This article appears in the Nov. 28, 2014 edition of New Canaan Exchange Express newsletter, published by the New Canaan Exchange Club, New Cannaan, Connecticut. It meets on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month (7pm cocktails, 8pm dinner) at The Roger Sherman Inn, 195 Oenoke Ridge, New Canaan, CT.
Nick Yanicelli is one of a dedicated group of professionals from the fields of law, academia, business, religion and corrections, who took a unique approach to the problem of mass incarceration in Connecticut and the United States and wrote a book – together! The book is titled, The Justice Imperative – How Hyper-Incarceration Has hijacked the American Dream
He will share their findings with you and discuss one of the most important civil rights issues of the 21st century, including concerns you should have as a citizen and as a taxpayer, where your money is going and what it is doing. He will also talk about whether or not communities are safer, how smart we are on crime and what is being done about it.
Nick Yanicelli. President of Malta Justice Initiative, is a retired corporate sales and marketing executive, having worked for investment banks in NYC and Houston for 30 years, following seven years with the Pennwalt Engineering Corporation in New Jersey and Texas.
He currently serves on the board of the Norwalk Hospital Whittington Cancer Center Institutional Review Board, the State Board of the Home Builders Association of Connecticut, the Fairfield County Board of the Home Builders and Remodelers Association, and is an active member of the Senior Men’s Club of New Canaan.
As one of the on-line editors for this site, I love finding information from all sources regarding how formerly incarcerated folks work to stabilize their lives. I am more a curator of this information than editor. There are so many positive stories out there… positive in the sense that they shed light on what folks are facing. We do not take credit for this work or any work that we post, we merely try to do our part in sharing and ensuring that more eyes have access. Until I saw this piece, I had no idea there was Micheal Barlow Center coaching ex-offenders for jobs. That’s the beauty of the internet and social media, information can be shared quickly and widely.~Babz Rawls Ivy
Client Bobby Childs gives a firm handshake to retention counselor Emma Mitchell-Clark upon arriving for a mock interview, and advice at the Michael Barlow Center in Chicago. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
By Barbara Brotman,Chicago Tribune
Emma Mitchell-Clark sat across the desk from Bobby Childs, looked him in the eye and asked the question most dreaded by anyone trying to get a job after getting out of prison:
“Mr. Childs, have you ever been convicted of a crime?”
Childs, who was released from prison seven months ago, had been so afraid of the question that he didn’t even want to fill out job applications. Now, however, he was ready.
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
He wasn’t finished.
“While incarcerated, I served my time in a very positive (way),” he said.
Chicago Jobs Council helps develop job developers
Chicago Jobs Council helps develop job developers
Manya Brachear Pashman
Childs had served as a peer educator, talking to other prisoners about HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases. He had earned an associate’s degree. He had taken a class in custodial maintenance and another in warehouse distribution, where he had learned to drive a forklift.
“But I never — ever — lost my passion for detailing cars,” he said.
Mitchell-Clark smiled. “That’s very good,” she said.
It was a mock interview for a fictional job detailing cars. Mitchell-Clark is a retention counselor at the Michael Barlow Center, which provides education, training and job placement for formerly incarcerated men and women. She leads the Road to Success class, which helps clients identify their skills, develop resumes and search for jobs.
The Michael Barlow Center is a program of St. Leonard’s Ministries, an umbrella organization on the Near West Side that offers residential and support services for people getting out of Illinois prisons. St. Leonard’s Ministries is one of the beneficiaries of Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation Fund.
At the Michael Barlow Center, clients can get job training, take computer classes and participate in a high school completion program. A recent morning there saw ex-offenders chopping vegetables in the culinary classroom, wielding hammers and drills in the green building maintenance class and sitting in front of screens in the computer lab.
Employment is a key to success in life after prison, center director Lynne Cunningham said, and handling job interviews is crucial. And though beginning Jan. 1 employers will no longer be allowed to ask on a job application whether a person has been convicted of a crime, they will still be free to ask it during a job interview.
Those who have been incarcerated must answer truthfully, Cunningham said. If they do not and an employer finds out the truth — and prison time is a matter of public record — a person can lose any chance of getting the job or keeping it if they have already started.
For ex-offenders, the prospect of dealing with questions about their criminal history is daunting.
“I had to be trained,” Childs said. Only after working with Mitchell-Clark, he said, has he become comfortable with facing it.
Having a criminal record does not doom a job applicant, Mitchell-Clark said. The organization has seen people “get jobs who were convicted of murder,” she said. “It’s all in how they presented themselves in that interview.”
For his practice session, Childs, 54, wore dark slacks, a white dress shirt and a dark tie, following the center’s dress code for interviews.
He had 13 years of experience detailing cars, he told Mitchell-Clark, and described his process, from vacuuming and shampooing the interior to the final buffing.
Moreover, “I am very reliable. I am punctual,” he said. “I like to come to work early, to make sure my area is full with all my materials and everything. And I just like doing what I’m doing.”
