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Article: Getting Out of Prison Meant Leaving Dear Friends Behind:
The Marshall Project May 31, 2018 by Robert Wright ...I stop in front of the cell of one of my oldest friends. He looks at me and turns away, wishing me well without looking into my eyes. I give him information on how to get in touch with me. When I go to hand him the piece of paper, I can see he has tears in eyes that he is desperately trying to prevent from falling in my presence. He was sentenced to 40 to life. Never in the 10 years that I have known him have I ever seen him in a moment of weakness. And now it is my departure that is the cause of his vulnerability. We hug through the bars that separate us and exchange I love yous. I walk away knowing he was watching the image of me in the mirror he stuck outside his bars become smaller and smaller, until it would be the last he ever sees of me. ... Read More
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CNI Micro Finance Group by Erica King
11-6-2017 One hundred twenty-five men and women recently released from the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) will be given a real chance to transform their lives thanks to an innovative new program forged by a dynamic public/private partnership fueled by CNIMFG with support from Citi Community Development. The program will provide training and start-up capital to help returning citizens open a business and create jobs and economic opportunities for themselves and underserved Chicago communities. Studies show that only 17.5% of returning prisoners who find regular employment, or create jobs for themselves, return to prison. Erica King, VP Lending, CNIMFG, recently joined Governor Bruce Rauner and other state officials to launch the Pathway to Enterprise for Returning Citizens (PERC), the new privately funded program designed to provide recently incarcerated citizens with in-depth training, personal coaching and mentoring from its program partners: Bethel New Life, Chatham Business Association, North Lawndale Employment Network, The Safer Foundation and Sunshine Enterprises. Once the training is successfully completed, participants will be eligible to receive up to $50,000 in start-up capital from CNIMFG to open a business. Watch or listen to the segment on line. PERC's partners include the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority, IDOC, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and CNIMFG. More than $1 million was raised to fund the program from Citi Community Development, The Chicago Community Trust, the Perry Family Foundation, US Bank Foundation and the Hughes Foundation. For additional information about PERC or CNIMFG's micro-lending products and financial services, contact Erica King, Vice President of Lending, CNIMFG, ateking@cnigroup.org or 773.341.2072. Does Solitary Make Inmates More Likely To Reoffend - Frontline
by ANJALI TSUI Abrams Journalism Fellow, As a teenager, Adam Brulotte relished the attention he received from getting into fights at parties. When he was 18 years old, he was arrested for burglary and aggravated assault after punching a man and breaking his jaw in seven places. Brulotte arrived in Maine State Prison in 2012 to serve a two year sentence for violating his probation. There, he was sent to solitary confinement for starting a riot on his cell block. During the approximately four months he spent in isolation, Brulotte cut himself, flooded his cell with toilet water and pushed feces under his door. Each incident earned him more time in solitary confinement. Once he was released, Brulotte tried to find a sense of normalcy. He started dating, got a job at a local convenience store but soon ended up back in jail for driving without a license, an assault and failing to pay court fines. “It leaves a scar on you that you won’t forget and you can’t heal … you get flashbacks and anxiety,” he said of solitary. Read More After Solitary - FRONTLINE
When Kenny Moore was convicted of aggravated assault, burglary and theft and sent to Maine State Prison at age 18, he expected to serve an 18-month sentence. But after a series of fights and disruptive behavior, he was sent to solitary confinement, where his disruptive behavior only worsened. All in all, Kenny spent five-and-a-half years in solitary confinement and nearly 20 years in and out of prison. Inside solitary, Moore ripped the hair out of his body. He bit chunks out of himself. He started hearing voices. He wrote messages on the wall of his cell with his own blood. “It turns you into an animal,” Moore says in After Solitary, a new virtual reality film from FRONTLINE and Emblematic Group. In After Solitary, follow Moore as he narrates an immersive, 360° tour of a solitary confinement cell, recounting what his life was like on the inside — and how that experience has impacted his life now that he’s a free man. The film is a visceral window into the practice of solitary confinement, which Maine State Prison began reducing the use of while Moore was locked up. The prison also started offering rehabilitation classes to inmates, and says that since 2011, rates of violence and self-harm have dropped dramatically. But studies show that inmates who have spent significant time in solitary are more likely to be sent back to prison. Meanwhile, Moore, who was released last fall, is struggling to adjust to life on the outside. He rarely leaves his bedroom. It is, he says, his “own personal prison” — and the place where he feels most safe. Read/Watch more Last Days of Solitary - Frontline April 18, 2017
Inside one state’s ambitious attempt to decrease its use of solitary — and what happens when prisoners who have spent considerable time in isolation try to integrate back into society. Watch this video Lowering the prison population isn't enough, not if formerly incarcerated individuals are denied jobs after release.
...It comes down to whether, as a nation, for people branded as violent offenders, if “second chances” are not just written into law, but possible. ... Read more about Mr. Rowe THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Road to RedemptionFormerly incarcerated residents struggle to rebuild their lives and overcome the stigma of serving time.By Cooper Levey-Baker 8/28/2017 at 5:00am Published in the September 2017 issue of Sarasota Magazine ... America locks up more of its citizens than any other country on earth. Home to 4.4 percent of the world’s population, the United States is also home to 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, a population that has increased fivefold in the last 40 years. More than 6.7 million Americans, one out of every 37 citizens, are under some type of correctional control, and more than 2.2 million are in a state or federal prison or local jail. Almost all of them will at some point get out. Each year, 650,000 people are released from federal and state prisons. Read more Around half of all the inmates put on parole in the U.S. end up violating the terms of their release and are sent back to prison. But across the country, states are trying to change the way their parole systems work in an effort to lower recidivism rates and reduce prison populations.
A new documentary called Life on Parole, FRONTLINE and The New York Times go inside one state, Connecticut, to examine its ongoing effort to rethink parole: a condition that offers a taste of freedom but comes with strict prohibitions on whom you can live with, where you can go, what time you have to be home and more. “Most people who are in prison in America will one day be released on parole,” says Matthew O’Neill, the Oscar®-nominated and Emmy®-winning director of Life on Parole. “And as Connecticut brings its prison population down and attempts to give parolees more chances to succeed, we wanted to see if the experience of the parolees reflected these changes.” "With unique access inside Connecticut’s corrections system, as well as camera-phone footage filmed by the parolees themselves, the film follows four former prisoners as they navigate the challenges of more than a year on parole — from finding work, to staying sober, to parenting — and doing it all while under intense supervision from the state:" Watch this important documentary American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Black Family in an Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Atlantic, October 2015 |
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