Katherine Thompson recently served as a policy intern with Justice Fellowship. A version of the following article originally appeared on the House of Margaret Thatcher website, and is used here with permission.
If I could attend church in prison every week, I would.
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As counterintuitive as it may seem, over the past five years both crime and imprisonment have declined. At least in 30 states.
Earlier today, The Pew Charitable Trusts released an infographic that illustrates this positive trend. According to its research, Pew found that between 2009 and 2014, the national imprisonment rate fell 7 percent, while the crime rate fell 15 percent (that’s half of the crime rate from 1991).
“The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola is one of America’s most unusual prisons.”
Thus begins Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on the facility once referred to as “the bloodiest prison in America.” The comment initially refers to the 18,000 acre property’s previous existence as a southern plantation purchased with slave trade proceeds, but as the video makes clear, the uniqueness of Angola goes well beyond it’s history.
Ethel Bradford teaches classes at a medium-security prison in Utah and was shocked when one of her students made the following statement: “If they ever put me out of here, within a week I’ll commit a crime that will force them to take me back.”
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As the wildfires raging through much of California continue to stretch the abilities and resources of professional firefighters, assistance is coming from an unexpected source—men in the California corrections system.
Nearly 4,000 prisoners have joined forces with roughly 6,000 firefighting professionals in an attempt to tame the fires that have burned 117,960 acres so far, and threaten thousands of homes and businesses.
When asked how many prisoners he hopes to ultimately reach with the program, Ludeman simply responds, “Millions.”
The community reentry team connected Albert with Paving the Way, one of Prison Fellowship's reentry partners that helps former prisoners in their search for employment.
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.
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.