Rod on why a housing or job-only strategy won’t prevent reincarceration?

Some of the responses to the issue have been a housing first strategy. Let's get them in secure housing, and that'll be a way to go at it. That is a failed proposition.  Some responses have been a jobs first strategy, just get them a job. That'll solve the problem. It is true that there is a correlation between having secure housing and having some success in life and having a stable job and having some success post incarceration, but it's missing the point. The people who were able to do that, and are successful are those who would have been successful without, and it's not the two thirds of the people who go back and who are really, really in need of a healing first approach.

Rob on the importance of a healing first approach to rehabilitation:

If you don't stabilize people and start addressing mental health, substance use, and the sort of the cognitive distortions that they bring to their life situation, there's no chance that any employment, education, or training program is going to be successful. As you know, two thirds of the people who go to prison return to prison, and that really is a problem of behavioral health. 

Rod on the impact of trauma in the prison population: 

I saw gang violence, I saw people fighting. It's community violence. It's the violence that happens at the home. It's the abuse and neglect, and all of those things that folks have to contend with. And then when you go to prison, one of the first things that happens to many people when they go to prison is they lose the ability to be empathetic, the ability to smile and enjoy life. I'm not one here to say that people should not be punished for crimes they commit. But I am here to say that we need a better response to getting them ready to re-enter the workforce, because over half the crimes that are committed in our country are committed by people who've been to prison.

Rod on the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to preventing reincarceration: 

Sometimes innovation is really interdisciplinary, right? It's when these sort of disparate things that don't necessarily go together, come together to form something much more powerful. That is the story. You can’t address it with housing first. You can't address it with a job first. You can't only address it with behavioral health, because you have to do something with folks, once they get treatment, right? And so having it all together under one roof operating with the right sequence, and the right mix of services is the thing that works. 

Keep Going: 

Read: 

Leadership on the line

Watch:

Just Mercy