Why we exist
Joseph House exists because 95% of the 100,000 men and women currently incarcerated in Florida will be released. Without support services, two-thirds will return to prison within three years.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one “criminal justice system;” instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold almost 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 181 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
157,000 people from Florida are behind bars. Additionally, the number of people impacted by county and city jails in Florida is much larger than the statistic would suggest, because people cycle through local jails relatively quickly. Each year, at least 350,000 different people are booked into local jails in Florida.
More than 650,000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, and studies show that approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release.
Mass incarceration is an extension of our past.
The United States has the highest prison population in the world, housing roughly 22% of prisoners worldwide. Long before this record was set, we had a history of lynching, slavery, and executions.
Public notice for a slave sale on June 29, 1842
Announcement with the date and time of a slave sale near Tallahassee by Charles S. Sibley, a Commissioner in Chancery appointed by the Superior Court of the Middle District of Florida.
The sale was to take place on a plantation known as the Fauntleroy Place.
The slaves are identified by name in the notice.
Turpentine Farming at forced labor camps.
Numerous convict camps sprung-up throughout north Florida in the decades following the Civil War. The primary industry in Florida was turpentine. These prison and forced labor camps were established during the period known as the New South when many southern states sought new ways to create industry in the postbellum South. Workers in these camps were mostly African American men who were arrested under what was known as the Black Codes and later Jim Crow laws.
Florida, along with other states in the South, began the practice of leasing out convicts – many of whom were criminalized for being unemployed, homeless, or incurring debt under a barbaric peonage system – to private industries that sought to modernize the South. As noted by historians, the roots of convict leasing in Florida stems back to the end of the Civil War and the establishment of the Florida Department of Corrections in 1869. By 1907 nearly 90% of all state prisoners were leased out to turpentine operations and the vast majority of these prisoners were African American men.
State prisoners often suffered from abuse, sadistic torture, inadequate diets, diseases, minimal health care and unsanitary living conditions. One historian estimates that the annual mortality rate in these camps throughout the South reached close to 25% of workers.
Convict Leasing for minor crimes.
In the early 20th century, the vast majority of state prisoners in former slave states were leased to private companies for hard labor in extremely harsh conditions.
Many were sent away deep in the pine forests of North Florida where prisoners were expected to labor from sunrise to sunset tapping pine trees for turpentine, clearing swamps, harvesting timber or building roads. Most of these prisoners were convicted of minor crimes such as loitering, vagrancy, or even changing employment without permission.
The Lynching of Claude Neal on October 26, 1934
Twenty three year old African-American laborer Claude Neal was accused of the murder of a white woman he had known almost his entire life. Neal was brutally murdered and left hanging on a tree outside the Jackson county (Marianna) courthouse.
The ‘spectacle lynching’ attracted a white crowd numbering over 2,000. There are 9 lynchings reported in Jackson county.
Florida had the highest rate of lynchings per capita of any state in the country in the 20th century.
This report sparked a radical critique of the South and the widespread practice of lynching.
Conviction of "The Groveland Four."
On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17-year old Groveland, Florida woman, accused four black men of rape, testifying that she and her husband were attacked when their car stalled on a rural road near Groveland, Florida. The next day, Charles Greenlee, Sam Shepherd, and Walter Irvin were in jail.
Ernest Thomas fled the county and avoided arrest for several days until a Sheriff’s posse shot and killed him about 200 miles northwest of Lake County in Madison county. Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were sentenced to death in a trial. 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, because of his age, was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1951, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Lee Irvin were shot by Sheriff Willis Virgil McCall while being transported from Raiford to Lake County. McCall said they had attacked him. Walter Irvin survived and accused McCall of forcing Shepherd and him from the vehicle in which they were being transported and shooting them down. It became known as the “Groveland Shooting”.
70 years later the four men were pardoned for what was a racially motivated conviction.
Sweat Boxes used for solitary confinement
“Sweat Box” used for solitary confinement at the Florida State Prison – Raiford, Florida. 1957 or 1958.
While the Sweat Box is now obsolete, solitary confinement remains a widely used form of punishment in Florida with roughly over 12,000 housed in confinement on any given day.
We know there is a problem and we are committed to change.
Florida’s incarceration rate exceeds every country on the planet. In this era of mass incarceration, when millions are warehoused in prisons and jails, the dignity of the human person is compromised.
In a process Joseph House calls accompaniment, we prioritize the material, relational, and spiritual needs of the human person by walking with them as friends and advocates as they rejoin us in free society.
Our approach understands the past, recognizes the trauma of the prisoner, and strives for truth and reconciliaton.
Our Approach
We have come to see through our work in prisons in the South that offering a narrative of their situation through history - the history of slavery, of Jim Crow, of racial terror lynching, of convict leasing - has been essential to the ability of those incarcerated to know themselves, to know the truth of their lives, of their father’s and mother’s, of their grandparents’ lives.
We find that, otherwise, they are left to sit in cells echoing with society’s condemnation and rejection, left to condemn and reject themselves and their own families and communities.
In 1970, many policymakers believed the prison population was too large at 200,000. Fifty years later, however, there is an alarming 2.3 million people incarcerated. We at Joseph House also acknowledge the grave racial disparity among the incarcerated.
The Bureau of Justice finds that 1 in 3 black male babies born today will spend time in prison at some point in their lifetimes. In 2016, black males ages 18 and 19 were 12 times as likely as white males of the same age to be imprisoned.
We are committed to addressing these troubling realities as we serve those most affected by mass incarceration.
People in prison experience traumatic stressors that threaten their physical and mental health. Their coping abilities can be overwhelmed and, as they develop PTSD and trauma related symptoms, their risk for re-arrest rises.
The harsh disciplinary tactics, physical and sexual violence, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, idleness, and inadequate health and mental health care within prisons and the racial and class bias within the criminal justice system cause lasting harm to incarcerated people and place burdens on the families and communities they eventually return to.
At Joseph House, we work to heal this harm. We provide trauma interventions that begin with addressing the fundamental human needs for safety and material security.
Our therapeutic services include trauma-specific treatment programming, a trauma-informed environment and daily opportunities for our participants to engage in a healing process of being heard and welcomed by a supportive community concerned with ending mass incarceration.
We exist to accompany the prisoner and give them a home.
Mass incarceration is the latest chapter in our history of social injustice, but the story is not yet finished. Journey with us as we accompany the most vulnerable and helpless amongst us, modeling our mission on the life of Christ.
Restoring Dignity
Through our extensive work in the prison systems, we have seen firsthand the relational, material, and spiritual needs of the human person re-entering society after incarceration.
Through our research into the present problem of mass incarceration, we have seen the parallels with our history of slavery, lynching, and executions.
Through confronting these difficult truths, we are better equipped for the modern realities challenging the dignity of the person.
.webp)
.webp)
The process of accompaniment
This is a shared journey in which we walk with the formerly incarcerated through their first days and weeks of freedom to help ease the burdens created by the multiple obstacles they face in obtaining quality housing, paying court fees, receiving their driver’s license, gaining dignified employment, receiving physical and mental health services.
Our journey together aims to create opportunities for participants to become self-sustaining and contributing members of society and to do so at their pace, led by their needs and values, their hopes and dreams