Organization Activities 11/13/09

10th ANNUAL CENTERFORCE “INSIDE/OUT” SUMMIT
Richard Althouse, Ph.D., President, IACFP

I was privileged to attend the 10th annual Centerforce Summit, held at the Westin San Francisco Airport Hotel October 25th through the 27th. It was one of the best and emotionally intense three-day conferences I’ve been to in quite some time!

The conference, organized by Carol Burton, executive director of Centerforce, and her staff, focused on a number of pressing challenges to politicians, correctional administrators and staff, incarcerated individuals, their families, and communities in California and elsewhere. While it was not possible to attend all the sessions, the ones I was able to attend focused on program, sentencing, and reenty issues (including health and mental health care) familiar to anyone working in the corrections field, and particularly in California, a state facing serious financial and corrections stresses.

Despite the economy, Ms. Burton and her staff pulled together a group of outstanding speakers who presented both individually and as panelists. Among them were Elizabeth Siggins, Acting Chief Deputy Secretary of Adult Programs for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reporting on the status of California’s corrections rehabilitation programs in the face of severe budget cuts, Ann Adalist-Estrin presenting “leading edge” brain research on the relationship of childhood trauma Carol Burton and Dr. Althouse

and adult addiction, Henry Steadman and staff reporting on the use of

S.O.A.R. to facilitate reentry in Florida, Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, Deputy State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a panelist discussing approaches to addressing California’s corrections crisis, Brian Fisher, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections, and Rev. Eugene Williams III, both on a panel discussing policies and practices that shift the culture of corrections. Other outstanding panels addressed topics including restorative justice, the death penalty, the impact of incarceration and crime, and sensible sentencing. The stories of those impacted by corrections, either as inmates or family members, were very moving, and provided deeper insight into the political processes and unfortunate side-effects of our country’s “rush to incarcerate.”

I was grateful for the opportunity to talk with a number of other speakers as well as attendees, all of whom had politically knowledgeable and insightful grasps of the topics discussed at the conference and whose energy I found quite infectious. They included Dr. Julie Lifshay (left), a social epidemiologist and one of the Centerforce staff , Gail Patrice-Brown (Inmate Family Council), Mark Koffman (Chicago) , Cameron Holmes from the Pennsylvania Prison Society (right), Joshua Mason (Palo Alto), and Maureen Nelson, a counselor from the Oakland Private Industry Council.

We will certainly hear more from this group! I am already looking forward to next year’s conference, and I hope to stay in contact and work with many of them between now and then. I also encourage IACFP members to watch for and attend next year’s conference if at all possible!