And then came June 29, 2023.​

That was the day we heard that there had been a badly handled incident at J’s facility, and he was placed on suicide watch for twelve days. J was then transferred out of the prison he had been in since the beginning of his sentence in late 2018.

That was the day my Founder & Executive Director hat was replaced with my Mum hat for a spell. With the help of wise people, I realized that I could not speak with integrity about the reality of having a loved one in prison if I was not willing to fully LIVE that experience with all its twists and turns.
​
So I pressed pause on a lot of things at PrisonCare, Inc., including The PrisonCare Podcast, releasing an episode on 8/14/23, but recording nothing new through the end of the year. I figured that my choice to be authentic and to remain healthy would actually better serve incarcerated people and prison staff in the long run.

I took time to focus on being J’s support as he was eventually allowed to call me, then was transferred to an interim placement, and was finally placed in a new prison home run by the Dept. of Corrections, a change from the private prison where he had been living to that point.

We have also learned that there are an incredible number of organizations, some large, many small, doing truly beautiful work for various people groups impacted by incarceration. No one has precisely the nonpartisan vision that PrisonCare has, but they are doing amazing things and need greater involvement from volunteers and supporters everywhere.

So the wisdom we gleaned in 2023 is shaping our next steps into a goal of CONNECTION.

2024 will see PrisonCare recreate its website to become a hub, a resource center:

• where people who want to support correctional staff can learn about organizations doing that well, and
• where people who want to support incarcerated people in their efforts to rehabilitate themselves can get their hands on resources that will help them do that, connecting them to other organizations with whom they can link arms, and a new focus
• for people who want to support the families of people who are incarcerated.

​
Instead of trying to single-handedly reform the prison system with a nonpartisan vision, we will help caring people find pockets of others with similar concerns with whom they can collaborate.

And we will offer that help using nonpartisan language, casting vision for an end to US vs. THEM along the way.

Instead of trying to raise funds sufficient for us to create a vast library of free resources, we will curate excellent resources that already exist but are not always easy to find, and point caring people to them.
​
We will remain committed to raising awareness and educating compassionate people about the realities of the fundamentally broken prison system, calling on them to respond. I will continue to speak to any group that will invite me. We will continue to create video resources for awareness and education that will be free and easy to share via the internet.

Story behind the song:
In county jail, I was in isolation and had been for some time. But Cal, my most persistent halloo, finally came back after months of being absent.

He scolded the hell outta me. Up until his reappearance, I was constantly analyzing and finding faults in everyone else’s actions leading up to the crime while trying to ignore my own. That’s when Cal’s eyes dug into my soul and said, “But when you’re lying all alone, there is no one else to blame.”

He was right. And those words helped me understand that good intentions aren’t enough. Sometimes when bad things happen, we truly did mean well. But you can’t hide behind the victim role.

Reality is, even if we desired to do the right thing but were incapable of perceiving what it was, our actions still brought suffering.

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“Be Honest” on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QcezRX0EjmY

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“BE HONEST”
Words and Music by J. Bloom © 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Used with permission on The PrisonCare Podcast.


LYRICS:    

I couldn’t keep that promise, those words they fell apart
I just wanted to be honest, but I never had the heart

I said I’d keep you safe, I said I’d keep you warm
In the heat I’d be your shade, be your shelter in the storm
But this lion lost his mane when he ate from evil’s palm
Now these charcoal-colored veins are tearing out my arms

I couldn’t keep that promise, those words they fell apart
I just wanted to be honest, but I never had the heart
And you kept too many secrets, they terrorized the light
You said you would be honest, I guess you never had the mind

We spent out nights waiting for dawn, we gave each other every star
That country highway was our lawn, and we made our home out of that car

I dreamt I’d build a stage and there we’d always reign
Every night receive applause, counting roses every day
But there’s just this rusted cage, and the king and queen are slain
When you’re lying all alone, there’s no one else to blame

I just wanted to be honest
Oh, why couldn’t you be honest?
We could have saved our shallow hearts

When you can breathe, don’t look for me
That highway sleeps beneath the deep of yesterdays
Now I’m the one dancing in the sun
And those charcoal veins flow red today on a brand new stage

And now I know how to be honest and how to let go these captive stars
To myself I make this promise:
To speak my mind with a braver heart

The PrisonCare workshop session was well-attended, and people were enthusiastically engaged. We had an interactive Penpal Encourager exercise and a great brainstorming space to wrap things up. The full video of the presentation will be on our YouTube channel in the next few weeks, if you'd like to watch it. You can also check out this episode of The PrisonCare Podcast if you'd like to hear more about the conference. 

