Over two months, some three dozen Hunter undergraduates met weekly to research the topic, grill the college’s waste managers and outside experts, tour the campus trash trail, and ultimately come to consensus on seven actions aimed at sending less garbage to recycling and landfills.

The CUNY Climate Assembly Project at Hunter, or CCAP, is one of the first citizens assemblies in New York state. The approach involves selecting participants at random, ensuring their demographics accurately reflect the community, and giving their recommendations real weight in decision-making. Also known as civic assembly, popular assembly, lottocracy, or citizen jury, it has been used in Europe for decades and is gaining traction in the United States and around the world.

Some of the Hunter College climate assembly participants were drawn by the $750 stipend. Others had nothing planned for spring break, when the assembly began. And some seized the opportunity to collaborate with others and achieve a tangible good.

“I’ve been in a phase of climate nihilism,” said Luisa Pellettieri, a senior in sociology. “I’m trying to say yes to more things. I’m hoping to get hope back.”

Over the summer, the group will present its recommendations to Hunter College leadership, which promised to review and respond to them. While college leaders did not commit to more binding language, they have been involved and supportive of the effort.

Assembly organizer Forrest Sparks said the project connects people in new ways. “The group that comes together looks like the larger public of Hunter,” he said, addressing the crowd gathered in the West Building’s eighth-floor conference room on a rainy Friday in February, waiting for participants to be drawn from a lottery spinner. Over 23,000 students received an email invitation to opt in to the lottery; 570 accepted the invitation, and 42 were selected by lottery.

“It really expands who decides and who designs within our democracy,” Sparks said to the group. “In our current political system, unfortunately, we don’t have too many pathways to do that. But y’all are leading the way.”

A democratic innovation

Central to any citizens assembly is the selection of participants by lottery. In a given city, an invitation might be mailed to as many as 10,000 to 20,000 people. Of those who respond, several dozen participants are usually chosen with tools that select for both randomness and demographic representativeness.

Running a successful assembly is labor-intensive. Organizers must secure funding, get buy-in from decision-makers who have the power to act on the assembly’s consensus, and recruit a qualified team to plan and lead the process over weeks or months. CCAP was funded by a Mellon Foundation grant to the CUNY Center for the Humanities and led by professional facilitators and trained graduate students.

But the payoffs can be significant. Proponents say citizens assemblies surface genuine public opinion and generate creative solutions that politicians — constrained by loyalties and conflicts — might never reach. They build trust in public policymaking, and participants often report feeling more engaged in democracy, sometimes for the first time.

Former New York City comptroller and councilmember Brad Lander called for a citizens assembly on housing while campaigning for mayor last year. “At a time of catastrophically low trust in our democracy, I believe citizens assemblies can help to renew it,” Lander, who is now a candidate for Congress, told New York Focus.

The model also forges unusual bonds: Because a citizen assembly’s “mini-public” mirrors the demographics of its community, participants collaborate with people unlike them politically and socioeconomically, and elected officials get policy options with democratic legitimacy already built in.

Local leaders

The Hunter College climate project isn’t the city’s only citizens assembly.

Through June 21, New York City residents over the age of 11 can vote on local projects in a city-sponsored deliberative process called The People’s Money. The five boroughs have $4 million total to spend on priorities selected through borough-level citizens assemblies.

Now in its fourth cycle, The People’s Money unfolds in four phases: open idea submission, a citizens assembly in each borough to choose finalist ideas, a public vote, and then implementation. Projects have included swim lessons for children in NYCHA housing, food-growing and cooking programs, and housing education for older adults.

The program is run by the Civic Engagement Commission, which was created by a 2018 referendum to initiate a citywide participatory budgeting process (in addition to the participatory budgeting programs run by many City Councilmembers in their own districts).

“People themselves do know what is best, and they can arrive at conclusions that work for the community and that are legislatively feasible,” said Benjamin Solotaire, senior adviser at the Civic Engagement Commission, who helped to integrate the assembly component into The People’s Money process. “It is really the lived experience that makes it feasible.”

New York and beyond

The climax of the Hunter College assembly’s campus “garbage tour” was a visit to the trash compactor on East 67th Street, where delegates watched as custodians on a high platform emptied trash from the entire campus into a massive metal container before it was carted away by the Sanitation Department. The goal was to see the problem up close.

Rozen Kapadia, a junior studying psychology, said her role on the assembly was already changing her mindset. “I do feel responsible,” she said. “I feel expected to bring about change.”

Over the two months that followed, the delegates worked to achieve it. They sought information from outside experts. They met every Friday to learn, deliberate and ideate. A public forum on May 15 included the broader campus community. Last week, the assembly developed and voted on nine recommendations, passing seven with a strong consensus. Those include expanding the compost program, barring on-campus vendors from distributing styrofoam and single-use plastics, and redesigning and relocating trash receptacles to encourage recycling.

The results will be discussed with the administration over the summer. Then nine students will serve as post-assembly fellows, working with campus leadership to implement the proposals.

“This was a great experience,” said Hunter junior Tariq Bradshaw after the vote. “I think I’ll always look back on this time, because I never thought I would do anything like this before. It was great being part of something bigger.”

It’s unclear whether supporting citizens assemblies is a priority for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration; neither the mayor nor his new Office of Mass Engagement answered questions about it. (OME’s first initiative is quite different: a campaign to recruit tenants to testify at upcoming rent stabilization hearings.)

Across the country, meanwhile, citizens assemblies are proliferating. This spring, Los Angeles used one as part of a city charter review, as did Lexington, Kentucky. Akron, Ohio, just conducted a citizens assembly on housing; Raleigh, North Carolina, held one focused on urban planning. Beginning in July, Connecticut will hold a statewide citizens assembly on property taxes.

Abroad, notable examples include the standing assemblies of Paris and East Belgium — whose recommendations have been adopted into law — and the 2016 Irish assembly that led the country to legalize abortion two years later.

Citizens assemblies are not infallible. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, overpromised and underdelivered on implementing the French Citizens Convention on Climate six years ago.

Still, the model may prove well suited to society’s emerging problems. Two western communities have already launched assemblies on artificial intelligence: the Central Oregon Community Solutions Assembly on AI and the Snohomish County, Washington Civic Assembly.

If elected, Lander said, he’d love to do the same in New York. A citizens assembly could “transform an extractive, profit-driven model of artificial intelligence by using a democratic model for amplifying our collective intelligence,” he said.

Known as the Survivors First Act, the legislation would bar the state from evaluating what’s known as “contributory conduct” to determine if victims are eligible for funds. Nearly all states have similar restrictions, based on factors like whether the victim was accused of using or selling drugs, fighting with the person who injured them, or being in a gang at the time of the crime.

The state Office of Victim Services decides who receives the funds, using information from law enforcement, prosecutors, claimants, and other sources. In 2024, the office denied roughly 40 percent of the nearly 8,000 claims it ruled on for reasons including incomplete applications and ineligible crimes. Of those, 16 denials included contributory conduct, the office said.

Research has shown that because victim compensation decisions rely on subjective assessments, they can also lead to racial disparities. In a 2024 analysis, University of Michigan professor Jeremy Levine found that Black New Yorkers represented 31 percent of all victim compensation claims in the state — but made up 53 percent of claims denied for contributory conduct. The disparity was particularly acute for Black men, who represented 14 percent of New York claims but 47 percent of contributory conduct denials.

Kira Shepherd, vice president of organizing and policy at Common Justice, a victim services organization that helped spearhead the bill, said these patterns are harmful for survivors in the moment — and down the line. “If they’re denied because they’re criminalized, they aren’t getting the healing they need, and that just causes the cycle of violence to continue,” she said.

The bill, sponsored by state Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Monique Chandler-Waterman, would strike the provision in the law that instructs the Office of Victim Services to use contributory conduct to deny claims or reduce awards, making New York one of the first states to do so. It would also make it illegal for the state to award survivors less money if they privately fundraised for funeral or medical expenses, as it does now. And it would require the office to better publicize itself and to publish regular statistics on applications for aid, rejections, and the reasons it denies applications.

Survivors and their families are sometimes unaware that they’re eligible for victim compensation or confused by the rules around it.

In 2024, Dylan Marino, 21, was stabbed to death by a worker in a Queens corner store. Grainy security camera footage shows the bodega worker chasing Marino, and then Marino chasing him back before staggering away.

The Office of Victim Services sent a funeral home $3,000 for his services, according to Marino’s mother, Kate Dessommes. Months later, however, the agency tried to claw it back without fully explaining why.

“Our investigation of this claim shows that the victim’s own actions contributed to his/her death,” the office wrote in a letter to Dessommes. “The victim cannot be considered an innocent victim of crime and is not eligible for an award.”

Dessommes attributes the denial to what she says police told her: that Marino had stolen a beer from the corner store. After she appealed, the agency attributed it to the fact that the worker wasn’t charged in the crime, though the statute does not require that.

