Category: Blog Post

Our Orange Tree

We started serving at The Living Room in July of 2020, during the peak times of the pandemic when we were just starting to realize it wasn’t going to end any time soon. The Living Room is a shelter offering stability and support for women in transition from homelessness. We put our dream of opening […]

Rehumanization: Correctional Officer Story by Brian Dawe

I started as a state correctional officer at MCI Norfolk medium-security prison in Massachusetts in May of 1982 and left the department in 1998. In 1988, I helped co-found the Massachusetts Correctional Officers Federated Union, and served on the executive board for nine years. During my tenure, I started connecting with the officers around the […]

Rehumanization: Correctional Officer Story by Andy Potter

I began my career as a Correctional Officer in the late 1980s working at the Michigan Training Unit. I also worked at a maximum-security facility called Oaks Correctional Facility and then I transferred back to the training unit. Currently, I serve as the executive director for the Michigan Corrections Organization. I’m also the founder of […]

Rehumanization: Correctional Officer Story by Jerome

I started my Correctional career at the federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, where I worked from 1994 to 1997. From there, I went to the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is now known as Immigration Customs Enforcement, as a detention officer. I worked there from 1997 to 2000. Next I went […]

BlackBox: Matt Watches MLK/FBI

The film covers a side of MLK’s life that I hadn’t often heard or been taught about. The worn exhausted look on his face in some scenes of this documentary weren’t images I was familiar with. And the look not from a source I’d suspect.

Rehumanization: Correctional Officer Story by Luis Soto

I started working as a Correctional Officer in 1991 when I was twenty years old. I was struggling to pay for college during my first year at Montclair State University, and I saw a posting for the officers’ entrance exam being given at the Northern State Prison in Newark, New Jersey. I took the exam, […]

Rehumanization: Correctional Officer Story by Kyle Julian Diaz

I worked for two years at the Arizona Prison complex in Tucson. During my time there I worked at every custody level including level five, where half the inmates were from the general population and half were seriously mentally ill. I’d been in the Marine Corps before moving to Tucson, and I found that, being […]