Hearing a bedtime story before being tucked in at night is often the best way to ensure a child’s peaceful night’s sleep.
However, for the children of incarcerated parents, having a book read by their parents isn’t an option. This sad fact is the reality facing many families in Oklahoma, where 7,701 children have mothers in prison, and 121 women per 100,000 people are incarcerated, compared to the national average of 65.
Enter Redeeming the Family, an Oklahoma nonprofit working to preserve the bond and relationships between parent and child. According to the organization, after a parent is incarcerated, the chances of depression, suicide, poor performance in school and arrest all increase for kids.
That’s exactly why they’ve launched the Oklahoma Messages Program. Under it, volunteers go into prisons and video a mother or father talking to their children or reading them a book. The videos are then sent to the offspring, who can now see their parents for the first time in, what may be, quite a while.
These videos are an important lifeline between individuals because, for children living with their mothers, only 55 percent have visited and only 40 percent have spoken on the phone during incarceration. In its four years of operation, the program has sent videos to more than 3,000 children, 823 in 2013 alone.
These DVDs are really making a difference. Redeeming the Family conducted outcome surveys on the children to gage impact. Initially, 81 percent said that after their parent was imprisoned, they had moderate to huge increases in sadness and depression. Another 84 percent reported moderate to huge spikes in stress and anxiety. After the videos entered the children’s lives, however, 65 percent reported a decrease in feelings of sadness and depression, while 54 percent had less anger and disruptive behavior.
While the videos do not replace the presence of the actual parent, receiving them three times a year — Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day — can make all the difference. Executive Director of Redeeming the Family Cheri Fuller has witnessed this first hand.
“Over and over, we hear children say it felt like my mother was in the room,” she told NewsOk.
For these children, hearing and seeing their parents is just what’s needed to induce a great night’s sleep.
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Tag: prison
This Houston Radio Show Connects Inmates to Life Beyond the Walls
To say that life behind bars is isolating is an understatement. There are restrictions on phone calls and visits. And sometimes, family and friends have to travel long distances — making those in-person visits even more infrequent.
No one understands that more than ex-convicts, who advocate for fostering a support system outside of jail to help reduce the chance of recidivism. And that’s exactly why former inmate Ray Hill created “The Prison Show,” a two-hour program dedicated to Texas’s inmates and hosted on the publicly-funded KPFT radio station every Friday night.
“We simply want them to maintain an outside support system,” Hill told the Texas Tribune in 2012. “Without a support system, when they walk out those doors, they’re going to fall back into the problems that brought them there in the first place.”
The show, launched in 1980, features a variety of segments including call-ins from friends and family, live music performed by former inmates and news programs addressing prison issues like prison health, civil rights and the death penalty, Voice of America reports. The show’s staff is comprised of volunteers — some who served time themselves and others who are affected by incarceration.
Though the program only reaches one-sixth of inmates in Texas, which is considered the largest state correctional system in the U.S. with 109 prisons, it serves as an example for correctional facilities elsewhere.
“What this show has become has led to other shows in other parts of the country adopting a similar format,” said Bill Habern, an attorney featured on the show to talk about legal rights in prison.
The show has even hosted wedding ceremonies, including its own proxy-wedding coordinator Anne Staggs, according to the Texas Tribune. Staggs was a prison nurse and lost her job and visitation rights when her supervisors found out about her relationship with a prisoner. On the airwaves and accompanied by a minister, her family and a wedding cake, Staggs married her incarcerated husband, who listened from his cell as Hill stood in to read the vows.
While “The Prison Show” has inspired stories of unrequited love, it’s mostly a chance for convicts to be a part of a greater community during an often isolating experience. Producer David Collingsworth, a former inmate, first listened in from his cell.
“It showed me that somebody cared,” Collingsworth told VOA. “Somebody was actually out there who cared.”
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How A New York Program is Reframing Prison Education
About two hours miles north of Manhattan, a group of young men meet weekly to debate philosophy and discuss composition. The curriculum is like any other liberal arts course, but the classroom is quite different from what most people experience.
These classes take place behind the confines of the Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in New York where many of its inmates are serving life sentences.
