USA Today. The group also distributed more than 30,000 placards, some of which were also designed by Fairey, in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Half a million more people downloaded and printed the posters themselves. Featuring stylized photographs of a diverse group of Americans, the campaign’s goal is to encourage dialogue about national identity and values.
“It’s an opportunity to represent marginalized groups and to get stories out that aren’t always in the mainstream press,” says Chip Thomas, who works under the name Jetsonorama in Arizona. He’s known for wheat-pasting enlarged photos of residents of the Navajo nation, where he also works as a family doctor, onto the sides of buildings, water tanks, grain silos and fences around the reservation. His work was highlighted by Amplifier last spring during the People’s Climate March in D.C. and hundreds of other cities around the world.
“The most I can hope for is that [my work] would stimulate people to see some things differently and not just think about taking action, but actually doing it,” says Thomas.
For MacPhee, whose designs were also featured in Amplifier’s climate-change crusade, the most effective campaigns aren’t the ones tied to large national demonstrations, but rather those targeted to local communities.
“I’m happy Amplifier did what it did with the Women’s March, but I try not to spend my time doing grandiose cultural work,” MacPhee says. “[Change happens] in actual physical places, not on the internet, so it has to connect to people on the ground.”
Last year, MacPhee partnered with Amplifier to design and distribute oversized foam fists for the New York–based Close Rikers campaign. The props were carried by demonstrators during a series of protests in the city against the massive Rikers Island jail complex.
“They were used over and over again. They just have become a staple of the campaign,” says MacPhee, who will be an artist in residency at Amplifier’s Seattle headquarters in 2018. “One of the things I’ve always wanted — and I think many artists who work in this space want — is to print 20,000 posters and bring them out on palettes to demonstrations and have them disappear. One of the things about Amplifier is that they’ve been able to actualize that.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that MacPhee runs Justseeds and is currently an artist in residence at Amplify and that Amplify started in 2010. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
The Long, Strange Journey of U.S. Drug Courts
The United States isn’t exactly an international role model when it comes to incarceration; out of all developed countries, we imprison the most people, and not very cheaply.
Close to half of those incarcerated in federal and state prisons are there because of drugs, but that hasn’t solved the nation’s ongoing drug crisis. And even though America is safer now than ever before, putting a glut of people behind bars isn’t the reason why.
The failures in the American justice system to tackle the drug epidemic — now in the form of prescription opioids and heroin — has forced the hand of lawmakers to reach across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions. Whereas prison reform used to be relegated to Democrats and libertarians, many Republicans have started to recognize the need for a change in a judicial system whose costs have far outpaced state and local spending on education.
One of these bipartisan solutions has been the implementation of drug treatment courts, an alternative to the traditional court system in which low-level offenders are kept out of prison. Under close supervision of a judge, addicts agree to undergo up to 18 months of mandatory sobriety meetings, group therapy sessions and random drug testing.
A COURT MADE FOR TREATMENT
In 1986, President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to build prisons and funnel money into treatment, but the most impactful (and most covert) aspect of the bill was imposing mandatory minimum sentences on drug users.
In 1982, before anti-drug measures were signed into law, there were just under 41,000 people serving time for drug offenses. That number skyrocketed throughout the 1980s and ’90s. By 2015, close to 470,000 people were incarcerated for drugs, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that analyzes U.S. Bureau of Justice data.
But incarcerating drug users didn’t help reduce crime.
In response, the first drug courts popped up in Miami in 1989, a time when the scourge of drugs and crime had made the nation’s most powerful CEOs rank the city as one of the worst places to establish a business, much less a place they wanted to live.
The drug courts started small at first, with only 42 programs in place by 1994, according to a report produced by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Less than two decades later, by 2010, the number of programs had reached 2,500. But despite that growth, as of 2008, only 3.8 percent of all arrestees considered at risk for drug dependence were actually diverted to a drug court for treatment.
SUCCESS, WITH A SIDE OF SKEPTICISM
Initially, the jury was out on the impact of drug courts, though a 1997 GAO report found an incredibly wide margin of success. For example, out of the 65,000 people examined in 1997 who had gone through drug courts, between 8 and 95 percent had completed the program, and retention within the program ranged from 31 to 100 percent.