To Dessommes, the letter felt like another emotional blow. “It added so much more stress to something that was already horrible,” she said through tears.

The Office of Victim Services said it could not “comment on an individual claim due to strict confidentiality laws,” but that there may be “circumstances in which OVS is limited in the information it can disclose, such as when doing so could affect an ongoing investigation or prosecution.”

Mika Dashman, founding director of the Restorative Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for non-punitive responses to harm, was working with Dessommes when she received the denial. She helped her push the state to stop trying to recoup the funding, which it eventually did.

“I couldn’t believe that an agency that was created to support victims of crime would use blaming language like that,” Dashman said. “The state should not be in the business of arbitrarily determining who is an ‘innocent’ victim and who is a ‘deserving’ victim.”

Aaron Cagwin, a spokesperson for the Office of Victim Services, said the agency reviews each claim “based on the information available at the time.”

“While OVS was required to follow the law as written,” he added, “the agency has always approached its work with a focus on supporting victims and survivors and ensuring that claims were reviewed as thoroughly as possible.”

Advocates and lawmakers have successfully pushed the agency to improve access to victim compensation. In 2023, they fought to remove a requirement that survivors report crimes to the police to qualify for aid. And in 2025, the state budget altered the contributory conduct provision so it can no longer be used against homicide victims, like Marino. In all other cases, however, the conduct restrictions still stand.

“If my child dies, they can no longer be blamed” in a way that denies or reduces compensation, explained Robert Gipson II, a New York attorney and former fellow at Giffords Law Center. But if “I catch a stray bullet and live,” he said, the Office of Victim Services “can still make an arbitrary determination about why I was shot.”

That’s where this year’s bill comes in. If signed, New York would become the second state, after Maryland, to completely eliminate contributory conduct as a factor in victim compensation, according to Gipson, who drafted the legislation and worked with the sponsors’ offices, Common Justice, Safe Horizon, and other groups to get it passed.

The bill passed both legislative chambers unanimously. The legislature has until December to send it to Governor Kathy Hochul, who can sign or veto it.

The governor’s office did not answer questions about whether she plans to sign the bill. In a statement, Jess D’Amelia, a spokesperson for Hochul, said the governor “has championed efforts to improve the state’s response to gun violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, gender-based violence and sex trafficking.”

“Governor Hochul remains committed to supporting victims and survivors of all crimes and will review this legislation,” she said.

For Shepherd of Common Justice, the bill’s passage is gratifying. “No one has really looked at these policies to make sure that they were equitable,” she said. “I believe that conversation is now happening.”

The new diploma is a central component of New York Inspires, the State Education Department’s multiyear effort to overhaul graduation requirements to ensure students leave high school ready for modern careers and higher education. If approved by the board, it would replace the current graduation framework, which allows students to earn one of three diplomas depending on how they perform on statewide standardized tests known as Regents exams.

At the meeting, Education Department officials called it the most significant transformation of the state’s graduation system in generations. The plan would direct school districts to shift away from awarding credits based on the time a student spends in a course and instead adopt a “competency-based” model with flexibility in how they develop mastery of specific skills.

“The big idea is that New York is moving away from an outdated factory-style education model toward a model system built for how students actually learn,” said Jeffrey Matteson, the department’s senior deputy commissioner for education policy.

The Education Department has only shared preliminary plans so far, so many implementation details remain unclear. During and after the meeting, some Board of Regents members and education advocates raised concerns about how schools will maintain academic rigor and support teachers as they adopt flexible models, and whether students across the state will have equal access to opportunities.

Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, said New York must strengthen K-8 instruction in order for the initiative to succeed, noting that students can only access opportunities like internships and college courses if they are proficient in reading and math.

The department plans to present the final plan to the board for approval once it’s complete and start a phased rollout in certain grade levels by the end of next school year. Here’s what we know so far.

What is competency-based education?

The Education Department defines competency-based education as a system in which students get closer to graduating after proving they’ve actually learned material instead of just completing required class time.

Students would still enroll in traditional courses, but would also be able to participate in activities outside of the classroom, such as internships, capstone projects, community service and career and technical education programs, to move toward their degrees. Instead of a single exam, students would have different ways to show what they know in each subject, such as assessments, projects, presentations, or portfolios.

In 2024, the Board of Regents announced plans to eliminate the requirement that students pass the Regents exams to receive a diploma. Currently, they can earn one of three diploma designations: a Regents diploma, an advanced Regents diploma for students who pass additional tests, and a local diploma for students who meet testing requirements a different way. On Monday, state officials explained that the exams would be one of many options students can use to qualify for a diploma.

“What will matter moving forward is the quality and substance of the evidence that a student produces, not the particular route that produced it or how long it took,” said Shannon Logan, director of strategic priorities and coordination in the department’s Office of Cultural Education.

What will the new transcript look like?

Current transcripts include a list of classes and assessments with corresponding grades, which do not “adequately reflect what a student knows and what they are able to do,” Angelique Johnson-Dingle, one of the department’s deputy commissioners, said at the meeting. Under the new framework, graduating students would receive a “universal transcript or learner profile.”

The transcript would document alignment with state learning standards and the six attributes the state outlined in its graduation blueprint, called the Portrait of a Graduate. It’s unclear exactly what the transcript would look like.

Will it affect college applications?

There is little evidence that competency-based education disadvantages students in the college admissions process. Many colleges have embraced more holistic admissions practices that consider portfolios and other demonstrations of skills that extend beyond GPA and standardized test scores.

Education Department officials said they are working with colleges and universities to ensure every institution that serves the state’s high school graduates ”understands and trusts” the new diploma.

What does this mean for current students?

Students who started ninth grade in 2023 would be the final cohort to graduate under the state’s current requirements.

Students starting high school in 2024, 2025, or 2026 would still have to fulfill current credit requirements and take the Regents exams, but they would not have to pass the exams to graduate. For the 2027 and 2028 cohorts only, the state would impose a yet-to-be-determined credit requirement.

The new flexible system introduced Monday, which would eliminate time-based credits, would be fully implemented for students who enter high school in 2029.

What are the next steps?

The state is currently reworking learning standards, competency rubrics, and the universal transcript and will release them within the next year. The department said it will continue to schedule working groups and advisory panels to gather feedback on the changes, and is updating the state’s data system to track student progress.

The Education Department encouraged school districts to start designing pilot programs for next school year that include hands-on learning outside of traditional classrooms, a wider range of ways to assess student learning beyond standard exams, and expanded career-related opportunities. Schools could hire work-based learning coordinators, for instance, or partner with local employers.

She hailed the effort — now called the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) — as an innovative model that could one day be replicated statewide.

For months, a task force led by top lawmakers and spearheaded by the United Way of Greater Rochester had been taking shape. Soon after going public, it announced an ambitious goal: slashing the area’s poverty rates in half by 2030. Key to that effort was a cutting-edge website that would seamlessly connect the region’s residents to a variety of social services, acting as a one-stop shop for everything from emergency housing to food assistance and mental health care. By increasing coordination among providers, proponents explained, it could eliminate the bureaucracy of getting help — providing a more holistic, user-friendly experience.

But the task force faced early stumbles. Its first leader resigned in 2020 amid criticism. Now, more than a decade since its launch, some are calling RMAPI — along with MyWayFinder, the website it kickstarted — an expensive flop.

“I’m not convinced an app that tells me where a food pantry is is solving the problem that needs to be solved,” Monroe County legislator Rachel Barnhart said of MyWayfinder, which came online in 2024 and officially launched in 2025. “The problem is when people actually go and apply to the government for the services they’re eligible for, and they encounter extreme barriers and red tape.”

The state has pumped at least $25 million into the MyWayFinder website, which took over eight years to develop. State documents billed the website as a transformative hub that would provide a “360-degree” view of each of Rochester’s 150,000 impoverished residents, allowing clients to transition from “crisis to stable to thriving” with a vast network of providers closely tracking their needs and the services they’re receiving.

Amy D’Amico, a nonprofit consultant and local housing advocate, has referred several people to the platform to easily locate resources, including a trans person who needed help identifying a health provider.

“I think there’s a significant gap in our community and elsewhere between the health domain and the housing domain,” D’Amico said. “These are systems that just don’t talk to each other.” MyWayFinder is one of many potential solutions that could help bridge that divide, she said.

But overall, uptake has been lackluster. As of June 2026, MyWayFinder has over 2,000 registered client users — a fraction of the 150,000 sign-ups promised upon the website’s rollout. Similarly, only 48 organizations are considered “Connected Provider Organizations,” which actively receive referrals from the site, far short of the 300 providers envisioned upon rollout in state contract documents — limiting the website’s ability to function as a one-stop shop.

The website’s current operator denied that the site had failed to reach its original goals and said that all providers listed on the website are able to utilize the network and are “reachable” through the platform, even if they don’t receive website referrals.

