INSIDE CIRCLE

At the broadest level, we want to shift this country from a culture of mass incarceration to one of mass rehabilitation. A shift of this magnitude requires focus on the unaddressed mental health challenges that drive violent, anti-social behavior in ways that are effective, culturally sensitive, and scalable. Our answer is to build a movement of formerly incarcerated peer-support facilitators skilled in our life changing work who know first-hand what rehabilitation looks and feels like - facilitators with the lived experience to inspire and support positive life change among their peers in the criminal justice system-involved community.

Our approach is to widely recruit, heal, train and deploy incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peer healing circle facilitators with the demographics and lived experience to match that of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, low-income, multi-racial, and at-risk/opportunity adults and youth in institutional and community settings. This approach serves two ends simultaneously, it supports the facilitators-in-training on a positive life trajectory while meeting the needs of challenged populations. It's efficient, it’s powerful, and it works.

We have a wide network of skilled trainers, a detailed, powerful, and flexible curriculum as well as a large number of community and institutional partners.

This training model works. We’ve been employing it successfully within Folsom prison for over 20 years - well before this group of formerly incarcerated leaders officially formed what we call Inside Circle. Our recidivism rate is under 10% and our graduates don’t simply survive on the outside, they thrive - regularly acting as mentors and leaders within their communities. The current leadership structure of our organization underscores this point. Our more recent success bringing our work to at-risk and incarcerated youth, the formerly incarcerated, and adults on probation points to our ability to generate similar results outside an adult maximum security setting. Some highlights include:

_Formerly incarcerated program graduates run our organization. They demonstrate to their peers and the world that change is possible - that we can reduce mass incarceration if we address the root cause driving much criminal behavior at the appropriate scale with the appropriate people.

_We have developed a thriving healing circle community designed to support training of the formerly incarcerated outside of prison as well advance the advocacy project initiated in 2017 with the launch of the film about our work entitled, The Work.

_We have successfully replicated our success within California State Prison, Sacramento, in a youth facility and gained the partnership of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group. They are now using our approach as an integral component of their new model for reform.

What's next?

We will continue to offer our life saving work in prisons across California and the US and expand our capacity to reach, motivate and divert youth from a lifetime of incarceration.