But as the drug court system matured and grew, so did its effectiveness. When it was analyzed again in 2011 by the same office, the rearrest rates of those who had completed their drug court mandates were significantly lower — up to 58 percent less — than those who hadn’t. The report concluded that “drug courts produce statistically significant reductions in drug use [and] in self-reported crime.”
However, the success (and failure) of drug courts relies heavily on the kind of treatment it administers. In other words, because of ideological differences in how to best treat addicts — which pits medical intervention against a cold-turkey approach — and the varying state laws, not all drug court programs have been created equally.
When courts recommend medically assisted treatment, or MAT, addicts are provided methadone or buprenorphine to help wean them off opiates. The practice is recommended and well-regarded among numerous world and national coalitions, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations. The research backs it up: In Baltimore, for instance, access to methadone and MAT reduced overdose deaths by 50 percent, according to a 14-year study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
But methadone, which has been used for treating opioid dependency for over 50 years, has its detractors. There is evidence that some people stay on methadone for years, leading critics to argue that these addicts are simply swapping one drug for the other.
A 2010 survey of U.S. drug court programs found that just more than half, or 56 percent, provided MAT. And though that figure is higher than in 1999, when only 39 percent offered the treatment, that’s still a wide gap considering methadone treatment has been shown time and again to reduce overdose deaths.
In giving reasons for their opposition to MAT, one survey respondent said that “Our drug court team feels that allowing our participants to take medication in order to ‘detox’ from one substance could result in new addiction to another substance.” Another court surveyed claimed that “When these drugs are used people are substituting one high for another.”
The aversion to methadone and buprenorphine has led some judges to enforce immediate sobriety. But that approach is highly ineffective, says the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, and only heightens the risk of future drug overdoses and deaths.
A BIPARTISAN SOLUTION
The promise of drug courts has led to some unlikely alliances. Liberal commentator Van Jones and Newt Gingrich, the conservative former speaker of the House, have teamed up to speak out on the opioid epidemic — and the political establishment is carefully watching their efforts to see how bipartisanship could help solve the crisis.
In a recent op-ed for TIME, both men made an argument for drug courts, writing, “What started as an experiment has now become a successful method for helping people with serious substance use disorders get on a path to long-term recovery.”
In New Hampshire last year, then-Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat and current U.S. senator, signed a law that directed $2 million in matching state grants to drug courts — a move that was widely praised, even by the conservative think tank American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
“Saving taxpayer dollars is a central pillar of a public official’s duty, and given the overall criminal justice cost of opioid dependence is estimated to be $5.2 billion annually, measures that seek to reduce that cost are necessary, especially if such measures simultaneously reduce crime rates,” wrote Ronald. J. Lampard, director of the Criminal Justice Reform Task Force at ALEC.
And there are more across-the-aisle measures being introduced. Earlier this month, a bipartisan bill was introduced that would reduce sentences for low-level drug crimes and give inmates with drug problems more access to treatment. If it passes, it could be another important footnote in the fight for prison reform — and for recognizing that treatment, not prolonged incarceration, is the best way to address addiction in a more meaningful, and effective, manner.
Continue reading “The Long, Strange Journey of U.S. Drug Courts”
This Nonprofit Has Hit on the Way to Keep Ex-Offenders Out of Prison
On a gray morning earlier this year, former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey was talking with Omari Atiba, a convicted felon, in Newark when they were interrupted by Atiba’s phone. As the recently released prisoner’s cell blasted the ’70s disco staple “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” McGreevey couldn’t help but nod along, full white-man-overbite style.
Few could blame the former politician for feeling upbeat. For the past three years, McGreevey — no stranger himself to controversy, having resigned his governorship in 2004 — has been working to remove the obstacles that face ex-inmates once they’re released. On the morning they met, Atiba was just two days out of a New Jersey state prison, where he served 30 years for murder.
Transforming ex-convicts like Atiba into responsible, engaged civilians is a project that has earned McGreevey the support of Chris Christie and four other former Garden State governors. It also led him to John Koufos, a former criminal defense lawyer whose own fall from grace after a drunken hit-and-run accident in 2012 resulted in disbarment and 16 months in prison. Today, Koufos is second-in-command at New Jersey Reentry Corporation (NJRC), the nonprofit founded by McGreevey in 2014.
