Christina Foor is joined by Maya Moore Irons, Jonathan Irons, and Bo Cornelius to discuss The Return. In January 2025, we stepped inside two maximum-security prisons together—Jefferson City Correctional Center and Algoa—to bring encouragement through music and capture Jonathan’s return to the [...]Read More
Becoming a Violence Interrupter
This blog post is part of Locked in Solidarity, CCDA's national awareness and action week on mass incarceration.What do we do when interrupting violence isn't an option? When the act has already been committed and the perpetrators are being punished? This is where I find myself: incarcerated. My [...]Read More
Interrupting Violence: Locked in Solidarity 2025
By Rev. Kevin Burns and Rev. Dr. Kevin RiggsThis is an excerpt from the Locked in Solidarity Preaching Guide, which is part of CCDA's Locked in Solidarity Bundle. Click here to download the bundle and get resources to help you and your community become "Violence Interrupters."I was arrested in July [...]Read More
The Realities of Restorative Justice
For the last several years, Healing Communities PA partnered with the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia on the Restorative Cities Initiative™️, a grassroots “porch front to city hall” model of bringing restorative practices to every part of community life, particularly in BIPOC [...]Read More
Restoring Community Belonging
Those Leaving Prison and Those In Churches Need Each Other To HealPrison reentry efforts can too often—unintentionally—keep men and women returning from prison isolated from the rest of their communities. With specialized reentry nonprofits, paid staff, transitional housing, and other important [...]Read More
Justice Through Healing
Equal Justice USA today is a much different organization than it was more than 20 years ago at our founding. Then we were focused sharply on ending the death penalty through state campaigns, and we’ve succeeded on that front. As important as those wins are, what we learned from those campaigns [...]Read More
Welcoming a bit of the garden of Eden into the reentry process
by Stephanie Vander Lugt“Its time to play… Guess. That. Vegetable!” The room erupted into game-show worthy applause as cruciferous and leafy wonders passed from table to table. Hushed tones ensued. Is it a beet? A melon? A kind of celery? Each team efforted to correctly identify the most vegetables [...]Read More
How our Church got Involved in Mass Incarceration
by Joe MarcucciOur entry to the dizzying world of Mass Incarceration began with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and the book Rethinking Incarceration by Dominique Gilliard. We were determined to move the marker for what our church was engaged with. When the initial registration for our [...]Read More