South Carolina Adopts Vera Institute of Justice's Restoring Promise Initiative

It's about support, not punishment.
Image may contain Flooring Door Floor Corridor and Prison
JUSTIN TALLIS/ Getty Images

For young adults incarcerated in the state of South Carolina, being in prison might start to look a whole lot different.

As result of a partnership with the Vera Institute of Justice, the South Carolina Department of Corrections is adopting the Restoring Promise Initiative, an effort to make prison a rehabilitating experience that prepared young people ages 18 to 25 to reintegrate into the community once their sentence is served. South Carolina will be the latest state to adopt this practice, joining the Connecticut Department of Correction and the Middlesex Sheriff's Office in Massachusetts, which have already implemented Restoring Promise in their own facilities. Rather than positioning prison as a punitive experience, Alexandra Frank, Senior Associate in Vera’s Center on Youth Justice, told Teen Vogue that having your freedom taken away is punishment enough — prison should be about healing.

"Today, there are over 200,000 18-24 year olds sentenced to state prisons where they are often locked in their cells all day with little or nothing to do. In Germany and other Western European nations, we’ve seen an entirely different view of incarceration. Your loss of freedom is already your punishment. Everything else has to be about preparing you to return home and be successful," Frank told Teen Vogue. "Restoring Promise takes that idea, that preparing people to be the returning citizens our communities need, begins with their experiences behind the walls."

Basically, Restoring Promise aims to work with people between 18 and 25 who are incarcerated and focus on four goals: creating safety, strengthening communities, facilitating healing, and advancing equity. This, Frank said, can be achieved through listening to what young people in prison want from their experience, not equating safety with shackles and handcuffs, and creating an overall better culture in prison that's more focused on outcomes than punishment.

"To do this right, systems need to reimagine things entirely, lay a foundation of safety and human dignity, and think of the daily schedule of life on the inside as preparing young adults to be successful on the outside," Frank said. "Young adults need to explore their identity, and have tools to realize who they are and what they want to be in the world. Any program that doesn’t do these things, and actively prohibits exploration, will ultimately fail."

But it's not just young people who are incarcerated, and perhaps not just young people who need a culture change. Still, Alex told Teen Vogue that this specific program focuses on young people because people in this age group represent 21% of prison admissions. Beyond that, the majority of people in prison who are over the age of 25 entered prison as a young adult.

So, how exactly will things change? Alex told Teen Vogue that other facilities using Restoring Promise have created areas in prisons specifically for young adults, where prison staff are trained on working with incarcerated people, rather than just policing them. In those units, there are older inmates serving life without parole who serve as mentors for the younger people. People in these units may also be allowed out of their cells more than they used to. Frank said that those currently in Connecticut's Cheshire Correctional Institution in the young adult unit are now out of their cells nearly all day, while those not in the unit spend about 22 hours a day in their cell. The units may also look different. Rather than cells lining the walls, Frank said there are more activity rooms, with spaces for religion and spirituality, a library, a barbershop, and other spaces to encourage meaningful development. The change also encompasses how people are punished for conflict. Rather than being sent to solitary confinement, young people may participate in restorative justice models like talking about what happened and how they might be impacted.

More than that, young people in the program say it is markedly different from a typical prison experience.

"It was different from past experiences of jail I’ve been to. Especially the interactions with the CO’s; they were shaking my hand and asking genuine questions about myself, my goals, and how I felt about being in the program. They also said how important it was that I was selected to be here, which made me feel exclusive," Jordan, who participated in Restoring Promise in Connecticut, wrote for Vera. "All of this is just the beginning and I’ve been told there is way more to come. "

Related: Youth Incarceration in the United States, Explained