NJRC has five outposts in the state, including Jersey City, Kearney, Newark, Paterson and Toms River. Its mission is to overhaul onetime prisoners’ lives by overseeing their sobriety, and training and placing them in meaningful jobs. The ambitious project carries an annual price tag of $3 million, which is funded largely by the state.
With a roster of around 1,600 clients, NJRC’s success rate has been praised by the Manhattan Institute as among the best of the New York City–area reentry prison programs. According to a recent analysis by the think tank, U.S. prisons release approximately 650,000 inmates every year. Within the first 12 months, more than half are unable to secure identification and jobs that earn them enough legal income to survive.
But certain programs, like NJRC’s, are proving successful in preventing such scenarios. From January to July 2016, NJRC placed around 1,000 former prisoners in jobs spanning sales, transportation, food services, manufacturing and public works, many with on-ramps to more lucrative positions with building-trade unions.
That 62 percent job-placement rate likely helped NJRC achieve its low 19.7 percent recidivism. Though that figure is impressive, it spans just six months; the true measure of success will be where these former inmates are five years from now. As the most recent national survey by the Department of Justice found, an estimated three-quarters of ex-offenders are arrested for a new crime within five years of release.
Understanding McGreevey’s and Koufos’ backgrounds helps explain their strategy. McGreevey, as former governor, knows New Jersey influencers, like the chair of the state DMV, and has persuaded them to do things like untangle knotty driver’s records to clear a path toward regaining the right to drive, often essential to maintaining a job. And Koufos, who handled hundreds of pro bono cases for the NAACP before he went to prison, has recruited close to 70 young lawyers to clear up unresolved past infractions such as traffic tickets that can, and often do, return former inmates to their cells.
“It’s incredibly sad,” McGreevey said. “So many of our clients have a sense that catastrophe is right around the corner.”
Sadder still is that often they’re right. Koufos says missteps like missed child support payments can easily secure ex-offenders a return ticket to prison. “A lot of times folks don’t participate in family court” because they’re scared of the outcome, which may include fines. “When they have a lawyer holding their hand, they’re no longer afraid.”
Though they are both the heroes of their own second acts, Koufos and McGreevey are an odd couple. McGreevey studied to be a priest after resigning his Trenton post. Koufos’ wobbly relationship with religion surfaces only at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “More jobs, less Jesus,” Koufos often reminds McGreevey when they’re talking to clients. But ultimately McGreevey is less concerned with helping clients find God than with helping them find footing in a social landscape built to topple them.
He meets weekly with prisoners across New Jersey to explain NJRC’s mission as well as his own rocky road to redemption. He was the closeted gay governor who left in disgrace, he reminds prisoners. What if it had taken him until his deathbed to come to the realizations that have helped him move forward?
Both men see every day as a chance to stub out others’ doomsday narratives. Atiba, the convicted murderer, now weighs fish in the seafood department at Newark’s ShopRite.
And Patrick D’Aiuto, who once lived in the cell across from Koufos and was released from prison in 2013 after 18 years for armed robbery, is now a commercial roofer with a union. He makes in the high $20s per hour and recently bought a condo.
“I spent pretty much my whole adult life in prison, and I knew that a lot of these programs can be tongue-in-cheek. I always wondered, Why doesn’t the media go to these people who claim to run these great programs and say, ‘If you actually helped someone get a good job, produce that person.’ They’d never be able to produce anybody.”
NJRC, D’Aiuto says, is different: “They’re not just getting guys jobs at Burger King. They’re getting them jobs with benefits that will get them a middle-class existence, so they can lead a productive life.”
Not that they succeed every time. A healthy percentage of clients, most of whom are addicts being treated through NJRC’s recovery channels, relapse. If a client is using, he gets a warning. If there is a second infraction, he’s out. Koufos is generally the one who does the kicking out.
He doesn’t mind, though.
“I dedicated myself to a life of service because of the pain I caused when I was addicted,” Koufos says. “If we can help the next guy recover, we stop the next victim from happening.”
Continue reading “This Nonprofit Has Hit on the Way to Keep Ex-Offenders Out of Prison”
A Prison With No Walls
This isn’t Thomas DiSilvestre’s first stint in prison. At 23 years of age, he’s already been inside New York’s Rikers Island and the Ulster Correctional Facility for felony drug charges. His arms are scarred, and his almond-shaped eyes are downcast on the table in front of him.
