Homeboy Industries

Alice Goffman, the speaker in this TED Talk, does a great job reaching out to her audience in a great number of ways. Her purpose in this TED Talk titled, “How We’re Priming Some Kids for College, and Others for Prison,” is to grab the attention of all people, but it is directed towards the younger generations, to show them that they have to work together in order for change to be made. The change would be to work together to help end the problem of mass incarceration; to help completely rebuild the Criminal Justice System. Throughout her talk, Goffman uses examples of logos, ethos, and pathos to reach her audience in an effective way, and to inform them of the problems going on with the United States Criminal Justice System.

Society has often struggled with how to help prisoners once they are released back into civilization. The number of prisoners in the American prison population has grown considerably in the last couple of decades. For many prisoners the process of arrest, incarceration and release is a continuous cycle, there is very little hope of them living in civilization for a long period of time. There is also a high a retention rate of the returning offenders. A large portion of these prisoners are minorities of African Americans and Hispanics face more time in jail or prison is extremely high. The success rate of offenders is measured by how long one can avoid being incarcerated and not by being reintegrated into civilization. These issues have become a national crisis in Joan Petersilia book titled “When Prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry,” she address these issues head on. The main purpose of this book focuses on how to help prisoners once they have been released out of prison. Petersilia gives efforts for future reform to alter the in prison experience, change prison release, revocation practices, revise post prison services and supervision as well as a working with the community to enhance informal social control. These are efforts that represent a better policy towards reform of prisoners and re-entry in the system. The book goes into great detail about the suggestions Petersilia makes and why it is necessary for change.

The problem to be address in this paper is the lack of reintegration programs and mass incarceration of African Americans in the United. Mass incarceration amongst African Americans has had a catastrophic impact on families and communities and continues to create a cycle of discrimination, which makes its nearly impossible as a race to progress. Because of the soaring incarceration rate in the United States, many prisons are over populated and lack resources and support to help inmates succeed once released from prisons. Since there is an insufficiency in resources, many of these men enter back into society in need of education and little job experience making it difficult to find a job, creating many of them to reoffend. Of all men released from prison 81.1% are unskilled or possessed no skills, 18.9% are semi-skilled or skilled workers with the average reading level being slightly below 8th grade and 42.5% having less than a 12th grade education. In the first three years of release, 73% of African Americans are rearrested. This is a critical issue that needs to be addressed by appropriate programs that focus on poverty, homeslessness, unemployment, substance abuse, and poor medical and mental health. The first step in the right direction is creating a policy that addresses those needs with a reintegration program through job readiness, education and health management. Reintegration programs will improve families, communities, and job opportunities. If

The mission of the Alston Wilkes Society (AWS) is to rebuild lives for a safer community. We give people who are facing insurmountable obstacles the tools they need to rebuild productive lives. AWS focuses on providing services to offenders, former offenders, homeless veterans and at-risk youth in order to prevent and reduce crime in South Carolina’s communities. Once provided with the tools needed to get their lives back on track–housing, transportation, job training/placement, counseling–these populations are more likely to achieve successful

In Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Father Greg Boyle organized a job and resource center for gang youth (Rodriguez, 2005), called Homeboy Industries. Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit organization, has received international attention for its bakeries, cafes, tattoo removal, schooling, job referrals and counseling (Rodriguez, 2005). The organization also provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved, and/or previously incarcerated, men and women. Full-time employment is offered for more than 200 men and women at a time through an 18-month program, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of the community (Homeboy Industries, 2005).

seek to provide an understanding of the roles of social workers and the social work

She argues that the reforms suggested by the conservative party would cause unintended harm to the people they are attempting to help. The author forms her argument by analyzing the prison reforms initiative put forth by republican politicians. Bruenig concludes that these attempts to bring needed modification to the criminal justice system have not improved the lives of disadvantaged people. By focusing on cutting prison costs the author states, the conservative’s suggestion for reform will fail to provide support to community programs that help people stay out of prison. This would make the reform meaningless. It would also rid communities of prevention programs.

Overall, the reintegration of prisoners has been a long standing problem in our justice system that has simply not been properly addressed. This issue poses a problem to the prison system, prisoners, and taxpayers in that the failure to rehabilitate inmate becomes a burden on all three. In order to combat this problem, we need to implement a national prisoner reintegration program that focuses heavily on equipping released prisoners with vocational assistance and support systems that are geared towards each individual’s success in transitioning back into society. From a feasibility standpoint, the costs of such program would be mild in comparison to its overwhelming benefits. For the most part, funding would come from reallocating money from the largely ineffective corrections department and would have little to no cost to the taxpayer and the resources such a labor can for be extended from preexisting programs already in place. Overall this issue influences every member of our society in one way, shape, or form, as citizens and taxpayers we need to advocate for this reintegration program because it ultimately reduces the societal burdens caused by recidivism

I currently volunteer with an organization that provides a safe and sober living environment for women in recovery. My goal is to assist women transitioning back into society after incarceration. The United States has become the world leader in incarcerating its people with over 2.3 billion being locked up and then being released back into society without skills needed to become a productive member of society.