Despite the tepid response, those running the platform have continued to seek more state dollars and are looking to expand MyWayFinder and spread the framework to other counties across New York. RMAPI has long since abandoned its ambitious target of halving local poverty rates and has pivoted to a broader set of metrics that, according to its executive director, “better reflect the root causes of poverty” and don’t rely on a single measure. RMAPI has also stepped away from MyWayFinder and transferred operation of the platform to another group.

MyWayFinder’s goal of streamlining social services couldn’t come at a more critical time. Historic federal cuts to Medicaid and food assistance are estimated to result in hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers losing their benefits in the months and years to come — placing a larger burden on nonprofit providers to fill the gaps.

These cuts are likely to be especially devastating in Rochester, where nearly 30 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line and roughly 40 percent of children live in poverty.

Rochester was once a bustling hub for some of America’s most iconic brands, including Xerox and Kodak, but decades of declines in manufacturing have taken their toll on the workforce, which has never recovered. And that was before the recent spate of federal cuts to safety net programs under the Trump administration.

The region also has a history of higher-than-average denial rates for programs like food assistance and punitive sanctions for those who fail to meet stringent requirements for drug or alcohol programs, Barnhart says.

But while MyWayFinder was built using state funds, it was never intended to connect users with the state or county agencies responsible for administering public benefits — which some critics say hamstrings the platform’s ability to ease the lives of underserved residents.

It can also be impractical, said Anna Valeria, CEO of Open Door Mission, the region’s largest housing provider. Open Door is among the majority of organizations listed on MyWayFinder that are not fully connected into the platform.

“It’s wonderful in theory, but the reality is for those of us doing the frontline work, it’s another layer to add,” said Valeria.

The platform connects directly with 48 providers, allowing users to request referrals for help such as finding a shelter or child care. But when MyWayFinder users click on a listing to Open Door or other nonprofits that aren’t fully connected, they are prompted to call or email directly for help, which Barnhart said makes the platform more akin to an online phone directory than the innovative one-stop shop promised in state documents.

Valeria said Open Door has no plans to fully connect because it has already fine-tuned its own intake process. Several other community partners that facilitate emergency and transitional housing placements for Open Door have also declined to connect, Valeria said, driving down the platform’s ability to improve coordination among providers.

She questioned why the state would bankroll MyWayFinder instead of directly supporting nonprofits at a time when many are struggling. In 2024, the United Way of Greater Rochester was criticized by local nonprofits after it announced funding changes that would significantly reduce its longtime support for them.

Barnhart raised similar concerns, calling MyWayFinder a costly attempt at unifying providers into a central system instead of investing in actual services. “We have other nonprofit organizations that essentially do the same exact work and don’t need these dollars from taxpayers,” Barnhart said of MyWayFinder and RMAPI. “We seem to be spending money to fund bureaucracy instead of putting money directly into the hands of people.”

The United Way of Greater Rochester is one of the larger nonprofits in the region, with a reported $183 million in assets as of 2024.

The organization is part of a national United Way network of affiliates that raise money through workplace giving programs and direct those donations to local nonprofits like homeless shelters and food pantries. Each United Way is independently run and operated, and many, like the Greater Rochester chapter, do not provide direct services to the public.

The organization’s relationship with RMAPI has raised questions. Nearly all of the state funds directed to the task force or MyWayFinder were issued as legislative awards, a process in which lawmakers direct grants to specific institutions. The practice has been flagged by open government advocates for inadequate oversight that “invites misuse and corruption.”

Unlike regular state contracts — which are often issued after a competitive bidding process and contain financial safeguards — agencies have limited powers to oversee legislative awards. Neither of the state agencies named on the grants that supported RMAPI and MyWayFinder were able to provide details about how the money was spent, and both noted that they had no control over the grants.

A tangled ownership structure also makes tracking spending more difficult. The state grants were entrusted to the United Way of Greater Rochester, which has housed RMAPI since the task force formed in 2015. All of RMAPI’s employees are United Way of Greater Rochester employees.

While RMAPI spearheaded the development of MyWayFinder, it has since transferred operation of the platform to another organization called TogetherNow, which also started off as part of the United Way of Greater Rochester. TogetherNow spun off into its own nonprofit organization earlier this year.

John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany said MyWayFinder’s transfer to a new operator raises questions about potential misuse of state dollars, especially if TogetherNow intends to expand the platform beyond the region. He recommended that the state open a financial probe into the matter.

The United Way of Greater Rochester charged the state $1.2 million per year to manage a five-year grant on RMAPI’s behalf while it was developing MyWayFinder but declined to share a breakdown of how it spent the $6 million total. State documents show an unspecified part of the annual fee went toward the salaries of United Way of Greater Rochester employees not directly involved in either RMAPI or MyWayFinder, such as CEO Jaime Saunders. Recent tax filings show Saunders earned over $365,000 annually as the nonprofit’s top executive in 2024.

United Way of Greater Rochester declined an interview request and responded to only some questions from New York Focus.

RMAPI Executive Director Aqua Porter said her task force is independent from United Way of Greater Rochester, despite the fact that she is listed in tax filings as an employee of the nonprofit. Porter said RMAPI’s budget over the past five years has hovered around $1 million annually, with state dollars accounting for as little as a third of overall funding at times. She declined to provide a full accounting of all state dollars RMAPI has received since 2015.

Because RMAPI is not a separate entity, it is not subject to IRS public reporting rules for nonprofits. “No matter the funding sources, RMAPI has always been an effective and deeply responsible steward of any money we receive,” Porter wrote in an email.

Porter’s low six-figure salary was among 18 United Way of Greater Rochester positions funded by state grants earmarked for the development of MyWayFinder, according to state records. She has served as head of RMAPI since 2020, taking over when the group’s last leader resigned after concerns from community members about the task force’s effectiveness turned personal, according to the Rochester Beacon.

Like United Way of Rochester, RMAPI does not provide direct services to the public. Its main function is convening a steering committee that includes several prominent lawmakers and local politicians, though it does not identify as a think tank or a lobbying group and is not subject to state ethics rules.

Congressman Joe Morelle — often described as the architect behind RMAPI’s creation in 2015, when he served as a state assemblymember — did not respond to requests for comment. Morelle has been a fixture at RMAPI events, attending a celebration for MyWayFinder last summer.

Asked about RMAPI’s legacy, Porter pointed to the group’s advocacy for policy changes such as the Empire State child tax credit, raising the state’s minimum wage, and a pilot run of Rochester’s Guaranteed Basic Income program. “RMAPI has brought to Rochester an element that had not previously existed, a central organization that sets common goals and leads the hard work,” she wrote in an email. “While systemic change takes time, we can see the results.”

Laura Gustin, executive director at TogetherNow, which now runs MyWayFinder, wrote in an email that her organization has set a new target to fully connect 15 percent of all services listed on MyWayFinder by 2028. As of June 2026, an impact tracker on MyWayFinder indicated 125 out of 3,361 total services listed on the platform – or fewer than 4 percent — are fully connected.

Gustin pointed out that MyWayFinder has been used over 200,000 times by more than 40,000 unique users and has a growing list of partner organizations. She noted that her staff have trained over 1,100 service providers to use MyWayFinder, but didn’t respond to follow-up questions about why she thinks relatively few have chosen to fully connect to the platform.

Keeping MyWayFinder up and running for its relatively small user base isn’t cheap. Gustin said that annual licensing fees for the website currently cost $1.4 million. It’s not clear whether state funds are footing this bill. Neither Porter nor Gustin provided more details about these ongoing fees. The platform itself was designed by IBM, which was hired by United Way of Greater Rochester as a subcontractor using state grant money.

Some community members remain hopeful that MyWayFinder could represent a promising new solution moving forward.

The platform has helped local residents navigate new federal changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. In March, new work requirements went into effect for thousands of Monroe County residents who rely on food assistance. The county directed SNAP households to a screening tool on MyWayFinder, which helped them identify if they were subject to the new mandate using a questionnaire.

The platform and RMAPI continue to receive strong political support.

Among RMAPI’s most enduring supporters is Assemblymember Harry Bronson, who represents Rochester and has served on the task force’s steering committee since 2015.

Bronson’s office declined to provide Focus with a full accounting of all state money the assemblymember has directed to the task force, but press releases and agency records indicate he is responsible for shepherding at least $10.5 million to the group.

“The funds I have requested for RMAPI’s continued work bolsters their ability to do outreach, retain staff and facilitate vital community collaboration necessary for our area to persist in addressing poverty and creating upward mobility,” he wrote in a statement. “One of the most significant successes of RMAPI has been in raising awareness that poverty does not only occur in the City of Rochester, as is commonly believed, but also affects those living in the surrounding rural and suburban areas of Monroe County.”