“You have to always worry about people running around, cutting you,” he says, talking about his previous times in prison. “You don’t feel safe.”
DiSilvestre is incarcerated again. In May 2016, he was caught breaking into someone’s home stealing, according to the police report. Being his second offense, he took a plea deal with the Queens County, N.Y., district attorney for attempted burglary and received another three years in jail — a terrifying prospect.
But DiSilvestre didn’t end up in the same prison environment as before. He’s currently held about an hour south of the Canadian border near Lake Placid at the Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility.
To be clear, inmates at Moriah do not receive shock therapy, as its formal name seems to infer. Rather, non-violent felons, like DiSilvestre, are “shocked” by therapeutic social programs and military-style schedules designed to lower recidivism rates.
At their height, shock programs were in more than 50 prisons nationwide, but most have been shut down over the years due to inefficiencies and poor outcomes.
Still, there are two shock programs in New York that have proven effective and have drawn praise from state department heads, academics well-versed on military-style prisons and inmates. The prisons boast both lower recidivism rates and lower costs. Advocates say it’s because of their focus on social programs and therapy, rather than just military drills and discipline.
Luis Tena, a 43-year-old Bronx, N.Y., resident, was caught dealing drugs in 1994 and sent to Lakeview.
“I actually learned about the people I was hurting. The same people I was selling to, I was hurting, and I was victimizing my own people,” he says, adding that the boot camp training is what gave him the discipline to walk into a job interview post-incarceration.
NEW YORK’S UNIQUE SHOCK INCARCERATION PROGRAM
At a time when there’s bipartisan support for the overhaul of America’s prison system, alternatives to traditional incarceration are being examined — especially for low-level drug offenders. Last year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to reform the state’s prisons by providing more education and keeping youth offenders out of jail. But little attention was given to New York’s shock program.
Two prisons in New York house shock programs: Moriah, in Mineville, and Lakeview, in Brocton. The facilities can serve more than 1,000 inmates combined, including women. During sentencing, judges give some felons a choice to go to Moriah or Lakeview in exchange for a shorter prison sentence.
“Before I went in, I couldn’t hold a job, I was an ignorant prick,” says Mike Semar, a former inmate at Lakeview’s shock program. “But when I got out, I wasn’t the old me I was before. That guy is dead and buried, he’s in the past.”
Cheryl Clark, a doctor in health and human services, developed the shock program in New York in 1987. By the early 1990s, its popularity increased as the crack epidemic (similar to today’s widespread addiction of opioids) swept through poor cities and neighborhoods across America.
NationSwell repeatedly asked to speak with Clark about shock incarceration and New York’s program, but she was unavailable for comment.
Interviews with current Moriah inmates, people formerly held at Lakeview and Moriah, and incarceration experts reveal that there are several factors that make New York’s program different. For one, the facilities themselves are unique. Unlike other prisons with towering three-story-high walls and guard posts with armed corrections officers, there’s very little of that at Lakeview — and none at Moriah.
“At other prisons, you’ll see a more physically hands-on policy with inmates when they act up or misbehave or throw them in a cell,” says Kim Schaefer, program administrator at Moriah. “We don’t even have cells here.”
Secondly, the New York prisons operate what are considered “second generation” shock programs, according to a report by the Department of Justice. New York shifted the focus from boot camp prisons, which were proven ineffective in the mid-1990s, to incarceration facilities that focus on therapy and education. Moriah and Lakeview’s success, even when others have failed, seems to be how they merge discipline with education and “self-based treatment,” which is different from typical prisons, which offer very few — if any — therapy programs.
According to shock’s prescriptive routine, a quarter of inmates’ time is spent in boot camp-style training and discipline. The remainder of their schedule is divided as follows: 25 percent on education, about 33 percent on therapy and group programs and the remainder on hard labor.
“When you teach people about self development, self knowledge and self awareness, you build those cognitive skills that are imperative to go back to employment and be part of their community,” says Katherine Vockins, founder and executive director of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, which uses art in prisons to teach felons how to make better decisions upon release.
Research shows that programs focusing on education are more effective in preventing felons from committing crimes in the future.
