The PrisonCare Podcast
The PrisonCare Podcast
J is in the Hole
Yeah, you read that right. There is so much complexity here, and this episode is Sabrina's super-careful analysis and fiercely-determined effort to LIVE OUT the non-partisan PrisonCare Mission of support for EVERYONE inside a prison neighborhood. No us. vs. them. Not even right now. Please listen to this important episode.
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:
(theme music outro, “The Fool,” by incarcerated artist J. Bloom © 2022, used with permission)
“I’ll wait. I'll wait until I break.”
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:
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Time Markers:
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:
(theme music outro, “The Fool,” by incarcerated artist J. Bloom © 2022, used with permission)
“I’ll wait. I'll wait until I break.”
===================
Hello, friends.
Today’s episode is different from anything else we’ve done here on the podcast. Today, I’m going to share with you something that is going on right now in J’s life, in his prison, and it is something hard, and it is without an end that I can predict.
This is an in-the-moment episode. There are a lot of big emotions surrounding it for me, and I’m going to do my very best to stay on-mission for PrisonCare as I share with you about it. I made sure I wrote a script for this one rather than allowing myself to wing it, because I want to be so diligent, so responsible with the mission of our organization, while also being absolutely honest with all of you, giving you a chance to pull back the curtain, so to speak, and experience a tiny bit of what intimate connection to a prison neighborhood does to people.
The reason I am taking you into this personal and difficult moment in our lives is because the situation we are facing is a powerful example of a fundamental problem with the U.S. prison system. We all know that very little rehabilitation is taking place inside U.S. prisons; the outrageously high rates of recidivism prove that. The majority of people who are released back into society after serving their prison sentence re-offend and end up right back in prison again. So the majority of people serving sentences are not experiencing rehabilitation, apparently.
There are lots of other factors in recidivism — and re-entry challenges deserve not only a whole episode, but probably a whole season, as the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against returning citizens — but on the surface, for a system that claims to be trying to rehabilitate individuals with criminal records, something is clearly not working.
This idea of a rehabilitative system is the core problem, honestly. Because the U.S. prison system is not a rehabilitative model, it is a punitive model. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Rehabilitation means restoring someone to health and life after an illness, an accident, or imprisonment. Restoring someone to health.
Punitive means punishment based and driven. Punishing bad behavior in an effort to stop it from happening again.
The punitive model in prisons is rooted in the idea that if someone does something bad and we punish them for it, make their life uncomfortable enough in the wake of their conviction in court, they will want to avoid punishment so much in the future that they will be sure to walk the straight and narrow.
So while the Constitution says that the loss of one’s personal freedom IS the punishment for a crime that sentences you to prison, the punitive model says, “and make sure it totally sucks being there. If it’s awful, they’ll remember down the road that breaking the law is not worth it.”
So inside prison neighborhoods, some argue, the food should be lousy. There should be little chance for being outdoors. Why offer medical or mental health services to people who broke the law, when there are zillions of people on the outside who can’t get the services they need? Isn’t that rewarding them for bad behavior? And so forth.
The punitive model will have limited success with one small segment of the incarcerated population — people who didn’t realize what they were doing could get them into any kind of trouble. For people who committed crimes thinking they weren’t committing crimes, experiencing a miserable 5 year-long prison sentence will probably cure them of committing the same crime after they get out. They’ll think, “Nope. If I had known it could land me in prison, I wouldn’t have done it the first time. Boy, was that an unpleasant wake-up call!”
I don’t know what the percentages are, but I think the number of people who are incarcerated for something they actually did, and who are serving time because they did something they didn’t know could land them in hot water, is very small.
What is more common is for people to be in prison because they did something they knew could get them in trouble, but they decided there were good enough reasons to take that chance and do it anyway. Most of these people either determined that they had no other option (whether that was true or not), or they justified their crime because of something they considered to be overwhelmingly important. They did something wrong because they felt like they had to.
There are those who are truly psychopaths or sociopaths who believe the rules don’t apply to them as they do to other people. But that’s not the norm.
Let me be clear; I’m not saying the justification was correct. I’m not even saying it was reasonable. But someone who steals to feed their starving child…I have to move very slowly before I label that person an immoral criminal.
