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Reducing Recidivism, One System-Impacted Entrepreneur at a Time
Jul 09, 2025
The U.S. prison system faces criticism for its failure to effectively rehabilitate incarcerated individuals, contributing to high recidivism rates. While some programs exist, they are often inadequate and lack sufficient resources, with many prisoners facing dangerous conditions and barriers to successful reintegration.
Alexis Tamm investigates, in a two-part series, the problems and responses to the significant obstacles recently released individuals face.
When Evie Litwok was released from prison at age 63, she was homeless, jobless, penniless, and given nothing but a Greyhound bus ticket home to New York. Her experience was not unique; most formerly incarcerated individuals in the U.S. are left with nothing and have no means to successfully start their lives again.
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate among all independent democracies in the world, with an estimated two million people behind bars. But it also has an alarmingly high recidivism rate—a direct result of the lack of resources for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted individuals. Over 50% of formerly incarcerated individuals are reincarcerated within three years of their release, while 82% were arrested again at least once by the ten-year mark.
Those incarcerated in the U.S. face numerous barriers to reentry, preventing them from being able to build stable and successful lives, despite state-sponsored reentry services meant to facilitate the process. Formerly incarcerated individuals are ten times more likely to be unhoused compared to the general American population, and as a result, more likely to face reincarceration for survival behaviors associated with homelessness, such as sleeping in public places or evading transit fees. Numerous legal barriers limit those with a criminal history from obtaining public housing, as do discrimination, bias, and lack of affordability in the private housing market. Twenty-one states impose limitations on receiving SNAP benefits, or food stamps for low-income families, for those with drug-related criminal convictions, fueling food insecurity. And finding a job is no easy task; over 40,000 state and federal collateral consequences limit employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals, namely by restricting employers from hiring them and limiting their access to occupational and business licenses.
The LGBTQ+ community is a particularly vulnerable target of the criminal justice system. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals are more than twice as likely to be arrested as their straight counterparts, and are incarcerated at three times the rate of straight people. They are also overrepresented in prisons and jails and on probation and parole, forced to serve longer sentences, and significantly more likely to be victimized by both staff and other inmates. Trans individuals also suffer disproportionately, as an estimated 1 in 6 trans people have been incarcerated, which includes almost half of all Black trans people in the country.
Litwok openly identifies as lesbian, for which she was targeted during her time in prison. Now, she is dedicated to helping system-impacted women and LGBTQ+ individuals—those who have been either directly or indirectly affected by the criminal justice system. “Because they face such horrific conditions when they are inside, and they are often released home, where they have even fewer resources than everyone else. This is something I know from personal experience,” Litwok said in an interview with The Good People Fund. “We are constant targets—especially transgender women and especially Black transgender women. We are targeted before we go into prison, we are targeted inside, and we are targeted once we are out.”
Her nonprofit, Witness to Mass Incarceration (Witness), is based in New York City and helps vulnerable populations, namely formerly incarcerated and system-impacted individuals and the LGBTQ+ community. Witness strives to build economic independence and reduce recidivism through numerous initiatives, including its latest program, the Art of Tailoring.
“We’ve started a vocational school, the first program being the Art of Tailoring, because there are some formerly incarcerated people with talent that don’t have the means, or the resources, or the know-how to start a business,” Litwok said. In collaboration with the Queens Economic Development Corporation and the Hetrick-Martin Institute, Witness launched the Art of Tailoring in 2024 with a four-year grant from the Department of Justice. The program aims to establish a “self-sustaining economic model” in which individuals impacted by the system are taught skills in tailoring, fashion design, entrepreneurship, and business fundamentals.
“We have about twenty 18-24 year old LGBT, system-impacted, mostly homeless kids that are in this class,” Litwok said. “A lot of them are in the shelter system waiting to get housing.” She interviewed about 50 eligible young adults found through HMI, selecting an initial class of 25 to form the Art of Tailoring’s inaugural cohort.