Mitchell-Clark praised his answers. But she had him repeat four times his response to her question of whether he had ever been fired, to make sure his “No, I have not” sounded firm without being arrogant.
And she talked at length about what to do if his interviewer asked to know what he had done to be sent to prison.
Childs said he didn’t want to tell interviewers his specific crime, which was nonviolent.
He had the right not to do so, Mitchell-Clark told him, but there could be a cost: “Once you refuse to answer a question, your interview is practically over.”
And it is possible to answer honestly and use the question to tell your personal story, she told him — to acknowledge his wrongdoing but to say, for instance, that he was very young and is no longer the same person.
A real job interview might give him the chance to decide how to handle that. Meanwhile, the mock interview was over.
Childs had learned how to conclude things: He shook Mitchell-Clark’s hand and thanked her for allowing him to come in for the interview.
blbrotman@tribpub.com
Copyright © 2014, Chicago Tribune
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 26, 2014
From The Justice Imperative Online Editors: We are pleased to see the mainstream press taking notice of the issues relating to prisons and mental illness. As someone who served fourteen months in a Federal prison for a white-collar crime, and spent part of every one of those days on a “pill line” for my bipolar disorder, I could tell you first hand about the conditions. I could tell you but, of course, nobody has asked. We applaud the work of Francis Greenburger and Cheryl Roberts at the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice, who are bringing new light to this dark issue out of deep family tragedy. We witnessed Francis’ profound testimony last month at the American Justice Summit at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and then got to speak to him up close at the launch event of JustLeadershipUSA a couple of days later. I have been given me the courage and resolve to speak out more about my truth. Isn’t that the point? – Jeff Grant, Online Editor
When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.
But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.
For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.
The experience of being locked up — which often involves dangerous overcrowding and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems, or creates new ones. Worse, the criminal justice system has to absorb more of the mentally ill and the addicted. The collapse of institutional psychiatric care and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison, where they rarely if ever get the care they need. Severe mental illness is two to four times as common in prison as on the outside, while more than two-thirds of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the general public.
Common prison-management tactics can also turn even relatively healthy inmates against themselves. Studies have found that people held in solitary confinement are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or attempt suicide.
The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on the already unstable communities most of the 700,000 inmates released each year will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars, families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless, and poverty and homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison, which increases their own risk of incarceration down the road.
If this epidemic is going to be stopped, the report finds, public health and criminal justice systems must communicate effectively with one another. That requires comprehensive electronic health records that can be shared among agencies, increasing the likelihood that those who leave prison with health problems will not fall through the cracks.
Better health outcomes also depend on giving newly released inmates a real chance to find jobs and housing. The report calls for the end of laws that keep punishing people after they have been released from prison, like denying public housing and food stamps to those with drug felony convictions.
Finally, the Affordable Care Act — which provides more coverage for mental illness and substance abuse, and expanded Medicaid for childless adults — is a big step in the right direction.
Like any epidemic, mass incarceration must be tackled at many different levels. It is an opportune time for such an approach, as states around the country are thinking more broadly, pulling back on harsh sentencing laws and focusing more on alternatives to incarceration. But the moment may not last long. Public health professionals should seize a unique opportunity to help guide criminal justice reform while they have the chance.
The Justice Imperative: Will Reform Threaten The Safety of Connecticut Citizens?
When one raises the specter of reform aimed at diverting offenders, right-sizing our prisons and facilitating re-entry, the first reaction of many law-abiding citizens understandably is focused on “WHETHER I AND MY FAMILY WILL BE PLACED AT GREATER RISK?” Without being able to answer this question in the negative, the prospects for enacting reform and effecting a meaningful cut in our prison population likely vanish.
In the face of this political reality, the editors of this book have endeavored to keep the public safety implications of reform top-of-mind in assessing the wisdom of alternative approaches to incarceration. In our consideration of “best practices” and in making specific recommendations, we have rigorously considered whether adoption of a specific practice or approach will place the public at greater risk of physical harm. If, in our collective judgment, the answer was yes, we eliminated any such practice or approach from further consideration.
We believe, with a high degree of confidence, that adoption of each of our recommendations will not jeopardize the public. Our belief is rooted, in large part, in the experience of other states that have implemented prison or sentencing reforms and/or right-sized their prison populations, including most notably New York. New York has achieved a significant reduction in its prison population over the past decade, while reducing the level of criminal activity, including violent crime rates.
Relevant statistics in Connecticut strongly suggest that a dramatic cut in the number of incarcerated individuals can be realized at no cost in terms of public safety. Indeed, reform, if carried out properly, may yield improvements in public safety, particularly in urban areas where the overwhelming majority of violent crime occurs in Connecticut (i.e., Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury). In suburban communities, one would not expect any adverse impact from the reforms recommended herein. The taxpayers in such communities would likely realize tax relief and/or better results for their hard-earned tax dollars.
