What Now, PrisonCare?

The end of a WHOLE YEAR of weekly PrisonCare Podcast Episodes...Whew!!
So much important info in this episode, y'all.  The mission is expanding, and there is room for a whole bunch of new personalities in the PrisonCare model. You do NOT want to miss this look at what we learned in our first year, and what we're marching into in Year 2. So much goodness...so much care!

Time Markers:
(0:32) Lots of People Care

(1:32) The Mission is BIG

(6:59) Person Stories are Important

(7:53) Raising Awareness in Year 2

(9:48) PrisonCare House Parties?

(11:13) Prison Residents Need Mental Health Resources

(16:08) Newest Resources and What’s To Come

(17:45) Telephone Coaching for Residents

(19:31) What Do YOU Want to Explore?

Transcript

This is THE PRISONCARE PODCAST! I’m Sabrina Justison, your host, the founder and Executive Director of PrisonCare, Inc. where we are committed to equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside, because everyone on the inside matters!

(theme music intro, “The Fool,” by incarcerated artist J. Bloom © 2022, used with permission)

“I want to be as relevant to you as you are to me…

…am I the fool who’s dreaming? I’ll wait.”

Support PrisonCare with a donation of any size:

http://prisoncare.org/community.html

Time Markers:

 (0:32) Lots of People Care

(1:32) The Mission is BIG

(6:59) Person Stories are Important

(7:53) Raising Awareness in Year 2

(9:48) PrisonCare House Parties?

(11:13) Prison Residents Need Mental Health Resources

(16:08) Newest Resources and What’s To Come

(17:45) Telephone Coaching for Residents

(19:31) What Do YOU Want to Explore?

Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
 The Fool, original recording music and lyrics by J. Bloom © 2022.

For the full song, visit the PrisonCare, Inc. YouTube Channel:

https://youtu.be/cG8zHpQZDug

What We’ve Learned in Our First Year, Where We’re Headed in Year 2, and What We Need to Know That Only YOU Can Tell Us!

Wow. This is the 52nd episode of The PrisonCare Podcast!

That’s a whole year of episodes, one each week.

And you have been here with us, and we appreciate you SO much for that!

So let’s close out the first year strong.

What We’ve Learned in Our First Year:

• First, foremost…people care!

Turns out lots of people DO care about prison neighborhoods, and the people in them wearing all the different uniforms. Turns out they care once they realize there’s something there to care about. Turns out they care as soon as they get a little bit of proximity, and the podcast has created that proximity for lots of folks. What wonderful news!

What ELSE We’ve Learned in Our First Year:

• The Mission is a BIG ONE.

A year ago, the picture of PrisonCare in my head was a resource, a library of sorts, that would help people feel confident beginning a Pen Pal Encourager relationship with some people who are incarcerated, encouraging them to really embrace personal growth opportunities and work to become their best selves, while fostering a less toxic culture around them. 

And I imagined people beginning to “adopt” individual prison facilities they had chosen, making a general connection via the chaplain, and finding ways to offer encouragement to Correctional Officers, as well. 

But it turns out the mission is WAY BIGGER than that, and it’s multi-faceted. 

The degree of difficulty many folks encounter when they try to write to a pen pal (as a voice of encouragement and healthy relationship in the life of someone who is serving a prison sentence) is much higher than I anticipated. Apparently part of the reason so few incarcerated people have a cheerleader and coach on the outside is because most of us on the outside are actually not wired for cheering and coaching via letters. 

Turns out that not every compassionate person is wired exactly like me…go figure!  What seems so obvious to me now is that it will be only a particular flavor of PrisonCare champion who becomes a PenPal Encourager. 

To those of you who are out there just KILLIN’ it, thank you for the tremendous impact you are making on the lives of your pen pals behind the wall. 

To those of you who tried it and found that you hate writing letters, or found that maintaining correspondence with more than one pen pal is overwhelming, thank you for trying to fill this role, and thank you for giving us feedback, so we could learn from you and further develop the model for PrisonCare compassion.

To those of you who never tried being a Pen Pal Encourager because you already KNEW it was a poor fit for you, but who reached out to us anyway and said, “yeah, not THAT, but help me find something else to try, because I believe this is incredibly important,” thank you for being true to yourself and including our organization in your journey, as you find ways to care for prison neighborhoods.

