Fairfield County Business Journal: Progressive Prison Ministries Head Jeff Grant Takes on Leadership of Family ReEntry, by Kevin Zimmerman - Reporter

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Fairfield County Business Journal:

Progressive Prison Ministries Head Jeff Grant 

 Takes on Leadership of Family ReEntry

By Kevin Zimmerman - Reporter

 Reprinted from Westfaironline.com

October 6, 2016

 

Support and counseling for white-collar criminals re-entering the general population is a growing business for Jeff Grant. Founder of Greenwich-based nonprofit Progressive Prison Ministries, Grant was recently named interim executive director of Family ReEntry, a nonprofit with offices in Norwalk, Bridgeport and New Haven.

Founded in 1984 as a re-entry support group for men at the Isaiah House in Bridgeport and with a budget of over $4.5 million, Family ReEntry is principally involved with helping people convicted of street crimes and their families re-enter society. The organization has some 15 intervention, re-entry, and family and children programs. Services are provided in Bridgeport, Derby, Norwalk, Stamford, New Haven and Norwich and in three prisons in Cheshire and Niantic.

Grant’s elevation — he’s served on Family ReEntry’s board of directors since 2009 — marks the first time that a formerly incarcerated white-collar criminal has served as the head of a major re-entry agency.

“It’s a tremendous step, and a bold decision on the board’s part,” Grant said. “This is a transformative period for Family ReEntry. I owe them my fresh start, so of course I said yes when they offered me the position.”

He is replacing Steve Lanza, who as the group’s executive director for the past 15 years “was the heart and soul of Family ReEntry,” Grant said. “He had some family issues he had to attend to and is starting a consulting practice for nonprofits in general and criminal justice nonprofits in particular.”

Family ReEntry is also in the midst of weaning itself from state support, as much of that was reduced as part of the recent budget cuts, which Grant termed “adverse and dramatic.”

“We’ll miss having that overabundance of state contracts,” Grant said, “but now we can be more creative in fulfilling our mission.” The nonprofit’s private fund raising department is already finding donors in that area, he said. “The miracle is that we’ve been able to use our experience and learning from the inner-city and white-collar communities to make each of them stronger and more empathetic, which is part of our mission of advocating for public awareness of the issues surrounding criminal justice and re-entry.”

In 2006, Grant, a former corporate lawyer with an office in Mamaroneck, N.Y., served 14 months in a low-security prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. He was charged with falsely claiming in a loan application to the U.S. Small Business Administration to have had an office on Wall Street that was impacted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

After his release, Grant volunteered with several nonprofits that helped rehabilitate former convicts as they re-entered society. After attending a 2009 Family ReEntry benefit in Greenwich, he and his wife Lynn Springer joined the group and began working to transform a blighted block across from Bridgeport’s First Baptist Church that had been home to drug addicts and prostitutes into a community park and garden.

In 2012, he graduated from the Columbia University-affiliated Union Theological Seminary, and holds a Juris Doctor and Master of Divinity degree. “It was a big deal that they accepted someone who’d been convicted of a white-collar crime,” he said. Now a [Rev. Deacon at St. Joseph Mission Church in Cliffside Park, NJ], Grant and his wife created Progressive Prison Ministries in 2013.

Both Progressive Prison Ministries and Family ReEntry have benefited from “individuals and families, who have been very open and receptive to our missions,” he said. “People who live in the affluent suburbs in particular have wanted to step up as a way of recognizing their civic responsibility and, frankly, for the tax savings” their donations can realize. “We have a message that resonates around the state — to make sure these people don’t recidivate.”

The cost benefits to society could be significant: according to the FBI, white-collar crime is estimated to cost the U. S. more than $300 billion annually.

Grant said he’s uncertain how much time he’ll be able to devote to Progressive Prison Ministries with his new responsibilities at Family ReEntry, though he pointed out that the former is still moving ahead with a number of ambitious projects.

One of those is an ongoing online support group for white-collar and nonviolent criminals, the first in the country, which began six months ago. Held on Tuesday evenings, the confidential videoconference sessions have had 25 participants from nine states logging in, with most from Fairfield County.

Since January 2015, Progressive Prison Ministries has served and individuals and families in 25 states, with consultations taking place before, during and upon re-entry from prison in person or by phone, email, Skype, FaceTime, GoToMeeting or, if in a federal prison, via CorrLinks.

On Oct. 15, Family ReEntry is serving as Connecticut sponsor of “Emerging Leaders Training,” a daylong event at the University of New Haven presented by New York City-based nonprofit JustLeadershipUSA, which is dedicated to cutting the U.S. correctional population in half by 2030 while also reducing crime.

