Correctional safety has historically pitted both correctional staff against people incarcerated and security procedures against the resources and opportunities needed to help people to thrive. This paradigm has resulted in missed opportunities to support sustainable rehabilitation and commitment to community safety. We can be leaders in reimagining and building toward a holistic vision of safety that brings people incarcerated and correctional staff together to produce the changes they want, need, and deserve—changes rooted in health, value, personal agency, connectedness, and trust.
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, one of the first psychologists to lead an American jail, will draw upon her experiences as well as those of correctional officers, people incarcerated, and survivors of crime to help us challenge our current concept of safety. Alongside a few co-presenters from the Chicago Beyond National Advisory Council on Justice Initiatives, she will share best practices learned from leading initiatives with lived experience groups aimed at instilling holistic safety in large correctional institutions. Participants should leave confident enough to communicate what holistic safety is (and is not) and to push systems toward these new goalposts.
Instilling Holistic Safety: How We Can Reimagine Our Approach Toward Safety in Corrections
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During this webinar, participants will:
- Analyze different correctional systems to determine what factors are contributing to a lack of safety.
- Learn how to explain to system stakeholders how health, value, personal agency, connectedness, and trust all contribute to safety so as to guide policy changes that reduce systemic harms.
- Articulate why and how lived experience groups—like correctional officers, people incarcerated, and survivors of crime—must be engaged to make system change successful.
Speakers
- Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia
Managing Director, Justice Initiatives, Chicago Beyond
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia is the managing director for Justice Initiatives at Chicago Beyond. She is an experienced psychologist who is passionate about mental wellness, criminal justice reform, and supporting young people who have experienced trauma. Since joining Chicago Beyond in 2018, Dr. Tapia collaborated to launch programs focused on positive family engagement for families who are justice-involved, holistic healing supports within Chicago Public Schools and peer-led healing supports for youth. She is the former warden of Cook County jail in Chicago, Illinois—one of the largest single site jails in the country. Under her leadership, Cook County jail implemented several bold strategies to promote wellness and to reduce recidivism, including the Mental Health Transition Center, a program that has helped hundreds of people who have been incarcerated to successfully rejoin their families and reenter communities.
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