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Monthly Archives

August 2015

Aug 03

Taking on controversial issues in the workplace

By Sponsor Insight

By Bryan Brenner, CEO and founder, FirstPerson

When Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was making headlines, a number of Indiana companies stepped up to make their support or opposition publicly known.

While companies’ taking public positions on pending legislation isn’t a frequent occurrence, it also isn’t unusual. In the past, we’ve seen Indiana firms of all sizes take positions on matters such as gay marriage, education standards, mass transit and even global geopolitics.

The firms’ positions might seem straightforward and logical, and their involvement might be relatively minimal (sometimes it’s nothing more than adding a signature to a group letter), but, if they do it right, their approach to getting involved in such issues is well-planned and transparent to their employees. Otherwise, they run the risk of increasing their standing among peers but losing their standing among their own people.

How do companies manage this balance?

Aug 03

How “prisons without bars” could cut the cost of prison and recidivism

By Feature, Programming

You probably already know the jaw-dropping stats about American prisons: that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. That we’re home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prisoners. That more than one in every 10 American men has a felony conviction. That more than 60 percent of people released from prison are back again within three years.

“Prison is horrible for the prisoner and expensive for the state,” write Mark A.R. Kleiman, Angela Hawken and Ross Halperin over at Vox. It doesn’t have to be. Kleiman, Hawken and Halperin study criminal justice policy, and they’ve recently proposed an innovative solution to help cut America’s incarcerated population, and ensure that those who are released don’t come back. It’s called “graduated re-entry.” The idea is to let convicts out of prison early — real early. Three-years-into-a-ten-year-sentence-early.

But here’s the catch. Parolees wouldn’t simply be dumped on the street with 40 bucks in their pocket and no clear path toward re-entering society, the way they are now.

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Aug 03

Can holistic prisoner reentry work

By Feature, Programming

By Matthew Johnson, multimedia manager, Urban Institute

In the dark of night, on the west side of Chicago, a group of young men jumped onto a moving Union Pacific cargo train, pried a door open, and attempted to steal what was inside. But this was not their night. They were detected, police rushed to the scene, and the young men were arrested.

Thus began a long cycle of incarceration, release, and re-offense for then 18-year-old Timothy Smith. Not far from Smith’s childhood home sits Garfield Park, a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago plagued by concentrated poverty, high unemployment, substance abuse, and crime.

Indeed, nearly a third of Garfield Park’s residents have been to prison at one point or another, and some have been more than once. The reason is simple: coming home after serving time in prison is hard.

http://datatools.urban.org/features/safer-return/

This story is based on prisoner reentry research by the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center and exclusive interviews with program participants, administrators, case managers, and mentors from the Safer Return demonstration project.