Playing With Fire: An Open Letter from Family ReEntry On Connecticut's Plan to Cut Funding For Criminal Justice & Public Safety

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for the Days Ahead
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 On Friday, May 6, at 10 am, a Press
 Conference has been scheduled at
 Family ReEntry’s office
 at 75 Washington Ave., Bridgeport.
 you are invited to attend!

 

Playing With Fire:

An Open Letter from Family ReEntry

On Connecticut's Plan to Cut Funding 

For Criminal Justice & Public Safety

By Steve Lanza & Ronda Muir

_____________

We at prisonist.org urge you to read this 

letter carefully and forward it to your 

Connecticut state legislators as soon as possible.

Time is of the essence. - Jeff  

_____________

"A hero is one who does the best of things 

in the worst of times, seizing every 

opportunity" - Joseph Campbell 

The governor and legislature are taking steps that drastically reduce Connecticut’s public safety and jeopardize our most vulnerable citizens. Disproportionately high cuts implemented last week by the Connecticut Department of Correction, in anticipation of the state budget being voted on this week by the legislature, have devastated the community justice providers across the state.

Family ReEntry is a high-impact nonprofit agency with integrated services for reentering citizens, those suffering from mental health and substance abuse, perpetrators of family/domestic violence, and at-risk youth and families. These programs help halt the tragic inter-generational cycle of violence and abuse and are proven to reduce recidivism, victimization, wasted lives, state and local costs, and a number of collaterally negative consequences, as well as create a positive climate for business growth Connecticut.

Family ReEntry was notified last week of the closing of 67% of its DOC community programs, including two large mental health and substance abuse treatment programs, which are already over-utilized and are projected to treat 1,600 by June 30, when the contracts are being terminated. We work with other community justice providers across the state essential to providing humane and effective care, and many of their programs were also eliminated this past week.

Without these services, crime will increase, incarceration will increase, associated costs will increase, unemployment will increase, and communities, families and individuals will suffer. This precipitate move will also negatively impact nonprofits throughout the state, resulting in layoffs of valuable workers, which will drive up the Connecticut’s unemployment costs and decrease income and sales tax revenue.
 
The regard in which Connecticut is held when it comes to the national conversation about criminal justice reform is being quickly sullied. While the fiscal year 2017 deficit is estimated at roughly 6%, these programs statewide, where even a small reduction will have a devastating and lasting ripple effect, are being disproportionately burdened by these cuts. 

Needed structural and policy changes to improve our state criminal justice system and produce associated benefits and savings will be much less likely from such a decimated base. In the long-term, these cuts will increase costs and leave a legacy of human and social destruction, as has happened in other states that have attempted to balance their budget on the backs of their most vulnerable.

Connecticut should create a long-term budget plan that funds human services and community justice at appropriate levels to maintain quality of care. Other investment strategies in the nonprofit sector, such as Social Impact Bonds and similar instruments, should be considered and savings in less critical public safety areas explored. In the meantime, the community justice sector and its vulnerable beneficiaries should not be unfairly sacrificed to the current budget.

Now is when the people of Connecticut need heroes!

Please implore your legislators to prevent these devastating budget cuts in the community justice sector and protect public safety. 

Yours,


Steve Lanza, Executive Director, Family ReEntry
Board Member, International Community Corrections Association, Member, CT Domestic Violence Offender Program Standards Advisory Council, Faculty, University of Connecticut, Department of Human Development & Family Studies

Ronda Muir, Esq., Chair, Board of Directors, Family ReEntry

______________

Comments from Social Media: 

Adam Dolan Malloy pushes $3000 credits for people who buy electric cars [i.e. toys for the wealthy], but he's fine with gutting programs like this. Incomprehensible. 

JustLeadershipUSA: A New Paradigm, by William Eric Waters - Guest Blogger

Progressive Prison Project

Innocent Spouse & Children Project

Greenwich I Weston I Bridgeport

Connecticut

JustLeadershipUSA: 

A New Paradigm

by William Eric Waters - Guest Blogger 

Glenn Martin, CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, will be a panelist at Family ReEntry Presents: An Evening With Danny Glover, May 6th at The Klein in Bridgeport. Danny will be interviewed by WNPR's Colin McEnroe.  Other Panelists & Presenters include Charles Grodin, Mayor Bill Finch, Steve Lanza, Hon. Erika Tindill, Fred Hodges & Joe Gaudett.  I am honored to serve as the event's Emcee.  Link for tickets. - Jeff

__________

With the recent launch of JustLeadershipUSA, Glenn Martin, President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA, is looking to elevate the voice of Americans impacted by crime and incarceration, especially people who have been imprisoned, by positioning them as “informed, empowered reform partners.” This will be done through leadership development, policy advocacy and reframing. JustLeadershipUSA has as its goal cutting the U.S. prison population in half by 2030. 

