28. October 2009 by Rev Young.

As I continue addressing the real underlying change that needs to come to this nation, I am going to post a series of stories about individual lives.  I will also be connecting the two blog sites that I write and administrate.  I use the blog site”Free Jonny” to tell stories of individuals who were or are currently housed in prison facilities.  These stories vary from their personal experience inside the criminal justice system to stories of transformation.  Right now we are focusing on the transformation that has come through the opportunity to be released from prison and lead a life outside of prison walls.  I will also be writing articles and passing on information concerning the use of clemency and the other opportunities inmates can receive for a second chance. 

Let me start by first directing you to a story that I posted at http://s246427087.onlinehome.us/freejonny/do-they-deserve-a-second-chance

This article tells the story of Raphael Johnson who committed murder at the age of 17 and received a sentence of 10 to 25 years in adult prison.  It tells of his accomplishments inside of prison and the business he now owns and operates outside of prison.  It tells of other prominent leaders and the crimes they committed in their youth.  It also tells how these young people went on to lead productive lives that benefit all who live in the community.

We have become so intolerant.  We are legalistic, staunch and unforgiving.  We are also missing opportunities to teach, mentor and watch the miracle of transformation in peoples lives.  We often wonder, as we watch the nightly “bad news”, where the good stories have gone.  The human interest stories of individuals who have been given the opportunity to improve their lives and the success they have found.  The stories of redemption, the stories of compassion, the stories of giving.  Where are they? 

We have also forgotten about teaching children to mediate, manage confrontation, overcome adversity or forgiveness that comes after making a mistake.  One of the most interesting changes that I have read about recently is the change in school policy from zero tolerance to managing confrontation.  It makes perfect sense to me.  How is a young child going to learn not to pass judgement too quickly when the school they attend is so eager to expel a student for any infraction? 

Children get into fights.  We all know this and we all probably experienced our share of conflicts in school.  It is by learning to turn conflict into a building block for relationship that we teach a child and give them powerful tools for their future.  It seems that their are some schools beginning to realize that the zero tolerance policy only taught children how to fail.  Not a lesson we should be teaching a young child.

This article will help you to understand the need and positive results of changing school policy.  Read On…

New Rules for Schools

Comment

By Amy Bach

This article appeared in the November 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
October 14, 2009

In October virtually every major media outlet ran a story about a 6-year-old boy who brought a Cub Scout utensil to school in Delaware. The boy wanted to eat his lunch with its little fork, but he ended up being suspended and threatened with reform school because the gadget had a knife on it.

The incident is one of a litany of examples that clearly show how “zero tolerance” school discipline policies have gone too far. The policies are at their worst when enforced by police officers stationed in schools to prevent serious incidents. Too often the cops end up being used as disciplinarians on matters that once would have been handled by school principals. Officers are handcuffing, pepper-spraying and arresting kids for being boisterous or cursing. The result is a flood of prosecutions and a wave of students denied education.

Child advocates have dubbed this phenomenon “the school-to-prison pipeline.” Studies show that children who are jailed or forced to appear in court are more likely than their peers to drop out of school and get into trouble again. And it’s unclear whether schools are getting safer.

A startling case in point is the juvenile court system of Clayton County, Georgia, which was buckling to the point of collapse in 2004. In the mid-’90s, after police officers were placed in the schools, the number of kids charged with crimes jumped 600 percent. By 2003, it had jumped another 400 percent. The increase wasn’t due to felonies–the cops were enforcing a “zero tolerance” policy against disorderly conduct or disruption.

Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske saw the problem. School police and probation officers could not do their jobs because the court was overloaded with minor cases that didn’t belong there. “Technically, the behavior may be a crime,” Teske said, using the example of a kid who gets into a fight to protect his sister. “But it shouldn’t be, in the context of adolescent youth behavior.”

So Teske brought together school officials, law enforcement, prosecutors, parents and heads of child-services programs. “I am telling you zero tolerance is not improving safety,” he told them. Not everyone agreed. But it was obvious that too many kids were getting arrested. Teske proposed something rather ordinary: give kids warnings and a workshop on behavior before dragging them into court. The committee discussed it before a neutral arbiter.

