Strong Communities Forum Inland Empire

Strong Communities Forum

Saturday, September 26, 2015

9: 00 am - 5:00 pm

The Hyatt Place 

3500 Market Street

Riverside, CA 92501

SAVE THE DATE: Riverside Strong Communities Forum September 26th!

Save the Date!

The Riverside Strong Communities Forum is taking place on Saturday, September 26, 2015 from 9 am to 5 pm at the Hyatt Place in Downtown Riverside, California.

We are inviting organizations to share and receive the “best of the best” that community organizations, non-profits, colleges, and universities have to offer in the areas of re-entry, Prop 47 assistance, social services, employment opportunities, post conviction relief, civic engagement, social enterprises, alternatives to jails, and housing options for those who have been incarcerated and are now being released into the community.

We are featuring solutions that include 9 key areas of re-entry and more!

• HOUSING
• PUBLIC BENEFITS
• PAROLE & PROBATION
• EDUCATION
• UNDERSTANDING & CLEANING UP YOUR CRIMINAL RECORD
• BUILDING BLOCKS OF REENTRY: ID & VOTING
• FAMILY & CHILDREN
• COURT-ORDERED DEBT
• EMPLOYMENT

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Marie Smith

Community Organizer, Riverside All of Us or None

LA Jail System Not Expanding After All As Taft Deal Dies

Prison reform advocates were appalled when Los Angeles County’s top elected officials last month agreed to lease an empty jail about two hours from Downtown LA.

“It’s so disappointing,” Lynne Lyman, the California director for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national advocacy group, said at the time.

Los Angeles County, which includes the city of LA, already had more people behind bars than any other U.S. county or city -- more than Miami and New York City combined. By adding the remote Taft city jail to its network of crowded facilities, the county would be able to lock up about 500 more people, raising its total inmate population as high as 22,000.

But on Tuesday, the county scrapped the plan after a key supporter changed her mind. Now, the county will have to come up with another way to relieve overcrowding in its jails.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who joined two of her colleagues in a 3-2 vote for the deal last month, told the Los Angeles Times she reversed her position after learning about an ongoing legal battle over the Taft jail. Until 2011, California used the Taft facility to house state inmates. Last year, Taft sued the state, after the state canceled the contract.

Molina told the LA Times she didn’t want the county to get dragged into the dispute. Molina’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Huffington Post on Wednesday. Molina generally favors jail expansion, and the county is likely to come up with another plan for enlarging its jail system soon.

In the meantime, prison reform advocates said they hope to convince Molina and the other county supervisors to support what they call “alternatives to incarceration.” That includes substance-abuse treatment, transitional housing, and other programs aimed at making sure people don’t go back to jail after they’re freed.

“Most of the people going into the jail system were already disconnected from basic services, such as housing, health services, and employment,” said Lyman. “Services provided after release can help them establish a basic foundation that moves them toward long term stabilization and ensure they do not return to jail.”

LA’s struggle with jail overcrowding goes back to 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law that shifted responsibility for many low-level, nonviolent offenders from the state to the counties in an attempt to ease overcrowding in state prisons.

To fund the program, Brown dedicated a portion of state sales tax revenues and vehicle licensing fees to the counties. In the program’s first three years, Los Angeles has received more than $700 million.

Lyman and her colleagues said they had hoped the county would spend that money on substance-abuse treatment programs, prisoner-reentry programs, and other alternatives to incarceration.

So far, however, only about 5 percent of LA’s funds have gone to reentry programs, although an additional 15 percent has gone to the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Public Health for treatment services.

“We are not investing in what we know works,” said Lyman.

In some parts of California, including San Francisco and Santa Clara, counties have invested in a different approach. Two years ago, for example, Santa Clara opened a reentry center that provides services to people coming out of prison or jail.

Ten months after the program began, only 20 percent of released inmates in the county were getting rearrested, compared with about 65 percent before the center opened.

By investing in similar programs, prison reformers said, LA could reduce its jail population by thousands of inmates.