But someone who justified a turf war with another gang for an enlarged territory, even if their own addiction was doing much of the thinking for them, gets less of my compassion, but still gets some, because addiction is a devastating condition.
Someone who lives with profound mental illness, who truly believes that the hallucinations they experience are more real than the person standing next to them, may justify breaking into someone else’s home and killing them in order to survive a desperate situation, and I will not applaud their action…but I will feel some compassion for the agony they were living through at the time they made that choice. And I will recognize the brokenness of their mind.
Someone who assaults their intimate partner or their child has some profound brokenness that is driving them, because no one with a healthy mind and life believes that battering is a way to build intimacy or to nurture. So I may be sickened at the thought of their crime, and no reason will ever excuse battering a loved one, but I would be wise to carefully consider all the circumstances…including whether or not the batterer was also a victim of someone else’s violence.
Do you see what I mean? It’s nuanced. It’s almost always nuanced. There are plenty of people in prison who appear to be unconcerned with what they have done, who appear to not even understand why it is a big deal, who laugh things off, who posture and strut in such a way that it would be easy to assume they just need to be punished. Make the punishment unpleasant enough and they will count the cost the next time and decide to skip the criminal activity.
But typically, even in “hardened criminals” who don’t much care about the morality of what they are doing, who are desensitized to suffering in others, they simply find ways to dig deep and handle the punishment. They become proud of themselves for managing prison so well. And when they are out on the streets again, facing the same problems that led them to justify crime in the past, they justify it again in the future, just trying harder not to get caught this time.
So unless we are ready to become a country that quickly executes a whole lot of convicted criminals (and I, for one, don’t think that’s the solution, just in case you’re wondering…) we need to look at the punitive model and ask ourselves a super-powerful question:
How’s that working out for us?
How’s that working out for us as a society?
The data is overwhelmingly consistent. This punitive model is not working, because it is not deterring people from a life of ongoing criminal activity.
So let’s weave rehabilitation INTO the model, right? That’s been the thinking for many people for quite some time. Programming that helps people learning to live substance-free in spite of their addiction. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on the Inside for personal responsibility training and an understanding of how to work on oneself and in partnership with others. Fine Arts programming, tapping into right-brain, creative work that can touch places that left-brain, language-heavy won’t ever achieve for many types of learners. Education - yes, please! Without adequate education, without vocational training, without a chance to build skills with which a returning citizen can make a healthy life, there’s no hope for success. So offer classes. And offer meds to those experiencing the symptoms of profound mental illness. And offer faith-building options for those willing to tend to their spirits as well as their minds and bodies and relationships.
I’m a huge fan of all of those types of rehabilitative programming, but what I never realized until a couple of years ago is how impossible it is to weave these elements into a model that is punishment-based. If the framework is punitive, adding programs in only makes positive change possible to those who can keep their lives completely on track, avoiding all rule-violations, over the course of their sentence. Because in a punitive model the rules rule. If the driving philosophy is, “Do what’s right, don’t break the rules, or else be punished,” then context becomes irrelevant.
Someone who is involved in lots of rehabilitative programming, who is perceived as fully-committed to self-improvement, may be seen giving food from his commissary stash to another inmate, and that’s a violation. The CO who observes this exchange of food may even KNOW the context already, my know that these two are friends, that one has family on the outside putting money on his books for commissary purchases and the other does not, and may feel confident that no extortion is taking place in this exchange of food.
But giving food to someone else IS a violation. It became one of the many rules in the prison because there have been people who victimized others by charging them, making them pay for their personal safety in commissary items. These items, bought by you and handed over to me, every week, or we’ll jump you. So giving food from your stash to someone else is breaking the rules. And now the CO who observes this exchange is forced to decide whether to enforce the on-paper rule, or whether to recognize what is happening within context, and respect the person sharing for his pro-social behavior.
This is one simple example among thousands. If the system is fundamentally and intentionally punitive, rehabilitative elements can only work when everything else is falling into place, when no one is being faced with nuanced circumstances that cause them to consider following the spirit of a rule while violating the letter of it. The rules rule in a punitive model.
Okay, thanks for hanging in there for all of this philosophical foundation, because I know you are wondering what is happening with J, and I’m about to tell you, but I needed to explain what a punitive model means in prison, and why it becomes problematic, because life is complex, rather than clear-cut.
