Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Cops, crisis calls and conflict over who should help

    Seattle Police Department's crisis response team answers some of the city's many 911 calls for people in distress, pairing police trained in handling such calls with mental health professionals. The aim is to counter the default policing approach to problems that usually involve mental illness or substance abuse, which is to control people. It doesn't always work, due to the complexity of the calls, the nature of policing, and the department's limited resources devoted to the program. But, when it works, it can help rather than escalate situations, and avoid the ultimate failure, the use of excessive force.

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  • St. Louis comedian shares story of redemption, reentry following prison sentence

    When people emerge from long prison sentences, they can be in a hurry to put their lives back on track. But, when enrolled in a voluntary re-entry program called the Concordance Academy of Leadership, they first must go through intense mental health counseling that begins while they're incarcerated before they launch a search for a job or permanent housing. The St. Louis-based program boasts much lower-than-average recidivism rates, in part because it responds to post-release mistakes with more counseling rather than automatic punishment.

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  • An Oregon city's decades-old alternative to police

    Like many cities, Seattle is looking to Eugene, Oregon, for a model to shift resources from police to unarmed crisis responders handling 911 calls about mental health, addiction, family conflict, and other non-criminal problems. Eugene's CAHOOTS program has been doing such work for half a century, and since 1989 sending medic-and-counselor teams on calls. In 2019 it saved $8 million in police costs and $14 million for ambulances and emergency room visits. But, while taking police out of situations where they might cause more problems than they solve, it's only as good as its region's social services.

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  • More Than 1,000 Open Prostitution Cases In Brooklyn Are Going To Be Wiped From The Files

    The Brooklyn district attorney is prosecuting few prostitution cases and has dismissed 262 cases that he and sex worker advocates say are a byproduct of law enforcement unfairly targeting trans women and women of color. The DA is working toward dismissing more than 1,000 cases and declining to prosecute all new cases. While legislative action is needed to achieve full decriminalization and to void the 25,000 criminal records that date to 1975 in Brooklyn, the DA exercised his discretion based on the harm done by arresting women for sex work and on related loitering charges.

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  • Almost a year after opening, Compass House provides direction amid safe surroundings

    Compass House provides safety and support for women, many of them newly released from incarceration, who struggle with substance misuse issues or mental illness. The transitional housing program is the first of its kind in a state that is sorely lacking in such services. Peer support and professional counseling and treatment can last a year or more. The women in the program, who are at high risk of homelessness without a refuge like Compass House, pay 30% of their income for rent, with the rest of the costs covered by a state agency.

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  • Inmates are learning to be their own bosses after they leave jail behind

    Inmates to Entrepreneurs has graduated 1 million people from its eight-week program that teaches incarcerated people how to start their own low-capital businesses. An extension of a free online entrepreneurship course, Starter U, the program offered in-person workshops until COVID forced it to go virtual. One study shows the unemployment rate in December 2020 for formerly incarcerated people was more than 27%, more than four times higher than the general public. Inmates to Entrepreneurs was started 28 years ago in North Carolina's prison system.

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  • The Free Hotline That's Saving Women's Lives by Disarming Dangerous Men

    The Calm Hotline takes calls from men in Bogotá, Colombia, in an effort to address the root causes of domestic violence: a culture of machismo. Four psychologists take emergency calls – about 700 calls came in the service's first month – and works to refer the callers to an eight-week "gender transformation program" that will attempt to change men's toxic attitudes that can lead to violence. The program is patterned on a counseling hotline in the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja that was associated with a steep decline in domestic violence.

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  • L.A. Unified experiments with new tutoring program during pandemic

    Step Up is a pilot tutoring program that was launched to help students in the Los Angeles Unified School District navigate virtual learning during the pandemic. The program is only open to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and pairs them up with tutors if their teachers opt into the program. So far, nine schools are part of the program, representing 402 students.

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  • After shootings hit new high, Durham to spend $935,000 on an alternative to police

    Because two Durham neighborhoods using the Cure Violence method of "violence interruption" bucked the citywide trend toward higher gun violence, the city will expand its Bull City United violence-prevention program to four more neighborhoods. The additional $935,488 cost will pay for 16 employees, many of them formerly incarcerated, who will mediate disputes after a shooting, to prevent retaliation, and who will conduct outreach to people at risk of gun violence.

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  • In Eugene, Oregon, civilian response workers—not police—are dispatched to nonviolent crises

    Eugene's well-established CAHOOTS program for replacing police as first responders to certain types of 911 calls has become a model for multiple cities as they seek to replicate its success in an era of questioning the role of police. While it saves its city money and replaces arrests and possible violence with social and health services for people needing housing or mental health care, or suffering from addiction, CAHOOTS is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of programs responding to these challenges. Communities' differences will dictate what works best for them.

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