Street roots., December 30, 2016, Page 7, Image 7

Street Roots •
Dec. 30, 2016-Jan. 5, 2017
News
Page 7
Raising the Red Lodge
Native Am erican practices around mental
health and solidarity are helping women
recover from the trauma o f prison
BY STEPHEN QUIRKE
STAFF W R ITE R
Z \ n March 15, the state’s Emergency
I Board is set to consider a $3.8
V Z million proposal to prepare a second
women’s prison in Oregon.
Jackie Whitt isn’t warm to the idea.
Whitt, an Advisory Committee member
for the Women in Prison Project, said a
second prison would not address the social
crises that are sending increasing numbers
of women to prison.
“They need to fund the programs that
could keep people out of prison,” said Whitt.
“Prison warehouses people. Prison is
traumatic; it’s a traumatic event where
you’re ripped away from your family. Trauma
and undiagnosed mental health issues leads
to drug addiction issues. What people need
is to heal from trauma and domestic
violence.”
Whitt speaks from experience. She
served two sentences at Coffee Creek
Correctional Institution in Wilsonville, and
said her parents and step-parents were
addicts while she was growing up.
“I found out later that I had undiagnosed
mental health issues and untreated trauma,
as (did) my parents, and endured a great
deal of psychological and sexual abuse,”
Whift said.
“Coupled with a lack of life skills, it was
really a recipe for ending up in prison,” she
said.
Whitt said she developed an addiction,
and eventually ran out of money. “You just
automatically go to where you can go to get
money to get some relief. After being
exposed to a lot of criminality it just seemed
like the normal thing to do - to steal.”
But during her second sentencing, Whitt
said she decided she would never go back to
prison. And she hasn’t.
Whitt credits her success on the outside
to a number of reentry programs, courses
that helped her work through a history of
trauma and addiction, and classes that
helped her develop the life skills she missed
growing up. But there’s one factor she
singles out as crucial to completing these
programs, and that’s the continued support,
both inside and outside the prison, of a
group called Red Lodge Transition Services.
Red Lodge is a group of Native American
volunteers that focuses on helping Native
I
Change worth
reading about
Americans - especially women - transition
out of prison. The group started informally
with volunteers bringing traditional Native
ceremonies and counseling to state prisons.
And although those services are continuing,
Executive Director Trish Jordan said their
goal now is to bridge prisoners with
communities, and to ensure these people
have the resources and support services
they need to succeed.
This mission puts them face to face with
complex social problems and severe poverty
in local Native communities, as well as the
blunt, law-and-order response of the criminal
justice system. Due to the enormity of these
tasks, Jordan said they’ve chosen to focus
on women, but they remain inclusive of both
men and non-Natives, provided they are
respectful and willing to change.
Over time, the volunteers at Red Lodge
have managed to score some important
victories for the rights of prisoners, and to
coordinate a high degree of community
support that draws people away from the
prison system.
" I l was a time of healing, a
time of processing, a time of
encouragement and strength­
ening one another. It fust felt
like a very sacred tim e."
- JACKIE WHITT
RED L O D G E C L IE N T A N D V O L U N T E E R
persistent problems like substance abuse,
trauma and poverty that were sending them
back to prison, and they needed real and
consistent support on the outside.
“We didn’t want to give people false hope
with religion,” Jordan said. “People were
getting sent back to abusive, dysfunctional
hen the volunteers began planning a
homes steeped in substance abuse and
sacred foods ceremony at Coffee Creek denial. They were sleeping on someone’s
prison 14 years ago, none of the staff knew couch, living in abject poverty, falling into
what to make of it. Prison officials were not
the same trap. It’s like a sweater unraveling.
familiar with the concept of “sacred foods,”
Women, especially, need a place to go that
and did not want the risk of serving food
isn’t a direct pipeline to prison.”
from the outside that wasn’t USDA
In 2006 Jordan and other volunteers
approved. One official informed them flatly,
formed the Native American Task Force on
“You’ll never bring those foods in here.” But Incarceration, and hosted eight community
free religious expression has been
meetings around the state. With the input
guaranteed to Native people in prison since
from these forums they decided to form a
1978, and Jordan used her knowledge of the
nonprofit called Red Lodge - a name Jordan
Native American Freedom of Religion Act to
said was given to them through ceremony.
assert their right to sacred foods.
Through years of persistent work, Red
In 2006 the first sacred foods ceremony
Lodge volunteers have managed to build
was conducted at Coffee Creek, and today
trust with prison staff around the state,
all prisons in Oregon are allowing traditional particularly at Coffee Creek. Today they
Native American foods at ceremonial events. have about 90 volunteers working across
“Spring Celebration is one day in the year Oregon, serving an estimated 1,200 people
that they don’t have to be in prison - they’re per year with culturally specific programs at
actually transported to a different place,”
10 prisons. In a 2012 letter, Department of
Jordan said.
Corrections Administrator of Religious
Bringing in the sacred foods was a major
Services Dennis Holmes described the
victory, but after seeing the people they had
organization’s work as helping lower
counseled return to prison, Jordan said she
recidivism among Native Americans. “I
and other volunteers realized that giving
believe these efforts reduce recidivism
people hope was not enough. People
among Native Americans and serve to
returning from prison were experiencing
promote Native American cultural
W
it
awareness. This organization is part of the
solution.”
Today, Jackie Whitt is in an electrical
apprenticeship program, and is part of the
International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers Union Local 48. She also supports
the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s
Women in Prison Project and speaks at
their annual Women in Prison Conference.
During her second sentence, Whitt began
attending a monthly sweat lodge provided by
Red Lodge volunteers. She started taking
care of the Outside Worship Area and
helping set up for the sweat lodge ceremony
by chopping wood and tending the rocks. It
began as a respite from the noise and
negativity of the prison, but over time she
began participating in other Red Lodge
programs, including Spring Ceremony, and
found a community that provided a sense of
safety.
“It was a time of healing, a time of
processing, a time of encouragement and
strengthening one another. It just felt like a
very sacred time,” she said.
Whitt said the feeling of community she
found at Red Lodge was unlike anything else
she found at the prison. “I must say that the
prison experience is extremely traumatic.
And there’s a lot of broken ladies there that
have had a lot of trauma prior to going to
prison.”
ell over half of all imprisoned women
in Oregon are convicted of nonviolent
offenses. In fact, a substantial number of
these women are victims of violent crimes
themselves - in 2015, 40 percent of women
entering prison in Oregon self-identified as
victims of child physical abuse, according
the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission;
Forty-eight percent also identified
themselves as victims of child sexual abuse.
One 2007 study of women on probation and
parole in Lane County found that abuse had
a signifcant impact on their decision to
commit a crime - 29 percent of the women
interviewed said they committed their crime
because they were in an abusive relationship
and were threatened by their partner.
In her groundbreaking work “Trauma and
Recovery,” Harvard Medical School
Professor Judith Herman stresses that
survivors of traumatic abuse have lived
through a social disaster that produces
specific and urgent needs.
According to Herman, the path to
recovery for such individuals is often a long
one, but the need for safety and community
is always of the utmost importance:
“Traumatic events destroy the sustaining
bonds between individual and community,”
wrote Herman. “Those who have survived
learn that their sense of self, of worth, of
humanity, depends upon a feeling of
W
See RED LODGE, page 12
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