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.