“I walk the jails every month,” said Herman Avilez, the head of California Drug Counseling, a group that provides substance-abuse counseling and other services to low-income people in Pasadena. “Those places are packed with people that shouldn’t be in there.”

via http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/la-jails-taft_n_4179372.html

Victory! California adopts Ban the Box - A Message from Dorsey Nunn

The signing of AB 218, the Fair Chance Employment Act, by Governor Brown creates enormous potential for California, formerly incarcerated people, and the community as a whole.  Now people with records will have a better chance to become employed, and thus to sustain themselves, their families, and contribute to their larger community.

Criminal background checks undermine fair hiring practices and discriminate against a class of people solely based on prior conviction history. The new law prohibits initial inquiry about convictions on job applications for state agencies and local government jobs, postponing any background check until later in the hiring process.

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and All of Us or None have been on a march to secure the full restoration of the civil and human rights of formerly incarcerated people for approximately 10 years. Our dedication to this mission is why we have been fighting to end structural discrimination in hiring and housing, represented by the question, “Have you been convicted...”

Over 10 years ago, All of Us or None initiated our Ban The Box campaign, which aims to prohibit employers, housing providers, and other quality-of-life providers from discriminating against people with records. Now thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations, service providers, and elected officials around the country have joined in the campaign for fair chances in employment.

We are grateful for everyone’s contribution no matter how large or small. We want to thank Governor Brown for signing AB 218, and Assemblymember Dickinson for authoring it and being a champion for the bill. Most of all we appreciate the hard work and tireless efforts of our co-sponsors, the National Employment Law Project and PICO California. With them, we mobilized people all over the nation to support an end to discrimination based on prior records, and to opening up employment opportunities in California for people with past convictions. This new law is a tremendous victory for all of us.

Real public safety and public health means that everyone has access to sustainable employment, affordable housing, and a productive quality of life absent of any forms of discrimination.

The signing of AB 218 is one step towards equality. We now need to prohibit others, including private companies and contractors, from legally eliminating people with conviction histories from job opportunities. We need to create more meaningful and accessible jobs so that people returning to our communities can have a legitimate way to support themselves, and contribute to our society as a whole.

In pursuit of justice,

Dorsey Nunn
Executive Director

Geo Community Reentry Services to Operate California Day Reporting Centers

BOULDER, Colo. — The California Department of Corrections and the Division of Adult Parole Operations has hired Geo Community Reentry Services, a division of Boca Raton, Fla.-based The Geo Group, to operate four intensive parolee reentry centers.

The centers, located in San Diego, Santa Ana, Pomona and French Camp, will serve more than 1,000 inmates annually.

“California corrections has undergone major changes in recent years, and we are ready to support the expansion of community-based services to reduce recidivism with these evidence-based programs,” said Loren Grayer, divisional vice president of Geo Reentry Services.

While the parole reentry centers in San Diego and French Camp will continue operation without disruption as operational authority transitions, the centers in Santa Ana and Pomona are scheduled to open in September.

The Day Reporting Centers (DRC) will aim to reduce recidivism by offering a wide range of programming for high risk inmates who have failed to successfully reenter into the general population. Staffed with licensed therapists, counselors, behavior change managers, vocational/educational managers and administrative staff, parolees at the DRCs will also be connected to local community resources for further support.

Inmates report to the center, which is open seven days a week, for up to six months. Daily check-ins, drug testing and intensive care management help to monitor an inmate’s progress. According to a press release issued by the company, parole agents are better able to manage their caseloads when high-risk parolees are able to attend Geo Reentry’s DRCs.

Along with reducing recidivism, the company hopes to also target employment or school enrollment, generate significant savings for taxpayers and alter parolee attitudes and behavior through classes available at the center.

Classes available at the DRC include substance abuse education and treatment; adult basic education; life skills development; cognitive restructuring therapy; parenting; domestic violence prevention; anger management; employment skills building and career development counseling; and relapse prevention aftercare. Inmates are also required to attend Community Connections, a program that provides parolees with local resources to housing, health services and additional counseling.

