GOGI’s Success In The Spotlight

GOGI board member, Dr. Kimora, professor at John Jay College of Criminology, ex-offender turned education advocate, Cheryl, and GOGI’s Coach Taylor were in studio last week on the national broadcast of the Joey Reynolds’s radio talk show.  The subject was the success of initiatives such as GOGI Campus, the immersion environment provided to inmates at the Century Regional Detention Facility for Sheriff Leroy Baca’s Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.   GOGI Campus is the in-custody component of a reentry initiative led by Getting Out By Going In (GOGI) which addresses and provides the essential reentry environment needed for reentry success.

“We are going to see a national trend toward addressing the needs of a supportive reentry environment to support positive decision making in the lives of the more than 700,000 individuals released from prison each year,” states Coach Taylor.  “What we are coming to accept is the fact programs inside prisons are not as effective as programs with a continuum support in an environment conducive for sustaining the in-custody learning.”

GOGI is at the cutting edge of providing sustainable reentry support for the women participating in the GOGI Campus pilot program, a volunteer service offered to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.  “In designing a replicable system for future campus sites, it was essential we move quickly and with collaboration as the key to the design,” Coach Taylor stated.  “To do this, we needed to mount a massive volunteer effort, coordinating community volunteers and universities and colleges.  We did not have the luxury of time or funding.  We had a mission, we knew the results we wanted, and we jumped in and made it work.”

The GOGI Campus concept is currently be explored in more than a dozen federal and state institutions, some under the direction of self-directed inmate-led courses and correspondence programs.