New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

Vicarious trauma is the trauma you absorb working with traumatized people, especially when you’re both inside of already traumatizing systems. Treatment not jail, diversion from harmful system-contact… Making justice reform work on the ground relies on an abundance of frontline staff: from mental health counsellors to peer mentors. But many of those staff, at our organization and at others like us, are hurting: navigating human suffering—trauma—on all sides. Full show notes [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/resources/vicarious-trauma-360/]

Think of probation as an enormous testing period: will you be able to adhere to the thicket of conditions governing your daily life? Fail at any of them and you could be sent to prison. At the heart of this testing ethos is drug testing: almost all of the almost three million people on probation in the U.S. are drug tested—peeing in a cup, generally under the observation of a probation officer. The tests are time-consuming, expensive, and traumatic. There is also little evidence justifying their use. Full show notes [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/publications/testing-supervision] Special issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter on drug testing and supervision [https://online.ucpress.edu/fsr/issue/36/4] Hear our 12/23 episode [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/publications/mass-supervision]: ex-NYC probation commissioner Vinnie Schiraldi calls for probation’s “incremental abolition”

A brief, moving excerpt from the recent award ceremony at the New York Public Library announcing the inaugural winner of the Inside Literary Prize [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/inside-literary-prize], the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated. Hear from Freedom Reads founder and CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, and from this year’s winner… And please be sure to listen to our earlier episode, profiling the work of some of the judges for this prize: ‘Inside Literary Prize: Shakopee Women’s Prison [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/publications/inside-prize-podcast].’

“They actually care. They want to hear about what we think, the ones that they have shut away.” The Inside Literary Prize [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/inside-literary-prize] is the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated, some of the most prolific readers in the country. Yet the walls we erect around incarcerated people also disappear them from conversations about culture, politics, and history—conversations to which they can make vital contributions. In this special episode, hear a behind-the-scenes portrait of what a day of judging sounded like in Minnesota’s Shakopee women’s prison. Full show notes [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/publications/inside-prize-podcast] [https://newthinking.blubrry.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Podcast_Header_ILP_08012024_5_0-300x150.png]

What would it mean to decriminalize mental health—to stop criminalizing the symptoms of what is very often untreated mental illness? And what would it mean to put racial justice at the center of that effort? The outcomes of the criminal legal system being what they are, those two questions are really inseparable. Full show notes [https://www.innovatingjustice.org/publications/mental-health-blackness]