Bronson was among those who attended a 2023 RMAPI event where Rochester Mayor Malik Evans spoke positively of the group’s efforts, calling it “a framework for change that is bold in ambition yet constructive in scope to confront the single greatest challenge of our entire region.” Monroe County Executive Adam Bello said RMAPI’s efforts had helped make the region “more prosperous and equitable.” Neither responded to requests for comment from New York Focus.

Some advocates say that raising awareness and fully connecting clients to a few dozen providers falls far short of RMAPI’s original goals.

While Valeria of Open Door welcomed RMAPI with hope back in 2015, she said she has yet to see measurable outcomes from the group’s efforts over the past decade.

“We get lost in the aspiration,” she said.

When someone sues the state government, they must bring their case to the Court of Claims. Yet to file a case there, they need to know the exact date, time, and place where a state official harmed them. For the second year in a row, the state Senate has passed a bill that would lift those requirements in cases involving allegations of sexual assault, while the Assembly has failed to advance it.

At a press conference Tuesday, Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, its prime Assembly sponsor, urged lawmakers to pass the bill.

“This is not something that should wait until next year, because people are suffering now,” she said. “People’s cases are going to vanish.”

The 1,600 cases stem from the Adult Survivors Act, a law that temporarily opened the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging sexual abuse against adults. An earlier law, the Child Victims Act, opened a similar window for people allegedly abused as children. Lawmakers involved with the passage of those bills say they never meant for filing requirements to stymie cases.

In other civil courts — like the state’s supreme courts, where hundreds of women have filed Adult Survivors Act suits against New York City over sexual abuse by Rikers Island jail staff — claimants can initiate cases by providing limited details, then gather more evidence through discovery. But in cases filed against New York state, judges have ruled that they need to share more information at the outset.

“Everything we know about the psychology of sexual abuse and rape trauma is that survivors actively suppress the memories of the abuse, and that they have difficulty recalling small details about it,” said Konstantin Yelisavetskiy, a partner at the law firm Slater Slater Schulman, which represents about 1,200 of the claimants suing the state. It’s also inherently difficult, he said, for any incarcerated person to keep precise track of time in prison.

“When you take those two things and you put them together,” he added, it’s an even greater burden. “So to not remove this harsh, inhumane requirement is effectively blocking their ability to attain justice,” he said.

In a consequential decision last year, the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, ordered the Court of Claims to dismiss a case filed under the Child Victims Act because the claimant could not provide a precise date for alleged abuse. The case set the bar for how to apply the strict requirements to the thousands of old cases filed under the two laws.

The proposed state law, which passed the Senate last month by a 57–3 margin, would remove those requirements for pending cases and apply retroactively to cases dismissed under the current filing requirement that are subject to potential appeal.

Last year, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s office expressed concerns over the degree to which the bill would relax pleading standards, and about changing the law in a way that would impact pending cases, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Heastie’s office, which has remained noncommittal about the bill this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During a court conference last October, attorneys for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said the state was planning to ask judges to throw out 500 cases based on the filing requirements, according to Yelisavetskiy and another attorney, who collectively represent hundreds of women in the cases. Attorney General Letitia James’s office, which represents DOCCS, has sought dismissal of cases based on the Court of Claims filing requirements. Her office did not immediately respond to a question about whether she supports the bill.

Hochul’s office said the governor “remains committed to supporting victims and survivors of sexual assault and will review all legislation that passes both houses of the state legislature.”

Meanwhile, DOCCS, a Hochul administration agency represented by James’s office, has sought to use the current filing requirements to its legal advantage.

In one case, for instance, James’s office convinced a judge to throw out a case because the claim included the wrong date of the alleged abuse — a mistake also included in the prison agency’s own records.

In another, James’s office asked a judge to toss a case because DOCCS could not locate a record of an alleged abuser — even though New York Focus was able to quickly locate the record, leading James’s office to withdraw its request.

Last year, the legislature passed a bill relaxing the pleading standard for sexual assault cases going forward. But it did not apply retroactively, so it did not cover cases filed under the Child Victims and Adult Survivors laws.

The big story of this year’s budget was the face-off between Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who made “tax the rich” a rallying cry of his campaign. Even as she stumped for Mamdani last fall, Hochul was adamant that she would not raise taxes on the wealthy.

In the end, they split the baby. Mamdani didn’t get what he most wanted: a tax hike on New York’s top earners. But he did get billions of dollars from the state to plug a hole in the city’s budget, new funding for child care, and a tax on luxury second homes in New York City, giving him something to burnish his socialist cred.

Hochul and Mamdani also had to contend with major federal cuts and threats from President Donald Trump about more pain to come. The governor and mayor have managed to stay on good terms. As the budget neared completion, Mamdani said in a statement that they had “partnered through every step of the process.”

The budget contains hundreds of new programs and laws. Some of the most important: limits on police collaboration with ICE, a significant weakening of the state’s landmark climate law, and removal of a major barrier to new housing statewide.

We’ve pored over thousands of pages of budget documents to make this guide, which will tell you about several dozen of the most important decisions lawmakers made this budget cycle. In the chart below, you can see where each party stood and what made it into the final deal. Below that, you can find written descriptions using the drop-down menus. Happy reading!

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With operating costs climbing across the board, from utilities to insurance, Fuentes said it simply isn’t feasible to pay another salary to accommodate just two more children.

“I have an inventory of child care spots that I’m reluctant to use because it is cost prohibitive,” said Fuentes, owner of On My Way Early Learning and Childcare Center, which serves around 240 children under 13.

New York state has some of the strictest staffing requirements in the country — stricter, in fact, than New York City’s. As state leaders allocate billions of dollars to address the child care shortage in this year’s budget, a new state law could ease those requirements and unlock new day care seats at no additional cost to providers — but only if the state agency that oversees child care decides to act on it.

In December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation eliminating a provision in a 2000 social services law that has prohibited the state Office of Children and Family Services from relaxing child care staffing ratios. The new law leaves it to the agency to actually change the ratios; if it did so, the same number of workers could care for more children.

State Senator James Skoufis, who introduced the bill in 2024, told New York Focus that adjusting the ratios is “more critical than ever” amid the state’s ongoing efforts to scale up its child care sector and provide more affordable care to working parents.

Child care advocates who oppose the change are concerned having the same number of staff supervising more children would increase the risk of accidents and injuries and fail to address a root cause of the state’s child care crisis: low wages for workers.

Supporters counter that looser ratios are consistent with national norms set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early childhood education, and that alignment with the group’s guidance would offer flexibility to providers who already operate with razor-thin profit margins.

So far, OCFS has not indicated whether it plans to update the regulations. In a statement provided to New York Focus, OCFS spokesperson Daniel Marans said the agency is “currently assessing the viability of the requested ratio change, with the goal of supporting child care providers without compromising our commitment to child safety.” The law does not impose a deadline for OCFS to make the switch.

More than 60 percent of New York’s census tracts are classified as a “child care desert,” meaning that there are three or more children under 5 waiting for every available slot, according to the state Office of Children and Family Service. Meanwhile, more than 16,000 children are unable to receive child care specifically as a result of staffing shortages that have led programs to operate under capacity. While that’s not necessarily related to staffing ratios, some think easing them could help address the shortage.

“We can provide more resources to counties and to providers all we want, but if we don’t provide the very common sense flexibility that these providers require in order to effectuate creating more seats, then the money is only going to go so far,” said Skoufis.

Skoufis introduced the bill after providers, including Fuentes, expressed their frustrations to lawmakers over being held to tougher ratios than their counterparts in New York City, where staffing requirements are set by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Day care providers in the five boroughs must have one staff member for every five children between 12 and 18 months and one for every six children who are 2 years old. In the rest of the state, it’s 1–4 and 1–5, respectively. The discrepancies are even wider for older children.

Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the bill, believes aligning ratios with New York City could help thousands of those families access a seat without burdening providers or taxpayers with additional costs.

“Child care providers are operating on such slim margins that they frequently worry about going out of business,” Hevesi said. “We were looking for a way to give them some breathing room in an incredibly difficult climate without costing anybody any money.”

Dede Hill, vice president of policy at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a social policy and advocacy organization, has a different perspective. “One thing that makes child care in New York state so high quality is because we have low ratios — and that’s certainly not something we want to step away from,” she said. Hill is a member of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, which advocates for universal child care.

“I don’t think staffing ratios are the solution to the tremendous issues we have related to supply,” said Hill. The key is more investment in the workforce, including higher pay for child care workers, she said.

One reason providers are facing significant financial strain is that the state’s reimbursement level for its child care voucher program, which covers nearly all of the cost of child care for low- and middle-income families, isn’t enough to provide high quality care, Hill said. With providers forced to absorb the shortfall, many are unable to offer adequate wages: In 2025, the annual average salary for child care workers in New York was $37,675, lower than 96 percent of other jobs.

Fuentes, who has owned her day care center in Orange County for 17 years, said she currently has to choose between raising tuition for all children in order to pay another employee and waitlisting families even though there is ample space to serve them. If OCFS chose to align statewide staffing ratios with New York City, she said, she could enroll around 15 more children without hiring additional staff.