Stay tuned for some exciting new ideas for expanding the model, for equipping new types of personalities for PrisonCare.

It also turns out that the walls around prisons are metaphorical as well as concrete and razor wire. 

Connecting with chaplains and Correctional Officers, with case managers and administrators, is really difficult. 

The walls that have been built mentally and emotionally to protect prison staff from being manipulated, played, or otherwise abused do a really good job of keeping caring folks like us OUT as well. 

It’s very complicated, this desire to find ways to support and show appreciation to prison staff members. They are a cynical bunch…and for good reason! But it was a learning curve for us over the past year to understand this truth and to find new ways to envision what supporting staff could look like.

If you are someone who organized an appreciation event, only to find it just got shut down by the very folks you were trying to celebrate, thank you for trying, and thank you for sharing your stories with us. These were not failures. They were learning experiences for us all.

If you are someone who raised funds and purchased gift cards for ALL the COs in a facility for CO Appreciation Week, and later learned only through the grapevine that those gift cards were confiscated somewhere in the Admin building, declared to be a potential attempt at manipulation, and quietly taken home for use by some lucky duck who made them disappear (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, DEAR COMPASSION TEAM LEADER WHO WALKED THIS RATHER BUMPY ROAD AND SHARED YOUR STORY WITH US!), thank you for caring, and trying, and continuing to hope, and strive, in spite of the disappointment. 

It’s an imperfect system, this attempt to learn how to be a support to the staff in a prison. Cheers to all of you who have tried, who are trying still, and who are determined to keep trying. 

Stay tuned for some exciting new ideas in this episode, ideas we have been discussing with long-time corrections professionals, finding some ways that just may actually work!

The mission is a big one, friends. It’s challenging. And we are learning how to pursue it more and more effectively! 

What ELSE We’ve Learned in Our First Year:

• People are interested in personal stories.

Listeners seem to appreciate that I am a mom as well as a non-profit founder, connected to J and to Dylan as they have shared their voices on the podcast, sharing the experiences of life as a prison resident, listeners have connected to friends and family members who have visited prison and shared their experiences, and that these stories have helped create a more-fully-formed, 3-dimensional understanding of prison neighborhoods in a way that simple stats would not.

And one MORE Thing We’ve Learned in Our First Year:

• We’ve got a lot of work to do…and there’s a place for so many different personalities in new ways!

Here’s where we move from What We Learned in our first year into Where We’re Headed in Year 2.

We are heading into your living rooms!

Yep, you heard that right. Stock up on some snacks, because this is the year that we begin to gather with small groups of your people to raise awareness about things like:

• the unsustainability of the prison system in the U.S., 
• the profoundly toxic culture behind the fence that is literally killing correctional staff, 
• the fundamental realities of the prison philosophy in this country that undermine rehabilitation at every turn, 
• and the ways that ordinary folks (like you and your people!) can be a part of the solution.

Conferences and conventions are fantastic places for sharing ideas and making connections, but they are only attended by people who are ALREADY interested in or connected to the corrections and criminal justice fields of study and employment. 

Where we’ve seen real traction in raising AWARENESS among people who have never really thought about things like:

• the looming staffing crisis in the U.S. around prisons, 
• or the lack of any agreed-upon definition of “rehabilitation,” 
• or the frequent use of strip searches and the psychological impact on STAFF who have to perform them, as well as on the residents who must endure them,
• or the impact of poor quality food, isolation, and virtually non-existent mental health resources…

…the traction in raising awareness comes from YOUR conversations with YOUR people. 

As you begin to become aware, you ask questions, you talk to others about it, and they ask questions, and then they talk about it…and what many of you seem to love is having someone to simply facilitate the discussion for you.

So, coming soon at prisoncare.org: a simple guide for hosting a house party to raise awareness! 

Really, really simple, you guys:

Pick a date, buy some snacks, invite some friends over for an hour, and share my PrisonCare 18-minute TED-Talk Style presentation about prisons, and about what caring for them can look like. 

I LOVE doing these presentations in person whenever I am able to, and because of my weird travel-lifestyle, I have, so far, been able to sit with you in real life in a surprising number of situations!

