Let Sabrina take you to the ACJS Conference with her and share the major lightbulb moments she had there (plus hear some really cool stories about how people in the PrisonCare Workshop responded to the mission!). A couple of major things she had never thought of before may just blow your mind, too.
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and SUPPORT our work
Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences -
https://www.acjs.org/page/PastMeetingPrograms
Shakespeare Behind Bars -
https://shakespearebehindbars.org/
Time Markers:
(4:29) There’s No Real Way to Measure Rehabilitation
(8:03) Why Are Recidivism Rates So High?
(10:46) Housing is a Major Problem
(14:00) There’s Minimal Opportunites for Jobs
(15:36) We Don’t Know What Our Goals Are
(18:56) Corrections Academies
(24:02) A Hidden Curriculum
(28:45) Shakespeare Behind Bars
(34:08) The PrisonCare Workshop
(39:07) People Want to Make A Difference
Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT: We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version) Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Let Sabrina take you to the ACJS Conference with her and share the major lightbulb moments she had there (plus hear some really cool stories about how people in the PrisonCare Workshop responded to the mission!). A couple of major things she had never thought of before may just blow your mind, too.
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and SUPPORT our work
Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences -
https://www.acjs.org/page/PastMeetingPrograms
Shakespeare Behind Bars -
https://shakespearebehindbars.org/
Time Markers:
(4:29) There’s No Real Way to Measure Rehabilitation
(8:03) Why Are Recidivism Rates So High?
(10:46) Housing is a Major Problem
(14:00) There’s Minimal Opportunites for Jobs
(15:36) We Don’t Know What Our Goals Are
(18:56) Corrections Academies
(24:02) A Hidden Curriculum
(28:45) Shakespeare Behind Bars
(34:08) The PrisonCare Workshop
(39:07) People Want to Make A Difference
Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT: We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version) Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to the PrisonCare Podcast!
I’m Sabrina Justison, founder of PrisonCare.org, equipping compassionate people to support the often-invisible people groups who make up a prison neighborhood - the inmate residents, correctional officers, staff, administration, and the families of all of these folks.
Join me for this week’s episode, and be encouraged to think, care, and respond as we explore the challenges facing prison neighborhoods everywhere.
Let’s support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYone on the inside matters.
http://prisoncare.org/community.html
Learn more about PrisonCare, Inc. and donate to our work
Time Markers:
(4:29) There’s No Real Way to Measure Rehabilitation
(8:03) Why Are Recidivism Rates So High?
(10:46) Housing is a Major Problem
(14:00) There’s Minimal Opportunites for Jobs
(15:36) We Don’t Know What Our Goals Are
(18:56) Corrections Academies
(24:02) A Hidden Curriculum
(28:45) Shakespeare Behind Bars
(34:08) The PrisonCare Workshop
(39:07) People Want to Make A Difference
Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Hello friends and welcome to this episode. I am Sabrina and I am going to take you with me on a trip to a conference that I was able to attend recently just outside Washington, D.C., actually. This was the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual meeting. This was my first time participating in the annual meeting. My first time meeting the many wonderful people who are a part of this organization, and it was also my first time presenting a workshop on PrisonCare as a new model for positive impact on prison neighborhood, populations. So it was like kind of a big deal. For me, anyway, it was a very big deal.
It was in March of 2023, and I was supposed to be attending with Kym, who is our Community Director. She's the one who was with me at the concert in the prison a few episodes ago, and she was going to be going with me. She is my amazing people-person person, and she was going to be on her amazing A-Game, as far as networking goes. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed in big social situations and meeting lots of strangers and that sort of thing.
Well, Kym not so much. She has never met a stranger in her life. She is the friendliest, most magnetic person in the room, and she just thrives on things like conferences, and lots of people, and exhibit halls, and all that sort of stuff. So we were going to divide and conquer as far as the different sessions that we wanted to go to. And then I was going to follow in her wake as she met a million people at the conference, and that was how I was going to get to meet people. I was basically going to cheat. And I was going to depend on her extroversion to balance out my introversion.
And then, just a few days before the conference, Kym got COVID.