“There’s a child care crisis in New York,” she said. “If we can’t use our full supply of seats, then that crisis is just going to continue.”

For Heidi-Jo Brandt, president of a union representing more than 8,800 providers outside New York City, the flexibility doesn’t seem worth it. Some revisions to standards may be appropriate, such as the current 1–2 ratio for children under 2 in home-based care, she said, but a broader relaxing of staffing ratios could put children at risk. Research shows inadequate supervision is the main cause of injuries in child care settings, including drowning, choking, and severe burns from bottle warmers.

“While it could have a tremendous impact statewide, our concern is always for the safety of children,” said Brandt.

Some research indicates that high staff-to-child ratios and smaller group sizes are critical for children’s health, safety, and development, but data on the safety outcome of ratios like New York City’s is limited.

In recent years, as the child care industry has reeled from a pandemic-driven dip in enrollment and rise in operating costs, over a dozen states have proposed loosening their child care staffing ratios, increasing maximum group sizes, and relaxing other regulations to meet demand. Many states set ratios based on guidance from the National Association for the Education of Young Children; New York City’s ratios are roughly in line with the group’s recommendations.

Meanwhile, New York state has some of the most stringent ratios nationwide. It is one of just a handful of states that uses the restrictive ratios recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Even New York City’s staffing ratios remain stricter than those in many other states.

Skoufis first introduced the bill after then-OCFS Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave informed him that aligning statewide ratios with New York City would require legislation. At the time, he said, OCFS officials “made it crystal clear” they wanted to pursue the changes, though he’s less clear on their position today.

In a January letter to current OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden, Skoufis argued that it is “financially unreasonable” to require a 1–5 staff-to-child ratio for 18- to 36-month-olds with a maximum group size of 12.

Hevesi said that he believes the agency should “act sooner rather than later” given the potential benefits.

“My instinct is that there’s going to be support to look at this and see what’s appropriate — but my role was just to take the handcuffs off and now they are free to do whatever they feel is appropriate,” he said.

Buffalo day care owner Emily Thrasher pointed out that New York City and state regulations differ on other aspects of child care: The city also has more lenient classroom space requirements than the rest of the state, as well as different age group definitions that determine other regulations. For example, New York City defines a toddler as a child between 12 and 24 months old, while New York state’s definition is 18 to 36 months.

Thrasher said full alignment with New York City’s standards would allow her small business to generate hundreds of thousands of additional dollars annually. That, in turn, would enable her to serve more families.

“I can’t even imagine how much that would compound for larger day care centers,” she said. “We could help more families, open more slots, pay our staff more. … The changes seem small, but it would make the biggest difference.”

She gave the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which had custody of her son, all the documents it requested — identification, a letter from her employer, paystubs. She got fingerprinted and let federal workers inspect her home. Then she waited. In the interim, Maria was only able to visit her son, Maykel, for two hours roughly every 15 days. She felt like she was living for those two hours, she said.

Months passed, and Maria grew more and more concerned. Maykel’s clothes and shoes were always dirty, and he told her he was afraid of being deported, she said. In March, a caseworker called with an update.

“You know that paperwork you sent — the letters, the checks, all that?” she recalled him saying. “Now it’s all expired.” (ORR policies say certain required documents are only valid for 60 or 90 days.) He told her she’d have to submit new documents before getting her son back.

Maria reunited with Maykel in late March — after she sued. She hired an attorney, Reuben Kerben, whose firm filed a petition alleging that ORR’s refusal to release Maykel amounted to illegal detention. Before a judge could rule on the petition, the agency finally released him and his five cousins.

“I brought him home with me to hug him, feed him, buy him clothes — to do everything the way it should be done,” she said.

Maria and Maykel, whom New York Focus is identifying only by their first names to avoid jeopardizing their ongoing immigration cases, are among a growing number of families in New York and across the country fighting the government to release their children from monthslong detentions in shelter facilities.

In most of these cases, children give themselves up to immigration authorities after crossing the southern border without adults in the hopes of uniting with parents or other family already in the US. The reunification process used to take about a month, but President Donald Trump’s administration imposed new vetting procedures for guardians.

Now, reunification drags out for so long that families question whether the government intends to release their children at all: The average length of stay in ORR shelters hit about 200 days in March, up from 30 days in fiscal year 2024. The Trump administration contends that stricter vetting protects children from abuse and trafficking, but advocates believe it’s intended to deter new arrivals, intimidate family members, and expose them to immigration enforcement.

Like Maria, desperate family members have turned to the courts to get their children out of government custody. They’ve started filing habeas corpus petitions, which allege that the prolonged shelter stays amount to unlawful detention. Such petitions have become adult immigrants’ best hope of escaping Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention since the second Trump administration all but eliminated bond hearings. Now, attorneys are using them to get unaccompanied immigrant kids out of ORR shelters — something that was almost unheard of prior to last year, several said.

Across the country, lawyers have filed habeas petitions for at least four dozen kids in ORR custody since last year, according to a New York Focus review of federal court documents and interviews with attorneys. For some of the kids, it was their second time in ORR custody: The agency re-detained them after a run-in with ICE and put their previously approved sponsor through additional vetting.

The tally includes at least six kids in ORR custody in New York City: Maykel and three of his cousins, as well as two siblings from Mexico, ages 9 and 17, who spent more than seven months in custody.

All of Maykel’s cousins have now been released to their parents.

“We completed everything they asked of us,” said Luis, one of Maria’s brothers, whose 3-year-old son was confined with Maykel. “Even then, we couldn’t get them out.” Like Maria, he only got his son home after his lawyer filed a habeas petition.

“With each passing day, it became more and more difficult,” he said.

The Trump administration’s new vetting procedures for guardians of unaccompanied kids have made lawsuits necessary, attorneys and advocates for immigrant youth say.

Family members trying to reunite with their children are required to submit to DNA testing and fingerprinting. Guardians also need to show identification documents that are difficult for undocumented immigrants to obtain. They must attend in-person appointments to verify their documents, sometimes at ICE offices — a risk for undocumented parents or those seeking asylum, as the Trump administration rescinded Biden-era rules blocking ORR from sharing sponsors’ information with immigration enforcement authorities. The California Newsroom reported that more than 100 people have been arrested while trying to get their kids out of ORR custody since last year.

The new policies also allow ORR, which falls under the federal Department of Health and Human Services, to disqualify potential sponsors based on their immigration status, making it potentially impossible for some families to qualify as sponsors for their children.

“It has come to the point where ORR is not functioning as it was intended,” said Becky Wolozin, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “It has in large part become an arm of immigration enforcement, and much like for adults, one of the only ways for a child to be released to their family is to bring a habeas at this point.”

The Trump administration has framed the new policies as a necessary corrective to its predecessor’s looser vetting standards. As the number of unaccompanied children traveling to the United States shot up after the Covid pandemic, the Biden administration pushed to speed up the sponsor vetting process to get kids out of crowded shelters more quickly. As a result, many minors wound up working in factories, slaughterhouses, hotels, and construction sites, The New York Times reported.

Immigration attorneys say the new vetting procedures are a pretext to gather information to potentially arrest sponsors. Maykel’s aunt, Blanca, was briefly detained by ICE at her identification check appointment in March as she sought to gain custody of her sons Stiven, eight, and Jhon, 13, she said. That incident spurred the family to hire their attorney, who decided to file the habeas petitions.

The six cousins, ranging in age from 3-year-old Eithan to 15-year-old Lizeth, left Ecuador last fall, after the home where they lived with their grandmother was robbed. They told New York Focus they decided to make the journey to join their parents — who arrived in New York City over the last several years — without telling them.

Lizeth, who stepped into the role of surrogate mother to her younger cousins, said the same hope motivated them as they trekked through the jungle and later as they spent months living with a foster mother.

“Our goal was simply to reach our parents,” Lizeth said. “When we were hungry, when we were wading through the rivers, when we were most struggling, reaching our parents was the only thing on our minds.”

When the children reached the southern border, immigration officials apprehended them and turned them over to ORR, as federal law requires. That agency houses kids by contracting with mostly state-licensed shelter and foster organizations, including more than a dozen in New York in recent years.

The kids traveled by plane to New York City and moved into a room in a foster mother’s apartment, only about 10 miles from their parents in Corona. That was when the adults started submitting paperwork, hoping to bring them home.

“Months passed, days, weeks,” said Luis. “As a father, I was in a state of desperation: What more can I do? Because we had given them all the documents they asked for and more.”

In court filings before the kids were released, ORR argued that the vetting process was still playing out and that the agency had agreed to expedite analysis of the DNA testing, after which it could reach a decision. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about the case or about delays more broadly.

As ORR scrutinizes their potential sponsors, kids must go to immigration court, sometimes without representation, to answer a judge’s questions about their experiences with the process. On a recent Tuesday morning, a teenage boy wearing headphones appeared on the screen inside Judge Lisa Ling’s courtroom on Varick Street in Manhattan. He sat at what appeared to be a well-used office cubicle, shifting his weight in the black desk chair as he waited. Ling asked what was going on with his reunification.

“It’s a bit slow,” he said in Spanish.

Ling assigned him another hearing in three weeks.

Many kids who are released from ORR custody get out without a habeas petition. In March, 228 children and teens were released to sponsors around the country, according to federal data. But attorneys said they no longer trust the agency to handle the cases, after encountering unexplained delays, even when sponsors complete every step, and hearing about sponsors being arrested by ICE during the process.

The nonprofit Center for Family Representation in New York City has set up what it calls a “new family reunification project” to help parents navigate the process. Zoe Schonfeld, attorney-in-charge of the immigration practice, said the project is currently representing 10 parents with children in ORR custody. They talk parents through every step of the process, explain the risks, and push back on requirements like appointments at federal Department of Homeland Security offices.

“But we can’t assure them that as a result of working to get their kids back, they won’t face detention,” Schonfeld said.

Knowing that their families are struggling or in danger of deportation worsens the toll the lengthy detentions take on children, said Emily Norman, East Coast regional director for Kids in Need of Defense, which provides legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children.

“There’s anxiety and depression, I think a feeling of helplessness when it’s not clear why they’re not being let out,” Norman said. “Kids feel a lot of pressure and worry over risks that they’re putting their family members in.”

In sworn affidavits, Luis and the other parents said adults told their children that their parents would be deported if they didn’t obey the facility rules. The children told New York Focus they rarely went outside while in ORR custody, except to travel from their foster home to the foster facility, which was operated by the New York-based nonprofit Cayuga Centers. They cried during visits with their parents.

Cayuga Centers declined to comment for this story.

One morning, about a week after their attorneys filed the habeas petitions, Maria got a call from Cayuga Centers: “Come get your son.” The results of her DNA test had come through, and ORR had approved the children’s release. That evening, all of the cousins and their parents celebrated over fish soup, ribs, and cake at an Ecuadorian restaurant in Queens.

The Trump administration has asked the court to dismiss their habeas cases on the grounds that they are now moot. Kerben, their attorney, is opposing that, aiming to keep fighting for a judgment against the government. The cases remain open.

“I wouldn’t want other kids to suffer like our kids suffered,” Maria said. “I want them to get out, to get help, to reunite with their families.”

Under a 2021 law, an incarcerated person with minor children can request what’s called a “proximity transfer” to the closest appropriate prison to their home. Shawna and Artamion quickly filed for one to get him closer, but Moore said they didn’t hear anything back for months.

She learned in January 2025 that the request was approved, but now, more than a year later, Artamion is still in Green Haven.

Moore’s experience isn’t unusual. Research by New York Focus found that the law’s implementation has slowed in recent years. The percentage of “proximity transfers” granted has dropped sharply, from nearly 40 percent of those requested in 2023 to just 20 percent last year.

One-third of the New York prison population has minor children. Research has found that regular visitation can reduce recidivism by as much as 26 percent, often by deepening family ties. It can also better the lives of children with incarcerated parents, reducing their feelings of abandonment and anxiety while improving their well-being, self-esteem, and school behavior.

For Moore, the five-hour drive and overnight stay has made it hard to visit her husband, who is serving a lengthy sentence for murder in the second degree. She is self-employed and a driver for Uber and Lyft. She only gets to see her husband once every two months or so. Their 11- and 17-year old children haven’t seen their dad since November 2025.

“They keep asking all the time when we’re going there, but it’s just such a hassle,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for over a year just to get him moved.”

Each time Moore calls the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision or his assigned counselor, she said she is told the same thing: DOCCS is waiting for a bed to open up. They can’t say if and where her husband will be moved.

Attica has the capacity to house 2,143 prisoners. As of late April, there were 1,846 people incarcerated there, according to DOCCS documents. Thomas Mailey, a spokesperson for DOCCS, said the agency “does not comment on individual transfer request cases” but added that staffing shortages may cause delays. The agency “closely monitors all available beds” and “makes every effort to process transfers as quickly as possible,” he said.

Meanwhile, many prisoners face involuntary transfers. Incarcerated people have described feeling insecurity and anxiety during these moves, which may take multiple days and include multiple stops, even for small distances. Out of 96 family members and loved ones of incarcerated individuals who shared their experiences with New York Focus through a survey, 41 said that their loved one had been transferred more than five times. Twenty-one said the repeated transfers made it harder to maintain contact as their loved one was moved further away from them.

There’s no limit to the number of times a prisoner can be transferred in New York state.

Also known as April’s Law, the 2021 Proximity Law was prompted in part by a teenager’s appeal to a Brooklyn lawmaker nearly a decade before. It requires DOCCS to consider the location of children when placing a parent in prison or conducting transfers.

In the first year of the law’s implementation, the agency allowed more than 1,553 proximity transfers out of 5,987 requests. The number has plummeted since then. Between May 2024 and June 2025, only 870 incarcerated people with minor children were granted their proximity requests out of a total of 4,349 incarcerated people who applied.

In its most recent report on the bill, DOCCS wrote that a corrections officers strike last year contributed to reduced and delayed transfer requests. Proximity requests can now take more than 18 months to process, depending on whether there is a bed available at the facility the person requests and a seat on the transport bus.

Kevin Nelson, a staff attorney in the Family Matters Unit at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, a nonprofit legal services organization, said that online “incarcerated profile reports” often show open beds in the facilities to which people hope to transfer, even when DOCCS has said there aren’t any. “I see a lot of clients who would be going to the general population, who are still being told that available bed space is likely a factor delaying their transfer.”

Mailey, the DOCCS spokesperson, said that while the agency monitors available beds, moving quickly isn’t always possible. “Due to staffing shortages and the ongoing state of emergency, which results in unstaffed beds, transfers between facilities are taking longer to complete,” he said.

When the agency improves staffing levels, Mailey said, “facilities will be better positioned to facilitate transfers more efficiently.” He noted that “aggressive” recruiting efforts are in the works.

DOCCS reviews proximity requests on a case-by-case basis, considering factors such as facility capacity, security classification, programming needs, and the best interests of the child. Requests are denied if, for instance, there are any crimes against the child or children in question or an active order of protection involving the children or the custodial parent or guardian.

The incarcerated person can’t be serving a disciplinary confinement sanction or attending a specialized treatment program, and must be more than five months away from a scheduled parole board appearance or release.

In its 2025 report on the legislation, DOCCS broke down why it cancelled or rejected 275 proximity requests. Some requests were placed too close to a parole board hearing, for example, or were withdrawn by the requester. But for the remaining 3,200 people, no explicit reason was outlined. When asked to explain the missing information, Mailey said that “requests can remain pending for a number of reasons including incomplete information and a thorough evaluation of the interest of the children involved. Some of this information is confidential and cannot be shared publicly.”

Former Democratic state Senator David Carlucci, who co-sponsored April’s bill, called the data New York Focus shared “deeply troubling,” noting in an email that it’s “not what any of us who co-sponsored this legislation intended.”

“If DOCCS is approving fewer than one in five proximity requests and cannot account for why the vast majority are being denied,” Carlucci wrote, “that is a transparency failure and an accountability failure.”

Nelson at Prisoners’ Legal Services said he has received 212 complaints from prisoners regarding proximity transfers.

Some said they never received documents that the non-incarcerated guardian needed to sign, Nelson explained. In other cases, DOCCS wrongly used an expired order of protection as justification for rejecting a transfer. Even if a court has permitted visitation or contact with the child, the department may still deny a proximity transfer.

Under certain conditions, including significant disciplinary infractions, DOCCS can initiate a reverse transfer.

That’s what happened to Devon Callicutt, 35, who is serving a life sentence without parole at Elmira Correctional Facility for a murder during a robbery. His wife, Shinasha Bowen, lives in Albany, more than a three-hour drive from Elmira, which is close to the Pennsylvania border. Callicutt requested to be closer to Bowen and her children in November 2023. Within a month, he was transferred to Green Haven Correctional Facility, an hour-and-a-half away.

“It was everything,” Bowen said. “The fact that he was closer, so I didn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn.” Bowen takes her children, 12, 17, and 18, with her to see him. “They love seeing him,” she said. “It’s important they see him.”

But after getting into a fight with a fellow prisoner, Callicutt was sent to Upstate Correctional Facility, then to Clinton Correctional Facility, and eventually back to Elmira. Now Bowen gets up at 2 a.m. to ensure she gets to the prison early enough to get a good spot in line. New York’s maximum security prisons used to allow daily visitation. Since last year’s wildcat strike, visits at most prisons in New York are still limited to one weekend day per incarcerated person.

After a reverse transfer, an incarcerated person has to wait at least a year for a proximity transfer. Callicutt requested another transfer in October 2025. He and his family are still waiting.