But for all the times I CAN’T actually make it to your house to  drink your wine and eat your cheese and crackers, well, for those times, we’re hard at work with Outsider Film Company, capturing that 18-minute presentation on film for you. Before the end of the summer 2023, we expect to have a video version available to show on your TV, in your living room, to your people, to facilitate your learning and success in building a compassion team or raising funds.

Raising funds, you say?

(Well, actually, I said it!)

Raising funds for WHAT?

Good question! That brilliant question brings me to one of the most exciting focus points for this second year of PrisonCare.  

Can you say MENTAL WELLNESS RESOURCES?

One of the clearest messages we’ve gotten over the last year is that there is a tremendous need for three distinct kinds of mental wellness resources in prison neighborhoods. 

Ok, pay attention, y’all; this is important.

1. Correctional Officers need access to professional mental health care, it needs to be trauma-informed care from a provider with a very specific understanding of their workplace and lifestyle as COs, and it needs to be available to them with COMPLETE confidentiality.

To effectively support prison staff, caring people on the outside can create ways to connect prisons with trained and willing professional counselors and therapists on the outside who will meet with staffers in crisis. And with our fund-raising efforts, we can make those appointments available to COs as cheaply as possible. 

Sounds like a tall order, right? But, I have it on good authority from decades-plus professionals in the field of corrections and in professional counseling fields, I have it on good authority that PrisonCare is striving in the right direction here. This IS doable. It’s complicated, but it’s doable. And it is the kind of support that is ACTUALLY gonna matter for this extreme at-risk population we call Correctional Officers. 

So, number one mental wellness resource we are committed to pursuing in the coming year is creating opportunities for Correctional Officers to access professional counseling without anybody at their work place knowing ANYTHING about it…and for as little money as possible. COs are dying — from heart disease, from stroke, from diabetes, from stress — and far too often by their own hand — and it is our responsibility to do something to help them.

2. Prison residents, the folks who are serving prison sentences, need tools for working on their own mental health and personal growth. The system is completely unable to provide counseling — even to the maybe 50% of inmates with a diagnosed mental illness — and throwing a few generic anti-psychotics at people every morning at MedLine is really not cutting it in terms of actual healthcare and rehabilitation. 

To effectively support incarcerated people who ARE willing and able to do the hard work for personal growth, who do want to take ownership of their rehabilitation, who are ready to change their lives, we must provide tools as well as encouragement. 

Think about it: when I’m ready to change a bad habit, or establish a good one, I don’t do it in a vacuum, right? I go online and read articles. I watch YouTubes. I order books from well-respected authorities in the field. I do my research and learn NEW THINGS that will help me change my life. 

People in prison don’t have access to self-help materials that would really be tremendously helpful to them. I mean, they can wait for their chance to get into the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People program, or they can hope the library has a book that will be a good fit for working toward their goal, but the limits placed on people who are actively TRYING to take responsibility for re-invention in their own livees…that’s our responsibility to fix.

We can send books in. Plain and simple. We have to do it according to the facility’s guidelines, but we CAN resource prisons with mental wellness materials that can be game-changers for incarcerated people who want to grow. And those are the ones who will then become culture changers…right? Acting change engines in their facilities. Their personal growth will become contagious. It will inspire others to take similar steps.

So, another mental wellness resource we are committing to pursue in the coming year is curating a recommended book list based on feedback we get from incarcerated friends who have found success working alone on the inside as they pursue growth using self-help resources.

And we’ll continue creating PrisonCare originals, as well. Our first few titles, that were aimed at people who are just beginning to take ownership of their journey — so far in this first year we created Improving Sleep, Improving Communication, Mental Wellness Tips at a Glance, and Finding Healing Through Writing — those first four titles have been really enthusiastically received. 

This is what one of our pen pals wrote to us recently, after working through the Finding Healing Through Writing Workbook -

“You should be proud that your name is attached to this personal self-help workbook. I eagerly participated in the exercises, and when I was done I felt lighter. I felt cared about. I felt you were listening and interested in my answers, and you care how I feel. I’m not really into curriculums, because most of them are robotic and lack emotion. What I like about your workbook is the simple options you gave with no pressure. From the core of my heart, thank you for helping me.”

Guys, I'm not making that up. That’s a direct quote.

