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Nick Chiles, Editor-in-Chief of Atlanta BlackStar, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. He has written or co-written 13 books and won over a dozen major journalism awards during a journalism career that brought him to the Dallas Morning News, the Star-Ledger of New Jersey and New York Newsday, in addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of Odyssey Couleur travel magazine.

Family ReEntry invites the public to an evening with the acclaimed actor and leading social activist, Danny Glover Wednesday, May 6, at 7 p.m., at The Klein Memorial Auditorium in Bridgeport.

Glover has gained respect for his wide-reaching community activism and philanthropic efforts with a particular emphasis on Mass Incarceration and the Racial Disparity in America’s prison system.

Family ReEntry’s mission is to develop, implement, and share innovative, sustainable, cost-effective solutions to the unprecedented numbers of people involved in the criminal justice system.” Since 1984, Family ReEntry’s effective community-based programs have significantly reduced the likelihood that a client will re-offend, be re-arrested, or be re-incarcerated. Reductions in recidivism resulting from Family ReEntry’s cost-effective programs increase public safety, improve quality of life, and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers.

In recent years, Family ReEntry has increased its impact by developing model programs, engaging in comprehensive research, and advocating for effective policy and practice in criminal justice. Our programs comprise three integrated sectors: 1) Early Prevention — Youth Programs 2) Intervention – Domestic Violence 3) Reentry. These programs provide a spectrum of services designed to help break the cycle of incarceration. Our goal is to help clients and their families make important behavior changes and access key community resources that will lead them to healthier, crime-free lives. Family ReEntry’s efforts are aimed at comprehensively and effectively addressing the enormous social problems related to crime, violence, abuse, and the unprecedented rates of costly incarceration.

This event is planned to educate and broaden community awareness of these huge issues. Mayor of Bridgeport, Bill Finch will do welcoming remarks and Reverend Jeff Grant of the Progressive Prison Project and Family ReEntry Board Member will Emcee.

Below is the event panel:

1) Colin McEnroe (Moderator) Radio Personality from WNPR

2) Steve Lanza – Executive Director of Family ReEntry

3) Erika Tindill – Superior Court Judge & former Family ReEntry Board Member

4) Glenn Martin – Founder and Chief Risk Taker of JustLeadershipUSA

5) Joseph Gaudett, Jr – Chief of Police Bridgeport,CT

6) Fred Hodges – Family ReEntry FreshStart Program Manager

7) Charles Grodin – Actor & Social Activist

For ticket or sponsorship information visit familyreentryevents.org or call Jeffrey Earls at 203-290-0865.

Family ReEntry invites the public to an evening with the acclaimed actor and leading social activist, Danny Glover Wednesday, May 6, at 7 p.m., at The Klein Memorial Auditorium in Bridgeport.

Glover has gained respect for his wide-reaching community activism and philanthropic efforts with a particular emphasis on Mass Incarceration and the Racial Disparity in America’s prison system.

Family ReEntry’s mission is to develop, implement, and share innovative, sustainable, cost-effective solutions to the unprecedented numbers of people involved in the criminal justice system.” Since 1984, Family ReEntry’s effective community-based programs have significantly reduced the likelihood that a client will re-offend, be re-arrested, or be re-incarcerated. Reductions in recidivism resulting from Family ReEntry’s cost-effective programs increase public safety, improve quality of life, and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers.

In recent years, Family ReEntry has increased its impact by developing model programs, engaging in comprehensive research, and advocating for effective policy and practice in criminal justice. Our programs comprise three integrated sectors: 1) Early Prevention — Youth Programs 2) Intervention – Domestic Violence 3) Reentry. These programs provide a spectrum of services designed to help break the cycle of incarceration. Our goal is to help clients and their families make important behavior changes and access key community resources that will lead them to healthier, crime-free lives. Family ReEntry’s efforts are aimed at comprehensively and effectively addressing the enormous social problems related to crime, violence, abuse, and the unprecedented rates of costly incarceration.

This event is planned to educate and broaden community awareness of these huge issues. Mayor of Bridgeport, Bill Finch will do welcoming remarks and Reverend Jeff Grant of the Progressive Prison Project and Family ReEntry Board Member will Emcee.

