Everybody celebrates in a different way Enrique Bautista is an incarcerated person at Snake River Correctional Institution in Eastern Oregon. He is a periodic contributor to Street Roots. Dec. 22. It is the day after my birthday. I am now 35 years old. I am a 35-year-old man. Wow! It feels like only yesterday I was just another 18-year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder coming into the system. With 20-something years to serve, mad at the world, full of hate and frustration. Everything was...

Inmates at Britain’s first ‘respectful’ jail have been given the keys to their cells – with prison officers having to knock before entering. Wrexham’s HMP Berwyn, the largest prison in England and Wales, says the move is a ‘rehabilitative’ approach to offenders. Prisoners have been given more privacy, with the ability to come and go from their cells as they please – as well as being able to lock themselves in at any time. The ‘knock first’ policy is aimed at creating a respectful environment...

There are 111,616 incarcerated women in the United States, a 7-fold increase since 1980. Some of these women are pregnant, but amid reports of women giving birth in their cells or shackled to hospital beds , prison and public health officials have no hard data on how many incarcerated women are pregnant, or on the outcomes of those pregnancies. A study published in The American Journal of Public Health Thursday changes that. The study included 57 percent of the US prison population (New...

About 4 percent of women incarcerated in state prisons across the U.S. were pregnant when they were jailed, according to a new study released Thursday that researchers hope will help lawmakers and prisons better consider the health of women behind bars. The number of imprisoned women has risen dramatically over the past decades, growing even as the overall prison rates decline. But there had been a lack of data on women's health and no system for tracking how frequently incarcerated women...

Sister Pauline Quinn says it was a German shepherd who saved her life. After running away from an abusive home and being shuffled between different institutions throughout her adolescence, Quinn was released onto the streets at age 18. Quinn would visit dogs in kennels as a way to cope with her mistreatment. When she eventually adopted a German shepherd named Joni, everything began to turn around. With the confidence Joni gave her, Quinn started thinking about how she could use dogs to help...

The key to this program is an initiative called the credible messenger approach to restorative justice. It pairs at-risk and justice-involved youth, who are individuals who’ve been involved with the criminal system, with people who have had comparable life experiences, such as ex-convicts or ex-gang members. “When you think of a credible messenger, you think of those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” says Jason Clark, the program manager at King County Credible Messengers...

Tony McGuire is a great carpenter. He ran his own construction business for years. Then he wanted to get into teaching. He became a Tenured Faculty member at a local community college, and landed in the state penitentiary as a Basic Skills Carpentry instructor. So how could that be connected to saving lives with a 20 buck investment? Tony got touched by CRI’s trauma-informed training. He saw himself past and present and knew somehow that, “with this information comes the responsibility to...

In Daidre Kimp's room, the walls are pink and white and there are family photos on a bulletin board. A stroller sits in a corner. It's early morning. Kimp grabs a diaper, a tiny shirt and pants and lifts her smiley, 8-month-old daughter, Stella, from her crib. They are getting ready for the day at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) in Gig Harbor, about a one hour drive from Seattle. It's their home, at least until Kimp enters a work-release program next spring. She picks up...

Every week, more than 10,000 prisoners are released from U.S. prisons and begin the long process of reintegrating into society. For many, a successful reintegration will occur only if they can access the types of credit commonly used by all American citizens, such as credit cards and auto loans. For those unable to borrow, prospects for successful re-entry fall and recidivism risks rise. That’s bad for all of us. Lack of access to credit can push former inmates into poverty traps and cycles...

CRI is Proud to Present the 2019 Beyond Paper Tigers Conference Session Descriptions and Presenter Biographies! Join us for the latest information, and strategies to build RESILIENCE! CRI is honored to have expert presenters in their fields to showcase a diverse selection of sessions revolving around the BPT Conference theme, "Building Resilience Across the Life Span." Conference Session Descriptions and Presenter Biographies are now available for review! If you have not purchased conference...

CRI is seeking various levels of sponsors for our Fourth Annual Beyond Paper Tigers conference. We would love if you would consider partnering with us to assist our community's education, best practices, and treatment strategies. Sponsorships will help pay for speakers, meals, supplies, and conference activities. To partner with us at our highest gift level- as a lead sponsor- would bring profound impact to our conference. We would be grateful for the honor of calling you our lead sponsor,...

CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast! Date: February 26, 2019 Time: 8am - 3pm Pacific Time A dynamic six-hour WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into action. The training includes three groups of topics: the NEAR sciences , a cluster of emerging scientific...