Project NIA Fights Against Recidivism and Supports Record Expungement

With today's economic woes, even those with a clean record are having trouble finding employment. So imagine what it's like for someone who has been incarcerated with a permanent record, including youth who are just getting into the workforce. One-year-old Chicago organization Project NIA in Rogers Park is trying to help Chicago youth in expunging their record.

"We work with youth in trouble with the law, specifically our focus is on making sure that we can dramatically reduce the arrest, detention and incarceration of youth," said Project NIA's founder, Mariame Kaba.

Kaba has a history in helping troubled youth and women. She has coordinated emergency shelter services at Sanctuary for Families in New York City, served as the co-chair of the Women of Color Committee at the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network, worked as the prevention and education manager at Friends of Battered Women and their Children, served on the founding advisory board of the Women and Girls Collective Action Network (WGCAN) and was a member of Incite! Women of Color against Violence.

After leaving the Steans Family Foundation last year after five years of employment, she created Project NIA. NIA is Swahili for "with purpose."

Kaba, a native New Yorker, also has a background in education, working in Harlem, NY before transferring to graduate school at Northwestern University. She's taught college courses at Northeastern Illinois University and Northwestern University.

"I was a Social Studies teacher who had a lot of people in my class, my students who fell into trouble so I learned pretty early on as a young person myself fresh out of college," said Kaba, now 38. "I started really noticing the reach that the prison industrial complex was having on the young people that I was teaching, on their families, on their lives and on the communities."

Kaba grew more concerned watching the prison population grow from her college years to now.

"The prison population had not exploded to the level that it currently has moved to," Kaba said. "We have 2.3 million people in our prisons. When I was born, we had less than 200,000 in prison so it's been a huge shift in my lifetime."

In June 2009, 23,251 Cook county residents were in prison out of a total of 45,545 in Illinois. Majority of the prisoners were male, calculated at 42,933 with African-Americans in the highest number at 26,605 and 1,493 are under 20.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1980 to 2008, the total prison population went from 319,598 to over 1.5 million. The population of those on probation or parole and in jail, in addition to the prison population, went from approximately 1.8 million to 7.3 million from 1980 to 2008.

This entry was originally published by the Chicago News & Events Examiner.