See More: Please go to Chapter Thirteen in “The Justice Imperative”
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The New York Times
When public health authorities talk about an epidemic, they are referring to a disease that can spread rapidly throughout a population, like the flu or tuberculosis.
But researchers are increasingly finding the term useful in understanding another destructive, and distinctly American, phenomenon — mass incarceration. This four-decade binge poses one of the greatest public health challenges of modern times, concludes a new report released last week by the Vera Institute of Justice.
For many obvious reasons, people in prison are among the unhealthiest members of society. Most come from impoverished communities where chronic and infectious diseases, drug abuse and other physical and mental stressors are present at much higher rates than in the general population. Health care in those communities also tends to be poor or nonexistent.
The experience of being locked up — which often involves dangerous overcrowding and inconsistent or inadequate health care — exacerbates these problems, or creates new ones. Worse, the criminal justice system has to absorb more of the mentally ill and the addicted. The collapse of institutional psychiatric care and the surge of punitive drug laws have sent millions of people to prison, where they rarely if ever get the care they need. Severe mental illness is two to four times as common in prison as on the outside, while more than two-thirds of inmates have a substance abuse problem, compared with about 9 percent of the general public.
Common prison-management tactics can also turn even relatively healthy inmates against themselves. Studies have found that people held in solitary confinement are up to seven times more likely than other inmates to harm themselves or attempt suicide.
The report also highlights the “contagious” health effects of incarceration on the already unstable communities most of the 700,000 inmates released each year will return to. When swaths of young, mostly minority men are put behind bars, families are ripped apart, children grow up fatherless, and poverty and homelessness increase. Today 2.7 million children have a parent in prison, which increases their own risk of incarceration down the road.
If this epidemic is going to be stopped, the report finds, public health and criminal justice systems must communicate effectively with one another. That requires comprehensive electronic health records that can be shared among agencies, increasing the likelihood that those who leave prison with health problems will not fall through the cracks.
Better health outcomes also depend on giving newly released inmates a real chance to find jobs and housing. The report calls for the end of laws that keep punishing people after they have been released from prison, like denying public housing and food stamps to those with drug felony convictions.
Finally, the Affordable Care Act — which provides more coverage for mental illness and substance abuse, and expanded Medicaid for childless adults — is a big step in the right direction.
Like any epidemic, mass incarceration must be tackled at many different levels. It is an opportune time for such an approach, as states around the country are thinking more broadly, pulling back on harsh sentencing laws and focusing more on alternatives to incarceration. But the moment may not last long. Public health professionals should seize a unique opportunity to help guide criminal justice reform while they have the chance.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 27, 2014, on page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Mass Imprisonment and Public Health.
By Joseph Shapiro, NPR News Investigations correspondent.
Photo: Sharnalle Mitchell (center) in Montgomery in May, after winning an injunction to stop the city from collecting court fines. With her (from left): attorney Alec Karakatsanis, fellow plaintiffs Lorenzo Brown and Tito Williams and attorney Matt Swerdlin. Courtesy of Alec Karakatsanis
There may be a model for court reform in Ferguson, Mo., in a legal settlement that happened quietly this week in Alabama.
The city of Montgomery agreed to new polices to avoid jailing people who say they are too poor to pay traffic tickets. In that Alabama city, as in Ferguson, there’s been tension between poor residents and police over the way people are fined for traffic tickets and other minor violations and then sometimes jailed for not paying.
On Monday, a federal court judge approved a settlement between the city of Montgomery and plaintiffs who said they had been unlawfully jailed when they were unable to pay court fines and fees.
In the settlement, the city agreed to set a clear standard for municipal courts to determine whether someone is too poor to pay court fines and fees. There have been similar lawsuits elsewhere — a judge closed down the municipal courts of two small Alabama towns in 2012 and 2013 — but those cases are still being hashed out and Montgomery is the first city to complete court reform following a lawsuit.
In Montgomery, people with income at 125 percent of the federal poverty level, which amounts to less than $24,000 for a family of four, now will be considered indigent. They will be allowed to pay off tickets by performing community service or by paying fines at $25 a month.
Earlier this year, an NPR investigation, Guilty and Charged, found that all 50 states had added numerous fines and fees — for services from the cost of a public defender to renting a court-ordered electronic monitoring ankle bracelet — and that poor people struggle to pay costs that typically add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The settlement also requires the city of Montgomery to stop using a private probation company that charged offenders extra fees to collect fines. And the courts have agreed to hold “amnesty days,” when people can get arrest warrants lifted. A similar program of warrant forgiveness is being tested in Ferguson.
Sharnalle Mitchell was arrested Jan. 26 at her home in Montgomery for failure to pay traffic tickets from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children, 1 and 4 years old, and sentenced to 58 days in jail to pay off unpaid fines. Mitchell, who also cared for her disabled mother, said she made a couple of small payments but fell behind because she had little income, less than $14,000 a year that she made from her occasional work styling hair.