Below is the event panel:

1) Colin McEnroe (Moderator) Radio Personality from WNPR

2) Steve Lanza – Executive Director of Family ReEntry

3) Erika Tindill – Superior Court Judge & former Family ReEntry Board Member

4) Glenn Martin – Founder and Chief Risk Taker of JustLeadershipUSA

5) Joseph Gaudett, Jr – Chief of Police Bridgeport,CT

6) Fred Hodges – Family ReEntry FreshStart Program Manager

7) Charles Grodin – Actor & Social Activist

For ticket or sponsorship information visit familyreentryevents.org or call Jeffrey Earls at 203-290-0865.

At a time of historic polarization in Washington, one issue has garnered strong bipartisan support: criminal-justice reform. Exhibit A is the list of strange bedfellows who have recently joined forces through the “transpartisan” Coalition for Public Safety. This new effort has brought together leading progressive organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the ACLU and left-leaning funders such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, alongside influential conservative groups such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, Freedomworks and the Koch brothers.

Much of the bipartisan focus in Washington has centered on the need for sentencing reform, through proposals like tackling overly harsh mandatory minimums. Sentencing reform is urgently needed, and bipartisan efforts such as Senator Lee’s (R-UT) and Senator Durbin’s (D-IL)Smarter Sentencing Act provide cause for optimism.

But the problems with our broken criminal-justice system don’t end when an individual is released from jail or prison. Every year, more than 600,000 Americans are released into their communities after serving their time. Moreover, millions more end up with criminal records without doing any time–through arrests that don’t lead to conviction or through probation-only sentences.

All in all, between 70 million and 100 million Americans—or as many as one in three of us—now have some type of criminal record. And due to the rise of technology and the internet—as well as federal and state policy decisions—having even a minor criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, education and training, building good credit, and even meager public assistance. For example, nearly nine in ten employers use background checks in hiring, and four in five landlords conduct background checks on potential tenants. Even a minor criminal record can mean every door is closed to you as you seek to get back on your feet.

The result? Punishment has been transformed from a temporary to a lifelong experience for many justice-involved individuals. In addition, mass incarceration and the barriers associated with a criminal record have come to serve as major drivers of poverty in the United States. This has broad implications—not just for the tens of millions of affected individuals, but also for their families, their communities and our national economy. For example, the cost of shutting people with criminal records out of the labor market runs as high as $65 billion per year in GDP terms. Thus, as the criminal justice reform train continues to move forward full speed ahead, it’s imperative that efforts include reforms to give people a second chance.

Senator Rand Paul’s and Senator Cory Booker’s REDEEM Act, introduced yesterday, is a good first step. Take a look at this summary if you want to see everything it does. Here are three key provisions, which, if enacted, would go a long way toward putting second chances within reach for Americans with criminal records.

1. Creates a mechanism for cleaning up a federal criminal record. As my colleague Sharon Dietrich and I explained in a recent Center for American Progress report, cleaning up a criminal record is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming the barriers associated with a criminal record. While state laws vary a great deal, the vast majority of states have “expungement” or “sealing” mechanisms to allow people to put their criminal records behind them. In fact, as the Vera Institute documented in a recent report, twenty-three states broadened these laws between 2009–14 through efforts such as expanding the categories of offenses that can be expunged or shortening wait times.

Yet despite the exponential increase in federal criminal prosecutions that resulted from the War on Drugs, there is no such mechanism to expunge federal records, even those resulting from arrests that did not lead to a conviction. Federal law thus lags far behind the states. By creating a judicial mechanism for sealing federal nonviolent records, the REDEEM Act thus fills an important void. (We have called for including all federal arrests that did not result in conviction, given that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system—but the REDEEM Act is a good first step.)

2. Improves the accuracy of FBI background checks. Understandably, employers and other users of background checks believe the information presented there is reliable. However, that information is often incorrect or not up to date. FBI background checks in particular are notoriously inaccurate—some 600,000 jobseekers received an inaccurate FBI check in 2012. One of the most common problems with FBI background checks is that they fail to provide the outcome of a criminal case. Given that many cases don’t result in convictions or are resolved on lesser charges, having a criminal record that has not been updated to reflect the outcome of criminal charges can be highly prejudicial.

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In recognition of this widespread problem, the REDEEM Act would require the FBI to review each record for accuracy and completeness before it can be provided to a requesting party. It would also prohibit the FBI from distributing criminal record information pertaining to arrests that are more than two years old if they don’t contain a final outcome of the case.