Otisville was the first to implement the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), a partnership between the City University of New York (CUNY) and the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). Led by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hostos Community College, the initiative selects inmates who have high school diplomas or GEDs and are eligible for release within five years to enroll as students through a process that includes assessment tests, submitting essays, and sitting down for an interview — much like the traditional college application process.
Founded in 2011, P2CP has successfully served 26 students incarcerated at Otisville and 30 students from John Jay College who sat in on monthly seminars with the Otisville students. The program boasts 12 students that have been released back into society, plus four that are enrolled at CUNY institutions (two at John Jay, one at Hostos and another at Bronx Community College) while two others have started the enrollment process. All of the men are employed and enrolled in a training program or an internship.
It’s no secret that prison education programs have been successful in crime prevention, but since the government passed a bill halting the federal financing of Pell grants to prisoners in 1994, support has been limited.
In fact, earlier this year New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo introduced a proposal in his budget to finance prison education but lawmakers opposed the plan. Since then, the governor dropped it. He need not look farther than his neighboring state of New Jersey, however, where Governor Chris Christie recently expanded the privately funded program the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons program (NJ-STEP). The initiative includes eight higher education institutions across the state offering courses to almost 500 inmates at six correctional facilities, NJ.com reports.
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Elsewhere in New York, programs such as the Bard Prison Initiative — a partnership with Bard College that began in 1999 — has reported that two-thirds of the program’s alumni are employed, finishing college degrees, or enrolled in graduate schools including New York University, Columbia and Yale. The College and Community Fellowship in New York focuses on helping female inmates leaving prison finish college.
As the New York Times points out, prison education programs can go beyond preventing prison recidivism and crime prevention. A program to engage young inmates could serve as a model to educate wayward youth in troubled communities — preventing entry into the correctional system altogether.
In the meantime, P2CP continues to break barriers between the life an inmate expects and one that they can actually accomplish. The program is recruiting for Fall 2014 semester at Otisville, plus Greene and Wallkill, two other correctional facilities that will serve as potential breeding grounds for more untapped, bright minds.
These Jailed Journalists Provide a Glimpse of Life Behind Bars
What if you had a chance to hear an inmate’s perspective on some of the country’s most controversial debates in the criminal justice system? Would you want to know how they feel about overcrowding in prisons or transgender relations behind bars?
In an effort to provide those incarcerated with a positive outlet, as well as giving the world well-reported journalism (held to the same standards as other established publications), the San Quentin News is fielding reporters from an unlikely place: California’s San Quentin Prison.
The staff of 15 — which is comprised of male felons serving time for crimes ranging from burglary and home invasion to murder and a Ponzi scheme — publishes a monthly newspaper with a circulation of 11,500 readers. The paper was founded in 1940, but six years ago, it was revived as a serious journalistic publication, according to the New York Times.
In a trailer next to the prison yard, reporters and editors pour over stories on topical issues including the availability of bras for transgender inmates and a federal court order regarding mental health care for death row prisoners.
Managing editor Juan Haines, 56, mandates his reporters use “boots on the ground” journalism in tackling tough issues.
“It’s about being heard in a place that’s literally shut off from the world,” said Haines, who is serving a sentence of 55 years to life for a bank robbery. “We can go right into the yard and get a quote about how inmates are affected by policy decisions.”
“The Pulse of San Quentin,” as the paper calls itself, is distributed to 17 prisons as well as the 3,855 people at San Quentin. Other topics covered include sports stories on the San Quentin Giants and the A’s as well as entertainment, baby announcements, man-on-the-street interviews and holiday greetings. For members of the public, an annual subscription costs $40.
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The subscriptions, along with donations and grants, fund the printing and distribution. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations does not contribute any funding, but prison authorities approve all content. Earlier this year, the news operation was suspended for 45 days for swapping a photo without approval.
But the paper is not alone in its enterprise. Volunteers and students from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkley offer editorial and research support. Richard Lindsey, a former staff member who received parole last year, also maintains his connection to the paper by pouring over studies from the Vera Institute of Justice, the Pew Research Center and other scholarly sources to assist reporters. Students from the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at UC Berkley have advised the staff on developing a 12-year business plan that includes increasing the number of paid subscribers to subsidize the paper for free copies for inmates.
