Aleph Institute to help AAs with alternatives to jail

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Sun, Jan 19 2020, 8:06 am

SEEKING JUSTICEBUILIDING BRIDGES
Aleph expands alternative sentencing program to African American community
Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel has been working for three decades to ease the sentences of Jews convicted of non-violent crimes. A foundation grant has helped him increase his reach.
By TOBY TABACHNICK
January 16, 2020, 8:28 am 0
Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel. (File photo)
Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel. (File photo)
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For the past three decades, Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel has worked to find sentencing alternatives for Jewish community members convicted of non-violent crimes, avoiding harsh jail sentences that would wholly dismantle their lives and the lives of their families.

Now, he is using his expertise to help those in the African American community as well.

Thanks in part to a 2018 grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation, Vogel has expanded the reach of his program, working hand in hand with African American faith leaders and others to find effective alternatives to prison.
Taking on federal, state and local cases, Vogel, executive director of the Aleph Institute-North East Region, and his team advocate to avoid life-destroying punishments, emphasizing rehabilitation instead.

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“All these years we were doing all Jewish clients,” said Vogel. “However, because we received the foundation money to do it not only for the Jewish inmates, we are now working with other agencies, non-Jewish agencies to help organize it in their communities too.”

In addition to the foundation funding, Aleph receives funds from Allegheny County to provide casework services to assist in alternative sentencing and reentry programs. So far, Vogel is working with about six African American clients in addition to those who are Jewish.

“Alternative sentencing should be for not only Jewish, but for everyone,” stressed Vogel.

Aleph, located in the heart of Squirrel Hill, also provides Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous programming, assistance in finding housing and employment, and help in accessing healthcare to those who have been incarcerated and their families.

Aleph has had a “100% success rate” in securing employment for participants in its Alternative Sentencing Program, and, for program participants without an alcohol dependency issue, “there is a 100% success rate in keeping the family units intact for ASP participants,” according to statistics provided by Aleph.

Vogel is now partnering with Rev. Tim Smith of the Center of Life in Hazelwood and with leaders of the Birmingham Foundation, “putting together a program where we agree our caseworkers will oversee that the individual will go to 12-step programs, will go to anger management, will go to parenting classes, will go to other programs that are available,” he explained. “We will oversee it and see that it works hand in hand with parole and other agencies to make sure that the individual has the resources. We find them jobs, get them back into the community, get them back into a healthy part of the community, with them going back to their faith-based program, whichever it is, and helping them become productive members.”

Alternatives to jail gives these people “another chance,” said Vogel. “So many of these kids on the streets have not been given a chance. They didn’t graduate high school, there is no one holding their hand to help them get their GED. They need to be directed and walked with as they go through it, and they 99.9% want to be productive members of society. They just need someone to hold their hands, and we are the hand-holder.”

Vogel’s partnership with the African American community began about five months ago, an offspring of an initiative begun by Dr. Bruce Rabin, who has been convening meetings between the Jewish and African American communities at the Birmingham Foundation on the South Side. Participants at those meetings have included several local rabbis, employees of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, and local African American clergy and other leaders.

The meetings between the two groups have focused on “the effects of trauma on the mental and physical health of young individuals and how we could use programs from the Jewish community that could be beneficial to the African American community, and how events occurring in the African American community could be made available for educational purposes for Jewish youth so they could become more cognizant of issues that black kids are growing up with,” said Rabin, a longtime professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Rabin was inspired to convene the meetings between the two communities following a program last spring at the Center for Victims during which he spoke about the effects of trauma on a community.

“That motivated me to bring people together to start talking about this, to show the black community that we are concerned and we want to do things, and in exchange we want help in educating our children about issues in the black community, so that when they grow up they will be involved in helping other people and not growing up in isolation.”

During those meetings, “one of the things that was quite obvious was the wonderful success Rabbi Vogel has had, and that the African American community could learn and benefit from what he is doing, and hopefully utilize his program to help black individuals avoid incarceration,” said Rabin.

The Center of Life’s Smith, who has spent the last 30 years working to reverse the disproportionate incarceration of young African Americans, said his recent collaboration with Vogel has been valuable.

