The first two employment posts focused on how to improve outcomes for reintegrating people once they were in the community. For this post, I’d like to focus on what should be happening on the inside. This is a graphic story… [Read more…]
Employment and Reintegration, Part II: Assess and Collaborate!
In my previous post, I referenced a White Paper (Duran, Plotkin, Potter, Rosen) published by the Justice Center that explores the intersection between reintegration and employment. With this post, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into their recommendations and the preliminary results from two test communities. [Read more…]
Employment and Reintegration, Part 1: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us
When I first started working in the niche known as community reentry, there was a widely-used refrain for two key pillars of successful reentry: a job and a place to live. This does not need a lot of explanation. Simply put, research shows that people reintegrating the community from prison do better when they have employment and a safe place to live.
I have come to believe that there are other critical legs to the ‘reintegration chair.’ For this series of posts, however, I want to focus on that first pillar of successful reentry: employment. [Read more…]
Fear and Public Policy
I have often felt that any law that bears the name of a victim of crime is probably bad public policy. I suspect that this informal rule of thumb can be broadened to include any legislation that is written out of either fear or anger. [Read more…]
Prison, Stories, and Healing
As part of the groundwork for an upcoming proposal, I am researching existing restorative justice practices in prison. So far, I’ve read about two broad ‘types’ of restorative prison initiatives: the first carves out certain areas of prison life–such as violations of prison rules–for the introduction of restorative values and processes; while the second ‘type’ focuses on repairing the offenders’ relationships with the affected community or victims. In my research, however, I have yet to come across a living example of a fully restorative prison. [Read more…]