June 13, 2017 – Our message this week came from Amy Barch, the executive director of Turning Leaf, a program with a mission to reduce crime and its costs by reducing recidivism. Turning Leaf is small – there are only three employees – but its work has the potential to validate programs which could save our community, our state and our nation thousands of dollars. Barch noted that in the 1980s there were around 500,000 prisoners incarcerated in our nations prisons and jails. Today that number is 2.3 million. It costs around $30,000.00 a year to incarcerate a prisoner in a federal penitentiary. Each year 600 inmates are released and return to the Charleston community. Currently 75% of those inmates who are released from prisons and jails nationally return to those institutions within five years of release. Continue reading “Amy Barch: Turning Leaf”
Serving historic Charleston, South Carolina, since 1920