“It’s not a matter of contention among the department, this program works,” says Martin Horn, executive director of the New York State Sentencing Commission and a distinguished lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “The program has proven its utility and is now integral to New York’s prison system.”
LIFE BEHIND (NONEXISTENT) BARS
When inmates look out their windows at Moriah, where the prison has taken occupancy of a 19th-century former iron mine, they see ponds filled with geese and mountains in the distance.
It feels more like a camp, says Boyce “Bud” D. Rawson II, who at 5:15 a.m. is barreling through Moriah’s front door gleefully.
“Hey boys!” he hollers to the staff. The man is enormous; he stands above six foot and has the build of a linebacker.
Rawson jaunts up the hill behind the administrative building passing by a flock of geese that he calls the prison’s “jailbirds.” He walks into one of the prison’s barracks where more than 40 felons are sleeping and picks up a touch dial phone.
“Ready,” he says, and within a minute, the speakers blast a crackled version of “Reverie.” The inmates jump out of their beds, count off and rush to the shower. They’re given 15 minutes to shave and get dressed before lining up outside for the morning drill, which is a grueling two hours of military exercises followed by a two-mile run.
The boot camp format isn’t for every inmate — even Rawson admits to that. “You have to really buy into this. You have to make that connection that what you learn here you can use outside this place.”
Schaefer, who was hesitant about working in corrections before seeing the atmosphere at Moriah, acknowledges that it’s unique. “It’s still a prison — we never forget that — but the goal here is different than other prisons. At other prisons upstate, they carry batons. Our officers carry whistles.”
A SUCCESSFUL MODEL
Other states have modeled the shock program, focusing heavily on the boot camp aspect, but prison advocates regard those as detrimental.
“Some of the people who are in prison have suffered a tremendous amount of abuse in their past, be it physical or mental,” says Vockins. “I can’t imagine these military programs could work for everyone because it could reacquaint them with that old trauma.”
Dave Allen, an officer at Moriah, says that the boot camp portion of shock is simply a way to get inmates focused. “The point isn’t to degrade them — that’s not why we’re here. But we need to make everyone understand that you can’t talk back, and you can’t be disrespectful, and if you do that, you can really do well in everything else we have here.”
Older studies conducted by the Department of Justice have also found that boot camp prisons aren’t effective in reducing recidivism rates. In June 2003, the department released a report that found boot camps — though effective in the short term — didn’t have positive effects in the long-term with inmates reoffending.
And recidivism rates are tricky to analyze, says Vockins, as there are a handful of ways to cherry pick data, which can produce different results. Agencies, for example, can track recidivism as re-entry into the prison system after three years due to a new crime, but could also not take into account parole violations that would put them back in the system after they are released.
Moriah and Lakeview stand apart from other programs that have seen cuts in funding or closures. The facilities cost less to operate than other New York state prisons — about $20,000 less per inmate per year. And they have some of the lowest recidivism rates in New York, according to data from the New York State Department of Corrections. Recidivism rates for New York prisons average around 65 percent after three years. For the shock program, they hover around 31 percent every year during the same time period.
But a change in New York’s harsh Rockefeller drug laws (which required mandatory minimum jail sentences) also means that fewer people are filling beds at Moriah.
“There really aren’t many low-level offenders in New York’s prisons anymore,” says Horn. “Because of [the changes in the law], those who are in prison are those with fairly serious crimes.
Currently, Moriah houses just under 200 inmates, but could accommodate around 100 more.
“If we ran at full capacity, we could save the state $90 million a year,” Rawson estimates.
The problem comes down to exposure to the shock program. Interviews with department officials say that many judges and district attorneys are unaware of Moriah.
“People say we’re the best kept secret,” says Schaefer. “Problem is, we don’t want to be a secret.”
Horn, for one, is skeptical of this and says that he goes to attorneys’ offices regularly to speak about the program.
LIFE AFTER SHOCK
It’s been almost 20 years since William Schoch was released from Lakeview, yet he still remembers the five steps to make better decisions that he learned while incarcerated.
“See your situation clearly, know what you want, expand your possibilities, evaluate and decide, and act,” he rattles off over the phone. “It’s become second nature to me.”
Two years ago, Semar, of Perry, N.Y., had a wife and child. On his 37th birthday, he was jailed for drug usage and ordered into Lakeview’s shock program.
