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Seeing the trauma and the pain among the youth and young adults incarcerated in one juvenile detention center was enough to propel Sam Burgett into a career of creating and providing reentry services within the juvenile and adult justice systems. Through years of working with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth and adults in prison, jail, juvenile detention, and work release centers, one thing became clear. Our justice system is not full of millions of bad people. We have a very broken justice system in America. This ethnography, compiled over a span of nearly four years, provides a glimpse into the lives of a group of justice-involved young men, allowing readers to gain a deeper understanding of the individuals' upbringings, the cards that were stacked against many of them from day one, their common desire to change, and their experiences cycling in and out of incarceration. The many trials and tribulations endured by the young men in this book provide a deeper understanding of the importance of measuring our success in moments when engaging with and walking alongside those who are facing such adversities. Sam Burgett is a social worker by trade and was the first police social worker in Porter County, Indiana. In 2019, she founded a nonprofit, the Community Change Center, in order to address soaring recidivism rates in Indiana. She enjoys teaching courses in sociology at a local university and facilitating trauma-informed justice response trainings in the community. For more information about the organization, visit: CommunityChangeCenter.org

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9781956823400

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In 2017, Samantha Burgett was running a teen program in Northwest Indiana, when she noticed several of her youth demonstrating new negative behaviors after having been incarcerated in the local juvenile detention center for a short period of time. Feeling called to address the issues she was observing, Sam, along with one of her professors and a close friend, launched a mentoring program in the detention center. After running the program in the facility for a few short months, Sam began working at the agency as a detention officer and quickly noticed many gaps in the American justice system. After studying reentry programs around the world, Sam launched an intensive reentry program within the facility, working with the older youth and young adults while they were detained and, for those who were interested, as they returned back to the community. Shortly after, the opportunity arose to launch a similar group in the local prison, providing reentry programming to incarcerated adults in the community. In order to funnel more resources into the programs and to be able to offer more services to program participants, Sam founded a nonprofit, the Community Change Center, in 2019. Today, the Center operates reentry programming in local correctional facilities and provides community-based reintegration services to individuals as they are released from incarceration, including transitional living, adult education, mentoring, case management, expungement fairs, and a Unity Cafe.For more information about the organization, visit: CommunityChangeCenter.org

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