Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, 1 February 1990 — OHA prison mediation program helps women to gain new skills [ARTICLE]

OHA prison mediation program helps women to gain new skills

A prison program to help inarcerated women is underway at the Women's Community Correctional Center, Kailua, O'ahu. The mediation/facilitation program is sponsored by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Instructors for the program are members of the Neighborhood Justice Center. There are 11 women participating in the onee a week, one hour sessions. Half of the participants are of Hawaiian ancestry. The two women instructors are also Hawaiian. The aim of the program is to teach "conflict resolution" skills to the class. These skills include how to get along with other people individually or as part of a group, how to solve problems, how to deal with people as a group, how to work out solutions to a problem asagroup,howto developa plan that expresses the group's feeling and present the plan

to supervisors or administrators, and how to deal with the prison administration. The participants in the program are encouraged to share their concerns, to develop skills to write proposals with recommendations for improvements whieh ean be discussed with the prison staff and, perhaps, be put into practice. A similar project was funded by OHA at the O'ahu Community Correctional Center at 1985. The success of that program led OHA to seek the funding whieh has made the current program possible with the cooperation of prison administrators and the Neighborhood Justice Center. The program began in November 1989 and will end in April. At the end of the project a report and evaluation of results will be submitted to OHA by the Neighborhood Justice Center.