Nine months later, Clayton County had a system that worked. As of 2008, the county had reduced the number of referrals by 68 percent, and in turn had seen another improvement: serious weapons charges were down 70 percent since 2004 (from sixty-three incidents to seventeen). Teske attributes the drop to the fact that officers are spending less time shuttling to court and more time gathering “intelligence” so future incidents can be avoided. Last year, instead of arresting a student who had gotten into a fight, Officer Robert Gardner talked to her. She spoke about a drug dealer’s house two blocks from the school. The information led to a search, which yielded two AK-47s, two drums of ammunition, seven handguns, a shotgun, five pounds of pot and $7,000 in cash.

Everyone wants safe schools. But the Clayton model may prove that the best, most cost-effective way to neutralize violence is not by arresting kids. By paying attention to everyday circumstances, the potential for extraordinary tragedy is defused.

Different communities are now asking Clayton County, How did you do it? In 2008 Jay Blitzman, a judge in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, invited Teske for a lunch meeting with his community. It lasted three hours. Today Middlesex is looking for ways to adapt the Clayton model. Birmingham, Alabama, also plans to use it. And this fall, Teske will be touring the country talking about it with the help of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Maybe there’s a lesson here. Paying attention to young people prevents day-to-day injustice. And young people who aren’t treated like criminals are less likely to become them.

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24. October 2009 by Rev Young.

I have been pouring over the many articles and reports concerning Juvenile Justice Reform today and I finally came to one conclusion…..we need change.  Not just the legislative changes we have been working toward, not just the reform to our criminal justice system and judicial system, not just changes in our prison systems but a sweeping change of minds. 

I have always been a great student of history.  Most people wondered why in the world we spent so much time studying the history and actions of countries, governments and individuals.  Most people failed to see the purpose or relevance.  I have always found history fascinating.  If you follow history you can find dramatic changes in our social order, social behavior, governmental structures, belief systems, education, medical advances…..it is all charted out in our history as people. 

You also have the opportunity to look at the failures and mistakes of cultures, leaders, countries and governments.  Why would we want to know that?  So that we do not make the same mistakes over and over and over again.  We should learn from the mistakes of others and our own mistakes.  That is the greatest gift that history can give us. 

But we haven’t learned much.  We allow poverty, oppression, slavery, racism, brutality and injustice.  Those problems have been inherent in this country since it’s inception.  As a matter of fact we find it throughout the world everywhere in our historical studies.  There are some countries who have had more success than we have, in dealing with these issues.  There are countries in this world that have placed more value on human life than we have.  Yet we claim to be the watch dog of human rights and human rights violations.

If you study the history of prison, courts, criminal cases, judgement and condemnation in this country, we have a pretty dark history.  Our Quaker and even Puritan beliefs caused us to condemn people (men and women) for the smallest infractions.  For instance, defiling the marriage bed would bring a sentence of whipping and 1 year in prison.  The second time the same person committed this infraction they were hanged.  We moved on from these brutal times to ones of incarceration.  Early prison history is smeared with stories where those held, had to barter for clothing, food, restroom privileges and guards would sell liquor to those housed at a steep price.  When those conditions were reformed, prisons became work farms.  This was a very good idea and plan as the earnings from these jobs paid for the prison facilities and also gave the inmates a nest egg for their families. 

We have improved our conditions of confinement compared to our historical patterns, but there is one thing that has not changed, our condemnation. 

The original punishments set in this nation came from the principle “an eye for an eye”.  We established our punishments according to this standard.  We wanted revenge, we have a history of vigilantes and mob’s that would raid jail cells and take matters into their own hands.  We were violent and murderous……to those that committed crimes.  We inflicted on the “criminal” the same violence they committed on someone else and we were justified.  We justified our actions by the revenge we held in our hearts and no one held us accountable.

We still do this. 

Our prisons are full of people that we are angry at.  We are taking revenge on people by confining them in prisons, separated from human touch, sound, light, sun light, purpose and forgiveness.  We have never been able to move past revenge to forgiveness.  If you do not see this then realize that even after a person has served his/her term in prison, the mark is forever placed on the record of their life.  Forever.  We don’t ever let them pay for their crime and move on.  Their infraction is recorded……and never stamped paid in full. 

