Osborne Association’s ‘Opening
the Door’ Event Attracts Brooklyn Community
by Brooklyn Eagle (edit@brooklyneagle.net),
published online 04-29-2005
 By
Michelle Karshan
Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — The Osborne
Association, one of the largest leading multi-service
criminal justice organizations in the United States, operates
programs in community sites, courts, prisons and jails.
On April 13, Osborne’s Brooklyn office, located
on Remsen Street, held its ‘Opening the Door’
event to showcase their Brooklyn programs.
Local guests included Justices Sheryl
Parker and John Walsh of Kings County Supreme Court; Robert
C. Newman, Esq. of the Legal Aid Society’s Special
Litigation Unit; Brian Segel, the New York Director of
the Low Income Investment Fund and Nancy Hernandez, the
Outreach Coordinator for Fort Greene Strategic Neighborhood
Action Partnership (SNAP).
Founded in 1931, Osborne works to transform
the lives of those who have come into conflict with the
law, as well as their families, through innovative, effective,
and replicable programs that serve the community by reducing
crime and its human and economic costs. Operating a broad
range of treatment, educational, and vocational services
for people involved in the adult criminal and juvenile
justice systems, Osborne serves 7,500 people annually.
Throughout their presentations, Osborne
staff explained that their program models demonstrate
that employment and family services, chemical dependency
treatment, access to HIV/health care, and constructive
and supervised alternatives to incarceration can reduce
crime, decrease violence, and address the concerns of
victims.
People Can Change
Carolina Cordero Dyer, Osborne’s associate executive
director, explained that Osborne was founded to further
the work and goals of Thomas Mott Osborne, an industrialist
and former mayor of Auburn, N.Y. In 1913, Osborne spent
a week as a prisoner in Auburn prison to see exactly how
prisoners lived.
Committed to transform America’s
prisons from “human scrap heaps into human repair
shops,” Osborne became the warden of Sing Sing prison.
Mr. Osborne “believed that people could change.
He believed in redemption,” Dyer said.
Pointing out that some see prisoners
as people flawed beyond redemption, Dyer stressed that
at Osborne, “We see day after day, year after year,
that people can change. That people are more than just
the crime they may have committed.”
As for difficulties in re-entry and staying
out of trouble, Dyer said that for those at risk or coming
home from prison, “these centers make a difference
— they create a space.”
Noting that 25 percent of people released
from New York state prisons come back into New York City
to live, Dyer added that, “People need help upon
release, and Osborne addresses any issue we believe is
fundamental to someone being successful and staying out
of prison.”
Citing one of the obstacles to success,
Dyer said that New York City has “no affordable
housing, and for persons coming out of prison, it is particularly
difficult to find housing.”
Dyer explained that while the United
States represents only 5 percent of the world’s
population, it now accounts for 25 percent of the world’s
prison population, and she added, sentences are now longer
than they were previously.
Job Training and Support Services
Alicia Guevara, director of development for Osborne, substantiated
Osborne’s claim to success, pointing out that a
formerly incarcerated person who has a job is only 1/3
as likely to return to prison as one without a job. Eighty
percent of those who graduate from Osborne’s job
training and readiness program at Rikers Island remain
employed at least six months after release.
In furtherance of the argument for re-entry
services and alternatives to incarceration, Guevara revealed
that it costs $33,000 per year to house a person in a
New York State prison facility juxtaposed to providing
Osborne’s job training and support services at a
cost between $3-5,000 per client, per year.
Court Advocacy Services Assist
Attorneys
In line with Osborne’s commitment to alternatives
to incarceration, Miles Jackson, a social worker who heads
Osborne’s Court Advocacy Services, briefed the audience
on the dramatic success rate of this program. The Court
Advocacy staffs conduct pre-plea and pre-sentence investigations
of defendants’ backgrounds to ascertain mitigating
circumstances, and advocate client-specific sentencing
alternatives — including treatment or other community-based
sanctions — in appropriate cases.
Jackson explained that the Court Advocacy
Services “tries to get the court to see the client
as a human being,” and also that it is crucial to
look to “rehabilitation instead of prisons.”
Without support services or client advocacy, Jackson stated
that “80 percent of youth are back in the system
within two years.” Jackson added that the majority
of youth caught up in the criminal justice system are
“Black or Latino, from disadvantaged neighborhoods,
and often from fractured families.”
Targeting only cases in which the defendant
would otherwise be detained pretrial or sentenced to a
term of incarceration of six months or more, Court Advocacy
Services makes referrals and facilitates intake to hundreds
of community-based programs that provide mental health,
HIV/AIDS, and substance abuse treatment services, as well
as to educational and vocational placements.
Progress of clients released from pre-trial
detention or sentenced to an alternative to incarceration
is monitored by Osborne and regular progress reports shared
with the court and counsel.
“If we think we can make a positive
difference to the outcome on the criminal justice process,
then we take the case,” Jackson explained. As a
result, he said, “We’re successful in at least
70 percent of the cases in obtaining alternatives to incarceration
or reduced sentences.”
Innovative Services
“Osborne works with persons who have high-risk behaviors
such as substance abuse, unsafe sex, involvement in crime,”
explained Gabriel Ramirez, Osborne’s Director of
risk reduction services. “We meet our clients where
they are at, and we go forward from there by giving them
the tools.”
Ramirez led part of the tour of Osborne’s
Brooklyn office, which houses its acupuncture center,
family and children’s room, the Court Advocacy unit,
and the Prisoner and Prisoner Family hotlines. Ricardo
Howard, a counselor with Osborne’s Family Resource
Center talked about the success of their Hotline, which
is set up to field calls from New York State prison families,
but last year received calls from 42 different states
and Puerto Rico.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2005
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