“About three months in, I got served divorce papers. When those papers came in,” he says, “my [corrections officer] came over said, ‘Look, I’ve been there. A divorce isn’t something that you look forward to. But everything you’re doing right now will make you better, stronger. You’ll be able to deal with a lot more stuff,’ he told me. After that, I bought into the program.”
Rawson receives numerous letters and calls from former inmates and their parents with positive feedback about the shock program. He says that it’s those messages that convince him it’s working.
DiSilvestre, who was caught stealing, is less than a month away from graduating from Moriah. When that time comes, he and his platoon of inmates will dress in their best. Then, in front of their family and friends, they’ll walk in formation across the grounds to receive a diploma listing their achievements.
“There is a lot of pride from the guys that leave this place. They’re changed men,” Rawson says. “It’s a great feeling, knowing that these moms and dads have their kids back.”
The Hope-Filled Program That’s Keeping One-Time Criminals from Becoming Serial Offenders
In the summer of 2015, Anthony was in a downward spiral, soaked in booze and clouded in a haze of marijuana smoke. “I saw no way out of my addiction,” the 56-year-old from Jamaica, Queens, says. He had stayed on the right side of the law since 2002, but he slipped up one day last July and found himself in handcuffs, booked on a felony charge of grand larceny. Advocates from The Fortune Society, a New York City nonprofit that provides court-approved rehabilitation, interceded on Anthony’s behalf and convinced a judge to let him try their program as an alternative to a three-year prison sentence.
The Fortune Society’s Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) is one of New York City’s most prominent pretrial release programs. With it, judges offer second chances in the courtroom and accused felons are voluntarily diverted into treatment. Enrollees remain under strict supervision — they must check in at Fortune’s offices daily — and spend their time working with a case manager to obtain stable housing, take classes to prep for the high-school equivalency test or job certifications and attend group sessions on anger management, decision-making and 12-steps to sobriety (these days, often for addictions to prescription painkillers). Those that fail to show up are remanded to court and their trial begins immediately, with little leeway from the judge; those that complete the requirements, are released without any time in lock-up. (Some receive probation or community service.) Of the 341 people who are assigned to Fortune’s ATI annually, roughly three out of every four successfully complete their court mandate, which usually means they have no new contact with law enforcement.
Counting down the days until the end of his court-ordered year in the program (which concluded on July 19), Anthony hopes to be included in that statistic. It isn’t that he is eager to leave Fortune behind; rather, he wants the external validation of the progress he’s made in 12 short months. Over a plate of ginger-poached chicken (part of the free lunch served daily) at Fortune’s headquarters in Long Island City on a recent afternoon, he spotted a journalist talking to two young guys and approached him.
Anthony located two free chairs, set his ID on the table and started talking. He credits his time in the program with transforming his criminal past into something good. “I really can’t overstate the positive difference [Fortune] had on my life,” he says. For starters, he got sober. Every one of his urine tests came back clean, and his attendance marks were high, he reported. He completed several job trainings and applied to LaGuardia Community College for next fall. He’s fully aware that employers are reluctant to hire a someone only a decade away from retirement — let alone a person that age with a criminal record — but Anthony is determined to be a nurse, a job that pays “a decent dollar.” He expected the judge would release him the following week.
“We, I think, have some of the most amazing folks walking our halls, who, because of poverty, because of race, because of lack of opportunity, are here. It’s such a criminal offense, I believe, to have somebody in our intake unit that dropped out of school in eleventh grade but tests in reading at a third grade level,” says Peggy Arroyo, ATI’s director. “That almost guarantees there is going to be a population that needs these services,” she says, adding that she “will gladly flip burgers at McDonalds” on the day when mass incarceration ends.
The quick turnaround in Anthony’s life would be an impressive accomplishment for anyone, but it’s particularly striking in comparison to the average results from New York’s correctional system. Those awaiting trial on Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail, struggle to maintain their sanity against the threats from fellow inmates and the barked orders or beatings from guards. (Last year, press attention focused on Kalief Browder, who was held on Rikers without trial for three years, much of it in solitary confinement. He committed suicide at his parent’s home in the Bronx in June. But there were also the lesser-known stories of Fabian Cruz, an inmate who killed himself on New Year’s Day, and Kenan Davis, an 18-year-old who hung himself in his cell while waiting for a psychiatrist.)