In the crowded, dirty jail, she says, she was despondent. “I felt like I was going to lose my kids,” she says. “I felt everything was just going down the drain.”
She got out of jail early after an attorney from a small civil rights nonprofit found her in her cell. “She handed me the court documents that said either she had to sit in jail for 59 days or pay $2,800, money she didn’t have,” says Alec Karakatsanis of Equal Justice Under Law. She could pay off her debt at $50 a day, plus make an extra $25 on days she agreed to work as a janitor and clean the dirty jail cells. On the back of her court documents, she had listed the days from 1 to 58, with the amount of money she made each day, subtracted from $2,800.
Karakatsanis, who sued on behalf of 16 people, says the city violated constitutional protections that prevent people from going to jail simply because they are too poor to pay court fines. Debtors’ prisons were outlawed in the U.S. before the Civil War. But the NPR investigation found there are no clear standards for how to determine who is too poor to pay — and should be excused — and those who have the ability to pay but simply refuse. As a result, the NPR series found, every day, poor Americans sit in jail because they can’t pay off their court costs.
Robert Segall, an attorney representing Montgomery, denies the city acted improperly and says municipal court judges had made “a considerable effort to determine whether there was an ability to pay and put off imposing any kind of penalties for quite a long period of time” to give offenders multiple chances to pay what they owed. But in May, a federal judge, responding to the lawsuit, cited concerns and issued an injunction, stopping the city from collecting fines. Segall said the city negotiated with lawyers from Equal Justice Under Law and the Southern Poverty Law Center to avoid a lengthy court fight. He says the city welcomed the chance to institute clearer procedures.
There’s been similar scrutiny of municipal courts in Ferguson, where arrests are a continuing source of tension. Last year, the municipal court in Ferguson, a city of 21,135 residents, issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations.
The City Council has already proposed steps to reduce the arrest warrants. A ticket “amnesty” — extended through the end of the year — allows people to erase pending arrest warrants and reset what is owed in small payment plans. The city of St. Louis announced a similar step last month, saying it would forgive some 220,000 warrants for nonviolent traffic offenses. Other municipalities in St. Louis County are considering similar programs.
Montgomery, in the settlement this week, also agreed to offer amnesty days when people can seek to lift arrest warrants for failure to pay tickets.
Karakatsanis says the agreement in Montgomery could show a way to do court reform in Ferguson. “The settlement this week,” he says, “has a chance to be a really groundbreaking moment in the fight against the rise of modern debtors’ prisons.”
I still remember the moment well. It was a wet, cold, grey Friday morning. I rose out of bed having had no sleep the night before. Panic attacks are horrific experiences by day, by night they are even worse.
Where once I would have felt sadness at seeing my friends heading to where I had always wanted to go, I now didn’t. Something much larger, deeper, darker had taken hold of my mind and sadness, despair, hopelessness were not strong enough to survive alongside what I was feeling.
They say something has to crack to allow the light in. At about 11am that morning, I finally cracked. I couldn’t do it anymore, all my strength at keeping up my pretence had gone. I curled up in the corner of the building and began to cry. One of the lads working with me came over and he didn’t know what to do. I asked him to take me home.
The GP called to my house and prescribed some sleeping pills and arranged for me to be sent to the hospital for some tests.
As I drove to work on my trusted Honda 50, a group of my friends passed in their car heading to college. They all smiled and waved and looked so happy. I smiled and waved and acted happy.
I had loved and excelled in school but it was the same with my hurling, it was the same with my friends, it was the same with my family, it was the same with the people of Cloyne, it was the same with life, I had lost interest in all of them. Losing interest in people was the worst.
I spent a week there and they done every test imaginable. Physically, I was in perfect health. I was diagnosed with suffering from ‘Depression’ or in laymans terms, that awful phrase ‘of suffering with his nerves’. I had never heard of the word before.
I was sent to see a psychiatrist in my local day care hospital. I was 19 years of age in a waiting room surrounded by people much older than I was. Surely I am not the only young person suffering from depression, I thought to myself. There was a vacant look in all of their eyes, a hollowness, an emptiness, the feeling of darkness pervaded the room.
The psychiatrist explained that there might be a chemical imbalance in my brain, asked me my symptoms and prescribed a mixture of anti depressants, anxiety and sleeping pills based on what I told him. He explained that it would take time to get the right cocktail of tablets for my type of depression.
I had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. Something deep inside in me told me this wasn’t the way forward and this wasn’t what I needed. As I walked out a group of people in another room with intellectual disabilities were doing various things. One man had a teaching device in front of him and he was trying to put a square piece into a round hole. It summed up perfectly what I felt had just happened to me.
I now stayed in my room all day, only leaving it to go to the bathroom. I locked the door and it was only opened to allow my mother bring me some food. I didn’t want to speak to anybody. The only time I left the house was on a Thursday morning to visit the psychiatrist. When everbody had left to go to work and school, my Mother would bring me my breakfast.