J is, to the best of my very limited knowledge, currently in the hole, in Ad Seg, or Administrative Segregation, or Isolation, or Solitary. Different words for the same thing.
Yep, J is in the hole.
What did he do??? Right? You only go to the hole for bad stuff, right?
Well, you may know from earlier episodes that sometimes it’s nothing more than a personal property violation, or missing your meds, or irritating the wrong CO on a really bad day that lands people in ad seg. But you can go back and listen to those episodes later if you haven’t heard them before.
This is what I know at this point, information coming from a couple of different sources over the last two weeks. J and three friends were hanging out in the music room. Two of the guys started rough-housing — wrestling and messing around. J takes musical instruments very seriously, and he didn’t think they should be tussling near the guitars and such. J was also having a rough day, stressed and irritable. He told his two friends to take it somewhere else. He probably wasn’t using his most respectful tone of voice.
One of the two tusslers was also having a bad day, stressed and irritable. He was annoyed at being told what to do. Something along the lines of, “you’re not my mom,” followed, and he and J began yelling at each other.
It was a pointless, ugly exchange between two people who have been close friends for almost 5 years. J got shoved, he loudly asked if his friend was now going to beat him up, told him to go ahead, because he wouldn’t fight him because he knew he’d lose. His friend has documented PTSD and a history of difficulty with emotional regulation when triggered. J, of course, has a documented delusional thinking, visual and auditory hallucination, and difficulty with emotional regulation when stressed.
The other two guys with them stepped in to put a stop to the nonsense, and the cooler heads prevailed. One guy took the friend out to walk it off in the yard, while the other stayed with J as he cooled down.
Unfortunate, when friends have bad days at the same time, and say and do things they would not normally do. But the nice second chapter to this story is that after chow that same day, J and his friend reconciled. They talked it out in normal tones of voice, respectful language, forgave each other, and talked about ways they could handle it differently, if they had something similar happen in the future, a moment where they pushed each other’s buttons in all the wrong ways.
One week later, these four guys are called in to an office and informed by a CO that an anonymous kite was filed — a kite is a message from a resident to staff, essentially. They are used for requesting a medical appointment, to reporting a discrepancy on a commissary account, to asking for a move to a new cell because of problems with a cellie, to reports of violence on the part of a staff member or another inmate.
So, someone who chose not to use their name, accused these four guys of fighting, and fighting is a violation everywhere in the prison, but is an even bigger deal for people living in Incentive Program Housing (Incentive programs are, of course, one of the rehabilitative elements woven into the punitive model at J’s prison), because you can be kicked out of the incentive pod if you are found to have been fighting.
The four men explained that there had been a big argument, no doubt, but that it had not turned into a fight, and they asked this staffer to pull the video and look at it. She watched it with them, and it did, indeed, appear that this was a non-fight. She said she believed their story about how things had gone down, and said she would pass that information along to the committee who would make a decision about possible punishment later that day.
Learning what was going on, two Board members at PrisonCare wrote careful and respectful emails to the committee members to serve as character witnesses for these four guys, all of whom are part of one of our Pen Pal Encourager program. These letters spoke to our hope that the context of the situation would be considered, that one anonymous complaint would not overshadow years of consistent pro-social behavior observed by everyone in the unit in the lives of each of these residents.
No news for two days.
And then the same CO called J and the one with whom he’d had the argument into the office and told them they were both being kicked out of the incentive program. The CO also told them that this would be on their records as a Class 1 Violation, which is the most severe, and which flags your file forever, making it impossible to re-apply to live in an incentive unit in the future. It’s like checking the, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” box on a job application.
And J lost it. He punched either or wall or a door (not sure which), hurt his hand, was taken to Medical, and was then sent to the hole.
In the days between the anonymous kite and the pronouncement of punishment, J had told me on the phone that if they decided to kick him out of the Music Pod, it would prove to him that it really is the liars and the bullies who run the world, and that he couldn’t face living in a world that hopeless. He warned me that he had written a goodbye letter to me, and if they kicked him out and he could find a way to kill himself, one of his friends would send me the letter.
