The Curious Autodidact

What do some police officers do with their spare time? Some more than you might imagine, you have already read here about Detective Bouldin’s Chess Club.

Well Seattle Police Detective Kim Bogucki is a co-founder (with Kathlyn Horan and former WCCW inmate Renata Abramson) of the IF Project.

She tells in this TEDx presentation of the $47,000+ a year it costs to keep prisoners locked up in Washington State and how her work helps people in prison to tell their stories to discourage others to enter that same pathway.  She encourages us all to mentor young people, to give a felon a job, a place to live and a chance.

From IF Project’s website:

“We are a unique collaboration of formerly and currently incarcerated adults working together with law enforcement personnel to affect change for those who are facing issues and challenges regarding incarceration and recidivism. Our work is built upon — and inspired by — these people sharing their personal experiences surrounding the issues of incarceration.

This project is based on the question:

If there was something someone could have said or done that would have changed the path that led you here, what would it have been?

“If someone would have told me I was relevant…”

“If someone would have cared about me to console me…”

“If I would have met someone that has been where I have been to share their mistakes”

What the IF project allows us, is a highly unusual but greatly needed path for collaboration as it brings together inmates and law enforcement in an unprecedented manner. Officer Bogucki’s alliance with the inmates provides a break through to discover the real reasons behind our system of mass incarceration and access to the personal stories and intimate struggles that are leading people down this dead end path. We watch as she offers them access into a new world and they discover their ability to change, to heal and to find forgiveness – both from society and for themselves.

We provide ongoing support and education to the inmates who participate in the project, we offer monthly meetings/trainings inside the prison. The monthly topics are chosen by the inmates and can include domestic violence, healthy relationships, sexual assault and abuse, child abuse, parenting, and gang violence.

To support their project click here.

• At age 14 I decided I wanted a baby because I wanted to have someone to love me unconditionally. At age 16 I was a mom and scared as hell.— Woman at Washington State Prison