Community & Justice Services

With help and ideas from incarcerated men and women, Van Buren is creating dynamic spaces that provide safe venues for dialogue and reconciliation; employment and job training; and social services to help keep people from entering the justice system in the first place.

For a crime he committed in his early twenties, the courts sentenced Marlon Peterson to 10 years in prison -- and, as he says, a lifetime of irrelevance. In this brave talk, he reminds us why we should invest in the humanity of those people society would like to disregard and discard.

This film looks into why so many transgender people encounter the police, how those encounters often lead to discriminatory treatment, and the inhumane conditions that transgender people all too frequently experience. The film examines how high unemployment of transgender people, family rejection and homelessness contribute to staggering rates of incarceration.