In 2010, I wrote and published A Closer Look, a data-driven portrait of violence, incarceration, and reentry in Richmond. It showed that 62% of the people paroled to Contra Costa returned to prison within two years, ten points above the state rate, and that three-quarters of the parolees in Richmond lived in just two neighborhoods. The County’s system for incarcerating people was well established; its system for helping them come home and succeed barely existed. No one was responsible for building it, so I set about designing the pieces.
In 2011, I developed Reentry Solutions Group, a civic education project that became my public forum: every month for eight years, I presented research and analysis on the local criminal legal system, bringing the County’s justice leaders into public conversation with the community they serve. In 2012, I wrote the County’s AB 109 operations plan to ensure that this new stream of state funding would be devoted to community initiatives. In 2013, some of that money was put to use to develop a new one-stop reentry center; I led the community-driven process to design the Reentry Success Center, which opened in 2015.
In 2015, I designed the County’s Youth Justice Initiative, which combined a school-based prevention program with a juvenile reentry effort to bring young people home from detention and back to school. And while advising the Community Advisory Board pro bono, I conceived and led the campaign to create the Office of Reentry and Justice. The County launched it as a pilot in January 2017 and made it a permanent part of the Probation Department in 2020.
In 2017, the County hired me to design CoCo LEAD Plus, its Proposition 47 diversion project, which won a state grant of nearly $6 million. That same year, Ali Saidi and the Contra Costa Immigrant Rights Alliance set out to protect immigrant residents facing deportation; with them, I designed Stand Together Contra Costa, a rapid-response deportation defense initiative. In 2022, I wrote the successful $6 million proposal for the Holistic Intervention Partnership for the Public Defender, building on the foundational work started years before with the Early Representation Project I designed.
In each case, the work began the same way it did in 2010: by finding and filling the gap no agency owned.