We were so sad. We were both so sad and she was down and out for a number of days, and she was definitely not cleared for contact with a whole bunch of bodies that weekend. So she had to stay home and take care of herself. And she is just fine now, by the way. She has recovered beautifully, and we are so very thankful for that. But I went off to the conference by myself, so it was a challenge for me. It was also probably incredibly good for me, because it forced me to just sort of take ownership of... okay, this is PrisonCare. This is not me, this is not really about Sabrina going out and being something that she's not, this is about PrisonCare being present at a conference where it needs to be. It is about allowing people to get close enough to PrisonCare that they can find out what it is that we're doing, what our mission is, what our heart is. And they can find places where what they're doing, where their heart fits very neatly, where it dovetails with the work that we're doing here, and we can find ways to link arms.
So, I put on my PrisonCare t-shirt and I also put on my PrisonCare mindset and heart. And I went off to the conference by myself.
(4:29) The first couple of days were packed with incredible sessions. I learned so much. My brain was absolutely filled to overflowing by the end of the first day. And I still had a whole lot more sessions to go to after that. So I'm very grateful for the many people doing excellent research, doing excellent work inside prison facilities and in universities, in classrooms and in service projects, and all all different arenas where the conversation really is being changed regarding the criminal justice system in our country, the criminal legal process, where Corrections and Philosophy come together, and how that turns into practice and policy...and just a lot of super-smart people doing some incredible things!
I am not a researcher, I do not have the background, the training, the skillset. And so I got to sit under the teaching of a lot of people who are really smart and wonderful and doing exciting things in a field that interests me, very much.
So, I just wanted to go over my notes from the conference and briefly share with you a few of the really highlighted kind of things in my memory of the conference. The moments that were not just, "oh wow, that was really good. That was helpful. I learned a lot," but were moments that were just almost magical because they were very powerful for me.
And then I'm going to tell you just a little bit about the PrisonCare Workshop there, and how we were received, and what came out of that, what will be following in the wake of it. And again, just, I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this conference, all right?
So, one of the things that I found absolutely fascinating, and disturbing, and challenging and inspiring, all at the same time, is the consensus among academics who are doing all the big research in this field, the sociologists and the criminal justice professors and researchers, the consensus that we don't have a way of measuring rehabilitation. There is no definition. There is no way to measure it. The only measurement that we use to determine the success or failure of our prisons is the recidivism rate, how many of them are getting out of prison, and then re-offending and coming back. Everything that you read all points to recidivism rates.
Now, it's not that this is not an important measure; it most certainly is an important measure. It tells us a lot. But in the sessions that I attended on re-entry, and in the personal reading and studying I've been doing, and listening to, to try to learn more about reentry possibilities and the challenges and all, a lot of recidivism is tied to re-entry problems. It is not actually tied closely at all to the personal rehabilitation of someone who has been incarcerated.
(8:03) So let me see if I can explain this better. There are people who appeared, over the course of their period of incarceration, to have been rehabilitated. They appeared to have changed on a very core, fundamental level. There are people who served sentences of a number of years, and over the course of those years they were observed by a whole lot of other people -- by other incarcerated individuals and also by staff and program managers and case managers and co-workers -- and they were either faking it really, really well for a period of years, or they actually did wake up and realize a lot of important things about themselves, decide to work hard and change the way they look at life, the way they look at themselves, the way they look at other people, to develop personal integrity to develop a work ethic, to find mentors to listen to and to learn from, all those kinds of things. They're people who really appeared to be putting in the work for personal rehabilitation to take place.
And when they were released, they ended up coming back. So they recidivated, right? So that means that it didn't work. It didn't stick, it didn't take. But when you get the opportunity to find out why, "What happened to you?" kinds of questions, when you ask those kinds of questions, what you learn from some of these people is very simply that the re-entry process is so impossible, that without really strong both family support and financial support upon re-entry, there is little-to-no way to make it back as a returning Citizen and to avoid again committing a crime.
For many people who recidivate, what they come back for is not another big crime like the first one that landed them in prison. It's a violation of their parole terms. It's missing appointments with a parole officer. But sometimes those appointments are missed because of a transportation issue, because of a job conflict issue, because of miscommunication on dates and times, there could be a whole lot of things that interfere with that. It is not easy to make your appointments, especially in certain parts of the country.
(10:46) You know, we picture this as all being, like, within a couple of city blocks, that somehow people get out of prison, and they have a place to live, and the place that they live is very close to their parole officer's office, and they also are able to get a job pretty close. So there's, you know, there may be some walking, there may be some riding some buses involved, but, you know, if you keep your head on straight, and you stay on top of things, you can do it, you can do it all. It all fits.
Well, it's outrageously confusing when you actually start digging into all of the pieces and how they have to fit together. It's not easy to make all of that happen. So a lot of times, someone comes back for a parole violation. A lot of other times, someone comes back for petty theft, and that is tied to this whole question of housing and financial support.
