Formerly incarcerated firefighters deserve to be hired

How much more Catch-22 can you get than to train a prisoner to fight forest fires, to get pay of $1.90 a day, then when he gets out to say, “Sorry you were a criminal so you can not get an EMT certificate. You don’t deserve that.”

Governor Gavin Newsom of California recently signed bill AB 2147 which is a step forward in reduci...

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.” ― Helen Exley

In the US prison system, they totally believe the first sentence of the quote and totally discount second sentence in the quote. In Brazil they appear to read the whole quote, since there you can get fou...

Courtesy of  Pixabay

By Adam Cook,*

Recovery from addiction does, in...

Guy R. Grant

Since fireman unemployment is extremely low, why would a trained firemen not be able to find work? Amika Sergejev, who worked for two and a half years as a firefighter and lead engineer shared her story of employment denials based on her prison experience. Current rules prohibit her from being hired at any firehouse because her work at a firehouse was the last part of her prison sentence (Sergejev, 201...

by Guy R. Grant

Whenever we see young unkempt men standing by the roadside holding a sign asking a dollar, a meal or a work; we might wonder what happened in their lives that they should be in such a dire need. Most people think of these men as panhandlers or freeloaders who do not want a steady job or any institutional boundaries that would provide income for them to pay their fair share of fostering a productive society. Few people, if any, ever st...

by Lucia Lacey Nevitt

The discussion takes a brief look at female population within the U.S. prison system. Women now represent one of the fastest rising segments within the American prison system. Since 1977-2009, the number of women within the prison system are staggering nearly 200,000 women are behind bars (Beck, Kerberg & Harrison, 2002; Paltrow, 2013). The departments of corrections are slow in response to the growing numbe...

By Ishmael Amin

John Legend has initiated Free America, a new campaign to reform the U.S. prison system. In John Legend’s words, "We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country... It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world... We as a society made some...

Society's response to the convicted criminal seems to be to lock them up and throw away the key. I see a certain amount of righteousness about this attitude especially among the politicians. But there is also a lot of fear in society that I think the politicians have fed on that fear as well as feed the fear (Alexander, 2012). Too often the laws on criminality seem to be written in mind for the profit which can be generated from prisoners. One only has to look at the

In the President’s State of the Union Address 2015, it was only a fleeting moment that he mentioned crime and incarceration. His statement addressed the issue of c...

In my August 17th 2014 blog, I stated that, “Pacholke's talks provides hope that the department of corrections has come to recognize the benefits of positive cultural changes within prisons with the hope of successful rehabilitation of reentry into society.” While the group of Washington State Department of Correction inmates benefitted from participating in university research projects, we have no certainty whether these types of prison experiences have translated into reducing r...

Phelps (2011) summarizes the shifts from rehabilitation to punitive prisons as follows: In the 1940’s prisons focused on teaching prisoners to be productive as a means of rehabilitation. Next, during the 1950’s through the 1970’s the trends was to use individualized assessment and treatment to reform prisoners; then return them to society as law abiding citizens. However, Martinson’s Report in 1974 proposed that prison reform did not work; hence the beginning of impos...

 Last month Attorney General Eric Holder made a bold request for States to rescind their disenfranchisement of formerly incarcerated persons.

Unfortunately the root of this practice is justified to those who do not believe in second chances or the Christian power of forgiveness and redemption.  It is the law and can be j...

Drugs are dangerous and do harm to those who use them. Crime rates increases and neighborhoods deteriorate. Unfortunately, the unforeseen consequence is that sentences are not equally administered. Most Americans, even a large majority of African Americans believe that the reason that more African American males are incarcerated is that they committed more drug crimes. Statistics do not justify this stereotype of African Americans committing more crimes.

Congressman C...

Bryan Stevenson inspiration speech on TED and guest appearance on the Colbert Report Show provides a glimpse of the seriousness of the high rate of recidivism. His TED speech on Identity calls us to become aware...

Reducing recidivism increases public safety and saves taxpayers’ money. According to Adam Gelb, Director of the Pew Center,  the reduction of 10 percent of repeated offenses will save the taxpayer more than a half-billion dollars in one year.

In the 2015 President's State of the Union Address, it was only a fleeting moment that he mentioned crime and incarceration. His statement addressed the issue of citizen unre...