Charleston Gazette-Mail – Before West Virginia can make any substantial progress in lowering its incarceration rates, Lida Shepherd, with the American Friends Service Committee, said that residents here — and everywhere — need to shift the way they think about “wrongdoings.” Read article.
“We need to shift the idea of what we consider bad behavior, and what we think is appropriate responses to that type of behavior,” Shepherd said.
On Saturday, Shepherd was joined by Loree Stark, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, and Rayna Momen, the summer policy fellow at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, on a panel discussing mass incarceration in West Virginia and how to end it.
The conversation was moderated by Gabrielle Chapman, Executive Director of Call to Action for Racial Equality, and was part of the WVCBP’s fourth annual Summer Policy Institute, which this year focused on criminal justice reform in West Virginia.