“It is obviously very important work and it’s important to me because what I have seen as an African American is a disproportionate amount, particularly of young men, get put in jail for very small offenses and actually sit in jail for long periods of time, without any good representation,” Smith explained. “Some of them don’t have a good understanding of the law, they don’t have the money to get a lawyer, the public defenders don’t really do a very good job for them. So being able to have some resources out there that we can tap into that will help to represent some of these folks is really invaluable.”

The two faith leaders have been working together for the release of a man who has been incarcerated since the 1960s. The man, who is dying from stage four cancer and other diseases — and who wants to spend his final days with this family — was arrested and imprisoned at the age of 17 for being in a stolen car. While in prison, he ended up killing two members of the Aryan Nations in self-defense and received multiple life sentences as a result.

“That was a black man who gets arrested in the 1960s for being in a stolen car, then gets triple life,” said Smith. “The reason why he killed these other guys is because they were trying to kill him. That’s the nature of the environment in prison. There is no real justice done here, it’s just somebody going through the system.”

Smith and Vogel are “working together to see how many people we can help, through either getting somebody to look at their case again, or get them out so that they can spend the rest of their time with their family,” Smith said. “We have found a way to work together and that means a lot.”

Allegheny County has joined in the push for alternative sentencing, Vogel noted. Just last week, the county published its year one report for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety + Justice Challenge, a “national initiative to prevent the misuse and overuse of jails,” with stakeholders in the criminal justice system “working collaboratively to reduce the number of people entering jail and those staying in the jail longer than necessary,” according to a press release.

As a result of the work in Allegheny County during this first year, the jail population was reduced by 7%.
“Everyone has come to recognize that prison is not the solution for every crime,” noted Vogel. “Not only is it not the solution, it’s very destructive. Even taking an individual out of society for three months, which is comparatively very small, is very destabilizing and ruins an individual terribly. He loses his job, it strains his relationship with this family. All of a sudden his family has to find resources to cover months without working. It’s very damaging.” pjc

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at
tttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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TAMPING DOWN ON HATE'MORAL CENSURE' MAY HELP WHEN CENSORSHIP IS NOT AVAILABLE
Limits of free speech explored by panel at Heinz History Center
The proliferation of incendiary speech on the internet and social media may require a reinterpretation of the law, experts predicted.
By TOBY TABACHNICK
January 16, 2020, 8:18 am 0
Keith Burris, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers and Ruth Ann Dailey (Photo by Toby Tabachnick)
Keith Burris, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers and Ruth Ann Dailey (Photo by Toby Tabachnick)
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The First Amendment right to free speech has never been absolute, just as the specificity of its limits have never been perfectly clear. The proliferation of the internet and social media have further muddled where the lines should be drawn between freedom of speech and when it should be constrained because of its potential for harm. The issue is ripe, as the hatred promoted on certain sites can lead to violence, as may have been the case with the accused murderer of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life building who had been active on such platforms.

A panel of experts, including Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha, parsed out the difficulties in navigating freedom of speech in the 21st century at the Heinz History Center on Jan. 8. The program, dubbed “Are There Limits to Free Speech?” was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Highmark and moderated by Keith Burris, executive editor of the Post-Gazette.

The 90-minute discussion before an audience of hundreds of interested community members had the panelists questioning whether our rapidly changing society should reinterpret where limits of speech should be set, as well as what everyday citizens might do to tamp down on the pervasive incendiary rhetoric polluting our atmosphere.

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Calling himself a “First Amendment fundamentalist,” Duquesne University School of Law Professor Bruce Ledewitz noted three categories of speech under the First Amendment that could raise concerns.

“One is when you are upset because of something I believe — and that’s a circumstance in which there is really nothing that can be done,” he explained.

The second category includes speech that is intended to harm, intimidate or harass, which is not protected under the First Amendment, according to the professor. Pursuant to a Supreme Court decision, this type of non-protected speech would include such acts as a cross-burning intended to intimidate.

The third category, said Ledewitz, is encouraging another person “to commit violence or other serious crimes.” Part of the test to determine if speech is protected is whether it is directed to causing “imminent lawless action,” and is likely to indeed “produce such action,” according to the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

The prominence of social media, Ledewitz speculated, may have altered what types of speech should not be protected under Brandenburg.

“What used to be just talking is now essentially planning violence, as speedily as circumstances permit,” he said. “And what used to be protected probably is not to be protected anymore, in all circumstances.”

