In 1993, a teenager named Oshea Israel shot and killed 20-year-old Laramiun Byrd at a party both were attending in Minneapolis. Israel was sentenced to 25 years behind bars for second-degree murder, while the mother of the victim was sentenced to life without her only child.
Hayden’s life collapsed the day his daddy went to prison. But today, Hayden is getting the love and support of caring Angel Tree volunteers and the church community where it all happens.
In a major criminal justice reform speech this week, President Obama brought attention to the steep rise in America’s prison population over the last few decades—and its collateral consequences for prisoners’ children.
“Around one million fathers are behind bars,” the president said.
For all the contentious, divisive issues that have recently dominated national headlines, there is one policy issue that continues to receive broad, bipartisan support—the need for meaningful sentencing and corrections reforms in the United States. And with new efforts by President Obama to highlight the need for changes, the time may be right for a significant transformation in how we view prisons and the men and women inside them.
It’s altogether too easy for those of us with little or no connection to prison to dismiss and ignore the men and women behind bars. Content to live our own lives, we are quick to conclude that the incarcerated “got what they had coming to them,” and to write them off as inconsequential.
Denise Harris is the field director for Prison Fellowship in Detroit, Michigan.
On a beautiful summer day, nearly 70 former prisoners, mentors, and Prison Fellowship staff descended upon the rolling hills of the Colombiere Conference and Retreat Center in Clarkston, Michigan, for a day they’d never forget.
The following story is written by Jeff Freeman, a prisoner at the Pamlico Correctional Institution. It was forwarded to Prison Fellowship by Don Fulford, volunteer chairman for the Nehemiah Project, which seeks to “reach, reconcile, and restore the men at the Wake Correctional Center” in North Carolina.
I sat recently with a state-level corrections leader who had made time in his busy schedule to have lunch. He was feeling the need for prayer. Though he is a man with an impressive career of leadership, he is new to his job and new to the entire field of corrections.
A version of this post originally appeared on the Justice Fellowship website.
A group of men in prison gather to listen as a mother shares the pain and sorrow of losing her child. The men sit silently with tears streaming down their cheeks while she relives the memory aloud.
Bobby calls it a privilege to “lead those in prison to a life-changing encounter with the one and only living God.”
For many prisoners, the challenges and difficulties that come with incarceration don’t end when they leave prison for the outside world. Free from the monotonous routine and structured environment of prison, these men and women are thrown into a world that is unfamiliar, with little (if any) support structure, few contacts that will do anything other than lead them to reoffending, and bearing a “scarlet letter” that makes it virtually impossible to establish themselves as productive members of society.
I’ve only ever been a member of one prison gang. Some time ago I was made an honorary member of “God’s Gang for Change,” the faith-based dorm at a correctional facility in Alabama.
On a recent visit I had the privilege of celebrating a worship service with my fellow “gang members.”
Shine Adams is employing those society deems "unemployable" and giving them a hope for a new future.
By the time he was 15 years old, Arthur Medina was a runaway living on the streets in Texas. It wasn’t long before he turned to crime just to survive.
Art earned his living stealing cars and running them across the border.
This past Sunday was a time of great celebration at IFI. Eighteen formerly incarcerated men returned to the Carol Vance unit to graduate before their families and other program participants.