3. Reforms the harsh and outdated lifetime ban on public assistance for people with felony drug convictions. In many states, even meager public assistance is out of reach for people with certain types of criminal records. The 1996 welfare law included a lifetime ban on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) for people convicted of a felony drug offense. The law gives states the option to modify or waive the bans, and many have. Yet most states continue to enforce the ban in whole or in part for TANF, SNAP, or both. This outdated and harsh policy deprives struggling families of nutrition assistance and pushes them even deeper into poverty at precisely the moment when they are seeking to regain their footing. According to The Sentencing Project, in the twelve states with the most punitive policies, an estimated 180,000 women were subject to the TANF ban in 2013. The REDEEM Act would lift this ban for people who were convicted for drug use or possession. (The ban would remain in effect for people convicted of drug distribution crimes.)

As bipartisan members of Congress take up criminal justice reform, we must not lose sight of the need to include reforms to give people a second chance. Passing the REDEEM Act would be a great start.

Read Next: Why the private immigration jail in Texas sparked outrage among inmates

With the recent launch of JustLeadershipUSA, Glenn Martin, President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA, is looking to elevate the voice of Americans impacted by crime and incarceration, especially people who have been imprisoned, by positioning them as “informed, empowered reform partners.” This will be done through leadership development, policy advocacy and reframing. JustLeadershipUSA has as its goal cutting the U.S. prison population in half by 2030.

At 2.2 million people confined, the U.S. prison population has increased exponentially since the late 1960s, beginning with Richard Nixon’s candidacy and declaration of war, that is, the “war on crime,” in 1968, which specifically targeted Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which Nixon declared “lawless.” Since then, various laws and policies, on the Federal and state level, have contributed to mass incarceration and the grossly disproportionate imprisonment of people of color, mostly men, in the United States: Rockefeller Drug Law in New York (1973), which was adopted in other states; mandatory minimum sentencing across the nation as well as the Federal criminal justice system (1984), with the Federal government providing monetary incentives, in the form of block grants, for states to adopt mandatory minimum sentencing, which almost always increases the length of time in prison (New York’s Governor, George Pataki, continuously mentioned how New York would not be eligible for these block grants to build more prisons or hire more police if the state did not adopt mandatory minimum sentencing, which it did in 1998 after the tragic killing of a young woman by an individual who had been on parole for a nonviolent crime); crack-cocaine laws, which created longer prison sentences for crack-cocaine convictions over cocaine convictions, which disproportionately impacted people of color; the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which made it easier, read quicker, to execute people sentenced to death; it also limited the right of habeas corpus, creating procedural hurdles that were too high to jump, not to mention the United States Supreme Court even ruling that a showing of “actual innocence” by an individual in prison could not overcome these procedural hurdles; tougher parole releasing policies as well as the increase in technical parole violations (returning people to prison for non-criminal violations of parole rules such as curfew violations or “fraternizing with known felons”); elimination of temporary release (including work release) programs; and three strikes laws requiring life sentences for those with three separate felony convictions, even relatively innocuous and nonviolent third felony convictions.

Thirty years after Richard Nixon declared his war on crime, people incarcerated in the mid- and late ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s were being released from prison. This is the reality, as Jeremy Travis writes and thus entitles a journal article and a book: “But They All Come Back: Rethinking Prisoner Reentry” (2000), and But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (2005). At the other end of the mass incarceration tunnel were individuals coming back from prison. The numbers are staggering. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals were released from Federal and state prisons, and since then that number has remained pretty much the same. Thirty years prior to that, the number was less than 150,000 individuals.

When we look at the more than 630,000 individuals released from Federal and state prisons every year, this translates into, every day, about 1,700 individuals released from these prisons, exploding onto the American landscape and this Era of Reentry. At the same time, there was great interest and thus an explosion of journal and newspapers articles on this phenomenon as well as books such as Jennifer Gonnerman’s Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, which shows how a bit player, not a queenpin, got caught up in a drug sale and was given a life sentence under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Law, while the more culpable people involved in the drug world who set her up got a get-out-of-jail-free card. Additionally, there were the stories of the people themselves, those who had been imprisoned; they showed us compelling cases of the possibilities of transformation and what it looked like. They added something new, something different, to the reentry narrative, that is, through their stories, which they began to tell at conferences, at colleges, to journalism grad students, on radio shows and television. Some wrote about these experiences, mostly stories of their transformation. See Harvey Brown’s Freedom at Last: The Life of an Ex-Con, and Theo Harris’ Blessed and Highly Favored: Memoirs of a Multiple Felon. See also Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The most important thing was that these men and women were taking control of their stories, not just being subjects, but also being authors of their own stories.There was something familiar in their stories, in their narratives, if you will, something that tapped into the historical connection between slavery and imprisonment in the United States. As many should know by now, imprisonment of people of color replaced slavery. (And the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color began even before the end of slavery. Gustave de Tocqueville and Alexis de Beaumont, in their study, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, published in 1833, noted the disproportionate imprisonment of “Negroes” in the Southern States.) This is stated explicitly in the Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The big difference is that people who have been duly convicted of a crime aren’t given any moral agency – “They committed a crime!” This, some think, takes away from the fact that imprisonment is slavery under another name, and imperfectly Constitutional.

