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The Roundtable is now accepting applications for the Advocacy Fellowship Program. This is a part-time, contracted position for persons with lived experience navigating the criminal justice system and reentering the community. The Roundtable anticipates having two Fellowships in 2018. The goals of the Fellowship program are two-fold: (1) to enhance the capacity of the Roundtable […]

  “Criminalizing mental illness is expensive [and] it is ineffective” Sally Hernandez, Travis County Sheriff People with mental illness are greatly overrepresented among the millions of individuals cycling through our criminal justice system. Travis County is no exception, with the number of jail inmates with mental illness trending steeply upward over the past ten years. […]

  According to the speaker, the United States and the majority of state governments have created a justice system that promotes incarceration to drive profit. Our society has made it profitable for corporations to incarcerate people, with prisoners calculated as growth commodities on corporate balance sheets. Shareholders are fiscally rewarded when private prison populations increase. […]

Leonard Manzella’s CAGES January 19-29th While counseling mentally ill patients in a corrupt prison system, a psychologist is challenged to evaluate his own life by the very inmates he came to help. When Dr. Tom Morri returns to the prison he had previously been terminated from, he begins to see the system – and himself […]

In 2016, with the support of Shield-Ayres Foundation, the Roundtable launched an Advocacy Fellowship Program for formerly incarcerated persons with lived experience navigating the criminal justice system and reentering the community. The Fellowship program was such a success that we are expanding it to include an additional Fellowship position for 2017. The new Fellow will […]

On November 14th, the UT Opportunity Forum, the William Wayne Justice Center at UT Law, and the Austin/Travis County Reentry Roundtable hosted a forum titled “Fair Chance Hiring: Reducing Criminal Record Barriers to Employment.” See coverage of this event and the broader issue in the attached article from the Austin American-Statesman.