WHO WE ARE

The primary purpose and focus of the Friends and Family of Incarcerated Persons is to help those who are left behind when society removes our loved ones from us. Our group provides a forum for open discussion about the problems we encounter. The friends and family can move past the stigma and connect with others having similar experiences.

While the incarcerated person is out of sight we continue to be visible. As we continue our daily routine we can feel like society thinks of us as part of the problem. We believe we should not accept guilt or blame. While other groups attempt to heal and reconstruct the offender we must stand on the sidelines and struggle. While we agree with and sometimes engage in advocacy for the prisoner's problems, we are a group primarily dealing with daily routine business and daily living on the outside. Because of meeting and sharing with each other our group is able to contend with the public's criticisms and educate ourselves into a supportive community. This supportive community relieves the feelings of hopelessness and negativity and turns our feelings of love into positive forward movement.

We exchange ideas, educate each other on problems and possible solutions and help each other maintain a healthy mind set during a difficult time. We must live responsibly even as we are of times held responsible for what someone else has done.

We support each other.

Heather Thompson is a historian who’s writing a book about the Attica prison uprising in 1971, but her research suggests some new ways of thinking about what’s happening with prisons in America today. She argues that what happened at Attica contributed to changes in U.S. laws that have increased the prison population by more than 2 million. Thompson suggests that this increase is having a detrimental affect on the American economy and our society. I’ve heard lots of discussion about prisons that focus on the poor conditions in which prisoners live. But Thompson takes a different approach; her focus is on how the growing prison system hurts the rest of us. Setting aside entirely the cost of keeping so many people in prison, large-scale incarceration has other social and economic costs. It breaks up families and communities, creates economic incentives for business and communities to maintain or even increase crime rates, and reduces the number and quality of jobs available to those who are not in prison. The first point seems somewhat obvious: when a parent or spouse is in prison, the family suffers, and when people who might otherwise contribute to community life are in prison, the community suffers. No doubt, some of those who are in prison were not model parents or citizens, but in prison, whatever ties prisoners, their families, and their communities may have had get broken. This happens in part because the private prison system often sends criminals to prisons far from their families, making it impossible for them to maintain relationships that might help them return more successfully to the community when their sentences end. Add to that the loss of any income they might have contributed to the family, taxes they might have paid locally, and prison conditions that encourage mental illness and asocial behavior, and we have a system that seems to be designed not to rehabilitate prisoners but rather to ensure that they will return to prison soon after they are released.

WHAT WE DO

We are a support and advocacy group - working mainly with the friends and family on the outside, and some for the prisoners. For instance we have parole plan packages, but they involve and include the friends and the families first and foremost. We send information for the children of the prisoners and are planning even more work with the children of the prisoners involving a mentor group. We answer questions via letter, phone and email. We inform regarding new decisions affecting all of us regarding legislation, legislators, AR's (administrative regulations), visitation, phones, & catalog opportunities to send things to our loved ones. We send inmates cards at holiday time and birthday cards to the ones who have friends or family who have attended a meeting or called, posted a letter, or an email. We try to keep up on the local organizations which help with food, clothing, shelter, furniture - for the families and for the inmates. We have been able to give furniture, bedding, clothing, etc. to the local families and occasionally are able to help an individual inmate when they get out. We try to help when someone is running low on money for utilities but are less fortunate in this regard as we don't have much money. We are a completely volunteer organization. No religious affiliation, but we gladly accept the free use of the room at the Episcopal Church. They also allow us to have a large holiday party every December in their parish hall. Occasionally we have speakers who address relevant issues within/without the prison system. We try to provide phone numbers for talking with someone, or emailing, during the week for problems that come up & as always our message phone line is answered by someone who has lots of knowledge regarding prison families/friends. The regular mail is handled in much the same way. All of us have had someone in prison and can understand what we go through. The board of directors includes a Professor of Criminal Justice at UNLV, a PhD in psychology and social services for Clark County (covers Las Vegas area), a person with a federal prisoner family member, two people with parolees, one with drug/alcohol problem family members, an out of state person who has someone in Nevada prison, and two Chaplains - so we are pretty diverse.

If you wish to be a part of the regular email list of FFIP please let us know. There are several categories and/or you may receive only "occasional" emails.

Please think seriously about joining us at a meeting.