“When they [prisoners] get involved and see they’re accomplishing something, that could be the one positive tick mark in the ‘good’ column for them,” said former San Quentin warden Robert L. Ayers, Jr.
With writing, he said, “they start expressing themselves in ways other than physical or violent means.”
Ayers revived the publication from the “inmate rant rag” it was into journalistic enterprise that it now is. Though he received pushback, he believes it’s an important outlet for San Quentin’s inmates.
“I’m just trying to give back, to deal with the rips and tears I’ve made in the universe,” said one of the staff members and inmate Glenn Padgett. The 50-year-old, known as Luke, stabbed a man to death and set fire to his home to conceal the crime at the age of 33.
But the work is more than a means of redemption. In fact, more recently the Northern California chapter of Society of Professional Journalists recognized the San Quentin News with one of its James Madison Freedom of Information Awards.
Perhaps it’s just an exercise of the mind for some reporters, but this newspaper is setting out to prove that sometimes the best form of journalism comes from giving a voice to the unheard.
Cooking Up Change at an Illinois Prison
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll never go hungry, the old saying goes. And while it’s hard to fish while incarcerated, organizers of a new program at the Cook County Jail, hope the same general philosophy holds true for teaching a man to cook.
A 90-day pilot program, which requires three hours each day, aims to teach inmates employable kitchen skills, DNAinfo Chicago reports. The added bonus? Work ethic and food lessons that can be used throughout the participants’ lives.
This jailhouse prison kitchen remains a far cry from a chef’s prep station, however. Knives are tied down; there’s not a soufflé in sight. But inmates find the lessons revelatory. (For some of the men, the first class marked their first whiff ever of fresh basil!) Some say the basement cookery stands as their first practical job skill education. They’re not only learning nutrition facts (think: olive oil instead of a fast-food fry-up), but how to employ all of their senses as they see, touch, smell, and taste.
“In three months, I can’t do miracles,” chef and teacher Bruno Abate told DNAinfo Chicago. “My mission is to transfer to them the love of food.”
Lieutenant. D. Delitz, who oversees the program, chose 24 participants out of a pool of 70 applicants.
Cook County hosts a broad range of programs for inmates, including seminars on parenting for men who had few, if any, male role models in their lives, reports WTTW. Organizers of the so-called Alpha Parenting Course (which is getting quite a bit of attention), say they believe theirs is the first such prison-based parenting counseling sessions in the nation (a similar one was discovered on the other side of the world, in New Zealand).
“These guys are definitely street smart but something like being a father has never been passed down,” Ebenezer Amalraj, a volunteer, told WTTW. “We want them to take our lessons, pass it on and have an influence on their legacy. We want them to make a difference and break the cycle.”
No word on whether inmates overlap between cooking and parenting. But now there’s hope that as they emerge from their sentences, maybe they’ll be able to make a better life for themselves — and their families.
Born in Prison Herself, She’s Helping Women Break the Incarceration Cycle
If you believe your tween and teen years were difficult, think again.
When she was just 11 years old, Deborah Jiang Stein discovered a letter containing an explosive secret that her adoptive parents hid from her. The letter detailed the fact that Jiang Stein was born not only to an incarcerated mother, but addicted to heroin herself. Plus, she learned that she spent the first year of her life behind bars.
Traumatized by this revelation, Jiang Stein led tumultuous teenage years during which she was addicted to drugs, committed robberies and smuggled drugs. When she witnessed an acquaintance stab a man, Jiang Stein vowed to turn her life around. And she did just that — reconnecting with her adoptive parents, earning a college degree, and writing the memoirs Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison and Prison Baby.
Jiang Stein’s birth in prison is sadly, not unusual — according to Sherry Amatenstein of TruthAtlas, seven to 10 percent of all incarcerated women are pregnant, and 70 percent of the children of incarcerated women one day end up in prison themselves. According to Jiang Stein’s website, three percent of American kids have a parent in prison.