So, housing is a huge problem for people when they come out of prison. Especially if they are not from a family with a lot of money, and especially if they are not from a family that has chosen to support them upon re-entry (because some families don't, you know; family is complicated, and just the fact that you have family, some of whom have money, does not really mean that those people are willing to go to bat for you) so, coming out and getting housing is super challenging. And for extended families who live near or below the poverty line, you have a whole added problem there, that subsidized housing, Section 8 housing, whatever, subsidized housing, which is where a lot of people who are really struggling economically it's where they live... they can't take in someone with a felony conviction.
They will lose their own apartment or house if it is found out that their loved one, who is a returning citizen is living with them.
So now you have to find somebody else who's going to take them in. Even if you, as their family, see that they have done hard work, that they are exhibiting all the signs that you would look for for rehabilitation to have taken place, that they have a hopeful future ahead of them...you even have a lead on a job for them, a legit job! And where you live is in close enough proximity to where they have to report for their parole check-ins, you know, even if all of that looks good, and you are happy to take this loved one into your home...if you live in subsidized housing, you can't do it or you risk, eviction yourself. And it's not like, "oh yeah, it's easy to slip it under the radar." It's not. They check for this stuff regularly. It is very sadly easy to end up facing eviction because you were taking in your loved one who is returning. So housing is a huge problem.
(14:00) Getting a job is a huge problem. Going to have to check the box on applications, job applications in a whole lot of states. And in the states that still have that, "Check here if you've ever been convicted of a felony," what you have is a whole lot of companies that just throw out any applications where they checked the box, where they had been convicted of a felony. So without even the opportunity to prove yourself, you're out of luck, and you're not going to get a job there, okay?
So very, very complicated for returning citizens to fully make it out of the criminal legal system. And a lot of people end up recidivating not because they weren't interested in leaving behind their life of crime, but because the challenges, the obstacles were so overwhelmingly difficult to master that yeah, that something small trips them up, that they ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, because they were back in the neighborhood that they came from, and even though they weren't running with those people anymore, those people were seen talking to them...and that can be enough that it starts all kinds of trouble.
So there's a whole lot of reasons for recidivism rates to be high, and not all of them are because no rehabilitation took place, and this person wants to be a criminal, and is just going to continue to be a criminal, and enjoys being a criminal, okay?
(15:36) So, recidivism is our only measure of rehabilitation, and that's not an effective measure for a lot of the reasons that I just shared with you. But aside from the fact that it is not a great way to measure this, there is, in my mind, there is just the startling and horrifying idea that we don't know what we're asking for when we're saying we want to see rehabilitation in people who have committed crimes and been sent to prison, we don't know what we're asking for. We don't know what we expect. And so, you can never possibly achieve goals if you haven't set goals in the first place. Right? Everybody cringes at the thought of working for a boss who says, "I just expect more from you," but they never tell you what "more" is.
You expect me to be here for longer hours each day? You expect me to generate more income for our business? You expect me to cut more fat out of our expense budget? You expect me to be a better team leader and mentor for others? What does, "more," mean? What do you want from me? Right?
To have those undefined expectations and those undefined goals, and then to have that attached to a system as huge and as important as the prison system in the United States of America -- we're talking over 2 million people who essentially work for a boss who just says, "Yeah, I'm going to have to see more from you." Only the boss won't tell you what MORE looks like.
That's not cool. That's foolish. And that's a huge waste of money, resources, time and lives. So that was that was a big deal for me. That was a big learning moment, to hear that. This was not just one person on a podcast saying this, but this was showing up in session after session after session that I went to, presented by people who are thought leaders in the field of Criminal Justice and Corrections, and who were presenting academic papers, who had done research that has been verified in all the ways that it's supposed to be verified that I don't fully understand, because I'm NOT a researcher at a university.
But these people were all coming to the same conclusion: We don't have a measure for what rehabilitation looks like.
So how exactly are we going to get any better at achieving it, right? Something's got to be defined here. Something has got to be defined so that we can go after it. Doesn't that just, kind of, like, stop you in your tracks when you think about it? We want people to be different when they get out of prison, and most of them are going to get out and come back into our neighborhoods. Most of them are going to get out. We want them to be different when they do, but we don't even have written down anywhere what is "different," exactly supposed to look like? And then, what are the steps that it would take to move toward that kind of different? We've got to have a way to measure rehabilitation.
