PRISON FELLOWSHIP BLOG: incarceration

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).

Stephanos Bibas, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a thoughtful piece in National Review on the state of incarceration in the United States.  Challenging presumptions of both left and right, Bibas argues that an effective system of corrections is one that holds people responsible for their behavior, but also seeks to forgive and restore those who have served their sentences.

What does it take to be a prison warden?

The answer to that question is rapidly shifting.

“Corrections has changed,” explains Warden Chris Hendry, Martin Correctional Institution (Indiantown, Florida). “We’re not ‘prison bosses’ anymore. We’re not in the same environment we used to be.”

On September 10, Hendry, along with 13 other wardens and assistant wardens from five prisons across the country graduated from the Warden Exchange™ (WE), a two-year-old program of Prison Fellowship to equip wardens to be transformative leaders in their prisons.