Incarceration
In a meeting Monday night, community leaders from North Oakland met to discuss a pilot program that will tackle sentencing for young offenders. Alternative sentencing will divert offenders from the court system and a criminal record, and instead focus on mediated discussion between victims and offenders.
California residents will vote on Proposition 47 in a week. The act would downgrade specific felonies to misdemeanors.
A photography and storytelling project shares the lives, now turned around, of 20 formerly incarcerated residents of Alameda County.
Oakland’s black youth are arrested in school at a rate that is more than double their proportion of the school population, a community nonprofit said.
Assembly Bill 999, sponsored by Democrat Rob Bonta of Oakland, would have required the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop a five-year plan to offer condoms in all California prisons.
“My last trip in the penitentiary, I had to make a decision on what I wanted to do with my life,” said Reggie Bailey, sitting in the swiveling barber chair in his small shop in the heart of downtown Oakland. “I just decided to go to barber college.”
On Saturday, over 20 people filed into the Ella Baker Center, just off Broadway in downtown Oakland, for a conference that gave former inmates, parents and family members of incarcerated young people a chance to tell their stories to each other.
Detention Dialogues is the first immigration detention visitation program in California. Each week one of 40 trained volunteers visits detainees, mostly from Central and Latin America. Their hope is to bridge the gap of isolation by visiting detainees on a regular basis and supporting them throughout their detention by contacting family members on their behalf, connecting them to attorneys and forging a bond with the outside American world.
With over 65 million Americans reported to have an arrest or conviction on their record, it seems nearly impossible for an employer to hire a person that does not have a criminal history. But Soul’s Restaurant in East Oakland has one goal: to provide jobs to those men and women struggling to transition back into non-institutionalized society.