During the two-year program, participants begin with a six-month pre-apprenticeship program that teaches essential skills in sewing and tailoring. The following twelve-month apprenticeship program shifts its focus towards entrepreneurship and will coach students on how to develop their own personal brand. The final six months comprise the incubator program, which provides more advanced entrepreneurship training in areas such as business growth, marketing strategies, and industry networking. The class meets every Monday at Witness’s MakerSpace in Queens, with the option for students to attend during the rest of the week to work on their projects.
By fostering economic independence and a sense of empowerment and self-worth among its students, The Art of Tailoring strives to help them build stable and successful lives—and demonstrate how supporting such resources can eliminate recidivism entirely.
In Part 2, Alexis explores how a program is not only personally transformative for its participants, but it has the potential to fuel revolutionary change in how the U.S. addresses recidivism and reentry.
Alexis Tamm is a senior at Georgetown University. An avid writer and aspiring journalist, she is passionate about solutions-focused reporting and driving change through storytelling.
Alexis was a cohort member in Common Ground USA's Journalism program, where Hugo Balta served as an instructor. Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. Learn more by clicking HERE.
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When Democracy’s Symbols Get Hijacked: How the Far Right Co-Opted Classical Imagery
Jul 08, 2025
For generations, Americans have surrounded themselves with the symbols of ancient Greece and Rome: marble columns, laurel wreaths, Roman eagles, and the fasces. These icons, carved into our government buildings and featured on our currency, were intended to embody democracy, civic virtue, and republican ideals.
But in recent years, far-right movements in the U.S. and abroad have hijacked these classical images, repackaging them into symbols of exclusion, militarism, and authoritarian nostalgia.
As a student of both Classical Civilizations and Public Policy, I’ve seen this trend firsthand. Online spaces and political rallies now bristle with distorted classical references: Spartan helmets on protest gear, Roman eagles on alt-right banners, and phrases like molon labe (“come and take them”) lifted from ancient Greek battles but weaponized for modern culture wars.
This isn’t accidental. Extremist groups deliberately lean on classical symbolism to project legitimacy and historical grandeur. Their goal is to link their movement with notions of strength, order, and Western identity – often coded with racial and cultural exclusion.
The far right’s fascination with the ancient world has deep roots. In the 1920s and ’30s, Benito Mussolini drew heavily on Roman imagery to build Italian Fascism, adopting the fasces (a bundle of rods and an axe once carried by Roman magistrates) as the regime’s primary emblem. Nazi Germany followed suit, celebrating classical sculpture and architecture as models of supposed Aryan purity, while denouncing modern art as “degenerate.”
Today’s extremists borrow these same visual cues. The January 6 Capitol riot showcased Spartan and Roman symbols among the flags and homemade shields. In Charlottesville, at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, white nationalists marched with fasces emblems and the Roman acronym SPQR, the historic motto of the Roman Republic. White nationalist groups like Identity Evropa and Vanguard America continue to embed Roman eagles and Greek statuary into their propaganda materials.
The strategy is clear: these symbols evoke a sense of timeless authority and noble struggle. They suggest a connection to ancient civilizations that are popularly, but often simplistically, viewed as the cradle of democracy and Western greatness.
And that brings us to an uncomfortable truth: this hijacking is made easier by the way mainstream American culture has mythologized the classical world for decades.
For many Americans, Greece and Rome have long been portrayed in a sanitized narrative: Athens as the pure birthplace of democracy, and Rome as a republic of virtuous citizens. Our civic buildings mimic the Parthenon and Pantheon. Our textbooks focus on Athenian voting rights and Roman legal codes, often skipping over the less flattering realities: slavery, imperialism, patriarchy, and political collapse.
By flattening classical history into a story of unbroken democratic virtue, we’ve created a blind spot. Extremist groups exploit this by framing themselves as heirs to an imagined tradition of Western strength and purity.
Take the Spartan obsession, for example. In reality, Sparta was a militarized society that depended on the mass enslavement of the helot population and engaged in routine violence to maintain social order. However, modern far-right groups latch onto a Hollywood-inspired version of Sparta: all heroism, all warrior ethos, with no historical context.
