A New Vision of What is Possible

With over two million Americans behind bars, the United States boasts the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world.  With only 5% of the world population, we claim 25% of the world’s prisoners.  In the last 30 years, the number of Americans in prison jumped an astonishing 1000% from 200,000 in the 1970’s to 2,131,180 in 2004.  To grasp this magnitude, imagine the entire populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines and Miami put together!  Furthermore, 61% of all our inmates come from minority populations, including one out of every eight Black men in their late 20’s.  What does it mean that in 2004 the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black males at a rate nearly six times higher than the world’s most openly racist society -- South Africa at the height of apartheid in 1993?  [851 Black males per 100,000 incarcerated in South Africa in 1993 as opposed to 4,919 per 100,000 in the U.S. in 2004.] Finally, the national budget for prisons in 2001 was 40 billion dollars per year, up from 13 billion in 1985.  These are dollars supporting the system.

A question we invite you to reflect on:  Is this the world and society we want to live in -- a world of increasing violence, discrimination and imprisonment?  If your response is ‘no’, then what can we do to build the society and world we actually want?  We have reached a crucial point of choice.  Are we going to live in a world of increasing fear and violence or a world of increasing understanding, connection, community and healing?  This is not just about prisons, but also about our hopes and visions for the world. 
     
The theory that the only effective way to establish public safety is to put more and more people into prisons is a faulty and dangerous belief.  As a social experiment, our criminal justice system has been tried and has been proven unworkable.  The way we interpret crime and violence and the way we interact with the outcasts of our society, the poor and disenfranchised, has a profound impact on whether violence increases or decreases. 

Freedom Project offers a path toward a solution, a way of thinking out of the box.  It is our experience that when former inmates are welcomed back into the community, provided support and connection, those prisoners can be transformed into peacemakers.  Such transformation provides both healing and the true safety our society longs for.  Subjecting former inmates to continued exile through expulsion from our neighborhoods, social ostracism, economic hurdles, etc., not only hurts them but further ruptures and divides our communities.  We believe that it is through connection within the circle of community that returnees find the means to live a different way.  We know that former prisoners can and do move away from destructive habits of violence and hatred to develop new patterns of thinking and behaviors that foster connection and integrity.  As a people, we can focus our resources on building an increasingly more expansive and expensive prison system or we can address the problem of violence at its roots by creating a societal soil that nourishes connection, caring, mutual responsibility and protection of trust.

We accomplish this mission through several avenues.  Inside prison, we offer multi-day trainings and month-long courses on NVC and mindfulness.  On the outside, returnees gather weekly to live and practice the new skills they have acquired.  We develop and train a team composed of returnees and volunteers who have never been to prison to ensure that our work will continue to grow.  In 2005, Freedom Project offered a 10-day residential program for colleagues engaging in similar work.  With over two dozen inspired participants returning to their respective countries and communities, we celebrate the effects of this work rippling out into the world.

Today we are applying all we have learned from creating our Freedom Project team and from our prison trainings to a visionary new transition program.  Freedom Project has formed a program development team to asses the needs of returnees to make a successful transition.  It is our hope to create a program that will serve the basic needs of people released from prison in addition to the concrete tools in NVC and mindfulness that we already provide. Freedom Project believes that for both returnees and community members to deepen their capacity for authenticity, empathy and compassionate connection, NVC and mindfulness is the bridge for them to meet their basic needs met in a way that is life enriching. Either with our resources or through collaboration with other community-based transition groups, Freedom Project hopes to ensure that the basic needs or returnees are met

An example of the work we do is reflected in the story of a young man in his late 20’s who arrive guarded and on edge at a prison workshop.  Over three days, he begins to see, hear and feel in ways that are new and unfamiliar.  He experiences an internal shift: it is uncomfortable and confusing even as his mind and heart are cracking open.  Referring to his violent skinhead history, he fingers Freedom Project’s multi-racial team and falters, “People like you are the ones I would target and attack.  But if I see you in the streets today, I’d be wanting to protect you.  And if my former buddies were here right now, they’d be after me to kill me!  I’m feeling so overwhelmed – I mean, I’ve become one of the people I used to want to kill and the people I used to want to kill I now want to protect! ….”   Voice breaking, he lowers his head and shields his eyes.  The silence in the room is deafening.   Yet in the long deep quiet that follows, the young man senses something he can trust:  “I was fifteen years old when I was sent to adult prison.  The moment I stepped inside, a group of guys began teasing me.   I was terrified.  I was sobbing and crying all over myself.  Finally an officer pulled me aside, took a T-shirt and wiped my face.  He said to me, ‘Son, don’t you ever ever let them see you cry.’”  Raising his eyes to connect with those around the circle, the young man added: “And I never did.  Until today.” 

“Until today” – these words acknowledge the individual’s potential for growth and transformation as well as a community’s potential to create structures that engender trust and safety.  This is what we believe is possible and this is what our program is all about, not just the transitioning of prisoners, but the healing of our communities so we can open our hearts to each other and see our common humanity.  Prisoners to peacemakers, hatred to love, the Freedom Project is a container and a source of that hope.