I cried nearly all the time. Sometimes she would sit there and cry with me, other times talk with me and hold my hand, tell me that she would do anything to help me get better, other times just sit there quietly whilst I ate the food.
Depression is difficult to explain to people. If you have experienced it there is no need, if you haven’t, I don’t think there are words adequate to describe its horror. I have had a lot of injuries playing hurling, snapped cruciates, broken bones in my hands 11 times, had my lips sliced in half and all my upper teeth blown out with a dirty pull but none of them come anywhere near the physical pain and mental torture of depression.
It permeates every part of your being, from your head to your toes. It is never ending, waves and waves of utter despair and hopelessness and fear and darkness flood throughout your whole body. You crave for peace but even sleep doesn’t afford that. It wrecks your dreams and turns your days into a living nightmare.
It destroys your personality, your relationship with your family and friends, your work, your sporting life, it affects them all. Your ability to give and receive affection is gone. You tear at your skin and your hair with frustration. You cut yourself to give some form of physical expression to the incredible pain you feel.
You want to grab it and smash it, but you can’t get a hold of it. You go to sleep hoping, praying not to wake up. You rack your brain seeing is there something you done in your life that justifies this suffering. You wonder why God is not answering your pleas for relief and you wonder is he there at all or has he forgotten about you. And through it all remains the darkness. It’s as if someone placed a veil over your soul and never returned to remove it. This endless, black, never ending tunnel of darkness.
I had been five months in my room now. I had watched the summer turn into the autumn and then to Winter through my bedroom window. One of the most difficult things was watching my teammates parade through the town after winning the U21 championship through it. That was the real world out there.
In here in my room was a living hell. I was now on about 18 tablets a day and not getting better but worse. I was eating very little but the medication was ballooning my weight to nearly twenty stone. I was sent to see another psychiatrist and another doctor who suggested electric shock therapy which I flatly refused. It was obvious to me I was never going to get better. My desire for death was now much stronger than my desire for living so I made a decision.
I had been contemplating suicide for a while now and when I finally decided and planned it out, a strange thing happened. A peace that I hadn’t experienced for a long time entered my mind and body. For the first time in years, I could get a good night’s sleep. It was as if my body realized that this pain it was going through was about to end and it went into relax mode. I had the rope hidden in my room. I knew there was a game on a Saturday evening and that my father and the lads would be gone to that.
After my Mother and sister would be gone to Mass, I would drive to the location and hang myself. I didn’t feel any anxiety about it. It would solve everything, I thought. No more pain, both for me and my family. They were suffering as well as I was and I felt with me gone, it would make life easier for them. How wrong I would have been. I have seen the effects and damage suicide has on families. It is far,far greater than anything endured while living and helping a person with depression.
For some reason my Mother never went to Mass. I don’t know why but she didn’t go. It was a decision on her part that saved my life.
The following week, a family that I had worked for when I was younger heard about me being unwell. They rang my Mother and told them that they knew a clinical psychologist working in a private practice that they felt could help me.
I had built up my hopes too many times over the last number of months that a new doctor, a new tablet, a new treatment was going to help and had them dashed when he or it failed to help me. I wasn’t going through it again. My mother pleaded to give him a try and eventually I agreed. It was a decision on my part that would save my life.
After meeting Tony, I instantly knew this was what I had been searching for. It was the complete opposite of what I felt when I was being prescribed tablets and electric shock therapy. We sat opposite each other in a converted cottage at the side of his house with a fire lighting in the corner. He looked at me with his warm eyes and said ‘I hear you haven’t been too well. How are you feeling’. It wasn’t even the question, it was the way he asked it.
I looked at him for about a minute or so and I began to cry. When the tears stopped, I talked and he listened intently. Driving home with my mother that night, I cried again but it wasn’t tears of sadness, it was tears of joy. I knew that evening I was going to better. There was finally a chink of light in the darkness.
Therapy is a challenging experience. It’s not easy baring your soul. When you sit in front of another human being and discuss things you have never discussed with anyone, it can be quite scary. Paulo Coelho says in one of his books that ‘A man is at his strongest when he is willing to be vulnerable’.
Sadly, society conditions men to be the opposite and views vulnerability as a weakness. For therapy to work, a person has to be willing to be vulnerable. Within a week, I was off all medication. For me, medication was never the answer. My path back to health was one of making progress, then slipping and making progress again. It was far from straightforward.
I had to face up to memories I had buried from being bullied quite a lot when I was a young kid. Some of it occurred in primary school, others in secondary. It was raw and emotional re-visiting those times but it had to be done.
A lot of my identity was tied up with hurling and it was an un-healthy relationship. The ironic thing is that as I began to live my life more from the inside out and appreciate and value myself for being me and not needing hurling for my self esteem, I loved the game more than ever. I got myself super fit and my weight down to 13 and a half stone.