“I think if you’re arrested, you have PTSD. The mere act of somebody putting handcuffs on you: you have no control, you’re told what to do and maybe not why. I’ve never been incarcerated” — Arroyo knocks on her desk — “so I don’t know firsthand, but it seems that, for the young people who come through our program, there’s just this cloud of confusion and pain, like ‘What am I doing here?’”
But getting through New York City’s jails might be the easy part. The difficulties of obtaining an apartment or a job — all the things people need to do to “survive in this insane city,” as Arroyo puts it — can be overwhelming for someone who’s just traded in his orange jumpsuit. Committing another crime might seem like the only fix. That’s likely why close to one-third of probationers — 32.4 percent — are re-arrested within three years, according to the most recent data from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS).
It’s stats like those that explain why there’s been a national push to curb mass incarceration in state and federal prisons. New York City has long been ahead of the curve, offering the country’s first pretrial release program in 1961 and witnessing significant drops in prison population without any major legislative mandates from the state capital. Most of the change can be attributed to a small core of nonprofits: among them, Fortune Society, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, the Osborne Association, the Women’s Prison Association and the Center for Court Innovation. Their alternatives to incarceration were designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate one-time criminals.
With the same clients cycling through courtrooms, diversion programs save money, encouraging prosecutors and judges to get on aboard, says Peggy Arroyo, ATI’s director. “It’s much less expensive to put somebody in Alternatives to Incarceration, and we believe it’s much more effective,” she explains. (DCJS is currently analyzing Fortune’s three-year recidivism rates; no data is publicly available yet.) “The higher the charge, the more of a sentence you would be facing. That’s more time we displace from prisons, and there’s a dollar figure attached to that,” she explains. Last year, ATI saved the state $2.95 million, Arroyo adds.
Among the select group of nonprofits, Fortune’s staff members say its size distinguishes their organization from others, allowing it to offer wraparound services to clients. “We’re very fortunate to be a one-stop shop,” Arroyo says. “We have everything: we have housing, mental health, substance abuse, employment services, education. We have it all.” The average day begins with educational classes — whether GED prep or vocational skills like cooking, construction and asbestos removal — from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., then several hours are spent in group therapy. Three evidence-based therapies make up those sessions: Moral Re-cognition Therapy focuses on how to make decisions that lead to a virtuous life, recognizing the errors in their previous thinking, making amends and reformulating a new process; Seeking Strength instructs how to led a healthy life, as it relates to safe sex, smoking pot and other choices; anger management classes teach participants how to defuse tense situations. Additional seminars — on parenting skills, relationships, relapse prevention — are also offered.
Those classes form the core of ATI’s programming, changing mindsets first so that men in the program choose to take advantage of Fortune’s other opportunities. They come to understand, not that they should be punished for breaking a law, but that the action they took hurt someone, the people around them and themselves. Fortune Society builds up the person, rather than the prisons, Arroyo says.
Josh, one of the boys in the lunchroom, says he never knew how to control his temper. When somebody would step on his foot on the subway or lost interest in conversation and looked away, Josh would lash out, sometimes violently. “I used to like to fight,” the 21-year-old from the Bronx admits. Initially at Fortune, he remained closed off. It wasn’t until he was remanded in January and sent back to jail that he straightened up. He hadn’t really cared whether he was in or out of prison, but he noticed that the advocates from Fortune fought for him to be released back to the program. “They went to bat for me harder than I did for myself,” he says. The judge gave him one more try. Josh stopped playing hooky, and listened more closely in the groups to older guys like Anthony, who, “have been through what I’ve seen.” Josh came to understand that he wasn’t a bad person, he “just didn’t go about it in the right way.” “I’m not innocent,” he cautions, but one day, he could be.
Arroyo says ATI helps these men realize their own potential and seize it. “By the end of the program, they realize things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. Now they have the opportunity to change that,” she explains. “We can’t undo what was done, but I hope for each individual to say, ‘No more. Not for me.’”
Fortune Society participants may not be able to change their past, but they can certainly modify the course for their future.
MORE: Who’s Responsible for Mass Incarceration? Van Jones Weighs In