Featured Resources
About the painting "White Butterflywires, Blue Hudson": Anthony Papa spent 12 years in a maximum-security prison. While incarcerated, he began to paint and was granted clemency by Governor Pataki in 1997. His memoir, 15 Years to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom, was published by Feral House in Spring 2004. To learn more, visit www.15yearstolife.com
 ICARE Brochure is now available! (Brochure is in PDF format)
Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
Race and the transformation of criminal justice, by Glenn C. Loury
from The The Boston Review July/August 2007
The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784 - all this while the city's population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania's violent crimes were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state's population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.
"Cities That Lead the Way"
New York Times, March 31, 2006 "Crippled by soaring corrections costs, states and municipalities are re-examining policies that drive ex-offenders right back to prison by barring them from employment. Locked out of the mainstream, ex-felons become burdens to their families, their communities and the nation as a whole. Three cities — Boston, Chicago and San Francisco — have taken groundbreaking steps aimed at de-emphasizing criminal histories for qualified applicants for city jobs, except in law enforcement, education and other sensitive areas where people with convictions are specifically barred by statute."
"Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn",
by Erik Eckholm, New York Times, March 20, 2006 "Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups."
“Study Shows More Job Offers for Ex-Convicts Who Are White”,
by Paul von Zielbauer, New York Times, June 17, 2005
“According to a study by two Princeton professors, the first to assess the effect of race on job searches by ex-convicts, found that black men who had never been in trouble by the law were about half as likely as whites with similar backgrounds to get a job offer or a callback. Black men whose job applications stated that they had spent time in prison were only about one-third as likely as white men with similar applications to get a positive response.”
No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, by David Cole
The New Press, 1999
“Cole’s analysis shows just how pervasive race- and class-based double standards are in virtually every criminal justice setting, from police behavior, to jury selection, to sentencing. It argues that, in fact, our system depends on these double standards to operate.”
www.restorativejustice.org
Restorative Justice Online is a service of the Centre for Justice & Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International. Information on PFI can be found on the Prison Fellowship International Website. The purpose of Restorative Justice Online is to be an authoritative, credible, non-partisan source of information on restorative justice. |