Okay. So that was one big thing.
(18:56) I’m going to shift to something completely different that was the idea of a hidden curriculum in Corrections Academies. And that sounds nefarious and I don't want it to. So, let me, let me try to make this both fair and clear right from the start.
Corrections Academies vary tremendously from state to state. Some of them are frighteningly short, a couple of weeks; some of them barely exist at all. It's really just on-the-job training. You start with a couple of days of orientation in the facility before you're on the tier, but there's really not an academy. Some states have an 8-week academy. 13 is another number. There's really not anything much longer than that in the U.S. So Corrections Academies are not, like, a year-long program, or a six-month program. They're usually pretty quick.
And within those academies, you are taught a lot of physical things. You are taught a lot of procedural things, but something that is not officially on the syllabus, it's not officially a part of the curriculum, that is an extremely powerful piece of what Corrections Officers are trained in, is what researchers often refer to as, "the hidden curriculum," which is the expectation of, "brotherhood inside the wall."
There is an unofficial curriculum that is taught by instructors in Corrections Academies that includes the things like, "Okay, so you all took this test on this set of procedures and you've all memorized what you were supposed to put on the list, and good job. Now, I'm going to tell you when you ACTUALLY get inside there. That's not actually how it works. Okay? So here's what really ends up happening."
Or you leave the academy. You get to orientation at the facility where you're going to serve, and the person doing your orientation there says," Now, I know you learned this at the Academy, and that's all well and good on paper. But this is what you're actually going to do, now that you're here, right?"
And it carries this subtle, "secret society," "we're all in this together; we're the only ones here for each other, right? We have to take care of ourselves. If I don't have your back, nobody has your back. If you don't have my back, nobody has my my back. So this is this is us taking care of us in this place, right? And so I'm going to tell you how that best happens here now."
And none of this is a part of the official curriculum that the state has approved and that is officially being taught in the Corrections Academies.
And so one of the things that that I came away from that learning, sort of rolling around in my mind as a question is, "How do we help to change the 'US vs. them' narrative. that is making prison so toxic for residents AND staff alike, when there's not an official part of the curriculum that's teaching that?"
Anyway, it's this hidden curriculum. It's this more subtle thing. It's the, "We all know what the book learning does, and it takes us this far, but you're not really going to know how to do the job until you actually do the job with other people who do it. And you're going to find all kinds of things there that do not line up with the manual."
That's true in every industry, right? To some degree. That's true in every industry to some degree. That is expected, I guess, right? That there's only so much you can learn from a book, and that there are things that have to be done differently in daily practice.
But when that difference, when that, "This is, how it really is," is tied so closely to, "You have nobody but your brothers in uniform, and this is life or death. This is actually about your personal safety and mine. And the only way that this is going to actually work in here, in practice, is for us to 100% be each other's safety, to be each other's resource, everything," something that gets communicated -- and I don't think anybody intends for it to be communicated; it's something that GETS communicated -- is, "Look the other way if you see something that's not quite right, because you cannot possibly betray your brothers or your sisters in here, right, those of us who are wearing the same uniform. There's a code. And the code says, "We take care of each other, no matter what."
(24:02) So even if it's in direct conflict with the policy and procedure that you had to test on at the Academy to graduate, this hidden curriculum, this attitude of, "Hey, look, it just comes down to us taking care of ourselves when we're in here. So this trumps everything else that you've learned," that's how corruption slips in so easily.
And, you know, we all know that contraband is an ongoing problem in prisons. We know that there's all this stuff that visitors have to go through because they don't want visitors bringing in contraband. And it's not that visitors NEVER bring in contraband, it's just that the vast majority of contraband comes in through staff. It doesn't come in through visitors. That was pretty much understood even before COVID, but I mean, for Pete's, sake COVID shut down prison visitation for over a year, and the contraband rates did not decrease during that time. And there were NO visits.
So visitation is not the primary problem with contraband, staff is. Corrupt staff. And this attitude of, "We look the other way, because that's my brother right there. That's my sister, that's...they're wearing the same uniform as I am, so that is more important for our safety than what I learned as far as policy," makes it very, very difficult. And Corruption does show up in your workplace.
So, that was something that was kind of new to me, because I am naive and idealistic enough that I have had, in my mind this idea that, you know, you have to tell, right? If you see somebody who's bringing in drugs, or who's taken somebody to an area of the facility with no cameras to teach him a lesson, you know? That of course you've got to tell if you're...Man! You went into this field to, like, be a stand-up person, and help do what's right.