At 2.2 million people confined, the U.S. prison population has increased exponentially since the late 1960s, beginning with Richard Nixon’s candidacy and declaration of war, that is, the “war on crime,” in 1968, which specifically targeted Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which Nixon declared “lawless.” Since then, various laws and policies, on the Federal and state level, have contributed to mass incarceration and the grossly disproportionate imprisonment of people of color, mostly men, in the United States: Rockefeller Drug Law in New York (1973), which was adopted in other states; mandatory minimum sentencing across the nation as well as the Federal criminal justice system (1984), with the Federal government providing monetary incentives, in the form of block grants, for states to adopt mandatory minimum sentencing, which almost always increases the length of time in prison (New York’s Governor, George Pataki, continuously mentioned how New York would not be eligible for these block grants to build more prisons or hire more police if the state did not adopt mandatory minimum sentencing, which it did in 1998 after the tragic killing of a young woman by an individual who had been on parole for a nonviolent crime); crack-cocaine laws, which created longer prison sentences for crack-cocaine convictions over cocaine convictions, which disproportionately impacted people of color; the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which made it easier, read quicker, to execute people sentenced to death; it also limited the right of habeas corpus, creating procedural hurdles that were too high to jump, not to mention the United States Supreme Court even ruling that a showing of “actual innocence” by an individual in prison could not overcome these procedural hurdles; tougher parole releasing policies as well as the increase in technical parole violations (returning people to prison for non-criminal violations of parole rules such as curfew violations or “fraternizing with known felons”); elimination of temporary release (including work release) programs; and three strikes laws requiring life sentences for those with three separate felony convictions, even relatively innocuous and nonviolent third felony convictions. 

Thirty years after Richard Nixon declared his war on crime, people incarcerated in the mid- and late ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s were being released from prison. This is the reality, as Jeremy Travis writes and thus entitles a journal article and a book: “But They All Come Back: Rethinking Prisoner Reentry” (2000), and But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (2005). At the other end of the mass incarceration tunnel were individuals coming back from prison. The numbers are staggering. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals were released from Federal and state prisons, and since then that number has remained pretty much the same. Thirty years prior to that, the number was less than 150,000 individuals.

When we look at the more than 630,000 individuals released from Federal and state prisons every year, this translates into, every day, about 1,700 individuals released from these prisons, exploding onto the American landscape and this Era of Reentry. At the same time, there was great interest and thus an explosion of journal and newspapers articles on this phenomenon as well as books such as Jennifer Gonnerman’s Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, which shows how a bit player, not a queenpin, got caught up in a drug sale and was given a life sentence under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Law, while the more culpable people involved in the drug world who set her up got a get-out-of-jail-free card. Additionally, there were the stories of the people themselves, those who had been imprisoned; they showed us compelling cases of the possibilities of transformation and what it looked like. They added something new, something different, to the reentry narrative, that is, through their stories, which they began to tell at conferences, at colleges, to journalism grad students, on radio shows and television. Some wrote about these experiences, mostly stories of their transformation. See Harvey Brown’s Freedom at Last: The Life of an Ex-Con, and Theo Harris’ Blessed and Highly Favored: Memoirs of a Multiple Felon. See also Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The most important thing was that these men and women were taking control of their stories, not just being subjects, but also being authors of their own stories. 

There was something familiar in their stories, in their narratives, if you will, something that tapped into the historical connection between slavery and imprisonment in the United States. As many should know by now, imprisonment of people of color replaced slavery. (And the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color began even before the end of slavery. Gustave de Tocqueville and Alexis de Beaumont, in their study, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, published in 1833, noted the disproportionate imprisonment of “Negroes” in the Southern States.) This is stated explicitly in the Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The big difference is that people who have been duly convicted of a crime aren’t given any moral agency – “They committed a crime!” This, some think, takes away from the fact that imprisonment is slavery under another name, and imperfectly Constitutional. 

These stories, these narratives, are similar to the slave narratives, eloquently given voice by Frederick Douglass. Making the transition from talking about slavery to talking about prison, more recently, we think of Malcolm X and his odyssey as documented by Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

These stories have been critical in including the voices of those imprisoned and those formerly incarcerated. However, they are mere testimonies, powerful, but individual stories that only touch the iceberg of the problems of mass incarceration. Imagine if Frederick Douglass confined his speeches to his experiences as a slave. We would not have got his talk about the importance of the franchise, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), which is an issue of importance today for those imprisoned and those formerly incarcerated, many of them having lost the right to vote for life in a number of states, mostly Southern, as a direct result of a felony conviction. And imagine if Malcolm X confined his speeches to his experiences as a prisoner. 

