Reclaiming Lives
This 4-minute video shows why
Restorative Community Coalition is Standing Up for Inmates Recovery, Jail Reform and Restorative Economics
Growing a healthy society is an individual, family, business and community matter. This video is about the individual impacts of excessive incarceration (without rehabilitation) on real people. We describe why it is cost effective and essential to reclaim people from the penal system as fast as possible. We share why the services we provide help create an interception, and helps with healing our local people, and in turn helps our communities recover from the negative ripple effects.
The Restorative Community Coalition was formerly known as the Whatcom County ReEntry Coalition. We changed our name to better reflect our commitment to solve the whole systems problems that came from the mass incarceration movement that started in the 1970’s. It has created a punishment-driven contrarian economic condition that has become dysfunctional. Caused by the side-effects of national privatization of prisons, the dysfunction has filtered down to affect our current system of justice. The effect has been to over-incarcerate, over-criminalize and then we have societal illness.
In the incarceration world there terms used that are specific:
Recidivism: The phrase used to describe the pattern of going back to prison after people are released. The recidivism rate is the measuring stick for how much people fail to leave the system.
Re-entry: This describes programs that are designed to help people re-enter society.
In working on these issues since 2006, we have discovered that it is far simpler and a better solution to implement preventive and early intervention strategies to stop people from entering the incarceration system in the first place. Once inside, the re-entry process is far more challenging and expensive to taxpayers. They have to recover from the emotional impact and trauma of incarceration, and then there are the workplace impacts that are further damaged inside the system.
A whole systems approach is far better:
1) Prevention & Early Education
2) Intervention, Rehabilitation & Redirection
3) ReEntry, Recovery, Retooling