And so you would have. But I don't think that I had any idea the power of this hidden curriculum, and how very understandable it is that that hidden curriculum is there.
So, how do we change it, if it's not official? I don't know what the answer to that is at all. It just gave me a lot to think about in terms of vision-casting. And in terms of believing that "Us Vs. Them" is failing everyone. Its failing the staff as much as it's failing the residents; it has to be changed. We have an unsustainable prison problem in this country because we can't staff our facilities. We can't get enough staff, right? So it HAS to change. And a core piece of that is this "Us vs. them," that is just poisoning any efforts toward rehabilitation through healthy and appropriate relationship and rapport, right?
I so strongly believe all of this and yet, when I try to picture how in the world is that going to be effectively communicated in a world where this hidden curriculum of, "At the end of the day, it's us taking care of us, only. Period. End of sentence."
Where that is the ruling philosophy, and because that has come out of a life-and-death safety issue for people in this career, it's very very complicated. I think that a piece of what is going to have to happen is going to be people in the industry. It's going to be the corrections staff beginning to speak out and call for something different. It's going to be enlightened voices, who have done years inside the fence, who say, "Look, I know this is what we've always said and done, because we believed it was the best way to stay safe. But I don't believe it's working. It's not keeping us safe. And there has to be a more fundamental change. And I've lived it, I've worked it. I'm saying that it has to change."
It's very it's sobering. It’s heavy. But yeah, that was a real eye-opener.
(28:45) And then, the third thing that was tremendous was a session that I went to that included the founder of Shakespeare Behind Bars, Curt Tofteland and I will link to Shakespeare behind bars in the show notes.
This program has been around for a long time, has just a beautiful heart and mission. And what I didn't know about it was some of the structure.
So, this idea of, okay, we go inside and we work, using Shakespeare's plays, and we either produce a play with residents or do a reading group where we read through and discuss apply or something, but use the works of William Shakespeare with incarcerated individuals, as a rehabilitative tool. That just tickles me pink just because I'm a drama geek and I'm a theater person and I'm a Shakespeare lover and all that stuff.
But what I didn't know and this was something that Curt shared in the session that I went to is that when he comes into a facility, he doesn’t come in with a whole game plan. "Okay, well, here's what we're going to do. Here's the play we're going to do, here’s how many weeks it's going to take, here's how we're going to cast it." You know. He comes in with kind of a very open agenda. And they often begin by sitting in a circle… everyone who wants to participate and on a piece of paper they write down a value that they see in someone that they really respect. So maybe it's generosity, maybe it's honesty, maybe it's hard work, maybe it's loyalty, whatever. But somebody that you really look up to write down a word, some character trait in them that you really respect. And then they throw all these pieces of paper in the center and they collect them and they go through and they make a list, based on those things, of what are the things that the people in this group at this moment in time, what are the things that you people value highly?
And if there are 6 people who all wrote the word loyalty, then loyalty is going to get 6 points, right? And if there's only one person who wrote generosity then, generosity is only going to get one point, right? So you tally this up and you find out from that, okay? So the people we have assembled in this group who are willing to do Shakespeare together, really highly value perseverance. So they say alright, let's do something with that. Let's choose a play that's going to touch on that, that's going to make it meaningful to us right from the Starting Gate because we know that perseverance is very important to a lot of us in this group. And then we also found that loyalty was very high, that four of us had listed loyalty and so we're going to look for play the deals perseverance and loyalty. And then we're going to create a code of conduct, an agreement of how this is going to run and it's going to reflect these values. We're going to say that these things that we really respect in other people, that we're going to make those things central to our time together, to the way, we speak to one another, to the way that we behave with one another, to the way that we act when we leave here and we're doing our homework, or whatever. Those values are going to shape our time together. Oh man, I get goosebumps even talking about it. It's so… it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful to take a room full of people and to start with, “what do you value deeply?” And then say, “okay, so in our time together, whatever that is… if it's six weeks for two hours each week or if it's six months and four hours each week for that whole six month, whatever our time is that we get to have together. We're going to lean into those values.” That's just… it's brilliant. It's wise and it's effective.