Our laws and practices currently condemn children, women and men equally.  We start with the 1st grader who brings his cub scout knife to school and is immediately escorted from the property and expelled from school.  We take youth, who make terrible mistakes and decide that they have no worth to the rest of society and we sentence them to live out their lives in prison…..a sentence of death.  We take women, separate them from their children and condemn them and their children to a life of persecution.  We take men from their families and put them, their families and their future in bondage. 

We have not changed.  We have not come to realize our vindictive nature.  We have not learned the human side of our nature.  We make mistakes, we are a product of our environment and we have times in our lives when our emotions, our needs and our addictions over ride our common sense. 

What do we need to change?  We need to first look at ourselves and realize we are not perfect and we have made mistakes, yet when the sun comes up tomorrow we have a second chance……a chance to make things right.  What about them?

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21. October 2009 by Rev Young.

Juvenile Justice Advocates, Criminal Reform Advocates and Prison reform Advocates all agree on one thing……we need programs.  It doesn’t matter to us if they are programs for juveniles in conflict with the law, juveniles who are incarcerated, adults in our prison facilities, inmates being released from prison or those sentenced to community corrections……we need programs. 

We have neglected the opportunity and responsibility we have to reform, re-educate and transition those in conflict with the law from a place of conflict to a place of productivity.  We have missed a very important step in the process of crime and punishment.  We have stopped the process with punishment.  We have forgotten that at some point we are going to have to help these people pass the place of penance and onto the next season of their lives.  The next portion of their lives where they can contribute and participate in our communities.

We have many who have brought scattered programs into facilities.  Some of these programs are aimed at education, some are programs to end addiction, some are vocational and some are spiritual.  What we need is an across the board transformation for our penal system and realize that we cannot punish people for their entire lives without a severe and extraordinary cost…….to all of us.

I want to encourage all who have skills or talents to begin thinking of ways to put those skills to work in the form of transformational programs.  We know that the government cannot and will not do this for us.  We have the capability the knowledge and we have the resources available to us at a significantly lower price tag than the government would put on these services.

Some of these programs can change the attitude and outlook of inmates, others will give them skills sets and still others will help to further their education so that they can function in our society. 

Let me give you an example of an ordinary enjoyment that we can tune in to everyday.  Music is probably one of our favorite pass times and enjoyments that we have in our lives.  We can have music fill our space with the flip of a switch.  We also know the ability of music to change the atmosphere around us and even help us to escape for a brief time from the concerns around us.  Music has an uncanny ability to sooth, heal, perform grief therapy, help us fall in love and help us to make it through difficult circumstance.  I have witnessed the effects of music on autistic children and seen the calming effect in my own autistic daughter.  From the time my daughter was very young, music had the ability to sooth her when nothing else could.  It also helped her to learn and adapt to the overstimulating world she lived in. 

It seems that this is true in prisons also.  The article, from Prison Fellowship Ministries, gives testimony to the transformational power of music…..something we take for granted.  Prison facilities do not have piped in music, they do not come with stereo systems and they do not have access to mp3 players or ipods.  An environment void of music.  I cannot imagine.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

Since the 1920s, when wardens whipped out band tunes to quell skirmishes in chow halls, music has played its way through barbed wire fences and into many a lonely prison cell. It found its way to the fingers of Jewish women in an orchestra at

 Music speaks to every human emotion. It rouses the inklings of love, soothes agitated spirits, and plays the companion to the suffering soul. As the American jazz composer Michael Torke put it, “Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?”

In the world of corrections, psychotherapy and music often converge, as many corrections experts discover music to be a helpful tool in rehabilitation. Others argue that using the arts to treat prisoners is little more than decorating a swamp with flowers. But when the double bar line has descended upon Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” there are few who can dispute that music has power, even in a world of concrete and gray.

Click on the link below and then read the attached article. Then give some thought to ways you could change their environment….or someone’s life.

http://www.prisonfellowship.org/inside-out/september-2009/12518-serenading-the-beast

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