Council in Prison, Reentry and Law Enforcement

by Jared Seide, Executive Director of Beyond Us & Them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4eBfNjwzDQ&t=124s

Council is embraced as an opportunity to engage in restorative work by listening deeply, bearing witness and speaking heartfully. Council in prisons offers an opportunity to begin that restoration – and is also a rehearsal for the work that is desperately needed in impacted communities. Work with marginalized and systems-impacted communities remains a primary focus of Beyond Us & Them, which is the successor organization to Center for Council.  Building on work originally envisioned in The Ojai Foundation’s 2008 “One Thousand Days Project,” our prison-based council programs have now been embedded into 29 California prisons, serving thousands of incarcerated men and women, as well as in the reentry process and with law enforcement officers.

Once seeded in a prison, our Council for Insight, Compassion and Resilience program starts to spread its impact quickly throughout the yard, as practitioners value the skills they learn and practice both individually and as a resource supporting deepening of trust and prosociality. Participants in prison council programs learn to practice new skills that support healthy and productive behaviors critical to effective and sustainable rehabilitation and reentry. Criminologists agree that the most effective rehabilitation programs target key criminogenic factors, chief among these being anti-social attitudes, anti-social friends, lack of empathy and impulsivity. Council for Insight, Compassion and Resilience addresses these factors, fostering connection and cooperation, dissolving pre-judgments, building trust and respect, strengthening bonds, reinforcing commonalities and lessening reactivity and impatience. Measuring these behaviors before and after participation in council programs demonstrates real progress towards what experts describe as “reduced criminality.” We have worked with RAND Corp and UCLA on program evaluation that has produced evidence of the reduced aggression and increased communication skills that emerge as a result of participation in this programming — which received the Innovations in Corrections Award from the American Correctional Association. 

Council-based programming for incarcerated individuals builds “positive culture” in prisons and supports successful reentry and reintegration into society. To strengthen the continuum of care, Beyond Us & Them has built out reentry programming for those returning to the LA area from prison sentences and has  established the Los Angeles Reentry Collaborative, a network of over 200 reentry service providers and clients. Through this network and its programmatic offerings, council-based skills and practices learned in prison continue to support participants’ communities upon release. Increasingly, these priorities are being emphasized as important facets of criminal justice reform and council programs provide an effective context for achieving these goals.

Beyond our work with system-impacted populations, Beyond Us & Them has developed programming for educators, the staff of community based organizations and with law enforcement. Our Organizational Wellness Program has trained the staff in over 35 community-based organizations to use council with their clients and stakeholders, creating the essential continuum of care through the critical prison-to-community transition. While incarcerated, practitioners are eager to introduce council to cellmates, visiting family and friends and they often look forward to practicing with their home communities upon their return. They speak of a desire to have their personal transformation and healing also serve the transformation and healing of society. As they recognize cycles of harm and neglect, they speak of wanting to repair, reconcile and restore relationships and community and they are motivated to return as elders to communities that are often bereft of the grandparents, uncles and aunts that have traditionally carried wisdom about deepening community. Our reentry programs and network, as well as affiliated organizations engaged in our programming, provide opportunities for this reintegration. 

A sense of purpose is a great motivator to participants in our prison programs reaching the end of their sentence.  Men and women who have been isolated from the mainstream can learn to assess and reset their perspectives by learning contemplative practices like council and engaging in regular practice with their peers.  As council programs simultaneously expand in community-based organizations, and our reentry network grows, the ground is prepared for the return of those who would fill vital community seats. 

But the work of reforming a dysfunctional and often unjust carceral system cannot exclude those whom it employs, often to the detriment of their own health and wellbeing. Today, law enforcement officers in the US have an average life expectancy of 59 years, which is 16 years less than the general population. Many of the conditions leading to earlier mortality are stress-induced: heart disease, stroke, diabetes and early-onset dementia. In addition, correctional officers have a 40% higher suicide rate than the rest of the working age population, according to one study. And the reports of “toxic agency culture” abound. Our work with officers, the Peace Officer Wellness, Empathy & Resilience (POWER) Training Program addresses critical topics like stress, dysregulation, burnout, empathy fatigue, moral distress, depersonalization and pathological altruism and provides a regular council practice as a dynamic and sustainable peer-to-peer resource. Agencies working with POWER find that the program leads to stronger relationships, more positive agency culture and enhanced police-community relations.

Find out more about the transformative work of Beyond Us & Them at its website: beyondusandthem.org.