What Happened at the Conference, Season 1, Episode 44

Excited for more opportunities like this in the future...a chance to LEARN and to CAST VISION to others!

I have a dear friend who regularly encourages us to "live questionable lives." 
By that, he means that we should live our lives with such love in action that it makes people wonder why we live the way we do, and maybe ask us about it. 

The "questionable cooking" behavior that our incarcerated friends showed in sharing their ingredients, prepping, cooking, making signs, spreading the word so no one missed out, and passing along our team's love with every quesadilla led to a LOT of questions from people in both kinds of uniform. J said that he and Dylan got a lot of practice sharing the PrisonCare elevator speech by way of explanation!
​
Everyone on the inside matters.
Quesadillas can communicate love.
Sharing food brings people together. 
It's better when no one is left out. 
​

If you want to get technical, the FIRST PrisonCare Compassion Team was just me.

I always tell people that you can adopt a prison by yourself , and I have beta-tested that model for you! It really can begin with just one caring person.

J had begun to tell me about some of the people he was getting to know, and some of these people had been great sources of encouragement to him in the dark, early days of his sentence. I asked him if it would be okay if I wrote to a couple of them, doing my dorky mom-thing, thanking them for being nice to my kid. He said that was fine with him, so I did.

Just maybe 3 or 4 letters at first. 

And they wrote back.

And I wrote back.

And so forth. Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

I enjoy writing, and I enjoy people, so I was enjoying writing to people who enjoyed writing to me.

But I noticed that the tone of the letters was really special. These people sounded surprised by my encourager language. I routinely responded to things they told me about themselves with words like, "So cool that you know how to _____, and that you're willing to teach others how to do it. I respect the willingness to share your talents with other people," or "It sounds like you really enjoyed travel before you were incarcerated. I can imagine it's hard to have lost that." 

Some of them told me that they could tell I thought of them as an actual person. 

(Read that sentence above one more time, please.)

(The fact that it would feel unusual for someone to think of you as an "actual person" is tragic.) 

I shared about this with a couple of friends, and they agreed that this looked like an opening for me to do something good in the wake of something catastrophic in my own life. Writing to people in prison and choosing to be a cheerleader in their lives was a good fit for my personality and for my longing to build something beautiful after crawling through so much rubble. 

And then came COVID-19. The prison went on lockdown. For months and months and months they were on lockdown. They couldn't go to programs. They couldn't go to yard. But they could still receive letters. 

So I asked my church community if there was anyone who would like to come alongside me and write to these guys I had begun to get to know, alleviating the boredom and depression the long period of lockdown was causing. I got a few takers.

The next piece of things was where the idea for PrisonCare was actually born: my friends from church, willing hearts in their bodies, and pen and paper at their disposal, asked THE question:
WHAT DO I SAY?????

I realized that because my initial point of connection had been my kid, I started writing to friends of J's, so it had made those awkward first letters much easier for me to write. I did a little research on best practices (and asked my incarcerated friends what they liked and didn't like in a first letter), and got to work on a "first letter template" that would help my friends from church break the ice. 



With a little bit of broader connection now in place, we asked our pen-pals on the inside for suggestions of other people who might like to get a letter, and they created introductions with new friends. In a very weird way, COVID and lockdown was a gift to PrisonCare, because it took things out of my personal, solo sphere and moved them into a collaborative effort.




​And then came the next piece of the PrisonCare vision: the determination to view our prison as a neighborhood, and to care about the CO's and other staff there, as well as the incarcerated residents. 

I had become hungry for an education about life inside prisons, and I was doing lots of research about Correctional Officers. I wanted to understand these people who lived in close proximity to my kid, and who had charge of his custody, care, and control.

One day, I saw a profile picture frame on a CO's Facebook that slammed me:

Around the CO's picture was a frame that said, "I can't stay home to save lives. I'm a corrections officer."

I can't effectively put into words what that moment did in my head and heart, but it was something profound. I began talking to our little team of pen-pals about the tremendously challenging lifestyle a CO leads, and we learned so much that we had never known before. There was so much that we felt we should have known about these essential workers, and we realized that we had never given prison staff a moment's thought before now. 

