Chicago Beyond Launches Do I Have the Right to Feel Safe?

CHICAGO – Chicago Beyond, an impact investor that works to ensure all young people have the opportunity to live a free and full life, today released Do I Have the Right to Feel Safe? A Vision for Holistic Safety in Corrections. The publication provides guidance for correctional administrators, and other stakeholders in the criminal legal system, to shift the vision of safety from one predicated on control to one that creates the conditions for community members – inside and outside of correctional walls – to feel and be protected, resilient, and whole.  

Violence and traumatization have been enduring characteristics of American correctional facilities, impacting not only the 1.9M people currently incarcerated and over 400,000 correctional staff members, but also silent victims like the 2.7M children with parents currently incarcerated and the nearly 113 million US adults who have had an immediate family member incarcerated. Between 2019 and 2020, prison deaths increased 46%, which doesn’t take into account COVID-19 related deaths that became more widespread throughout the pandemic. Correctional staff are leaving their posts in record numbers due to the mental and emotional toll. Do I Have the Right to Feel Safe? comes at a moment when the system is at a point of reckoning, a moment where our age-old problems desperately need new solutions. 

Chicago Beyond, along with other progressive organizations in the criminal legal reform space, recognize that this kind of trauma cannot continue. The newly released vision aims to help correctional administrators within the system reimagine what safety can be and offers a framework built on five core tenets – health, connectedness, value, trust, and personal agency – to guide correctional administrators in making the necessary training, policy, procedure, and culture changes needed for results. Moreover, it stresses that these changes – and the process used to create and implement them – must empower people with lived experience in the system.  

“The key to system-wide reform is to uplift the lived experience of those who currently operate within the system. If people who work and are detained within the system never have a true seat at the table, we’ll never holistically meet the needs of individuals and produce a safer environment,” said Liz Dozier, Founder and CEO of Chicago Beyond. “Do I Have the Right to Feel Safe? provides a unique opportunity for those currently leading the system to take a step back, listen, and adjust.”  

Do I Have the Right to Feel Safe? is groundbreaking in that it was created alongside and has been endorsed by leading – and occasionally divergent – grassroots movements championed by people with lived experience in the criminal legal system: Correctional officers (One Voice United), people formerly incarcerated (JustLeadershipUSA), and survivors of crime (National Center for Victims of Crime). The work is the culmination of hundreds of conversations with the aforementioned groups as well as current and former correctional administrators, community leaders, researchers, academics, lawmakers, policymakers, funders, and advocates.  

John Wetzel, former Secretary of Corrections in Pennsylvania, recognized the power of this collective input. “The fate of people connected to the corrections system – those who live there, those who work there, and those who love and care for them – are inextricably linked. It’s amazing to see someone seek to build off the strengths created by this symbiosis rather than accentuating the differences. Clearly this is the only path to holistic safety,” he said.   

Other leading correctional administrators have also endorsed the work including Kevin Kempf, (Executive Director of the Correctional Leaders Association and former Director of the Idaho Department of Correction), Scott Semple (former Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Correction), and Vincent Schiraldi (former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections).