Beyond the Walls: Prison Health Care & Reentry Summit

When: June 10, 2014, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Where: Pennsylvania Convention Center at 12th and Arch Streets Philadelphia, PA 19107

Join Decarcerate PA and many of our friends and allies at the 2014 prison health summit. Check out our workshop “Prison reform through community empowerment” and stop by our table to learn how to get involved.

About the Summit:

Through panels and workshops, we will explore health and reentry challenges facing persons who are incarcerated and persons reentering our communities, including HIV, mental health issues, substance use, housing, employment, advocacy, mentorship and educational programs.

With a focus on community-led responses to the crisis in the criminal justice system, workshops reflect the needs of prisoners and former prisoners and will highlight the work being done to improve conditions inside the prison walls and in the communities to which prisoners are returning. With over 36 workshops and over 1,000 in attendance, this summit promises to offer something for everyone.

Among our major collaborating partners for this summit is the Philadelphia Prison System, which participates in the planning process, provides speakers for our panels, and allows staff members of FIGHT’s Institute of Community Justice to bring HIV 101 presentations to all correctional staff during AEM.

This year’s Keynote Speaker will be Michelle AlexanderThe New York Times Best-Selling Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorblindnessHer book challenges the conventional wisdom that with the election of Barack Obama as president, our nation has “triumphed over race.” Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a permanent, second-class status, much like their grandparents before them who lived under an explicit system of racial control. Alexander argues that the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African American men, primarily through the War on Drugs, has created a new racial under caste – a group of people defined largely by race that is subject to legalized discrimination, scorn, and social exclusion… Read More.

 

Learn more and check out all the workshops here.