This Sunday at 7:00 pm ET, 60 Minutes—the CBS flagship news magazine show—takes a look at the people living and working in the groundbreaking T.R.U.E. Community, a re-purposed housing unit in a maximum security prison in Connecticut that centers healing and restoration for 18- to 25-year-olds. Vera’s Restoring Promise Initiative, in collaboration with
MILPA Collective, partnered with the Connecticut Department of Corrections to establish T.R.U.E.—the first unit of its kind in the country. Today, Restoring Promise has opened re-purposed housing units across five facilities in three states: Connecticut’s women’s prison, the Middlesex County Jail in Massachusetts, and most recently at prisons in South Carolina.
Former Department of Correction Commissioner Scott Semple, said, “We are proud to see T.R.U.E. and its residents and staff featured on 60 Minutes. T.R.U.E. is part of a journey that began when then-Governor Dannel Malloy and I traveled with Vera to Germany to see a different approach to incarceration rooted in human dignity. We were honored to work with Vera to bring it home. The radical transformation we see at T.R.U.E. is exceptional, but it is no longer the exception. Vera’s powerful approach has sparked a movement that has already spread beyond Connecticut, and will continue to grow.”
60 Minutes spent a year meeting people living and working at T.R.U.E., as well as talking to Vera staff who developed the approach. The episode will focus on the powerful story of Shyquinn Dix, today a Dean's List student at the University of Maine at Presque Isle and the star player on its basketball team, who credits the healing experience of living in the T.R.U.E. unit for his ability to thrive—as well as the staff who supported him.
Watch a trailer of the episode here.
We’ll be live-tweeting at #ReimaginePrison throughout the broadcast.
And we’ll host a Facebook Live on Monday at 1:00 PM ET on Vera’s Facebook page to provide more insights and perspective into the unit and the system reform it is advancing, featuring Restoring Promise Program Director Alex Frank and Abdul Bradley, former T.R.U.E. resident and now program assistant at Vera.
For more on T.R.U.E., be sure to check out
Maurice Chammah’s piece on the process and impact of Restoring Promise, published in The Marshall Project last year and now the lead story in the Marshall Project's
pioneering new newsletter for incarcerated readers, just released yesterday.
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