Last I heard anything, through one of his friends who is pen pals with someone on this prison’s compassion team with me, J was on suicide watch in Medical, his hand had been treated and was going to be okay, and staff reported that on day 2 he was significantly better than he had been at first, less distraught, perceived to be less of a danger to himself. He was expected to be transferred to Ad Seg the next day, should be allowed a brief phone call to me at the time of that transfer, and would then be held in isolation until he is shipped out to another facility later this month.
Final, significant and disturbing piece of the story is that one of J’s friends found a moment to ask one of the higher-ups who had been on the committee that decided the guys’ fate why it was ruled a Class 1 Violation…and was told that it wasn’t. The CO who told them what had been decided was either confused, or chose to abuse the power of that position by making the punishment sound even worse than it was. According to the higher-up, J could have appealed the decision and been re-instated in a couple of months, if his time in general population had not earned him any additional rules violations of any kind. He had no explanation for why the CO told the guys it was Class 1.
I think the difficulties in this situation for the inmate residents are pretty obvious, so I won’t belabor the point. Consistent years of pro-social, culture-creating behavior on the part of this friend group, in spite of actively symptomatic mental illness in a living environment in which hyper vigilance and overstimulation are the daily norm. No easy space for getting off by yourself when you are having a bad day. A moment that could have exploded into violence, that was, instead, managed with words, helped by friends rather than declining into taking sides and squaring off. No marks on anyone’s bodies. No damage to any prison property. Full, personal responsibility taken by each man to discuss and reconcile the relationship, after a few hours of cooling off time. Consistent evidence over the next week of that restored friendship. And yet the greater context did not seem to matter. They received dismissal from the Incentive Program…forever (or so they were told).
But PrisonCare remains committed to the mission of supporting positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYONE on the inside matters. So I want to show the respect due to the staff who mishandled this situation (in my opinion, of course…you can call me Mama Bear if you want, but I think I’m taking a very measured approach to examining this whole thing). I want to consider the context (as best I understand it) of the staffers involved in this.
An anonymous kite was filed. If my understanding is correct, that automatically drew the attention of a facility investigator because it was anonymous. So now the CO who directly oversees this housing pod has someone outside/higher up paying attention to how they handle looking into it.
This primary CO in this scenario stated that they have sometimes been accused of showing favoritism to residents who help train the dogs, so they needed to bump the accusation upline to a committee to make the call, protecting the reputation for fairness. That’s an understandable concern.
The committee tasked with making a decision has limited personal knowledge of the four residents in question. Their jobs do not have them in daily connection to them. So while they know them somewhat, they do not know them well.
The letters the committee members received as character witness came from people they do not know, and have no reason to trust or believe.
The video, while apparently not showing anything that would typically be considered a fight in a prison, did show two residents very angry with one another, and one yelling about the potential for a fight. In a prison, this wouldn’t generally raise any eyebrows as explosive behavior, but in a regular workplace on the outside, it would. So I can understand that the definition of a “fight” is a hard thing to nail down.
When the two residents were informed of the decision, they were given incorrect information. I’m having trouble with that one, honestly, y’all. Everybody makes mistakes, I know. But this seems like a pretty big thing to be mistaken about. I’ve tried and tried to wrap my head around why this punishment got over-stated, and I’m coming up with nothing positive. If you have thoughts as to why something like that might happen for something other than negative reasons, please email me. I’d like to be able to assume the best about this staffer.
J hit a wall or a door. That’s simply not okay. People shouldn’t hit things when they are upset.
He was given medical care, in spite of having inflicted the injury on himself in a fit of temper. I am grateful that he was seen by medical. He was observed as being suicidally distraught, and was placed in observation in an attempt to keep him from dying by suicide. I am grateful for that concern for his life.
And all of this brings me full-circle, back to the philosophical look at punitive and rehabilitative models of prison…which is called Corrections, by the way. We obviously think we’re supposed to be correcting something that is off-course.
Within a punitive model of corrections, the rules rule.
There is a rule about fighting in an incentive housing pod.
If two residents fight, they lose their incentive place.
Got it.
Define “fight,” please. No staff were aware of it when it was happening. No residents reacted in any obvious way to an incident happening in a public room (remember, this was not in someone’s cell with the door closed). Typically, inmates react to a fight by either getting away from it as quickly as possible (wise!), or by circling up to watch the show (not so wise)…and EVERYONE gossips about it. I was told by an administrator once, “You have to remember that there are NO secrets in prison.”
