2023 in Review!

It was our second year. It was eye-opening.
​You didn't hear much from PrisonCare in 2023.
(Hope we didn’t make you worry!)
This 2023 year-end report will catch you up on all that has happened.
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The first half of 2023 was filled with excitement!

Community Director Kym Smythe and I flew to Colorado for a concert inside the prison facility where J (Co-Founder) and Dylan (Inside Community Director) participated in the My Song for Life certificate class. It was good in so many ways! If you haven’t heard all about it, there are two episodes of The PrisonCare Podcast devoted to it (Ep. 31 & 32).

(From the programs they had for us at the MSfL concert. That's Dylan and J in the middle of the picture, and J's friend Omar - now paroled!! - collaborating with J on the bottom.)

The first quarter of 2023 went on to include:

• creation and distribution of Mental Wellness Resources to incarcerated people who requested them on “Improving Sleep” and “Improving Communication”
• set up of Paypal, Venmo and CashApp for receiving charitable donations
• a graduation party thrown by one of our compassion teams in celebration of a resident penpal (recently paroled!!) who completed his college degree while serving his sentence
• presentation of a workshop at ACJS Conference in Washington, DC
• Co-Founder J Bloom’s release of his original song, “The Fool,” as a free download
• the filming of “Unsustainable Prisons” and five free instructional videos for YouTube

As we rocked the next three months of the year, PrisonCare:

• participated in a book discussion group with Desert Waters Correctional Outreach (Building Bridges with Corrections Staff)
• met with Anthony Gangi of Tier Talk, and Stephanie Rawlings (former Staff Wellness Administrator for IL Dept. of Corrections) to explore ways of connecting with correctional officers in supportive ways
• created and distributed Mental Wellness “Fundamentals” and “Finding Healing Through Writing”
• curated a book list of titles that we might recommend (and potentially gift via Amazon) to residents who are seriously working on their own rehabilitation
• curated and gifted resources for a domestic violence recovery group being facilitated by a resident with no access to curriculum
• surveyed professional life coaches for ideas about connecting residents with coaching by phone
• released J. Bloom’s original song, “Be Honest,” as a free download
• participated in an overdose awareness event in DE and met some returning citizens with powerful stories

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.
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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.

J's new prison neighborhood is surrounded by mountains. Beautiful! But hard to visit during the six snowy months of the year, so our visitation schedule has to adapt.

I used some of the quieter time to enroll in an online course on effective management of non-profit organizations, and to carefully read every policy on the Colorado DOC website in order to better understand the system’s challenges…only to discover that recording interviews over the phone for the podcast was a violation. (It’s weird how NOT clear that is to anyone who doesn’t go searching the policies database on the DOC website, btw.)

So we took down all episodes of interviews on our podcast platforms in order to comply with policy, because we have to live what we preach. Administrators matter, and they have decided it is best not to allow incarcerated people an audible voice outside the walls of the facility.
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Personally, I don’t agree with them. I don’t like it. But I don’t get to simply choose my own way if I want to show respect for them and the hard job they do, appreciating the nuance in the decisions they make each day.

That change led us to reimagine what The PrisonCare Podcast should be in a larger sense, if it couldn’t have interviews from the inside as a core element.

I visited J at his new prison home for the first time in September, and again in early November, and we shared ideas for the next steps for PrisonCare. Kym and I communicated with Dylan to get his ideas and input. And we are looking forward to some new things in 2024.
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The final event of 2023 was our first ever Caring Art Exhibit hosted by our flagship team in DE. For three Sundays leading up to the New Year, the church that formed a PrisonCare Compassion Team in 2021 set up a display of original visual art created by incarcerated friends, and asked visitors to offer comments and feedback to the artists. They took photos of the people enjoying the artwork, and copies of those photos, along with the comment sheets for each piece, are now on their way to the artists, so they can know that their work was exhibited and enjoyed by people on the outside. The creativity of these incarcerated artists impacted others, and the DE team facilitated that interaction.

So here we are, beginning our third year at PrisonCare, Inc.
What have we learned? How is that wisdom shaping our next steps?
To be frank, we’ve learned that the original PrisonCare model is probably unworkable.

The US vs. THEM culture in the prison system is SO firmly in place that it is almost impossible for a compassion team to “adopt a prison” as we originally envisioned.

We have yet to find any way to offer meaningful support to staff. Any effort is suspect. This segment of our society (correctional officers, case managers, prison health workers, administrators) has had to become deeply suspicious in order to survive. We ask how we can support them, and they take two steps back and say, “Mm-hmm…why?”

We spent significant time examining our vision as a nonpartisan prison reform organization — seeking to support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYONE on the inside matters — wondering if it is fundamentally wrong-headed.

But we have come to the conclusion that the vision is NOT wrong.

This vision cannot be pursued in the original way we thought it could, but it is, in reality, the ONLY way for prisons to truly be reformed into something that can be effective for society.
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As long as we continue to care about only one group in the prison neighborhood - either the staff OR the incarcerated people - we will fail to dig deep enough to remove the toxicity rooted there. The humanity of every person inside the walls is undeniable, and this shared humanity must drive reform.

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.

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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.
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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.

We will reinvent The PrisonCare Podcast as the details for a new approach come together in the coming weeks. We know the podcast platform is a really effective one for connecting with other people concerned about prison reform, and we know that our fans have been asking when new episodes will be available.

And we will continue to equip individuals and groups who want to  begin connecting as Pen Pal Encouragers, hosts for Art Exchanges or Caring Art exhibits, or making any other effort to support positive prison culture from the outside.

2023 was instructive.
It was hard.
It was informative.
We are grateful to have come this far.
We have important work to do in the coming year.
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Will you continue to journey with us in 2024?
Thanks for caring, friends.

With unending hope,
Sabrina
Sabrina Justison, Founder and Executive Director
PrisonCare, Inc.