Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), an award-winning non-profit, as well as staff from GEO Care, delivered a timely workshop at the International Community Corrections Association’s annual conference in Seattle, Washington, on November 1, 2017.
The workshop focused on parolee reentry, specifically focusing on how to successfully reintegrate long-term offenders into local communities.
Titled “From Lifer to Community Member: Making it Work,” the well-attended panel featured Jon Stern, Chief Deputy Regional Administrator for the CDCR’s Division of Adult Parole Operations Southern Region, Dwayne Cooks, Project Director for Civic Pit Stop, and Maria Richard, Facility Director of GEO Care Parolee Services Center in San Francisco, California.
GEO Care’s National Director of Business Development Kathy Prizmich Kernan moderated the panel. The panel discussed how states, with California leading the way, are releasing more long-term offenders today, and how it takes unique programming to help prevent recidivism.
The workshop focused also on an innovative public-private partnership in San Francisco, California, in which the state, GEO Care, and the non-profit Pit Stop is transforming neighborhoods while also providing employment for long-term offenders who are bridging back to the workforce.
For many of these program participants, the experience has been life-altering. Pit Stop hires many of the GEO Care participants to serve as attendants at unique public restrooms, thereby helping to reclaim many neighborhoods from criminal activity. City and state politicians as well as the public works department have praised the program.
“What we are doing is unique, and it is working,” said Maria Richard, who has worked at the GEO Care's Taylor Street Center since 2000.
Located in the heart of San Francisco, California, this center delivers residential and non-residential programming for Federal Bureau of Prisons, Federal Pretrial and CDCR clients. The key to the success of these individuals, according to Dwayne Cooks, the Director of the non-profit offering the jobs to participants, is the treatment and training they receive at the GEO Care Center. Dwayne Cooks said GEO Care prepares these individuals with the life skills and attitude to succeed in the workplace. GEO Care has created, in concert with CDCR, a curriculum specifically for these individuals called the Long-Term Offender program.
Jason Carpenter, GEO Care Program Manager for the Parolee Service Center and Transitional Housing Program, was instrumental in developing this program.
Pictured left to right: Jon Stern, CDCR, Maria Richard and Kathy Prizmich Kernan, GEO Care, and Dwayne Cooks, Pit Stop.
