It is no
secret that impoverished communities in urban centers throughout the United
States have become incubators for street crime and violence. Generations of youth raised in those
communities are being inculcated with anti-social, life negating values and
beliefs. The mass incarceration of
hundreds of thousands of people in those communities has obviously done little
to alter the socioeconomic, political, and racial realities underlying the
crime and violence. Only a nationwide
public safety initiative accompanied by a seismic paradigm shift in our
approach to criminal justice reform will deliver healthy hope for a better
future.
The Lifers Public Safety Initiative
(PSI), a prisoner-led program of the SCI-Phoenix L.I.F.E.R.S. Incorporated
inmate organization, has conceived a new model for advancing public safety
efforts. Formally established in 2003 by
men serving life sentences in Pennsylvania, PSI members engage in a variety of
activities designed to significantly reduce crime and violence within prison
and free world communities. Our mission
is to end what we have theoretically identified as a pervasive “Culture of
Street Crime” (COSC) that perpetuates urban crime and violence from generation
to generation.
PSI
operated on the premise that ending the street crime culture can be achieved by
fostering a radical change in the thinking of its members, a cognitive
transformation through positive peer intervention. Our commitment to ending the culture of
street crime is essentially a self-liberating freedom movement. We endeavor to liberate members of the
culture from the self- and community-destructive beliefs, values, and behaviors
that inevitably lead to long-term incarceration, crippling injuries, or
death. Our experience from working with
fellow prisoners has produced evidence that self-transformed members of the
street crime culture are able to foster radical changes in the thinking of
others immersed in the culture of street crime.
Our crime reduction strategy of fostering cognitive transformation
through positive peer intervention is a much more practical and economically
sustainable public safety strategy than mass incarceration. Over the past 17 years, PSI has functioned as
a catalyst that placed hundreds of prisoners on the path of self-transformation
via a process involving intense dialogical engagement.
Initiating
a cognitive transformation of members of the street crime culture on a
nationwide scale, however, will require a “Collective Transformation” of
society at large. Collective
Transformation can only occur if there is a societal embracement of what
renowned criminologist Shadd Maruna and others in academia call “Redemptive
Truth,” the observation that “nearly all offenders eventually grow out of
crime”. (Shadd, Maruna, et al., “The
Prisoner’s Beatitude,” Relational Justice, Issue 14, May 2001). PSI’s “Positive Peer Intervention” model has
evidenced the ability of transformed incarcerated and ex-offenders to
accelerate the aging out process via the promotion of intervention strategies
that can foster a sense of generativity in offenders of all age groups. Currently, the test of our PSI
initiatives can best be demonstrated, internally and externally, in all of its
collective transformative aspects through Project Pipeline To Prison
Youth/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men as our model for the nation.
______________________
Mr. Paul Perry is President of LIFERS, Inc. (https://www.lifersincpa.org) and a Contributing Editor to IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD(R).
No comments:
Post a Comment