The same goes for Roman imagery. The fasces, which in the U.S. have long symbolized unity and civic authority, are now appearing on hate group banners to signal authoritarian power. Even the Latin motto SPQR, originally an emblem of citizen governance, has been stripped of context and repurposed for modern nationalist signaling.
So, how do we respond?
First, educators have a critical role. As a classics student, I’ve learned that understanding Greece and Rome means wrestling with contradictions: innovation and oppression, civic ideals and systemic injustice. Middle and high school teachers, as well as university professors, should present the classical world in its full complexity—not as a golden age to be uncritically admired. Students should leave a unit on Athens knowing not only about democracy, but also about who was excluded from it.
Second, policymakers and civic leaders must be mindful of how they use classical symbols today. While classical architecture and symbolism remain fixtures in public life, their deployment must be accompanied by an awareness of how extremists are attempting to reframe their meaning. Civic leaders should refrain from using these images in ways that inadvertently echo extremist aesthetics, particularly in campaign materials or public art.
Third, online platforms and moderators play a crucial role. Just as we flag hate symbols and dog whistles in other contexts, there should be an awareness of how classical imagery is being used in far-right propaganda. This doesn’t mean banning every Roman eagle, but it does mean being alert when such symbols appear alongside calls to violence or exclusion.
Finally, the general public needs to approach classical imagery with more historical literacy. The solution isn’t to erase Greece and Rome from our civic identity, but to study them with clear eyes. When we understand their full history, including their flaws, failures, and complexities, we rob extremists of the ability to manipulate these symbols unchallenged.
The classical world was never monolithic, and neither is our democracy. Both are complicated, diverse, and constantly evolving. If we want democratic symbols to remain tools for inclusion rather than division, we need to reclaim them from those who would distort the past to undermine the present.
Bennett Gillespie is a student at Duke University and a council member of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. He is also an intern with the Fulcrum.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
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What Remains of “Public” Education?
Jul 08, 2025
Recently, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that will likely reverberate through American classrooms for years to come. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices granted parents broad authority to exempt their children from curricular materials and school activities that conflict with their religious convictions. Like so many recent decisions from this Court, the ruling is being hailed as a victory by some and met with grave concern by others. But beneath the headlines and the predictable cultural skirmishes, it’s worth pausing to ask a deeper question: What does this mean for the role of public education in a pluralistic society?
It’s tempting, as so many commentators already have, to frame this as another act in the ongoing battle over religious liberty. The plaintiffs—an alliance of evangelical, Catholic, and Muslim families—argued that specific lessons on sexuality, gender identity, and even evolution violated their sincerely held beliefs. They found a sympathetic ear in the Court’s conservative majority, which cited the Free Exercise Clause and the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. “The State may not compel a child to participate in instruction that contradicts the religious tenets of their family,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion. “To do so would be to place the state above the conscience.”
That line will no doubt find its way onto the banners of activists and the letterhead of advocacy groups. But it also raises a fundamental problem that I find deeply fraught. Public education in America has long been a test of coexistence. The country’s first common schools, championed by Horace Mann, were conceived as a way to unite a population of immigrants, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and, eventually, students from every imaginable background. The classroom was where children learned not just math and reading, but also how to live with differences.
In the nineteenth century, Catholic families objected to Protestant readings of the Bible in public schools, and their protests sometimes turned violent. In the twentieth century, legal battles erupted over prayer, the teaching of evolution, and the inclusion of sex education in schools. Each conflict forced the courts and the culture to grapple with the limits of tolerance—how much pluralism a pluralistic society can bear.
The latest Supreme Court decision pushes that tension to its breaking point. By giving parents broad veto power over what their children encounter in the classroom, the Court has effectively privatized the public square. Imagine a biology class where a third of the students are excused during discussions of natural selection, or a history class where half the room steps out for units on the civil rights movement because the narrative doesn’t align with their parents’ worldview. What, then, is left of the “public” in public education?
The majority argues that this is a matter of conscience, not censorship. “No child should be forced to choose between their faith and their education,” reads the decision. But in practice, this ruling opens the door to a kind of balkanization—with each family carving out its own version of reality, shielded from uncomfortable facts or perspectives. This isn’t religious liberty in the classic sense; it’s a retreat from the very project of public education.
