Council for Insight, Compassion & Resilience

Read the feature in Corrections Today

The Council for Insight, Compassion & Resilience (formerly the Inmate Council Program) is a six-month intervention where participating incarcerated individuals are trained to facilitate council sessions for their peers, empowering them to become positive agents of change, on the yard, and in their lives. The program contributes to a shift of culture within jails and prisons and equips participants with tools for successful reentry and reintegration into their communities upon release. After the successful 2013 launch of the program at Salinas Valley State Prison, the program has now grown to 27 California prisons.

For more detail about the Council for Insight, Compassion & Resilience, download the program overview, or contact us.

Watch the video above to learn more about the program
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New videos that introduce and promote the program for
participants in jails and prisons can be found here

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our impact:

27
california state prisons

3500
incarcerated program participants

video testimonials

Meet Joseph

Meet Mitch

Meet Juan

Meet Anival

watch more videos

research

Independent program evaluation of the Council for Insight, Compassion & Resilience conducted by researchers from the University of California and the RAND Corporation revealed significant positive outcomes in the following areas:

Reductions in physical aggression
Reductions in verbal aggression
Reductions in anger
Reductions in hostility
Reductions in PTSD symptoms
Improvements in mindfulness
Increases in empathy
Increases in resilience
Increases in sense of connectedness with others
Improvements in mental health

An evaluation report of recent research on this program conducted by Dr. Stacy Calhoun and her team at UCLA may be found here.

On April 4, 2018, Center for Council was asked to present an outline of its evaluation program and preliminary findings to the California Rehabilitative Oversight Board; view more information on that presentation here.

sites throughout the state

Center for Council has implemented the Council for Insight, Compassion & Resilience in 27 prison facilities operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). The majority of the programs began as a result of the Innovative Grant Program, which was established in 2015 by CDCR to "support and advance inmate rehabilitation efforts and increase volunteerism in prisons across the state."

We are also grateful for funding that has come through private sources (including the JIB Fund Community Building Initiative), supplementing the state-funded programs and enabling us to expand the reach of the program to several additional facilities.