Community Legislative Briefing

Community Legislative Briefing

Developing Champions to Restore the Golden State

Friday, August 23, 2013

10:00 - 12pm

ACLU - SC

1313 W. 8th St.

Los Angeles, CA 90017

Many Returning Home from Prison, War: More Services Needed

By Carla María Guerrero

After leaving prison, Stacy Johnson (left) and Lori Hogg found the services they needed at A New Way of Life to stay off the streets and reintegrate into the community. (Photo by Joshua H. Busch)

Stacy Johnson had no idea what to expect when she was dropped off last August in front of a well-kept home in a quiet neighborhood in South Los Angeles. The 45-year-old had just been released early from serving her third prison sentence. She arrived at A New Way of Life Reentry Project hoping to make a fresh beginning after what had been a tumultuous twenty years.

Every year thousands of men and women like Johnson leave California prisons and return to South L.A. in need of jobs, housing and other supportive services. Their numbers could grow even higher under the state’s new prison “realignment” law, which transfers responsibility for “nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious” felony offenders from state to county authorities.

According to Los Angeles County’s Criminal Justice Committee, an estimated 9,000 men and women who have served their prison sentences will be released to the county’s supervision by midyear and nearly 15,000 by mid-2013.

At the same time, the end of the Iraq War means the return of a significant number of veterans to the community. They share many of the same critical needs for jobs, housing and health services as those exiting prison. For both populations, locating these services in a community affected by deep budget cuts and the economic recession can be difficult.
But once found, these services can make a huge difference in whether an individual coming back from war or prison successfully reintegrates into the community.

Crucial Help
For Johnson, connecting with A New Way of Life and its founder, Susan Burton, has already changed her life immeasurably. She is in school full time and has been sober for almost three years. Eventually she would like to find a full time job and get her own place.
“I owe [Burton] everything. I came out of prison with nothing. I would’ve been back on the streets, probably using [drugs] again and staying in motels,” said Johnson, who knows firsthand how easy it is to fall prey to addiction.

At 22, Johnson started using crack cocaine and her life started unraveling. That same year, she was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after she picked up a knife to protect herself from being raped. Her assailant died and Johnson got twelve years in prison. After leaving prison she tried to rebuild her life around a new job and a new boyfriend. But he was abusive. She turned to drugs again, lost her job and her freedom, and gained one strike.
After serving two years, she lived in motels or on the streets and took drugs to numb the desolation. “When you are on drugs, you are weak. You are so vulnerable,” Johnson said. She went to jail a third time after being arrested for crack cocaine possession.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the state has one of the highest recidivism rates in the country. Nearly seven in ten former inmates will return to prison within three years.

Realign Priorities
For Cpl. Lauren Johnson, a 28-year-old African-American veteran of the Iraq War, knowing about the services and support available is key to successfully reintegrating back into communities.

“My experience was different from most veterans returning home because I was knowledgeable about the resources and services available to me,” she said. Originally from a Texas community with a strong military presence and culture, Lauren Johnson knew what benefits to tap into to help pay for school after her tour in Iraq.

Now working for Congresswoman Karen Bass, Lauren Johnson connects veterans with resources and services in South L.A., including referrals to Veterans Affairs and local organizations that provide housing, employment training and other services.

“It is imperative for us to mobilize for veterans once they come home. They’re used to unit cohesion and sometimes it can be a bit scary when you no longer have that camaraderie and that network you’ve been used to,” she said.

Social service advocates fear additional budget cuts will further erode the safety net in South L.A. at one of the most crucial moments.

“There needs to be an investment in housing, prevention, intervention and education … instead of systems of supervision and further incarceration,” A New Way of Life founder Burton said. “There needs to be a realignment of investment into people and communities so that crime won’t rise but opportunities for jobs and training programs will.”

Carla María Guerrero is the communications assistant at Community Coalition