Jiang Stein, who is now in her fifties, has dedicated her life to connecting with imprisoned women and teaching them they have value and can still turn their lives around. She travels the country giving seminars and leading writing workshops for incarcerated females. “Women in prison are a disappeared group, and the majority is sentenced for substance abuse and domestic violence offenses,” she told Amatenstein. “I want people to notice these women are not scary. They are wounded human beings who need compassion and life tools.”
In 2012, Jiang Stein founded The unPrison Project, a nonprofit whose goal is “to empower, inspire, and cultivate critical thinking, life skills, self-reflection, and peer mentoring for women and girls in prison.” She presents workshops in prisons across the country and plans to expand her nonprofit’s mission to offer “Mother Mail” — packets of letters and artwork sent from schoolchildren to their moms in prison. She aims to provide incarcerated women with goal planners they can use to advance their education and help with substance abuse treatment. She also wants to connect formerly incarcerated women to assistance with jobs, housing, and parenting. Jiang Stein told Amatenstein, “Prison is my birth country. Going back has freed me.” And now her work is freeing other women too.
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Does Reducing Jail Sentences Take a Bite Out of Crime?
“We cannot prosecute our way to becoming a safer nation.”
That’s the guiding principle behind Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Smart on Crime” initiative, which he launched last spring. This week, he made impressive strides toward making good on that statement, as well as the plan’s promise to enforce fair punishments as well as ensuring safety.
This Moving Photography Series Combines Portraits of Prisoners With Letters They Penned to Themselves
We’ve all heard the phrase “hindsight is 20/20.” It’s never been truer or more poignant than in these letters, written by prison inmates to their younger selves.
As part of photographer Trent Bell‘s project called REFLECT: Convicts’ Letters to Their Younger Selves, 12 prisoners at a Maine correctional facility were asked to write letters to themselves, as well as sit for a portrait session. The resulting images — photographs of the inmates’ superimposed with their scrawling handwritten notes — are nothing short of heart-wrenching. From tales of regret to inspired pieces of advice to the realities of life behind bars, these men open up in ways that anyone can appreciate, and their words will make you think hard about your own life.
“In reading most of the letters I found myself feeling surprisingly similar to these men,” Bell told Fast Company. “But I also realized that either their situations were different than mine or that they had made incremental decisions that led them to these situations. The whole experience really made me look at my own life and reflect on why I’m ‘me.’”
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About a year ago, Bell, who is mostly known for his architectural images, was shocked to find out that a close friend of his had been sentenced to 36 years in jail. This friend was a professional, husband and father of four. The man was someone who never thought he would find himself behind bars. For months, Bell says he was haunted by the reality that just one bad decision can change a life forever. He kept thinking that it could have been him. “There were times when my son would look up and smile at me, and the finality of my friend’s situation would rush into my head,” he wrote on his website. From this, the idea of REFLECT was born.
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At first, Bell intended for REFLECT to be solely a photography project, but then he and his team realized that it wouldn’t capture the prisoners’ emotions in the same way. Of all the inmates they approached, only 12 agreed to be included in the project. The final images, which debuted at the Engine Gallery in Biddeford, Maine, in January, are powerful in their simplicity. But really, it’s the inmates’ words that truly move their viewers. “Our bad choices can contain untold loss, remorse, and regret,” Bell says. “But the positive value of these bad choices might be immeasurable if we can face them, admit to them, learn from them and find the strength to share.”
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How a Second Chance Can Benefit Prisoners and Taxpayers
The numbers are shocking. Almost half of all prisoners who received parole in the previous 15 years had been recincarcerated within three years of their release, according to a Pew Research study published in April 2011. It’s no wonder that overcrowding has crippled the U.S. prison system, as taxpayers foot an ever-growing bill to keep criminals behind bars. It may seem at times that there are revolving doors to our nation’s prisons, but there is one cost-effective solution that has proven results: education. Research has shown that inmates who took part in educational programs were at a much lower risk of recidivism within three years of their release. With that in mind, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced a plan to finance college classes in 10 state prisons, giving inmates the opportunity to earn either an associate’s or bachelor’s degree over a two- to three-year period. Currently, New York spends $60,000 per year on every prisoner. The education program would be a fraction of the cost — $5,000 per inmate, per year — and would hopefully keep participants from returning to jail. “Giving men and women in prison the opportunity to earn a college degree costs our state less and benefits our society more,” Governor Cuomo said in a press release. “Someone who leaves prison with a college degree has a real shot at a second lease on life because their education gives them the opportunity to get a job and avoid falling back into a cycle of crime.”
