2020 – Invest in People 1st – this is the way we can do Social Change.  Developing a restorative economics model for community business investment is a way to intercept and turn around the mass incarceration industry’s traumatizing and and tax addictive spiral of accelerating loss.  The United States leads the world in incarceration.  We are arresting and jailing over 12 million people annually.  By comparison, only 630,000 people annually are entering prisons. That means that most people arrested are non-violent according to statistics compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice and validated by other studies.

Whether or not these people are guilty, they are treated like criminals at the point of an arrest.  This causes a split brain kind of  experience by the total  disassociation from freedom and everything people believe about being safe and “innocence until proven guilty” in the US.  This is so terrifying, disorienting and traumatizing it creates deep distress, and sparks mental illness symptoms in people.

It has become routine to arrest people from 911 calls, rather than striving to divert people to mental health facilities, housing alternatives, recovery and rehabilitation programs.  When we stop the automotic arrest cycles and build the intervention systems, we can start investing in emotional trauma recovery at the point of 1st contact.  We can stop the millions of people who end up homeless, in poverty, in mental health situations.  Yes.  With civic leadership and commitment, we can reverse the trends, and transform the results.