My essay on rehabilitation
Rehabilitation
By Wanda Sabir
Rehabilitation is something one thinks about as the sole responsibility to the individual who is as Mimi Silbert, director of Delancey Street Foundation, says, "hit rock bottom."
However, often her clients say they don't know how to change. That they would have changed their lifestyles and habits, if they'd had the necessary tools. The idea of change is easy to suggest or demand, yet, for how many is relapse the reality? Change is successful when an entire community is involved and where examples of what one is working towards lives within reach.
It is often better to throw away the societal miscreant than help the person find options and alternatives, many beyond reach or view. This assistance is what community is all about.
It is what our Constitution means when it says, its citizens are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How can a person be happy if they are homeless, stoned out of their minds or caught in a web of futility and worthlessness enabled by habitual bad habits?
Government has not been successful in its job of rehabilitation if the huge number of prisons in California is any indicator, so programs in the public sector like Delancey Street Foundation, which not only provide jobs to the down and out inhabitants of society, it also provides a great social good.
Founded by a physiologist and three former incarcerated men, Delancey Street, 31-33 years later is a leader in the rehabilitation field with many former clients who swear without DSF they would be dead.
Using tactics one might not agree with like scare or intimidation strategies, one might ask, what differentiated Delancey Street from Synanon, the 1960s cult or Jim Jones Peoples Temple?
Both cults used intimidation or bullying to get its member to follow company rules.
DSF like these cults does not allow its members to have family with them, however, unlike Synanon and Peoples Temple, DSF is right in the community, accessible and therefore more transparent than the more secretive and damaging organizations labeled cults, making DSF's ends much more socially acceptable and welcomed.
Rehabilitation
By Wanda Sabir
Rehabilitation is something one thinks about as the sole responsibility to the individual who is as Mimi Silbert, director of Delancey Street Foundation, says, "hit rock bottom."
However, often her clients say they don't know how to change. That they would have changed their lifestyles and habits, if they'd had the necessary tools. The idea of change is easy to suggest or demand, yet, for how many is relapse the reality? Change is successful when an entire community is involved and where examples of what one is working towards lives within reach.
It is often better to throw away the societal miscreant than help the person find options and alternatives, many beyond reach or view. This assistance is what community is all about.
It is what our Constitution means when it says, its citizens are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How can a person be happy if they are homeless, stoned out of their minds or caught in a web of futility and worthlessness enabled by habitual bad habits?
Government has not been successful in its job of rehabilitation if the huge number of prisons in California is any indicator, so programs in the public sector like Delancey Street Foundation, which not only provide jobs to the down and out inhabitants of society, it also provides a great social good.
Founded by a physiologist and three former incarcerated men, Delancey Street, 31-33 years later is a leader in the rehabilitation field with many former clients who swear without DSF they would be dead.
Using tactics one might not agree with like scare or intimidation strategies, one might ask, what differentiated Delancey Street from Synanon, the 1960s cult or Jim Jones Peoples Temple?
Both cults used intimidation or bullying to get its member to follow company rules.
DSF like these cults does not allow its members to have family with them, however, unlike Synanon and Peoples Temple, DSF is right in the community, accessible and therefore more transparent than the more secretive and damaging organizations labeled cults, making DSF's ends much more socially acceptable and welcomed.
posted by Professor Wanda's Posse at 1:00 PM
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