I made the Cloyne Senior team and went on to play with the Cork Senior hurling team, making a cameo appearance in the final of 2006. It is still one of the biggest joys of my life playing hurling with Cloyne, despite losing three County finals and an All-Ireland with Cork. Being involved with the Cloyne team was a huge aid in my recovery and my teammates gave me great support during that time.
I went back to serve my time as an electrician. I went to college by night and re-discovered my joy of learning. I work for a great company and have a good life now. I finished therapy in 2004. I have not had a panic attack in that time and have not missed a day’s work because of depression since then.
I came to realise that depression was not my enemy but my friend. I don’t say this lightly. I know the damage it does to people and the lives it has wrecked and is wrecking so I am only talking for myself. How can you say something that nearly killed you was your friend? The best coaches I have ever dealt with are those that tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. You mightn’t like it at the time but after or maybe years later, you know they were right.
I believe depression is a message from a part of your being to tell you something in your life isn’t right and you need to look at it. It forced me to stop and seek within for answers and that is where they are. It encouraged me to look at my inner life and free myself from the things that were preventing me from expressing my full being.
The poet David Whyte says ‘the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s’.
This is an ongoing process. I am still far from living a fully, authentic life but I am very comfortable now in my own skin. Once or twice a year, especially when I fall into old habits, my ‘friend’ pays me a visit. I don’t push him away or ignore him. I sit with him in a chair in a quiet room and allow him to come. I sit with the feeling. Sometimes I cry, other times I smile at how accurate his message is. He might stay for an hour, he might stay for a day. He gives his message and moves on.
He reminds me to stay true to myself and keep in touch with my real self. A popular quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is ‘a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step’. A correct translation of the original Chinese though is ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet’. Lao Tzu believed that action was something that arose naturally from stillness. When you can sit and be with yourself, it is a wonderful gift and real and authentic action flows from it.
Many, many people are living lives of quiet misery. I get calls from people on the phone and to my house because people in my area will know my story. Sometimes it is for themselves, other times it is asking if I would talk to another person. I’m not a doctor or a therapist and anyone I talk to in distress, I always encourage them to go to both but people find it easier at first to talk to someone who has been in their shoes.
It is incredible the amount of people it affects. Depression affects all types of people, young and old, working and not working, wealthy and poor.
For those people who are currently gripped by depression, either experiencing it or are supporting or living with someone with it, I hope my story helps. There is no situation that is without hope, there is no person that can’t overcome their present difficulties. For those that are suffering silently, there is help out there and you are definitely not alone.
Everything you need to succeed is already within you and you have all the answers to your own issues. A good therapist will facilitate that process. My mother always says ‘a man’s courage is his greatest asset’. It is an act of courage and strength, not weakness, to admit you are struggling. It is an act of courage to seek help. It is an act of courage to face up to your problems.
An old saying goes ‘there is a safety in being hidden, but a tragedy never to be found’.
You are too precious and important to your family, your friends, your community, to yourself, to stay hidden. In the history of the world and for the rest of time, there will never again be another you. You are a once off, completely unique.
The real you awaits within to be found but to get there requires a journey inwards . A boat is at its safest when it is in the harbour but that’s not what it was built to do. We are the same.
Your journey in will unearth buried truths and unspoken fears. A new strength will emerge to help you to head into the choppy waters of your painful past. Eventually you will discover a place of peace within yourself, a place that encourages you to head out into the world and live your life fully. The world will no longer be a frightening place to live in for you.
The most important thing is to take the first step. Please take it.–Conor Cusack
Please click the image for the text of Jeff’s Sermon from Aug. 24, 2014 at The First Baptist Church of Bridgeport.
Published November 14, 2014 | Reprinted from: http://www.patriotradionetwork.com/2014/11/14/how-is-a-prison-like-a-war/
The similarities between mass incarceration and mass murder have been haunting me for a while, and I now find myself inspired by Maya Schenwar’s excellent new book Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. This is one of three books everyone should read right away. The others are The New Jim Crow and Burning Down the House, the former with a focus on racism in incarceration, the latter with a focus on the incarceration of youth. Schenwar’s is an overview of incarceration in all its absurd and unfathomable evil — as well as being a spotlight leading away from this brutal institution.
Locked Down, Locked Out is both an incomparably put together report incorporating statistics and studies with individual quotations and anecdotes, and a personal story of how incarceration has impacted the author’s own family and how the author has thought through the complex issues.
Yes, I did recently write an article specifically criticizing the widespread habit of calling everything a “war,” and I do still want to see that practice ended — but not because the linguistic quirk offends me, rather because we make so many things, to one degree or another, actually be like wars. As far as I have seen, no other practice bears remotely as much similarity to war as does prison. How so? Let me count the ways.
1. Both are distinctly American. No other nation spends as much on its military or its prisons, engages in as many wars or locks up as many people.