America’s religious communities have always played a vital role in shaping civic life, and their desire to protect their children from what they see as moral confusion is hardly new. But I worry that the Court’s decision mistakes the purpose of public schools. The point was never to provide a tailor-made education for each student. It was—and should be—to foster a shared understanding, a common vocabulary for citizenship.
There is, of course, a long tradition of parental rights in American law. The Supreme Court recognized as much in cases like Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which allowed Catholic families to send their children to parochial schools, and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which exempted Amish children from compulsory high school attendance. But those decisions carved out narrow exceptions. The new ruling is something else entirely: an open invitation for parents to opt their children out of any lesson they find objectionable, no matter how central it may be to the curriculum.
What’s at stake here isn’t just the content of textbooks but the integrity of the classroom itself. Teachers will be required to navigate a complex web of exemptions, permissions, and potential lawsuits. Administrators will have to track which students can hear which lessons. And students—most of all—will be denied the chance to encounter ideas that challenge their assumptions or broaden their horizons.
It’s worth remembering that education is not supposed to be comfortable. The best teachers I ever had unsettled me. They forced me to question what I thought I knew—about history, about literature, about how my own experience fit, or didn’t fit, into the broader story of America. To shelter students from intellectual discomfort is to rob them of the very thing that makes education transformative.
The Court’s decision also risks deepening the divides that already threaten our democracy. We live in an era of epistemic sorting, where Americans not only disagree about values but about basic facts. Social media has made it easy to curate information and shield ourselves from dissenting views. Public schools, for all their flaws, remained one of the few places where young people could encounter difference—not just in the abstract, but in the faces and voices of their classmates. The new ruling chips away at that fragile common ground.
Some will argue that parental control is the only bulwark against indoctrination by the state. But this is a false dichotomy. The answer to discomfort is not retreat but engagement. It is possible—and indeed essential—for schools to respect religious diversity while upholding a core commitment to truth, inquiry, and shared civic life.
What, then, are educators to do? Some will comply, quietly excusing students from lessons that risk controversy. The real challenge, though, falls to all of us: to articulate a vision of the common good that is capacious enough to include fundamental disagreement but sturdy enough to withstand the centrifugal forces of private conviction.
American public education has never fully lived up to its ideals. It has excluded, marginalized, and, at times, indoctrinated. But the hope is that, over time, the classroom could become a workshop for democracy. Such hope grows dimmer when we allow fear, however sincerely felt, to dictate what can and cannot be taught.
Our nation’s highest Court has spoken, and the law is now as clear as mud. The work will now be more challenging. But it has never been more urgent. We must take action to ensure that our public education system continues to promote a shared understanding and respect for diversity.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
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From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship
Jul 08, 2025
Social entrepreneurs are people who launch ventures aimed at promoting positive change in their community and in the world. I am such a person. In 1982, I founded a nonprofit organization called Search for Common Ground (informally known as “Search”). My bottom line was not financial gain but making the world a better place.
My credentials as a social entrepreneur grew out of my hands-on involvement in building Search from zero into the world’s largest nonprofit group involved in peacebuilding. My partner and closest collaborator was—and is—my wife, Susan Collin Marks. By the time we stepped down from Search’s leadership in 2014, we had a deeply committed staff of 600 employees working out of offices in 35 countries. In 2018, Search was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
There are two kinds of social entrepreneurs: those, like us, who work in the nonprofit sector, and those who start social enterprises whose goal is both to promote the public good while supporting their work by making a modest profit.
As a social entrepreneur, I was self-taught, neither a theoretician nor a scholar. Over the years, I developed a set of eleven working principles that have become my modus operandi and provide the basic framework for my new book, “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship," from which this series of three articles is adapted. While I applied these principles in nonprofit work, they are also applicable to social enterprises—and to life, in general.
