A panel discussion at the Mariposa Museum Wednesday focused on ways to prevent violent crime at the grassroots level by connecting with communities, particularly youth, and providing young people with alternatives to gang-based lifestyles and crime that will prevent them from entering the criminal justice system.
David Blair, co-founder of the Mariposa Museum, moderated the discussion, which marked the opening of the museum’s new exhibit, “Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project,” featuring quilts by 20 men serving life and long sentences at Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly called “Angola” prison. The exhibit includes recorded interviews of incarcerated people as a group “forgotten by society,” and examines the history of the U.S. criminal justice system.
Panelists in the discussion included Frank Knack, policy director for ACLU-NH; P. Natasha Mitchell and Brian Mitchell, founders and facilitators at Potters Wheel Community Services in Sprngfield, Mass.; Jodiann K. Gleason, a dispatcher at Manchester Police Department with a doctorate in law enforcement and mental health; and Antony “Tone” Payton, a journalist, podcaster and publisher with Nashua Digital and Granite State News Collaborative.
According to the ACLU, there are 2,000 people in prison in New Hampshire, meaning they received a sentence of more than one year, while people with a sentence of one year go to jail. Knack stated that the ACLU does not have exact numbers for how many people are currently in jail in New Hampshire, but it is estimated to be about 1,600 people.
“The bail reform system has been a positive for New Hampshire. Prior to reform, there was huge inequity; people with wealth could afford to pay bail and could walk out, while people without wealth could not afford to pay. The law was reformed in 2019 and has curtailed the state’s jail population drastically – we have 35% fewer people in jail, but we also have 30% less crime. New Hamshire is a testament that you can have bail reform and you can also reduce crime,” Knack said.
Potter’s Wheel is a community services center based on a model restorative circles, and P. Natasha Mitchell described the center’s approach to preventing community violence and connecting with traumatized people.
“I’ve seen young men come into our center and put a gun in my face and say they want to kill someone else in the program. In that moment of anger, they want to kill that person. Then the moment of anger passes, and they don’t want to kill that person anymore. The question is, ‘How do we prevent that moment of anger?’” Mitchell said. “If they are doing restorative work, they don’t want to kill someone. Our goal is to educate the educators on how to do this work. We go into schools, we go into the prison systems, we work with street workers —these are people who go out where there is high crime and they are violence-interrupters – and we work with them on reaching the community, on cultural education, on connecting, on healing.”
Brian Mitchell described restorative justice as adding the “why” factor into how a situation is perceived and defused, giving an example of a young man who attended a workshop and had a knife fall out of his backpack.
“According to protocol, this kid brought a knife to school. That’s a weapon; there are policies he has broken, and there are rules about what happens. But if you ask the young man why he brought that knife … it turns out he and his little brother have been getting harassed by gang members on their walk home from school, and he needs to protect his little brother. He does not want to do any harm to anyone at school, but he has to protect himself. If someone asks ‘why,’ changes the whole situation. That is the restorative approach,” Mitchell said.
Payton became a drug dealer at a young age after his family destabilized, and was previously incarcerated. He credits the prison’s food service internship program with enabling him to transition into society after he was released.
“I wish there was a point of intervention – if we could take kids who are 14 and dealing drugs and say, ‘You know, what you’re doing, you are a businessman. You deal in profit margins, you deal with payroll and marketing and advertising. You have these skills; now come to me, and I’ll show you what a spreadsheet is.’ None of that was taught in Black homes when I grew up. No one ever told us about trade schools, how to get real skills. The drug dealer on the corner making money, that’s what we saw growing up,” Payton said.
Gleason described Manchester’s Critical Incident Training (CIT) program, which trains officers how to more effectively deal with people with mental health problems.
“We have mental health counselors come in and teach officers how to de-escalate situations and how to help people with mental health. We bring mental health services out to the community, to people who might be having a mental health crisis, so they do not have to find it themselves,” Gleason said. “Officers tell us this that the CIT training is an effective tool to have in their toolbox.”
Knack also spoke to mental health services as key to preventing violence.
“New Hampshire has staggering racial bias. Just using marijuana as an indicator, the usage rates of marijuana are the same among while people and people of color, but people of color are 4½ times more like to be arrested for marijuana use. The question is, who decides what is a crime? Tobacco kills 2,000 people a year, marijuana kills almost no one. We can’t arrest our way out of the drug problem. Treatment centers are the answer to this problem, not putting people in jail,” Knack said. “We need to invest in more counselors and mental health resources in schools, not more police in schools. The police might not be trained to deal with behavioral issues, with children.”
Toward the close of the discussion, Blair cited the “exception clause” of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which states “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
“Legalized slavery is what many of the men serving time at Angola experienced,” Blair said, indicating the quilts hanging on the walls surrounding the room. “You can learn about their experiences here.”
The “Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project,” will be on exhibit on the Mariposa Museum until Dec. 29.