2. Both are seemingly simple and easy solutions that don’t solve anything, but seek to hide it away at a distance. Wars are waged thousands of miles from home. Prisoners are stored out-of-sight hundreds or thousands of miles from home.
3. Both are fundamentally violent and dependent upon the notion that a state “monopoly” on violence prevents violence by others, even while the evidence suggests that it actually encourages violence by others.
4. Both rely on the same process of dehumanizing and demonizing people, either enemies in a war or criminals in a prison. Never mind that most of the people killed by bombs had nothing to do with the squabble used as motivation for the war. Never mind that most of the prisoners had nothing to do with the sort of behavior used to demonize them. Both populations must be labeled as non-human or both institutions collapse.
5. Both are hugely profitable and promoted by the profiteers, who constitute a small clique, the broader society actually being drained economically by both enterprises. Weapons factories and prisons produce jobs, but they produce fewer and lower-paying jobs than other investments, and they do so with less economic benefit and more destructive side-effects.
6. Both are driven by fear. Without the fear-induced irrational urge to lash out at the source of our troubles, we’d be able to think through, calmly and clearly, far superior answers to foreign and domestic relations.
7. Both peculiar institutions are themselves worse than anything they claim to address. War is a leading cause of death, injury, trauma, loss of home, environmental destruction, instability, and lasting cycles of violence. It’s not a solution to genocide, but its wellspring and its big brother. U.S. prisons lock up over 2 million, control and monitor some 7 million, and ruin the lives of many millions more in the form of family members impacted. From there the damage spreads and the numbers skyrocket as communities are weakened. No damage that incarcerated people could have done if left alone, much less handled with a more humane system, could rival the damage done by the prison industry itself.
8. Both are default practices despite being demonstrably counter-productive by anybody’s measure, including on their own terms. Wars are not won, do not build nations, do not halt cruelty, do not spread democracy, do not benefit humanity, do not protect or expand freedom. Rather, freedoms are consistently stripped away in the name of wars that predictably endanger those in whose name they are waged. The nation waging the most wars generates the most enemies, thus requiring more wars, just as the nation with the most prisoners also has the most recidivists. Almost all prisoners are eventually released, and over 40% of them return to prison. Kids who commit crimes and are left alone are — as many studies have clearly and uncontroversially documented — less likely to commit more crimes than kids who are put in juvenile prison.
9. Both are classist and racist enterprises. A poverty draft has replaced ordinary conscription, while wars are waged only on poor nations rich in natural resources and darkish in skin tone. Meanwhile African Americans are, for reasons of racism and accounting for all other factors, far more likely than whites to be reported to the police, charged by the police, charged with higher offenses, sentenced to longer imprisonment, refused parole, and held to be violating probation. The poor are at the mercy of the police and the courts. The wealthy have lawyers.
10. The majority of the casualties, in both cases, are not those directly and most severely harmed. Injuries outnumber deaths in war, refugees outnumber the injured, and traumatized and orphaned children outnumber the refugees. Prisoners’ lives are ruined, but so are the greater number of lives from which theirs have been viciously removed. A humane person might imagine some leniency for the convict who has children. On the contrary, the majority of U.S. prisoners have children.
11. Both institutions seem logical until one imagines alternatives. Both seem inevitable and are upheld by well-meaning people who haven’t imagined their way around them. Both appear justifiable as defensive measures against inscrutable evil until one thinks through how much of that evil is generated by optional policies and how extremely rare to nonexistent is the sort of evil dominating the thinking behind massive industries designed for a whole different scale of combat.
12. Both war and prisons begin with shock and awe. A SWAT team invades a home to arrest a suspect, leaving an entire family afraid to go to sleep for years afterward. An air force flattens whole sections of a city, leaving huge numbers of people traumatized for life. Another word for these practices is terrorism.
13. Both institutions include extreme measures that are as counterproductive as the whole. Suicidal prisoners put into solitary confinement as punishment for being suicidal are rendered more suicidal, not less. Burning villages or murdering households with gunfire exacerbate the process of making the aggressor more hated, more resented, and less likely to know peace.
14. Both institutions hurt the aggressor. An attacking nation suffers morally, economically, civilly, environmentally; and its soldiers and their families suffer very much as prisoners and prison guards suffer. Even crime victims suffer the lack of apology or restitution or reconciliation that comes with an adversarial justice system that treats the courtroom as a civilized war.
15. Both horrors create alternative realities to which people sometimes long to return. Prisoners unable to find work or support or friendship or family sometimes return to prison on purpose. Soldiers unable to adapt to life back home have been known to choose a return to war despite suffering horrifically from a previous combat experience. The top killer of U.S. soldiers is suicide. Suicide is not uncommon among prisoners who have recently been released. Neither members of the military nor prisoners are provided serious preparation for reintegrating into a society in which everything that has been helping them survive will tend to harm them.