If you go to the Shakespeare Behind Bars website you're going to see, I think it's on their landing page even but that the average recidivism rate… There we go again, recidivism is all we have to look at, right? But the average recidivism rate is 60 something percent. And that the rate for people who have participated in the Shakespeare Behind Bars program over years is something like 6%. This is life-changing for people. And it's life-changing for people not because Shakespeare is so awesome and he is but it's because of this foundational principle that we start with value and character and we say what matters to us. Okay, these things matter deeply to this group of people at this moment in history so we're going to lean into those things and focus on them and then we're going to use these brilliantly written stories and these complex and challenging and inspiring characters. We're going to use the words of William Shakespeare to then do something that draws us all closer to those things that we value. Just wonderful… exciting.
(34:08) Okay, so as I wrap this up, I'm going to quickly tell you that then the PrisonCare Workshop was very well attended, which delighted me because of course, it's a new model and so not much of anybody knew anything about it. It was exciting to me too that I had several people show up at my workshop who I had met at other workshops over the previous two days, two and a half days, whatever it was. And so that validated me too. Okay, I didn't have my awesome extroverted bestie, Community director, Kym along with me to make connections. But somehow I was making some connections in chatting with people at these sessions that we had shared interest in and there were people that were intrigued enough that they wanted to come to the workshop. There were also some people that I had not seen or talked to you at all, have no idea why they chose the PrisonCare Workshop to attend but they did.
I found that the approach I took in my presentation was really well received. I had a strict rule for myself with my PowerPoint slides and that was that basically all they were was faces to go with the stories that I was telling. There were no long bullet lists. There was no words, words, words, words all over the screen. Instead I did what I do, what I do well which is I shared my heart and my vision for change and I told stories about people who are already participating in the mission and what would up on the screen behind me was pictures that just helped make that real for people. Super well-received. We had such great interaction, we had brainstorming, we got a couple of really cool ideas that I'm going to carry forward and try out in the coming months. And so that was that was neat too. I felt like I got as much as I gave in terms of vision and ideas and fresh energy for things and enthusiasm.
And I also was able to share with them a piece that J and Dylan co-wrote. They called it their essay, I think. Really beautiful. I'm going to save that for another episode. It's fairly long and it's something really neat to unpack. So we'll do a standalone episode on their essay.
But I got to share that with the room and it has surprisingly emotional impact on me because it was a chance to represent, to truly represent. I talk a lot about things that are going on inside prisons with real life individual human beings, who are living inside a prison. I do my best to represent them well but this was the first time that I had asked them to represent themselves as well as they could for a particular audience. And then I simply delivered the message and it felt really hopeful and it felt humbling. It felt hopeful because the message that they were sharing, the meat of their essay was beautiful. And these are people who are waking up in a cell every morning.
These are people who are having to live the incarcerated life as it is now but they can see a vision for how it could be different even though they're living it with all the weight that that brings with it. So that was exciting and hopeful. It was also humbling because I can go around and talk about this stuff and I still have my freedom and I still have all the comforts that come with being with my husband and my family, and my friends and driving my car, and living in my house and sleeping on my comfortable mattress and eating what I want to eat when I want to eat it. I have all of that freedom and I talked about this stuff but it was so humbling to formally present in a workshop, at an academic conference and to be sharing the heart and the words from people who are incarcerated. It just really gave me a sense of the magnitude and the desperate need for partnership, the desperate need for compassionate people on the outside to care enough to support positive prison culture on the inside. Everyone on the inside matters.
(39:07) And that is my conference story. I hope that there were things there that you either learned or had stirred up things that caused you to think or question. And also some hope and some inspiration that we're headed in a direction that's going to make a difference. It really is. There's all these people on University campuses all over the nation and all over the world… I've met people from other countries as well. And there are Corrections Industries professionals who are looking into the same things that we're talking about here. They're just doing it from a highly educated and differently published sector of society. But we're all in this together and there is a growing awareness that it's time. It's got to change.
And all the different kinds of people are beginning to come together, right? The brightest minds. And the ones with the most experience, inside the prisons in the corrections industry, and the ones with the biggest hearts. And I think I fall into that last category. I think that you probably do too and if you would like to explore that heart of compassion for prisons even more, I encourage you to visit prisoncare.org, look for ways to become more involved. Learn more about the things that people are already doing that are working well and yeah. And tune into future episodes because I love having you here. I love knowing that you are eager to keep growing in this kind of compassion and in this commitment to bring positive change to prison neighborhoods everywhere. So thanks for being here and I look forward to talking with you again next time.
Thanks for listening to the PrisonCare podcast. Be sure to visit us at prisoncare.org. PrisonCare, equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside because everyone on the inside matters.