PART ONE
PRINCIPLE #1: START FROM VISION. Social entrepreneurs need to have a clear vision, and everything they do should be consistent with that vision—or at least not inconsistent with it. A vision may appear in a flash or evolve over many years. My vision was to shift how the world deals with conflict—away from adversarial, win-lose approaches toward non-adversarial, win-win problem-solving.
During the Cold War, my vision included ending the adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like so many people, I was terrified by the prospect of nuclear war. If something profound were not done, I feared the superpowers would blow up the planet. Preventing nuclear war—in essence, saving the world—provided me with huge motivation. It still does.
I believed the best way to reduce the threat was to move the superpowers from a state of confrontation to one of cooperation. Consequently, my colleagues and I played a key role in facilitating cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in countering terrorism. To that end, we even facilitated collaboration between the CIA and the KGB.
This photo appeared on the back cover of the book I edited with Igor Beliaev, called Common Ground on Terrorism and published by W.W. Norton. From left: Igor Beliaev, Political Observer, Literaturnaya Gazeta; Feodor Sherbak. former First Deputy Director, Internal Security Directorate, KGB; William Colby, former Director, CIA; Ray Cline, former Deputy Director, CIA; Natalie Latter, interpreter; John Marks, President, Search for Common Ground; Valentin Zvezdenkov, former Director of Counterterrorism, KGB; Oleg Proudkov, Foreign Editor, Literaturnaya Gazeta
PRINCIPLE #2: BE AN APPLIED VISIONARY. Social entrepreneurs should not be pure visionaries unless they intend to start a new religion or write a philosophy textbook. Rather, they need to be visionary leaders who produce tangible results in the real world. Although they may have lofty intentions, they have no choice but to move ahead one step at a time and be incrementally transformational. If they go for overwhelming, unified solutions, they are likely to fail. However, if some part of their overall goal is reachable, they should probably start there. I call this a salami-slicing approach. A small victory is almost always more useful than a large failure. And their timing needs to be right. If they move too quickly or are too far ahead of the curve, they will be viewed as hopeless dreamers. However, if they are too slow in reacting, there may be little reason for them to proceed. I have found that being six months to a year ahead of conventional wisdom is a good position to be in.
For example, in 1993-1994, before official peace talks had begun between Jordan and Israel, we at Search sponsored back-channel meetings between former generals from the two countries. Together, they worked out unofficial understandings on key issues. After each session, the results were promptly sent to the Prime Minister of Israel and the King of Jordan. Our unofficial talks demonstrated that agreements could serve the interests of both parties, and many of the formulations made by our generals became part of the eventual Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.
PRINCIPLE #3: “ON S’ENGAGE ET PUIS ON VOIT.” This is a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte – someone not generally considered a peacemaker. A non-literal translation is: “One becomes engaged in an activity, and then one sees new possibilities.” Napoleon was a soldier, and he believed that the best way to understand enemy defenses was to attack and then observe the reaction. As a peace-loving civilian, I only apply this Napoleonic logic metaphorically. I don’t go around beating up opponents to see how they defend themselves. However, the lesson for social entrepreneurs is that once engaged in an activity, they will likely detect opportunities they would not have seen otherwise.
I found that excessive planning was often a barrier to moving forward. As boxing champion Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they’ve been punched in the mouth.” The Soviets learned this the hard way with their five-year plans.
Allen Grossman, my oldest friend and a former chair of Search’s board, topped off a successful career in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors with twenty years as a professor at Harvard Business School. According to Allen, there are two principal management styles. The first is management by rule. It requires employees of an organization to follow well-defined procedures. The second is adaptive management. It requires problem-solving and decision-making in response to exceptions, new information, and changing circumstances.
All organizations must have rules, but I found that social entrepreneurs are usually much more interested in being adaptive than in following regulations. The path forward most often emerges, not from long-term, deliberative processes, but from unfolding events.
The remaining eight principles of social entrepreneurship will be described in two additional excerpts from the book, “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship.”
In addition to founding and heading Search for Common Ground, John Marks is a NY Times best-selling and award-winning author, who most recently started the Pro Bono Litigation Corps in partnership with Gary DiBianco under the auspices of Lawyers for Good Government.Keep ReadingShow less
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