Legal Action Center Q + A with Wendell Walters

Can you describe the Osborne Association’s work in supporting people directly impacted by the criminal legal system?

Osborne Association works to address the impact of the criminal justice system on people, families, and communities. We operate programs that create opportunities for people to thrive, including diversion and alternatives to incarceration, substance use disorder treatment, reentry planning and reintegration services, job training, mentoring, housing support, and other services inside courtrooms, jails, prisons, and the community. Additionally, through the partnership and leadership of people directly affected by the criminal legal system, our policy team works to build a justice system that rejects mass-scale, long-term incarceration, and instead works to achieve equity, healing, and transformation. We know that respect, accountability, and resources have the power to transform lives and to bend criminal justice systems towards justice, as defined by equity, inclusion, investment, and healing and we work to end the racial injustice and oppression that saturate law enforcement and the criminal legal system.

Can you describe Osborne’s Fulton Community Reentry Center?

Long ago, we and others had identified the issue of adequate transitional housing for people returning to the City from incarceration. When we asked New York State for the shuttered Fulton Correctional Facility, an old seven-story prison in the Bronx, we saw an opportunity to repurpose it into a welcoming community asset that could help meet the need for transitional housing. It’s currently in construction and slated to open in 2022. When it opens, it will provide 135 beds for people coming home, with an emphasis on older folks and those who are most disconnected, and will offer spaces where individuals can share meals, foster community, and hold classes, training sessions, support groups, events, and private meetings. Also, there will be an on-site kitchen, Osborne’s Fresh Start social enterprise, that will train and employ formerly incarcerated people to prepare meals for residents and commercial clients.

What is Osborne’s approach to solving the crisis of Rikers Island?

We agree that is long past time to close Rikers Island. While that work continues, there are things we can and must do now for the people who are currently held or who face potential detention or incarceration on the island. The City must cut the jail population both by reducing the number of people they send to Rikers in the first place and must send more people home from Rikers, faster. We work with our fellow service providers and advocates to push for the City to use all the available sentencing and decarceration tools — such as the recently signed Less Is More Act – and continue to work to expand alternative pathways for people who cause harm. And because there are thousands of people who live and work there right now, we continue to advocate for improving living and working conditions at Rikers. Ultimately though, New York must close Rikers — replacing its aging and isolated facilities with smaller, safer, and more centrally located jails. These new facilities should be small, to ensure reasonable management; local, so that their operations are transparent and visible to its neighbors; full of programs that promote education, employment, and wellbeing; and designed to welcome visiting families and preserve the dignity of detained individuals.

As a member of the NY ATI/Reentry Coalition, which helped to produce the recently published Blueprint for Transforming Criminal Legal System Outcomes in NYC, what do you think is the most important takeaway for the City’s administration?

Society’s go-to tactics for dealing with harm — policing, prosecution, and incarceration — are limited, blunt tools that are bound up in a racist, oppressive system that treats people as disposable. All of us — especially people who have been harmed by crime — deserve alternatives that enable communities to thrive by allowing people to address the harm they have caused and rebuild their lives.

Read the full interview in its original format here.