So it was only a question because someone filed an anonymous kite.
People have all sorts of reasons to file complaints anonymously, fear of retaliation being the most common. But the people being complained about are all well-known for not having gang affiliation, for being actively pro-social. Of all the people in the pod to complain about, this group is an unlikely one to fear.
Are there ever selfish or jealousy based reasons for complaining about others? I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but it should certainly have been a possible considered piece of context. It would not be unreasonable to wonder if this kite was filed by someone jealous of the positions in the Music Room and in the Dog Program that J held.
Context. Context. Context.
Who are the people being accused?
Do they have documented histories of mental illness symptoms that are exacerbated by stress and fear, and that make emotional regulation difficult?
Are they people who have been observed for years working hard to master emotional regulation skills anyway, in spite of the added challenges?
Is this the third time you’ve found them close to explosive in the last month…or the first time ever?
They claim this was not a fight, and that the relationship itself was fully restored in short order. Is there video evidence of them spending good friend time together in the days following the incident? Are there other residents you could ask about what they observed…friendship, or enmity between them?
Context.
It’s there. The staff could look a little more closely and consider the context…if they weren’t already stretched so thin, with so little time and too many fires to stomp. If they were not required to file time-consuming reports on every incident like this, detailing everything they took into consideration in making their decision, knowing that anything nuanced is likely to be called into question by administration farther up the hierarchy.
This prison is a punitive model society. The rules rule. When there is a question of context, you don’t explore the context, you default to what the rules say. That’s the wisest, the safest choice. And as corrections staff, your primary job is to keep the facility safe, to give no extra room for trouble to brew. If someone might be stirring up violence, you put them in a place where they can’t endanger anyone else as quickly as you possibly can.
You take the guy with the consistent pro-social reputation — consistent with staff and other residents alike — the guy with documented symptomatic mental illness who has just been given devastating information (which happens to be incorrect, by the way), and who responded childishly to that information by hitting an inanimate object, and you get him into the hole as quickly as possible, because his frustration and temper might spark a similar response in others, leading to a riot.
The potential is there. I get it. I believe it. I truly do feel for the impossibility of the situation for the staff.
But it is impossible for the staff because prison in the U.S. is a punishment-based model that tries to incorporate elements of rehabilitation into a punitive process.
What would be different in a rehabilitative model?
Remember the definition of rehabilitate: to restore health and life after an illness, accident, or imprisonment.
Restoring life and health in the wake of that anonymous kite would have included things like:
- talking to the 4 men involved, watching the video, and determining that this is a complex situation, and not an obvious fight, in the traditional sense
- involving mental health staff to talk with J and his friend separately about what led each of them to falter in their emotional regulation. What were the triggers, what do they realize now they could have chosen to do differently that would have deescalated more quickly? Are there specific things going on in their personal lives that have them experiencing more stress than usual recently? (I know J does, and it’s quite possible his friend does, too, as he had been unusually sensitive over the last several weeks, but no one has ever looked into that, to my knowledge.)
- involving staff or volunteers trained in restorative justice practices to facilitate full reconciliation between J and his friend, the other two friends in the room that day, and anyone else in the pod who felt that they were impacted by the situation negatively, including staff. Determine what steps, if any, must be committed to by J or his friend to keep working on personal emotional regulation, and what restitution, if any, needs to be made by either of them to anyone who was harmed by the incident. Create an action plan for that follow-up, and hold them accountable to fulfilling it.
Does that sound like a lot? Yeah, I think so, too.
Honestly, I think it sounds completely ridiculous, knowing what I know about the staffing shortage in the prison. I think it sounds ridiculous, because I know there are almost NO mental health workers in the prison at all, and there is no restorative justice staffer or volunteer either.
I think it sounds stupid because most of the staff who are trying to keep the facility calm and non-violent are struggling tremendously with personal emotional regulation themselves, because Corrections Fatigue so utterly shapes their lives that they have no margin for all this added compassion and understanding.
They cannot pour from an empty cup…and certainly not from a cup that has been so battered it is cracked in several places. They are sleep-deprived. They have PTSD. They are called on to make decisions in highly-charged situations every single day, with little to no margin for error. They must remain hyper-vigilant at work, and before long their brains are no longer able to turn that off outside the fence, either, so they go through life keeping their back to the wall and their eyes scanning the room.