Friends on the inside are asking for more titles on topics - lots of topics, like Managing Anxiety, Dealing with Depression, Using Visual Art for Personal Growth, Rebuilding Bridges That Were Burned with Loved Ones and more. By creating printed resources like these in-house at PrisonCare, Inc., we can keep the instruction simple and bite-sized, we can keep the examples prison-resident-appropriate (think about it: nothing worse than an article on improving sleep that tells an inmate to light a candle and take a long hot bath before bedtime…), so, we can make these articles then available for FREE on the prisoncare.org website so people everywhere can print them off and mail them in to incarcerated folks who need them.

Finally:

3. Prison residents need actual coaching when they reach a certain point in the rehabilitative process. There’s only so far that self-help books will take you.

Telephone coaching is a thing. It’s a complicated thing to get inside the walls of a prison, but it’s not impossible. 

PrisonCare’s board has been interviewing various Life Coaches who do telephone coaching appointments, learning from them what would make something like this successful and meaningful to them in their professional work, and from that, we are beginning to create a PrisonCare Coaching Certification training program that Life Coaches could take to prepare them for this kind of work. 

Once a friend that we’ve made on the inside shows themselves ready for “the next step” beyond self-help materials, a Compassion Team could raise the funds necessary to pay a PrisonCare Certified Life Coach, and begin the facilitation process to get phone access for that resident and their coach to have a series of phone sessions for work on a specific goal. 

Would we love to find a way to provide actual therapy — from licensed, professional psychologists and therapists — to our incarcerated friends? Heck yes. But that’s a bit farther down the road. 

The goal of connecting an inmate with a Life Coach is a difficult enough challenge for this week. We’ll start where we are, and get where we want to go eventually!

So that’s What We’ve Learned, Where We’re Headed in year 2, and so now it’s time to talk about What We Need to Know that ONLY YOU Can Tell Us, friends! Here’s the question.

What sounds like a new avenue you want to explore?

• Would you like to host a house party, a casual awareness evening for friends? Invite me over! Like, seriously! Invite me over! (in real life or via video)
• Would you be able to sponsor the creation of a new PrisonCare Original Mental Wellness Resource? Each one costs in the neighborhood of $250.00 to create at this point. Donate via Paypal, Venmo, CashApp or check, and just designate “new Mental Wellness Resource Creation” in the memo line. And you’re gonna know we spent the money on what you asked for, because you will be able to download the PDF from prisoncare.org and mail it to someone you care about behind the fence!
• Would you be interested in gifting books, quality personal growth titles, to be sent to individual prison residents who are asking for them, or as a donation to a prison’s library? Start a wishlist on Amazon. 
• Would you be willing to begin cultivating relationships with licensed therapists or counseling practices who might become Corrections-Trauma-Informed? If you start the process, we could eventually begin making these professionals available for confidential CO counseling sessions, paid for by funds raised by a PrisonCare Compassion Team! Talk to a counselor you know, or make an appointment to discuss the possibility with the owner of a local therapy practice.

We’ve got so much great information coming your way in the coming weeks, how-to resources to walk you through each step of the process in a variety of compassionate endeavors!

None of the original stuff is going away, by the way! We are still ALL ABOUT equipping PenPal Encouragers to do what they do, making a world of difference in the lives of countless incarcerated folks who like to write and receive letters. 

And we’re still all about equipping small teams to adopt a specific prison facility.

The vision is still personal and flexible. Our mission statement hasn’t changed.

It’s just getting bigger…it’s growing…and it has more and more roles for YOU to play!

Email me, sabrina@prisoncare.org, and tell me what makes your heart excited. 

And thank you so much, friends, for caring!

(theme music outro, “The Fool,” by incarcerated artist J. Bloom © 2022, used with permission)

“I’ll wait. I'll wait until I break.”

Support PrisonCare with a donation of any size:

http://prisoncare.org/community.html

Time Markers:

(0:32) Lots of People Care

(1:32) The Mission is BIG

(6:59) Person Stories are Important

(7:53) Raising Awareness in Year 2

(9:48) PrisonCare House Parties?

(11:13) Prison Residents Need Mental Health Resources

(16:08) Newest Resources and What’s To Come

(17:45) Telephone Coaching for Residents

(19:31) What Do YOU Want to Explore?

Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
 The Fool, original recording music and lyrics by J. Bloom © 2022.

For the full song, visit the PrisonCare, Inc. YouTube Channel:

https://youtu.be/cG8zHpQZDug