prisons

The nonprofit Judy Dworin Performance Project harnesses the arts to build social awareness, staging performances that draw on issues ranging from incarceration to immigration.

And it has been doing this for 30 years.

This hour, we sit down with Judy Dworin to reflect on this milestone. We also talk with performers and colleagues, and we hear from you, too. How has the Judy Dworin Performance Project touched your life?

William Outlaw is a natural leader. He's been a key figure in helping to lower New Haven's homicide rate over the last decade. He's a strategist and an organizer who can size up a situation quickly. He can defuse a threatening situation with his charisma and charm. He can run a business. 

As a street outreach worker in New Haven, he uses all the same skills today that he used when he co-ran New Haven's largest cocaine gang in the 1980's. 

At sixteen years of age, Reginald Dwayne Betts went to prison for carjacking. Decades later, Betts is a celebrated poet and graduate of Yale Law School. But, like many ex-offenders, the consequences of those teenage mistakes have followed him for years.

In 1993, a lawyer at the Center for Children’s Advocacy brought a lawsuit challenging, among other things, the conditions of confinement at the state’s  juvenile detention centers. Four years later, the court approved an agreement that resulted in the Emily J. Consent Decree, part of which required the state to retool its educational services for juvenile detainees.

Connecticut's "Second Chance Society" has reduced the number of people going into prison and better prepared offenders for a meaningful life when they get out. 

Much of the criminal justice system has changed over the three decades that Rollin Cook has worked in prisons. At the beginning of his career, the main job of correction officers was to warehouse inmates – make sure the jails and prisons were secure, that the prisoners made it to their court hearings, that the gates opened and closed.

Cities and towns have laws to keep people from engaging in behavior that may disturb others, like sleeping on park benches, drinking in public, or just plain “loitering”.

What does it mean when just hanging out in a public space puts you in violation of these laws?

Over the 21 years Sen. Cathy Osten worked for the Department of Correction, mental illness was so pervasive among Connecticut’s inmates that it was not unusual for her to hear from families who were grateful their loved ones were incarcerated because they were better off behind bars than on the street.

The American criminal justice system has become less 'just' over recent decades and prosecutors bear much of the responsibility.

The FBI, the Justice Department's inspector general and the New York City medical examiner will investigate how billionaire and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan early Saturday morning. 

A first-in-the-nation bill that would make phone calls from Connecticut prisons free is moving to the next level. 

The American criminal justice system has become less 'just' over recent decades and prosecutors bear much of the responsibility.

The Connecticut state Judiciary Committee passed a bill this week that could make prison phone calls free.

Senate Democrats have unveiled their plan to legalize and tax recreational pot. Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney said with neighboring Massachusetts already selling legal marijuana, Connecticut needs to treat cannabis like other adult products.

“What we need as we have done with alcohol, as we have done with tobacco is a scheme for legalization for those who are adults, plus regulation and taxation,” said Looney.

A new report is raising serious concerns about conditions for young people incarcerated or detained in Connecticut facilities.

When Suzi Jensen went to see her mom in prison at the age of 12 she was only allowed to hug her twice, once at the beginning of the visit and once at the end.

Criminal justice reform advocates are trying to spark a larger conversation regarding the role race and poverty play in mass incarceration. In Hartford recently, a dialogue took place between lawyers, community stakeholders and rehabilitated offenders. 

A Meriden Republican has continued his public attacks against crime under Gov. Dannel Malloy's administration a week after Malloy said the state’s crime rate was at a 51-year low.

Connecticut voters support reducing the prison population and investing in rehabilitation instead of incarceration. That’s according to a new poll released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.