Billi Jo Starr, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Education at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, will take part in a panel of community experts discussing “Prisoner Re-Entry” on Wednesday, March 4 at 4 pm in the Mary Cheadle room, 3rd floor of the UCSB Library. The panel is part of the ninth annual UCSB Reads 2015, in which the campus and Santa Barbara communities are reading the same book, Piper Kerman's best-selling memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
In addition to Starr, who is also co-founder of Freedom4Youth, an organization that supports youth as they exit detention, the panel will include Kristianne Clifford and Sister Terry Dodge. Clifford is a program assistant at the Freedom to Choose Foundation, which offers workshops in California prisons on communication and self-forgiveness. Clifford, who grew up in Goleta and spent 18 years in prison, knows firsthand what it is like to make the transition. Sister Terry Dodge is from Crossroads, a nonprofit in Claremont that works exclusively with women who have been incarcerated. In the state of California, 59 percent of all women released from prison return to prison within three years. By contrast, 86 percent of Crossroads graduates are self-sustaining after six years.
Starr is working on her Ph.D. in the Department of Education, working with Professor Michael Gerber as her advisor. Freedom4Youth, which she co-founded, empowers youth in the juvenile justice system by facilitating opportunities for expression and socioemotional learning through programs focused on: effective communication, education planning/job training, mentorship, and community integration.