16. Both war and prisons generate vicious cycles. Crime victims are more likely to become criminals. Those imprisoned are more likely to commit crimes. Children effectively orphaned by incarceration are more likely to become criminals and be incarcerated. Nations that have been at war are more likely to be at war again. Solving Libya’s problems three years ago by bombing it predictably created violent chaos that even spilled into other nations. Launching wars on Iraq to address the violence created by previous wars on Iraq has become routine.
17. Both institutions are sometimes supported by their victims. An endangered family can prefer incarceration of a violent or drug-addicted loved one to nothing, in the absence of alternatives. Members of the military and their families can believe it is their duty to support wars and proposals for new wars. Prisoners themselves can see prison as preferable to starving under a bridge.
18. Both institutions are disproportionately male in terms of guards and soldiers. But the victims of war are not. And, when families are considered, as Schenwar’s book considers them so well, the victims of incarceration are not.
19. Both institutions have buried within them rare stories of success, soldiers who matured and grew wise and heroic, prisoners who reformed and learned their lessons. No doubt the same is true of slavery or the holocaust or teaching math by the method of applying a stick to a child’s hands.
20. Both institutions are often partially questioned without the possibility of questioning the whole ever arising. When Maya Schenwar’s sister gives birth in prison and then remains in prison, separated from her baby, people ask Schenwar “What’s the point? How is Kayla being in prison helping anyone?” But Schenwar thinks to herself: “How isanyone being in prison helping anyone?” Candidate Barack Obama opposed dumb wars, while supporting massive war preparations, eventually finding himself in several wars, all of them dumb, and one of them the very same war (or at least a new war in the very same nation) he had earlier described in those terms.
21. Both institutions churn along with the help of thousands of well-meaning people who try to mitigate the damage but who are incapable of redeeming fundamentally flawed systems. Reforms that strengthen the system as a whole tend not to help, while actions that shrink, limit, or weaken support for the whole machinery of injustice deserve encouragement.
22. Both are 19th century inventions. Some form of war and of slavery may go back 10,000 years, but only in the 19th century did it begin to resemble current war and incarceration. Changes through the 20th and early 21st centuries expanded on the damage without fundamentally altering the thinking involved.
23. Both include state-approved murder (the death penalty and the killing in war) and both include state-sanctioned torture. In fact much of the torture that has made the news in war prisons began in domestic prisons. A current war enemy, ISIS, had its leadership developed in the cauldron of brutal U.S. war prisons. Again, the aggressors, the torturers, and their whole society are not unharmed.
24. Crime victims are used to justify an institution that results in more people being victimized by crime. Victims of warlike abuse by others are used to justify wars likely to harm them and others further.
25. Prisoners and veterans often leave those worlds without the sort of education valued in the other world, the “free world” the prisoners dream of and soldiers fantasize that they are defending. A criminal record is usually a bar to employment. A military record can be an advantage but in other cases is a disadvantage as well in seeking employment.
26. Beyond all the damage done by war and prisons, by far the greatest damage is done through the trade-off in resources. The money invested in war could pay for the elimination of poverty and various diseases worldwide. A war-making nation could make itself loved for far less expense than what it takes to make itself hated. It could hang onto a much smaller, more legitimately defensive military like those of other nations while attempting such an experiment. The money spent on prisons could pay for drug treatment, childcare, education, and restorative justice programs. A nation could go on locking up violent recidivists while attempting such a change.
27. Restorative justice is the essence of the solution to both war and prison. Diplomacy and moderated reconciliation are answers to the common problem of writing an enemy off as unreachable through words.
I might go on, but I imagine you get the idea. Huge numbers of Americans are being made seriously worse citizens, and almost all of them will be back out of prison trying to survive. And, if that doesn’t do it for you, consider this: when incarceration is this widespread, there’s every possibility that it will someday include you. What if you’re falsely accused of a crime? What if somebody puts a link on a website to illegal pornography and you — or someone using your computer — clicks it? Or you urinate in public? Or you use marijuana in a state that legalized it, but the feds disagree? Or you blow the whistle on some abuse in some branch of the government that you work for? Or you witness something and don’t report it? Or you work so hard that you fall asleep driving your car? An injustice to one is an injustice to all, and injustice on this scale is potentially injustice to every one.
What to do?
Californians just voted on their ballots to reduce prison sentences. Get that on your ballot. For the first time ever, this week, a prosecutor was sent to prison for falsely convicting an innocent person. We need a whole reworking of the rewards and incentives for prosecutors who have long believed that locking people up was the path to success. We need activist resistance to prison expansion, divestment from for-profit prison companies, and educational efforts to begin changing our culture as well as our laws. Locked Down, Locked Out provides a terrific list of organizations to support, including those that can help you become a prisoner’s pen-pal. Schenwar explains that there is nothing prisoners need more, as long as they are locked up. Those not receiving mail are seen as the easiest targets for abuse by guards and other prisoners. And our receiving their letters may be the best way for us to learn about the hidden world in our midst.
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