We would not have his famous speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), given more than 100 years after Douglass’ speech on the same topic. 

When Martin of JustLeadershipUSA talks about elevating the voice of Americans impacted by crime, he is talking about much more than the formerly incarcerated providing their testimony. He is talking about the people “closest to the problem” providing solutions to the problem. Indeed, many who have been on this reentry circuit for a number of years think of this “testimony-telling” and only testimony-telling as a “dog and pony” show. Needless to say, providing this testimony is important, more so for someone recently released as opposed to someone who has been out of prison for a number of years and has continued his or her formal education and worked in various capacities in the for-profit and the not-for-profit world, oftentimes in leadership positions. 

JustLeadershipUSA is positioning itself to go beyond the dog and pony show. It is, however, only the most recent organization looking to elevate the voice of formerly incarcerated people, but unique in that its goal is to reduce the U.S. prison population in half by 2030. Before JustLeadershipUSA, in New York, there was the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions. In California, there was All of Us or None. 

The mission of the Center For NuLeadership on Urban Solutions is “to influence socio- economic, criminal and juvenile justice policy by providing research, advocacy and leadership training to formerly and currently incarcerated people, their families, communities, allies and criminal justice professionals....” Similar to JustLeadershipUSA, the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions promotes “active participation in criminal and social justice policy decisions, discussions and deliberation by the people whose lives are most directly affected and who have a legitimate stake in the outcome.” 

All of Us Or None “is a grassroots civil rights organization fighting for the rights of formerly- and currently-incarcerated people and our families. We are fighting against the discrimination that people face every day because of arrest or conviction history. The goal of All of Us or None is to strengthen the voices of people most affected by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. Through our grassroots organizing, we will build a powerful political movement to win full restoration of our human and civil rights.” 

There are other organizations across the country, founded by formerly incarcerated individuals and their families, most notably Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc., based in New York, which holds an annual Awards Ceremony honoring formerly incarcerated people for their work in the world and in their communities. The Awards are named after formerly incarcerated people. Also worth noting is Exodus Transitional Community, Inc., a faith-based reentry organization in East Harlem founded by Julio Medina, which has garnered national attention for its work in the field of reentry. 

Many of the above organizations were formed because the founders wanted to create new possibilities for themselves and others similarly situated. Additionally, working at established organizations, reentry organizations included, these individuals encountered the green wall, the glass ceiling for formerly incarcerated people. Most of these organizations were not truly cultivating the leadership of its formerly incarcerated employees. 

Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), has mainstream America and academia talking about the criminal justice system in ways we have not previously, stating that incarceration is being used as a"system of racial control."

Martin and JustLeadershipUSA, and the other organizations mentioned above, as well as those not mentioned, are creating a new paradigm to not only elevate the voice of formerly incarcerated people, but also to develop the leadership of this group. With this, we are moving into another stage of this Era of Reentry. Stay tuned. 

We have become friends with Eric Waters from his regular attendance at the Bridgeport Reentry Roundtable. 

William Eric Waters has more than 25 years experience in the criminal justice system. He is the author of three books of poetry and one novel. He has a master's degree from New York Theological Seminary and bachelor's degrees from the University of Albany and SUNY New Paltz. Check out his blog at www.ezwaters.wordpress.com.

___________

Rev. Jeff Grant, JD, M Div, Minister/Director
jgrant@prisonist.org
jg3074@columbia.edu

(o) +1203.769.1096
(m) +1203.339.5887

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Lynn Springer, Advocate, Innocent Spouses & Children
lspringer@prisonist.org
(m) +1203.536.5508

George Bresnan, Advocate, Ex-Pats
gbresnan@prisonist.org
Jim Gabal, Development
jgabal@prisonist.org
(203) 858-2865

Babz Rawls Ivy, Media Contact
mediababz@gmail.com
(203) 645-9278

__________

Donations

We are grateful for donations from individuals, religious groups, charities, foundations and the like. Donations can be made by credit card/PayPal or by sending your check payable to: “Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc.” P.O. Box 1232, Weston, Connecticut 06883. Progressive Prison Project/Innocent Spouse & Children Project are missions of Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc. We are a CT Religious Corp. with 501c3 status - all donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Thank you for your support and generosity.

If transformation and redemption matter to you, a friend or a family member with a white-collar or nonviolent incarceration issue, please contact us and we will promptly send you an information package by mail, email or via Dropbox. The darkest days of a person's life can be a time of renewal and hope.