Throughout recent decades in the United States, and other Western countries, the prison population has dramatically and exponentially risen from approximately 357,292 inmates in 1970 to 2,306,200 in the year 2014. This has been coined as the era of mass incarceration, with the United States becoming the largest prison nation in the world. Within these present statistics, one in seventeen white men, compared one in three black men will go to prison, illustrating the obvious inequality and racialized justice that is embedded throughout U.S. societal, political and legislative spheres. In the mid 1990’s the government, with the help of popular demand, enacted the ‘get tough’ prison ideology in which the “No Frills Prison Act” was passed (Johnson 1997). The idea behind this movement of a harsher prison environment, with the regulation and/or exclusion of certain amenities and recreational programming, further criminalized prison inmates while continuing to punish them once they were in prison. In present day, there have been many attempts to increase recreational opportunities and programs within prisons, including but not limited to sports, work, rehabilitation programs, educational programs and much more. Many researchers and criminal rights advocates have attempted to increase the awareness of the effectiveness from different types of recreational programs, with many resulting in positive outcomes. Through the combination of personal

Creating positive influences on our prisoners can reap many more benefits than just educating and releasing back into society. Just as we invest money to educate our children, we can reinvest money to target populations that our prisoners come from to prevent crimes. When we teach them new skills that can better their lives, they can then teach others by example. Once an inmate enters back into society and gets a job in his or her field, stays away from crime, and makes better choices, they can make a positive impact on their communities. Younger generations can see the encouraging example set forth and know that they too can make wiser decisions and hope for the

Whether guilty of crimes or innocent, our incarceration system is an issue that many activists rally around in terms of its success and promise in correcting and rehabilitating criminal behavior. So, to read letters and hear the voices of those who are living on the marginalized edges of our society, but who rarely have a voice in the issue that’s being nationally rallied around, is an uncommon circumstance that should be noted and have more attention and action drawn to. Their desire to educate themselves within the confines of a prison wall is real and heard by those of us who take time to spend their weekday evenings in the bottom of a church basement, sorting through donated books, and reading literary wish-lists of those who are incarcerated.

Prisoners are put into penitentiaries because they have committed a crime. But how many of us haven’t made a mistake in our life? The important thing is what you do after you make those mistakes. Unfortunately, prisons provide little opportunities for inmates to better themselves. During an interview with Kai Wright, an author for the Colorlines websites and a feature director of The Nation magazine, six black men shared their personal stories about life after incarceration (Wright, 2014). Most of these men’s criticisms were aimed towards the fact that their new found freedom was such an adjustment from the prison life which they had grown so accustomed to. The positive comments that were said included anything from the program helping them

To begin, in the past couple of weeks I’ve learned plenty about the Amity foundation, not only from the tour, but from 4 members of the foundation who attended one of my sociology classes as guest speakers. Before they attended the class, I grew very skeptical about attending the foundation because I continued to think of the men as who they were before in their troubled history. Through our community project description, it was mentioned that Amity Foundation was home to former prisoners, gang members and drug and alcohol addicts. Due to this, I grew a fear of attending the site. My fear rouse from my inability to see the men past their old wrong doings and who they had been. However, this fear suddenly disappeared the day I met the four members of the Amity Foundation on a Thursday afternoon in class. The men who attended, although still covered in tattoos, were people who were sober, intelligent, religious, and hard workers. The Amity Foundation had helped them overpass their struggles and the stigma of being former prisoners by enhancing their capabilities and providing them with rehabilitation centers, living arrangements, a support system, and trust. Those characteristics are what set the Amity Foundation aside from other rehabilitation

In the case of prisoners that need help staying outside of prison after their release, my biggest question is what happens to them if the Government or the NGOs cannot find social impact funds to provide for the prisoners? This is a question Toby Eccles did not address. There is also a huge risk for the investors because they only get a share of the profit if the service works. This makes me believe that if there are no social impact bonds available, then we can’t have any impacts on the society. There is also the risk of politicization, bureaucracy and the model becoming a fee for service model which will not encourage