Transfers for involuntary reasons — such as disciplinary action, programming, or a prison’s staffing needs — often upend proximity requests. Only one transfer can be in process at any given time.

Proximity transfers are “just a drop in a very large bucket,” explained Iolanthe Brooks, a PhD candidate in sociology at Northwestern University who analyzed DOCCS transfer data from 2020 to 2022.

A prisoner in good standing may also request a “preference transfer.” Brooks’s analysis showed that requested transfers brought incarcerated New Yorkers an average of 147 miles closer to home, but transfers for other reasons moved incarcerated people an average of 29 miles farther away from their county of conviction.

“We see that for those transfers, on average, people are actually getting moved farther from home, which is the opposite, of course, of the intent of these closer-to-home laws,” Brooks said.

Nearly 65 percent of incarcerated people convicted in New York City are placed in prisons more than 100 miles from the city, according to a calculation by New York Focus.

DOCCS has transferred Deione Gray’s 34-year-old son Unique at least 14 times over a six-year period. He was sentenced to 29 years-to-life for a murder during an attempted robbery in 2015.

Recently, Unique was transferred from Upstate Correctional Facility, a prison near the Canadian border, to Five Points, a maximum-security prison over 200 miles southwest. Each time he’s transferred, Gray has to find a new private shuttle that can take her to his prison; she doesn’t own a car and the prisons are hundreds of miles from her home in Brooklyn. Gray makes the trip as often as she can.

For Gray, the proximity law doesn’t apply — her son does not have minor children. The law does not allow transfers for incarcerated people seeking proximity to adult children, elderly parents, or other close relatives.

Proposed state legislation could provide a solution for this: It would create a pilot program for moving any incarcerated person, rather than just parents, closer to home.

“I just need to hug him,” Gray said. “I miss him so much.”

“If you were a city Democrat, I’d say go [away],” one voter told the state senator as he went door to door in the lower Hudson Valley town of Chester on the Saturday before the November general election.

We walked up and down rows of identical yellow-shingled houses as he asked residents to vote for Democrats in town and county races.

The 38-year-old state senator had canvassed the working-class housing development as many as 10 times over the 13 years he’s served as a state legislator, he told me.

From the outside, it seems like a hard sell. Chester is in Orange County, where Republicans dominate politics. President Donald Trump won the county by 8 points in 2024, and Republicans have long controlled county government. Skoufis, meanwhile, describes himself as “center-left” and supports policies like higher taxes on the rich, free pre-K, and free tuition at public colleges.

But Skoufis, whose state Senate district nearly matches the county lines, thinks he’s cracked the code. He represents one of the reddest districts of any Democrat in Albany, and often brags that he is more popular than Governor Kathy Hochul among his constituents. During the past three presidential election cycles, he said, Orange County had a “surprising” number of homes sporting both Trump and Skoufis lawn signs.

That Saturday, the voter who derided city Democrats assured Skoufis he planned to vote for the Democratic slate.

“We don’t really have the commie Democrats they have down in the city,” the man said, an obvious reference to New York City’s then-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Skoufis laughed and agreed.

Skoufis does not shy away from antagonizing his Democratic Party colleagues. Last year he delivered a speech on the Senate floor accusing Hochul of running the state budget process like a “monarch.” (Later, Hochul vetoed seven of his bills on a single day in September.)

Toward the end of last year, their feud came to an end. Skoufis declined to go into detail about the resolution, but said he had a “series of conversations” with Hochul and her senior staff that calmed tensions.

“We all resolved that this fight is stupid, it’s not serving anybody well, and that we’re far better off working together,” said Skoufis, who has since reintroduced several of the bills she vetoed. His battle with the state’s most powerful politician had begun and ended unexpectedly — evidence, he said, of his philosophy that politics is often akin to “changing the tires on a moving car.”

He passed the most bills last year of any lawmaker, was appointed to the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee (after a failed long-shot bid to serve as chair), and led oversight hearings into Hochul’s overhaul of the state’s home care system. His outspoken and sometimes abrasive style has captured media attention and made him one of the most recognizable names in state politics.

Elected officials and advocates told New York Focus that Skoufis is primarily motivated by delivering for his constituents. His ability to do so on basic issues — like renovating a courthouse, putting a splash pad in Port Jervis, and helping the town of Cornwall get funding for holiday lights on Main Street — is part of why he consistently wins reelection, they said.

He’s made enemies of some local progressive groups who believe he was a key force in watering down the 2024 good cause eviction law, which Skoufis vocally opposed. But critics and allies alike said he was deeply committed to the causes he chose to dedicate himself to — even if that has sometimes led him to be petulant.

“His critics aren’t wrong when they say he’s a strident, obnoxious, pain-in-the-ass,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group. But Kaehny called him “a tremendous advocate for his constituents,” “great for Democracy in New York,” and “a very effective politician.”

Skoufis is seeking to use his success and platform to steer New York Democrats — and the national party — in a new direction. He believes that the future of the party lies north of the city, in a purple district that resembles the suburban and exurban areas where his party is battling to win back voters.

At the moment, Skoufis is the lower profile young, upstart Democrat reshaping New York politics and the national party.

Skoufis said he shares Mamdani’s philosophy about politics: Both are sharply critical of the establishment and represent voters who feel politicians have failed them. While Skoufis rarely interacted with Mamdani during the socialist’s time in the Assembly — “he wasn’t super legislatively active,” Skoufis said — he noted that he has some Mamdani-esque accomplishments. He landed a legislative grant for a free bus pilot in his district, and another to dispatch social workers rather than police to respond to mental health calls.

A vocal child care advocate, Skoufis has been energized by Hochul’s promise to make pre-K universal by the 2028 school year, and made an unsuccessful push this spring to move that deadline up by a year.“That is a wonderful fight to be having, versus whether we are doing universality or not,” he said.

But politically, Skoufis hews closer to the center, and prefers the moniker “populist.”

His most notably populist crusade has been against the approximately $10 billion in corporate subsidies that state and local entities grant each year. He’s brought corporate watchdogging to his role as chair of the state Senate investigations committee, where he’s held hearings on energy prices, live event ticketing, and pharmacy benefit managers.

In the 2023 state budget, he convinced the state to install a first-of-its-kind independent monitor to oversee the activities of an Orange County agency tasked with attracting corporations to the area with tax agreements. Since November, Skoufis has been locked in a battle with that office, the Orange County Industrial Development Agency, after he successfully urged the monitor to veto a 15-year, $80 million package of tax breaks for Amazon to build a 3.2 million-square-foot distribution center.

The IDA sued the state to overturn the veto in January. Within weeks, though, the agency’s leaders began negotiating a possible compromise with Skoufis to wind down the monitor in exchange for reforms, such as wage floors for workers on IDA-funded projects and more input from localities before tax breaks are granted. In the end, they were unable to reach an agreement, and Skoufis is now pushing to extend the monitor’s presence for another three years in the upcoming state budget.

Skoufis has supported Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on millionaires and big corporations. But he’s quick to note that the policy would have a limited impact on his constituents, even if the tax hike were ever applied statewide.

“I represent very few of them,” he said, “but if you are a millionaire in New York state, I am open and conceptually supportive of modest increases to personal income taxes.”

Elsewhere, he sharply diverges from Mamdani: The senator has declined to support statewide immigrant sanctuary legislation, although he says he wants to “protect” undocumented people who live their lives “peaceably.” And Skoufis was a high-profile opponent of congestion pricing, as well as good cause eviction.

Skoufis is skeptical of activists and believes that the average voter doesn’t care much about hot-button ideological debates.

“I don’t read a script from white papers when I’m communicating with constituents,” he said. “They don’t expect me to, they don’t want me to, and if I did, I wouldn’t win every couple of years in my district.”

Skoufis has been “one of the main political faces of Orange County for a long time,” according to Chris McKenna, a local reporter in the Hudson Valley.

At the doors in Chester, Skoufis was lighthearted and seemed happy talking to his constituents. Many residents, upon opening the door, recognized him as their state senator.

An older woman wearing a New York Police Department windbreaker, a registered Republican, told Skoufis that she voted for him last year and would vote for him again.

“The [Republican] party left you,” Skoufis told her.

Middletown’s Democratic mayor, Joseph DeStefano, said that Skoufis had helped launch a program to install a “social service coordinator” in the police department to respond to police calls and help connect people with social services. After the legislative grant expired, the department made the position permanent because they had “such significant success with it,” the mayor said.

“He’s very solid on supporting police,” DeStefano said. “When a police officer was shot, he was one of the first people to call.”

Skoufis has also made allies of some Republican leaders. Port Jervis Mayor Dominic Cicalese said that Skoufis landed him legislative grants that funded 90 percent of the cost of a new police training facility. “That was tremendous of him.”

“It’s not a question of Democrat or Republican. It’s, are you bringing in the funding? Are you effective with the legislation that reaches the Senate?” said Cicalese. With Skoufis, he said, the answer to both questions is “yes.”