These stories, these narratives, are similar to the slave narratives, eloquently given voice by Frederick Douglass. Making the transition from talking about slavery to talking about prison, more recently, we think of Malcolm X and his odyssey as documented by Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

These stories have been critical in including the voices of those imprisoned and those formerly incarcerated. However, they are mere testimonies, powerful, but individual stories that only touch the iceberg of the problems of mass incarceration. Imagine if Frederick Douglass confined his speeches to his experiences as a slave. We would not have got his talk about the importance of the franchise, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), which is an issue of importance today for those imprisoned and those formerly incarcerated, many of them having lost the right to vote for life in a number of states, mostly Southern, as a direct result of a felony conviction. And imagine if Malcolm X confined his speeches to his experiences as a prisoner.

We would not have his famous speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), given more than 100 years after Douglass’ speech on the same topic.When Martin of JustLeadershipUSA talks about elevating the voice of Americans impacted by crime, he is talking about much more than the formerly incarcerated providing their testimony. He is talking about the people “closest to the problem” providing solutions to the problem. Indeed, many who have been on this reentry circuit for a number of years think of this “testimony-telling” and only testimony-telling as a “dog and pony” show. Needless to say, providing this testimony is important, more so for someone recently released as opposed to someone who has been out of prison for a number of years and has continued his or her formal education and worked in various capacities in the for-profit and the not-for-profit world, oftentimes in leadership positions.

JustLeadershipUSA is positioning itself to go beyond the dog and pony show. It is, however, only the most recent organization looking to elevate the voice of formerly incarcerated people, but unique in that its goal is to reduce the U.S. prison population in half by 2030. Before JustLeadershipUSA, in New York, there was the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions. In California, there was All of Us or None.

The mission of the Center For NuLeadership on Urban Solutions is “to influence socio- economic, criminal and juvenile justice policy by providing research, advocacy and leadership training to formerly and currently incarcerated people, their families, communities, allies and criminal justice professionals….” Similar to JustLeadershipUSA, the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions promotes “active participation in criminal and social justice policy decisions, discussions and deliberation by the people whose lives are most directly affected and who have a legitimate stake in the outcome.”

All of Us Or None “is a grassroots civil rights organization fighting for the rights of formerly- and currently-incarcerated people and our families. We are fighting against the discrimination that people face every day because of arrest or conviction history. The goal of All of Us or None is to strengthen the voices of people most affected by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. Through our grassroots organizing, we will build a powerful political movement to win full restoration of our human and civil rights.”

There are other organizations across the country, founded by formerly incarcerated individuals and their families, most notably Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc., based in New York, which holds an annual Awards Ceremony honoring formerly incarcerated people for their work in the world and in their communities. The Awards are named after formerly incarcerated people. Also worth noting is Exodus Transitional Community, Inc., a faith-based reentry organization in East Harlem founded by Julio Medina, which has garnered national attention for its work in the field of reentry.

Many of the above organizations were formed because the founders wanted to create new possibilities for themselves and others similarly situated. Additionally, working at established organizations, reentry organizations included, these individuals encountered the green wall, the glass ceiling for formerly incarcerated people. Most of these organizations were not truly cultivating the leadership of its formerly incarcerated employees.

Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), has mainstream America and academia talking about the criminal justice system in ways we have not previously, stating that incarceration is being used as a”system of racial control.”

Martin and JustLeadershipUSA, and the other organizations mentioned above, as well as those not mentioned, are creating a new paradigm to not only elevate the voice of formerly incarcerated people, but also to develop the leadership of this group. With this, we are moving into another stage of this Era of Reentry. Stay tuned.