After Incarceration

OUR MISSION

After Incarceration is a cosmopolitan community-based organization. We claim a stake in all communities experiencing cycles of poverty and violence. We organize to prevent community violence, to interrupt institutional violence, to dismantle systemic violence. Our mission is to hold space for people to process the trauma of incarceration, to un-compartmentalize their consciousness and debrief whatever dehumanization they internalized to survive prison. We gather to remember what made us who we are, and to release ourselves from what no longer serves our sanity. We work to cultivate networks of support and collaborate to center consent and prioritize respect. Our pilgrimage to peace involves a combination of restorative practices and the organizing steps of Kingian Nonviolence.

After Incarceration adopts nontraditional approaches to social justice. We learned—in prison—that there is no such thing as a “prison problem.” All problems in prison are transplanted there from the communities in which the prisoners are removed. The “community problems” are concentrated in correctional facilities. People who have lived their whole lives, out of necessity, circumventing the systems that govern the United States, are warehoused. The prisons become big Petri dishes. The system offer very little protection from cross-contamination; thus, we witness more pathogenic mutations than healthy adaptations. The criminogenic impact of mass incarceration must have been understood by its architects—how we would learn to circumvent that part of the system is something they weren’t able to fathom.