We began brainstorming ways we might be able to show support and appreciation for staff in the prison. We're still trying to figure that part out, to be perfectly honest; this has been the most difficult part of the puzzle to work.

​Connecting with staff is suspect (for good reason...I get it), and because PrisonCare is committed to caring for EVERYONE on the inside of a facility, the fear of inmates manipulating staff is always there. The Us vs. Them world of prisons makes a group like PrisonCare sound like an oxymoron.

People have to be on one side or the other, right? You can't be supporting people in both kinds of uniforms.

But our vision not ridiculous. It's challenging, but it's not impossible to care for everyone inside a prison neighborhood, and as we connect on the national level with more and more professional organizations for corrections officers, staff, and administrators, we are learning more about this delicate, nuanced relationship, and how it might work well in the future.

In the meantime, we continue to care for staff BY caring for residents!

The more connected residents are, the healthier they are. The more they are encouraged to work toward personal goals they have set for themselves, the more hopeful they are. The more they are supported in learning to communicate effectively, to do solo work in trauma recovery even when no counseling is available, to grow in emotional regulation skills...all of this resident growth means the neighborhood's environment will become that much less toxic.

A less toxic environment means a safer workplace for COs and caseworkers, and safer is better. So while I continue to look for opportunities to do more in direct support of staff, we'll keep supporting them from inside the cells. 

And that's the story of the FIRST PrisonCare Compassion Team!

Do you have an origin story to share? How did YOU begin caring for a prison neighborhood?

This was not something I dreamed of doing when I was a kid (or an adult).

In fact, the events that led me to begin PrisonCare, Inc. were more of a nightmare than anything.

But somehow in the creation of this non-profit organization, I have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

Isn't that remarkable?

In my 50's, after decades of doing lots of things I found challenging and rewarding, I finally feel as if I know what I want to be when I grow up, and it's this. The Executive Director of PrisonCare, Inc.

My life was reinvented by the tragic and utterly unexpected events that led my son, J, into a psychotic delusion, an episode that took an innocent person's life before it was finally broken. The specifics are unique to our story (you can read about it if you like on my personal website, http://sabrinajustison.com) but the core of the story is not. 

      People's lives go off the rails.
     Horrible acts are committed.
     People are sentenced to prison.
     Families grieve,
       and rage,
       and struggle,
       and question,
       and curl up in shame.
     Meanwhile, life goes on as normal for much of the world.

When J's life went off the rails, when he committed a horrible act, when he was sentenced to prison,
       I grieved.
      I raged.
      I struggled.
      I questioned.
      I curled up in shame.

And then I realized that the story wasn't over yet. God has made a habit of reminding me throughout the years that CIRCUMSTANCES do not get the last word in a person's life. My response to all the tragedy was mine alone to decide. So I decided to find some way to build something beautiful out of the ashes of psychosis and death and fear and rage and shame and prison. And here you have it!

You see, the same truth about my life (that CIRCUMSTANCES do not get the last word) is true for other people, too -- including people who are in prison, and the people who work in those same prisons 'round the clock.
 
J has this thing he likes to say:
"Circumstances being what they are, and me being who I want to be..."

The circumstances surrounding people who are serving prison sentences are pretty grim. But each incarcerated person still gets to choose how to RESPOND to those circumstances, moment to moment.

The circumstances surrounding people who work in the corrections industry can be pretty grim, especially considering how little most of us outside their field understand about their jobs. But each corrections professional still gets to choose how to RESPOND to those circumstances, moment to moment.

J is living as the person he wants to be, and he is doing it with a heart that is grateful for the support he gets from people on the outside who love him. I want to see that same kind of support become available to people behind the razor wire, people who don't have it, no matter what kind of uniform they wear.

So does J.

So here we are, co-founding PrisonCare.

​Maybe the work we do here will help others figure out what they want to be when they grow up!

Maybe prison residents will find the strength to refuse to be defined by the worst moment in their lives, and instead lean into their interests, abilities, and relationships.

Maybe prison professionals will find the strength to do a difficult job well, knowing that they are valued and respected.

Maybe both groups will find NEW WAYS to live side by side in their prison neighborhood, building a healthy rapport, fostering an atmosphere of rehabilitation, and exploring possibilities for restitution in the wake of crime. 
​

​Circumstances being what they are,
and me being who I want to be, 
​I'd like to try to support something like that. ​