The Journey Continues

It has been a pleasure and a wonderful experience sharing a class with you all. Professors Stein and Reitz, Robert, Ruby, Roberto, Dani, Popy, Gary, Christine, Cynthia, and Simon: Thank you for making this experience a memorable one.

As we all seen from our role playing at our hypothetical parole board hearing, an individual seeking reentry will undoubtedly face numerous obstacles on his/her journey. Whether it is the other parent, seeking employment or the psychological battle that may take place in the mind of the ex-offender. In the end, the board ruled that the conditions of the prisoner's release were to participate in parenting, anger management and job skills classes. Let's take a moment and consider our various individual perspectives we were given. Let's talk about how these classes would OR would not help the ex-offender deal with these perspectives (or points of views).

Got Gangster?

Happy Mothers Day to Professor Stein, Professor Reitz and Ruby!

First off, thank you everyone for participating in my gangster class! All of you were given a 'personality' to be and all of the 'personalities' were actual people.  Towards the end of class, we all went back and forth on re-entry to society ideas for former gang members. I didn't get to hear from entirely everyone before we ran out of time.
Keep in mind on the person you were given to be during class, what are some ways to rehabilitate them? Also, every person on the index card was under 21 and had already had that lifestyle and trauma, what are some of the factors that are harmful to youth? America has the highest expulsion rate in the world.  If you had to convince a school board to lower their standards for not expelling kids so easily, what would you say to them?

Fear of a ______ Planet

There were so many thought-provoking (not to say tear-provoking) things said this morning at Job Path.  We could, after praising Ruby of course, talk about issues of equity.  In our affirmative action and DV conversations we've been talking about guaranteeing equity even where there is difference (in citizenship status, sexual orientation, skin color). Fredda Rosen and Rachel Pollock both made the point that there is social justice in ensuring that everyone has the same chance to have the same kind of home life.  We could talk about Rachel's wise words that we shouldn't see law school (or whatever you are working toward right now) as a goal, but as a process for the more important goal of  learning about ourselves.  We could talk about patience and the extraordinary benefits of having long-term goals and the grace to work hard over a long period of time to achieve them.  In our instant-gratification, noisy world, the patient and quiet space of Job Path was enormously moving to me.

We could talk about all these things, but what I'd like to ask you to think about is fear.  As I thought about what the Job Path professionals said, and my own reactions over the years to people with developmental disability (even in my own family), I kept thinking about fear and what a potent force for evil it is.  Whether it is fear of someone who looks or sounds different, whether they are HIV+, whether because they seem "off" or because they are wearing a hoodie or whether you go to a home on a DV call and instead of a tough guy and a shrinking woman you find two buffed men, fear takes over and makes decisions for you.  It's like Orwell says about vague language, if you don't work hard to say what you mean, vague language takes over and begins to think your thoughts for you.  If you don't work hard to conquer your fears (and we all have them, it's very basic), they begin to think your thoughts for you.  We only have to look at electoral politics post 9/11 to get a very graphic illustration of this.

What role does fear play in your agency?  What fears do you/we/society have about your client population?  What fears do they have that might have shaped their early life choices or shape their choices right now?  Is fear a topic you talk about at your agency?  And how would we talk about it?  Is this just an issue of consciousness-raising, where we each have to recognize that our fears are based in our own ignorance/limited perspectives?  That seems kind of unsatisfying to me, given what a source of discrimination and bad choices fear is.