Context.
And since the prison model is a punitive one, the system has no reason to provide mental health staffers in abundance, restorative justice practitioners, or even mental health support for staff.
It’s simple — the rules rule. COs need to just do their job and enforce the rules, and no one will get hurt, and people will serve their sentences and be returned to society ready to behave.
Except…How’s that working out for us?
One final thought as I wrap up this painful episode.
I want you to know that it is amazing that I, J’s mom, have any idea what is going on with him. What I know is sketchy, for sure, but at least I know something. I only have the information I have because PrisonCare compassion team volunteers have formed relationships with multiple residents in J’s facility, and they are concerned for him and for me, so they are getting us what updates they can.
What typically happens in a situation like this is that your loved one who is incarcerated, who calls you every other day around 7 pm suddenly just goes silent. For days and days, or weeks. And you wonder — did they get sent to the hole? Did they have an appendicitis and get transferred out to the hospital? Did they get jumped, and are so badly hurt that they are in Medical with a broken jaw and crushed voicebox? Did they randomly get transferred to another facility, and their commissary hasn’t gotten properly transferred yet, so they don’t have any phone time available? Did they try to kill themselves, and they’re in a suicide watch observation cell with no access to phone calls?
You can call the facility, but all they can do is send a case worker or chaplain to perform a wellness check, and report back to you that your loved one is in the facility and alive. That is all they are allowed to tell you.
In a rehabilitative model, I would imagine there would be some provision for the positive support of loved ones on the outside to aid in responding to a crisis on the inside. A person in crisis who HAS loving support outside the fence is not benefitted by having all contact with them removed as punishment for bad behavior. The rest of the population who come in contact with that person in crisis is not helped by that cut-off of communication, either — especially not the overworked staff who are trying to see to it that they do not kill themselves.
But hey, the rules are the rules. When you lost it and hit a wall, you go to the hole. When you are in the hole, you don’t get phone calls. And maybe if you suffer enough, you’ll remember the next time you are in pain and don’t know what to do with all of it that the pain to come will only pile onto what you already can’t manage. That’ll make you a better person. Yes!
Let’s be honest; it’ll make you a self-mutilation or suicide statistic more than it will cure what ails you.
Punitive model doesn’t work.
Rehabilitative strategies cannot be added into a punitive model with any consistent success.
But a rehabilitative model?
A rehabilitative model with punitive strategies woven into it for use when necessary?
Now that could be something!
It could be something that actually works for us. And there are other countries leading the way in the use of this model who are having tremendous success with it. Perhaps America could be humble enough to learn from people who are getting the outcomes we long for?
And with that, I will sign off for this episode. I am still waiting to hear where J is, how he is, and whether he is still alive, to be perfectly honest. My nerves are a little jangled, so if my personal emotional regulation is not on-point, I hope you will be gracious.
I recorded this episode today, July 3, 2023, right in the moment, for two reasons.
One, transparency. This is the reality of J’s life, of mine, and of more than 2 million other incarcerated people and their loved ones.
Two, accountability. PrisonCare, under my direction, is calling tirelessly for a non-partisan approach to prison reform. For an end to us vs. them. That has to apply to the woman in the mirror, too. I am faced with a situation unfolding around my child, and I want to go all us vs. them like a mad dog. But I refuse to do that, because the staff who have been running the show in this situation are also worthy of my compassion and understanding. Their job is absolutely impossible to do with any consistent success. The very best of the best of correctional staff are working to facilitate rehabilitation in the lives of inmates, and their hands are tightly tied by the rules of the punitive model in which they are employed.
If anyone from J’s facility listens to this episode, I want to know that they heard respect from me for their difficult, complex, and nuanced position in all that has happened in my kid’s life over the last two weeks. Everyone on the inside matters. Everyone on the inside matters.
Thank you for listening. Please get involved. Learn more on the prisoncare.org website. Give to support our work. Volunteer. Invite me into your world to share this vision with your friends. If nothing changes, in another 5 years we’re still going to be looking at the hot mess that is corrections in the U.S. and asking, “So how is this working out for us?”
We can do better. We have to do better. Thanks for caring, friends.