Wasi Mohammed, Pittsburgh director of community entrepreneurship at Forward Cities and the former executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, noted that his opinion on limits of speech has evolved over time. While he was raised with the mentality that free speech is “sacred,” his views have become more nuanced.

As “the darkest corners of the internet are manifesting in physical violence almost daily,” targeting marginalized communities, Mohammed said that he now weighs the First Amendment freedom for hateful speech against the rights of others protected by such laws as “the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection for everybody.”

Shapiro highlighted the responsibility of ordinary citizens to “move this dialogue forward.” He implored the community to “yes, remember the horrors of what happened in Rabbi Myers’ shul, but to also remember what happened two hours later at the corner of Forbes and Murray when we gathered together — people from all walks of life committed to working together to break down the hate, and bring up the love and bring people together.”

While Shapiro noted that he works to “find the line between protecting ideas and stopping certain acts,” the real work that needs to be done “to deal with hate speech in our community is your responsibility, on your timelines and in our town halls, to make sure that we’re bringing down the temperature. And that we are speaking to one another with respect, and with that feeling of love that we had that evening, standing outside in that misty weather.”

Indifference is not an option, said Meagan Cahill, senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

“We can’t just say, ‘We’re not Jewish. It’s not really affecting me,’ or ‘I’m not Muslim. It’s not affecting me,’” she said. “We all have to step up, and we all have to say that it’s not acceptable. Now, I don’t have a great solution for how we do that in these times, like on 4chan and Reddit and places where it’s that strong, tight community of whatever kind of terrorist groups might be posting on there. There’s not a ready good answer for that. But I think at the very least, we all have to say we’re going to be active, we’re going to actually be proactive….We have to change some of the statutes but we need to be doing the prevention work as well. I think if we’re proactive, if family members notice that something’s going on, if people notice someone is posting things online, there are new tools, especially for law enforcement, that they might be able to use, to remove weapons temporarily.”

While censorship may not always be a viable option, moral censure can be, emphasized Ruth Ann Dailey, a columnist for the Post-Gazette for almost 20 years.

The recent rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area reminded Dailey of the Crown Heights riots and murders in 1991, after a black child, Gavin Cato, was accidentally struck and killed by a car in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Following the accident, several Jews were attacked on the street by black youths, and a visiting Jewish student from Australia was killed. Two weeks later, a non-Jewish man was killed by a group of black men, who might have mistaken their target as a Jew.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, in his eulogy at Cato’s funeral, referred to “diamond dealers” and made other provocative remarks about Jews, some say stoking the violence.

Sharpton has reportedly expressed regret privately to Jewish leaders for his comments, and in May 2019 conceded he could have “done more to heal rather than harm” at the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center conference.

In researching the Crown Heights riots of 1991 in relation to current events, Dailey recalled that a banner was displayed at Cato’s funeral that said, “Hitler did not do the job.”

“People who are still active in modern politics spoke at that funeral,” noted Dailey, adding that “moral censure” could be appropriate for those “who participated in that room, who stood and spoke at that funeral and didn’t protest.”

“I think there might be a responsibility to hold the people who are still out there today active and prospering in American society, to see if we can we can hold them responsible,” she said. “That would be an example of moral censure.”

Dailey noted that in the ensuing years following the Crown Heights riots, “some of the leaders of the black community and the Jewish community reached out and spent years of bridge building. As recently as a few years ago, you would see regular coverage of how pleased they were that that had helped bring peace, civil rest.

And then here suddenly, again, we have another outburst of these horrible acts of violence. And I do think that is greatly increased by social media and until our laws catch up, as Megan (Cahill) said, we have to be manning the barrier there of appropriate civil discourse.”

Myers implored the community to make connections across ethnicities and religions.

“We don’t know our neighbors,” he said. “I daresay most of the people in this room don’t know anything that the Pillars of Islam. Most of you, unless you are Jewish, may not know the tenets of Judaism — even if you’re Jewish you might not know the tenets of Judaism. What’s the difference between a Protestant and a Roman Catholic?

“So if we get to the point of legislation, it’s too late, because we’ve missed the boat on education,” he continued. “It’s about education. If you understand your neighbor, you have to love them. If you understand your neighbor, you can appreciate who they are, their origins, where they come from. So as adults, we need to find and create opportunities to get to know our neighbors, both from an educational, and social and cultural point of view.” pjc

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at
ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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