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| Innovative Program Helps Native Women Transition Out of Prison |
| By indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com - Terri Hansen |
| Published: 12/02/2011 |
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Ask Myrna Taylor Crazy Bull what it’s like to come back home after being surrounded 24 hours a day by barbed wire and steel bars, and like many of Oregon’s other Native women prisoners she will tell you: It’s like staying at Red Lodge. Crazy Bull, a Cherokee, was incarcerated on alcohol-related charges in Oregon’s Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a “negative, gray, ugly” women’s prison, in 2004. “It was a place without humanity,” she says. It was her first contact with the legal system after a life spent raising her family. On arrival she was strip-searched, told to keep to herself and thrust into a huge, noisy concrete room. She says making alliances with other inmates was discouraged and a few of the officers seemed bent on humiliating the prisoners. During her stint working in the prison kitchen she says she helped prepare fish that came out of cartons marked, fish bait, not suitable for human consumption. She says volunteers from Red Lodge Transition Services came in to Coffee Creek every month as part of their program serving Oregon’s incarcerated Native women to conduct a sweat lodge ceremony. “It was like going home,” says Crazy Bull. “In the lodge, you can put all those things away, on the rocks. It was the one thing that held me together while I was there.” Red Lodge is a program designed to help people newly released from prison reenter society. Carma Corcoran, the Chippewa/Cree chair of the Red Lodge board, says the program evolved from Native women doing work in the prisons more than a decade ago. The mission, she says, is to reduce recidivism, prevent intergenerational incarceration and advocate for religious freedom and human rights in Oregon’s Department of Corrections. Corcoran, who is also the Indian law program coordinator at Lewis & Clark Law School, says Red Lodge is currently providing direct services for eight women, and to date has helped about 60 women, with what she claims is an 80 percent success rate. “There’s no cutoff date, which speaks to the Native American way of doing things,” says Corcoran. “I still have contact with women who have been out four to five years. As their journey to self-sufficiency grows, they don’t need us on a daily basis, but we’re here.” Read More. |
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