![]() ![]() In a letter to his family, John described this place as “not a regular prison environment an open, caring, hopeful environment.” He began to develop relationships both with older men who act as mentors in the unit and corrections officers, with whom he played chess, talked, and reflected on visits with his family. They asked him and the other young men in the unit serious questions about their goals and expressed genuine interest in their thoughts, feelings, and plans. The corrections officers greeted him and shook his hand. In transit, John spent time in a kind of purgatorial interstitial space, waiting in what he described as “a full cage from top to bottom, something like on the show Lockup or Hard Time.”īut once inside the new unit, John entered a different world. Though the unit is within the same facility, John was handcuffed and shackled and placed in a prison van, subjected to strip searches, and given a medical assessment. In October of last year, John,* * Name has been changed to protect the individual's privacy a young adult in Cheshire Correctional Institution where-most people spend 22 hours a day in their cells-was accepted into a new small housing unit. Our mission is to link these things and suggest a path forward that is as much about reconciliation as it is about criminal justice reform. And it is rooted in our own obligation-now physically exhibited in a museum and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama-to acknowledge and atone for our brutal history of dehumanization and racial oppression and to understand how it has shaped what we do today in our justice system. It is inspired by what we learned studying and visiting prisons in Germany, where the very conditions and operations of that entire system are defined by a commitment to uphold human dignity-a commitment born of that country’s coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is in the hope, daring, and promise of a small unit for young adults in a Connecticut maximum-security facility. Indeed, our vision has concrete reference points. Yet we need not accept as a given the way we do things now, and we encourage you to envision a different path. It articulates a view that is sure to be alien to many. It asserts a dramatic reconsideration of the most severe criminal sanction we have: incarceration. This document-unlike anything we have ever produced at the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera)-is about the possibility of radical change.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |