How LA County’s JCOD is Reimagining Life After Incarceration
By Daniel Graham
April marks Second Chance Month, a campaign established by the Prison Fellowship in 2017 with the intention to “raise awareness about the nearly 44,000 legal barriers faced by men and women with a criminal record.” Since then, the Prison Fellowship has partnered with over 1,000 organizations to fight back against policies that limit the ability of incarcerated people to reintegrate into society post-release.
The Los Angeles Justice Care and Opportunities Department (JCOD) celebrated Second Chance Month with a variety of events spanning Los Angeles County. These serve to bring awareness to the broad consequences that incarceration has on individuals, their families and their communities. Events ranged from a weekly pop-up in Lancaster to a film festival at California State University, Los Angeles, with the goal of connecting with justice-impacted individuals.
“Information about our JCOD programs, what they are, what we do, and how we are acknowledging Second Chance Month can be found online,’ said Brenda Duran, Director of External Affairs at JCOD. “We appreciate the great collaborative effort extended by this program to have someone inside learn and teach others about our department.”
Formed in 2022, JCOD serves people and communities impacted by the criminal justice system by connecting them with resources necessary for post-incarceration success. Resources include job training and education, as well as tools to help navigate housing and legal services.
According to the board motion that established JCOD, the intention was to lessen the county’s reliance on the prison system for handling issues it is ill-equipped to handle. In the 2022 motion by Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, she says that the system had a “department-driven and overly bureaucratic approach to service delivery, instead of a person-centric one.” She continues by describing the old system as one that offers “processes as a proxy for process.”
Now, JCOD is uniquely positioned to work with the justice system by giving them access to support programs such as behavioral health, housing support, social services and workforce development. Because the justice system’s population overlaps with those who use these programs, JCOD connects those in dire need of assistance directly to the resources they need. Director Judge Songhai Armstead (Ret.) says that the goal of JCOD is to “promote community safety, community wellbeing, and to deliver equitable justice.”
“Next year, we are going to focus on stories about solutions available for justice-impacted students,” said Robert Ian Jones, Professor of English and Journalism at Chaffey College.
Rising Scholars is another state program that seeks to elevate the standing of justice-impacted individuals by providing them access to higher education and the resources they need to navigate it. At Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., students on campus work alongside incarcerated students at the California Institute of Men to edit and publish their work through the independent media outlet Local News Pasadena and in the Chaffey College student-led media outlet, The Breeze. The students hope to help incarcerated journalists launch their own news outlet from within the prison, mirroring other prison publications across the nation.
“Our collaboration with the Chaffey College Program and the California Institute for Men in Chino is another important way we continue our Pasadena Media Foundation mission to save and support local news,” said Sheryl Turner, Publisher of Local News Pasadena and President of Pasadena Media Foundation. “We continue to be encouraged by the depth of writing we receive from the scholars inside.”
In and out of prison, resources are being made available to the justice-impacted community that set them up for success rather than leaving them behind. Justice does not stop at conviction; it is a long and arduous road of rehabilitation, and incarcerated people cannot be expected to make the journey alone. With the help of JCOD and other state programs, the justice-impacted community has a second chance at overcoming obstacles that once seemed insurmountable.
This article was written for Second Chance Month, celebrated every April “to raise awareness about the collateral consequences of criminal convictions and to unlock opportunities for individuals with criminal records to successfully reenter society. It highlights rehabilitation, clean slate legislation, and second-chance employment,” as described by The Clean Slate Initiative.