Over the last quarter century, the number of women behind bars has increased by more than 700 percent. According to The Sentencing Project:
Half of those women were not employed full-time the month before incarceration. Nearly half had never finished high school.
Your eyes—a deep ocean of sorrow and grief. Your tongue—like earthquakes so violent and strong, but brief. Your voice—a sound of trumpets that tumble down or soar. Your thoughts—a mystery, a puzzle, unsolved because there’s something more.
A fledgling poet penned those lines from Mat-Su Youth Facility, according to Alaska Dispatch News (ADN).
“I never knew when my father was coming home,” Ahmarr Melton told DelawareOnline.com.
For 14 years, Melton watched other boys play with their fathers and experience a unique relationship that he never had. His own father, Coley Harris, had been serving a second-degree murder sentence since Melton was two years old.
“The only thing I’d ever graduated from was drug treatment. I had no training, no certifications in anything. What I did have was a very lengthy criminal history,” says Jessica Towers.
With six felonies and a scant professional résumé, Jessica wasn’t exactly set up for success as a jobseeker.
Dozens of prisoners in Florence, Arizona, just can’t wait to get up for work in the morning.
The minimum-security prisoners pair up with mustangs and burros at Florence State Prison for a unique job opportunity. In an effort to protect local rangelands and teach men behind bars a new trade, the Arizona DOC partnered with the Bureau of Land Management to form the Wild Horse Inmate Program (WHIP).
Boston’s roughest neighborhoods are hardly foreign territory to Luis Rodrigues. At 11 years old, he began roaming those streets as a crack dealer. That lifestyle continued for years, until his life was nearly taken from him.
One night in 2008, Luis was shot repeatedly at close-range.
There’s a little taste of Honduras in Skagit County, Washington. It’s called the Underground Coffee Project, a business run by a group of former prisoners who roast and sell an artisan blend of Honduran coffee beans.
It began as the vision of Bob Ekblad, who led in-prison Bible studies and built friendships with the men behind bars.
When Robert Wickham was released from prison in 2011, he felt that he had been held captive for long enough. He had not lived a life of true freedom. Since dropping out of high school, Robert struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, losing jobs and ruining relationships along the way.
The men at California Medical Facility have turned a prison yard into their own personal Eden.
The program in Vacaville is a product of Insight Garden Program (IGP), which exists to rehabilitate prisoners through horticultural education. Prisoners learn the basics of environmental responsibility, as well as practical permaculture gardening skills.
