Family Justice Hub provides support
POTTSTOWN >> When individuals are arrested, their loved ones are often faced with questions about how they can help or what to do next.
That’s why the Participatory Defense Initiative Family Justice Hub in Pottstown is letting people know that they’re there and that they can assist.
Located at First Baptist Church, 301 King Street, the hub serves as a place for families and friends of incarcerated individuals to learn how to best support their loved ones.
“The Family Justice Hub is about families coming together to support their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers who are in the criminal justice system,” said Dean Beer, chief public defender for Montgomery County. “It’s meant to bring the family together to figure out how to constructively support them, either by helping them get people to come in and support them for bail reductions, to work on defending their case or helping them get out of incarceration. That’s our goal. Too many people are unnecessarily incarcerated in this country and in this county,” said Beer.
Beer explained that many
individuals who are incarcerated quickly lose their connections to important things like jobs, family and housing. These hubs, sponsored by the public defender’s office, are specifically designed to let family members know how they can mend the disconnects and work practically to assist their loved ones.
“In establishing character witnesses and things it also provides a support because they feel like they’re able to do something, that they’re able to help their loved one. A lot of times you feel like you can’t help and you don’t know what to do. So it gives direction and a plan so that people feel more connected, more effective and that they can just come in and be able to talk about the situation. It helps them emotionally,” said Joanna Figueroa, program facilitator and assistant to the program’s director, Pressley Day.
The hub is not run by lawyers and was not intended to be run that way, according to Beer. Instead, the program works with people such as Day to better understand the system and bring the community together to work on criminal justice issues.
“It does wonders for this town to have that program here,” said Day. “We are very fortunate to have this in Pottstown. We want families and individuals to use it. We’ve helped six families and two individuals so far.”
“This is the first ever in the history of Pottstown,” said Robert Edmunds, program assistant. “This is because of people like Mr. Day who sat down and thought about all the problems in Pottstown. The public defender’s office didn’t just wake up one day and decide to come to Pottstown.”
The Pottstown hub location is not the first in Montgomery County, however. In 2015, Norristown became the first public defender office in the United States to sponsor participatory defense. The hub partnered with Raj Jayadev and the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project in San Jose, California, a community organizer who developed the participatory defense model. The two hub locations make Montgomery County among the very first communities in the nation to introduce the community-based tool, according to the county website.
“We went out to the national gathering. There’s about nine cities across the country that are involved,” explained Adrienne L. Aiken, deputy director of the Montgomery County Community Action Development Commission. “It started in San Jose with an organization called Debug. They actually don’t work with their public defender’s office so we’re blessed to have the public defender’s office involved.”
Aiken explained that after only 15 months of operation in Norristown, the hub has significantly helped those who have entered the criminal justice system, citing one instance where the group helped take 57 years off a man’s sentence following psyche evaluations and drug testing. Aiken added that by shaving off unnecessary years of sentencing, the program also helps save taxpayers dollars.
The group said that even those who do not have a loved one in the criminal justice system are still able to help the program by attending meetings and hearings for support.
“More volunteers would be great for both these programs in Norristown and in Pottstown. There’s a lot of education that needs to be going on about what goes on in the criminal justice system, how people are treated in the criminal justice system, and the more volunteers we have the more information we can get out to people.
The Norristown hub is located at 113 East Main St. and is open every Monday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pottstown’s hub hours are every Thursday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Questions about the hub can be directed to Pressley Day at golfday16@gmail.com or Dean Beer at dbeer@montcopa.org.