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While New York is far from the only state to experiment with prison education, for the most part, these programs have been funded and run by private groups. A study by the University of Missouri’s Institute of Public Policy found that the state’s inmates’ chances of finding full-time employment after being released were greatly enhanced if they had completed a prison education program. Reincarceration rates for those with full-time jobs were “nearly cut in half” compared to those who were unemployed. In New York, Bard College has directed a smaller initiative, with enrollment of around 500 prisoners since 2001. Of those participants, more than 250 have earned degrees. While the state’s recidivism rate hovers at around 40 percent, only 4 percent of prisoners who took part in the Bard Prison Initiative returned to the prison system. Of those who graduated, the recidivism rate dropped to 2.5 percent. Overall, researchers at the RAND Corporation found that inmates who participated in prison education programs have a recidivism rate of 43 percent less than those who did not.
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With statistics like these, why wouldn’t state or even federal governments invest in correctional education? Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s plan, like Republican Senator Greg Ball, say that the last thing the state should be doing is funding education for criminals, especially when law-abiding families are struggling to send their own children to college. But that outlook may be shortsighted. In 2010, more than 650,000 people were released from prisons nationwide. At the current rate, almost half of them will return. By providing these people with an education that can help them get jobs, taxpayers could save $2.7 billion per year. That’s no small sum of money. And providing correctional education has another positive result: giving a second chance to those who want to leave behind a life of crime.
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Think It’s Impossible for Rival Gangs to Resolve Their Differences? This Man Will Prove You Wrong
Brooklyn might not look the same as it did back in the 1970s, when Robert DeSana started teaching at John Dewey High School in Bensonhurst. But underneath the coffee shops, loft spaces and trendy restaurants lies some of the same problems that plagued the area decades ago. Gangs are still the way of life for far too many youths born and raised in New York communities. Racial tensions still run high. And drug dealers still stake their claim to street corners. To DeSana, this is no way to live, so for almost 40 years, he’s been showing youths and adults alike that there is another way through the Council for Unity.
The CFU is a nonprofit that empowers youth to take ownership of the problems of bias and violence that exist in their schools and communities. The program, which includes a specific curriculum developed by DeSana and approved by the NYC Board of education in the 1980s, is centered on “Four Pillars”: family, unity, self-esteem and empowerment. The idea is to build a culture of acceptance, in which students from varying backgrounds can grow to understand and support each other to eradicate violence. So far, the program been a success. CFU reaches more than 100,000 kids a year, ranging from 8 to 20 years old, throughout 30 schools in the New York City area and beyond. More than 93 percent of attendees eventually graduate from the program. “If 93 percent of them are graduating, that tells you one thing: The street is not winning, we are,” DeSana told TruthAtlas.
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When DeSana started the Council in 1975, he designed it as a way to unite opposing groups to prevent violence in school. That sense of peace ended up expanding into the surrounding community, and he was eventually asked to replicate the group at schools that faced similar challenges. From there, CFU just continued to grow. “It started as a club. Then, it became a program, then a course, then a culture,” DeSana said. “Now, it has become a movement.” In addition to New York schools, the Council has taken up residency in various prisons in the area, including Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security institution in Ossining, New York, and the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Riverhead. Here, prisoners from rival gangs can find a common ground and a safe haven. “The founders of CFU in the Suffolk County jail were members and leaders of the Crips, the Bloods, MS-13, the Latin Kings, and the Aryan Brotherhood,” DeSana said. “That is an impossibility. That had never occurred before.” DeSana hopes he can prevent at-risk youths from becoming criminals in by offering them a community where they feel safe and secure, without the violence.
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