At the same time, he’s been a disruptive force in local politics. In 2023, Skoufis held a press conference in front of the county government center and spoke about what he has called a “complex web” of “very obvious contract fraud.” (Skoufis called the press conference “pulling a Preet Bharara,” referencing the famed US attorney who prosecuted Albany corruption.)

Skoufis accused Republican County Executive Steve Neuhaus of an unethical scheme in which the county awarded a major contract to the family member of one of Neuhaus’s closest advisers. (County officials denied any wrongdoing.)

When knocking on doors, Skoufis made sure to tell voters about an FBI investigation into the alleged corruption.

“The average person appreciates that … when I find wrongdoing, fraud, I actually say something about it, I do something about it,” Skoufis said.

“I don’t go along to get along,” he often says.

For a politician who has so effectively sold himself to voters, he is relatively quiet about his own biography. In some ways, Skoufis is a “city Democrat.”

“In Orange County,” he said, “quite a bit of my background might not be relatable to my constituents.”

As a young child, he lived in the same public housing development that his mother had grown up in: Pomonok, in Queens. His father was born in a rural village in the mountains of Greece and immigrated with his family to New York as a teenager. “It’s sort of the cliche ‘they came here with basically nothing but the shirts on their back’ story,” Skoufis said.

Skoufis’s parents divorced when he was young and his mother moved to Orange County to send him to better schools. She worked for the US Postal Service, and Skoufis’s dad opened a deli in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The senator was the first in his immediate family to attend college, attending George Washington University for undergrad and Columbia University for a masters in political science.

And despite his populist bent, he is as much of a career politician as anyone: In 2012, at the age of 25, he became the youngest member of the state Assembly.

He won that election — against a Republican — without the support of the state’s top Democratic elected official, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo.

According to Skoufis, the Cuomo administration contacted his campaign and said they had one question for him before they could decide whether to endorse.

“I’m thinking to myself, it’s probably a question about [reproductive] choice or taxes or the environment or something big picture,” Skoufis recalled. “You know what their question was before considering an endorsement? What my position was on rail on the new Tappan Zee Bridge.”

Cuomo opposed spending money to add a rail track to the bridge, which would have been a significant expansion of commuter transit for Orange County residents. Skoufis said he supported the rail project.

Skoufis told the story as evidence of his electoral prowess: He wins by delivering for his constituents on issues that shape their daily lives, while myopic state leaders put political considerations first.

A former senior Cuomo staffer, who requested anonymity because her current employer does not permit her to speak with the press, told New York Focus that Skoufis had been an outspoken critic of the previous governor, but that the office maintained a working relationship with the legislator.

Skoufis told her at the time that attacking Cuomo “works for me. I get cheered if I hit back against the governor,” she said — a line he later repeated publicly about his feud with Hochul.

“He needs to show his folks that he’s fighting against the machine,” she said.

Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Common Platforms Where Sextortion Begins

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Common Platforms Where Sextortion Begins

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Conversation Prompts for Parents: Talking About Sensitive Topics

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Common Platforms Where Sextortion Begins

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Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Conversation Prompts for Parents: Talking About Sensitive Topics

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Conversation Prompts for Parents: Talking About Sensitive Topics

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Conversation Prompts for Parents: Talking About Sensitive Topics

Starting conversations about online safety and sextortion with teens can feel difficult. These practical conversation prompts help parents discuss sensitive topics, recognize red flags, and build trust so young people feel safe asking for help when they need it.

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The post Conversation Prompts for Parents: Talking About Sensitive Topics appeared first on Saprea.

Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > What is Online Grooming? Understanding Grooming in the Digital Age

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What is Online Grooming? Understanding Grooming in the Digital Age

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What Stops Children from Reporting Grooming: Understanding Barriers to Disclosure

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Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids

Like many of you, the stats of sexual abuse had never sunk in before all my loved ones shared their experiences, but then and now, these figures scream at me. I can no longer look the other way. I can’t discount the discomfort by saying the research must be wrong or that the research responses must have come from somewhere else and someone else.

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Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > What Stops Children from Reporting Grooming: Understanding Barriers to Disclosure

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What Stops Children from Reporting Grooming: Understanding Barriers to Disclosure

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What Stops Children from Reporting Grooming: Understanding Barriers to Disclosure

Learn why children and teens often don’t report grooming, the manipulative tactics abusers use, and how caregivers can create safe, supportive environments to help survivors speak up and heal.

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Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids

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The post What Stops Children from Reporting Grooming: Understanding Barriers to Disclosure appeared first on Saprea.

By Joan Tabachnick

We are excited to share an important opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the field of sexual abuse prevention. Sexual Abuse is now inviting submissions for a special issue on “What Works in the Prevention of Sexual Abuse?”

This issue, guest edited by Kieran McCartan, Ryan T. Shields, and Joan Tabachnick, will shine a spotlight on primary perpetration prevention—programs, policies, and practices designed to stop sexual abuse before anyone is harmed.

Join the Conversation

By bringing together evidence, practice, and innovation, this special issue aims to build a stronger foundation to answer the vital question: What truly works to prevent the perpetration of sexual abuse?

We invite researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from around the world to contribute to this conversation by submitting a Letter of Intent by September 25, 2025.

Why This Special Issue Matters

Preventing the perpetration of sexual abuse is one of the most critical yet challenging areas of work. Unlike treatment or response strategies, primary prevention often requires proving that “something didn’t happen”—an outcome that can be difficult to measure.

Yet across the globe, innovative programs, interventions, and policies are being developed to reduce risk, strengthen protective factors, and create safer communities. This special issue seeks to bring those successes, research, evaluations, and innovations together in one place to help shape the future of perpetration prevention efforts.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions that critically examine and expand our understanding of primary perpetration prevention, including but not limited to:

• Evidence of success in primary perpetration prevention programs, including meaningful outcome measures.
• Lessons learned from past prevention efforts—and how they can guide the future.
• Risk and protective factors for first-time perpetration of sexual abuse.
• The role of public messaging, policy, and science in prevention.
• Implementation challenges: overcoming politics, stigma, and sustainability issues.
• Global perspectives: cultural and regional insights that broaden the scope of prevention.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Aniss Benelmouffok, Managing Editor of Sexual Abuse: aniss@atsa.com

Together, we can deepen the science of prevention, learn from one another, and build safer futures for individuals, families, and communities worldwide.

To frame these ideas, she draws on two concepts:

     •    Memes and Memeplexes: Coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, “memes” are self-replicating cultural units that spread and evolve like genes. Memeplexes—like religions and political ideologies—are networks of related memes.
     •    Mimetic Desire: Introduced by René Girard, this concept suggests we desire what others desire, emulating “models” in our social spheres. This can lead to rivalry and scapegoating.

Asparouhova proposes that if we take these two concepts as "canon," we can see how the internet has poured fuel on them. "Rather than ushering in an era of global peace, the internet made us leap at each other's throats," she says. 

 

What Are Anti-Memes?

Anti-memes are cultural ideas that resist spreading—often because they disrupt social harmony. Asparouhova writes, “Networks have a strong built-in immunity to anti-memes,” noting that these ideas tend to be suppressed because of their disruptive power.

Prevention—especially when it comes to sexual violence—is inherently antimemetic. Like disaster preparedness or gun violence prevention, it rarely garners sustained public or political support unless a recent tragedy has captured public attention. ATSA's Roadmap to Talking About Perpetration Prevention offers a structured approach to breaking through this “immunity” and reshaping how we talk about sexual harm.

Asparouhova herself points to how prevention is deprioritized in public discourse and policy. Consider how media attention surges and fades after mass shootings—or how funding for disaster preparedness lags until catastrophe strikes. Prevention doesn’t spread easily because it requires uncomfortable conversations and long-term thinking—both of which challenge the fast-paced, reactive nature of contemporary communications.

The same is true for conversations about treating individuals who have caused sexual harm. These conversations demand we acknowledge the harm sexual abuse has caused, to consider the harm that may occur, and requires frameworks grounded in science that address its prevalence in our communities.

ATSA's Roadmap to Talking About Perpetration Prevention

ATSA's Roadmap to Talking About Perpetration Prevention is a guide for turning anti-memetic ideas into meaningful conversations. It encourages professionals to lead with values—to explain why they work with people who have sexually harmed others or are at risk to. It provides structure for conversations that highlight our shared goal: ending sexual violence.

Although designed for ATSA members, this roadmap is for anyone ready to talk about prevention with nuance and purpose. It:
     •    Emphasizes collaboration with individuals affected by trauma
     •    Draws on decades of clinical research and evidence-based practice
     •    Makes prevention the focal point of our work—not an afterthought

Why We Need Champions

So how do anti-memes break through? Asparouhova’s answer: Champions. These are people who know how to navigate complex systems and bring difficult ideas into broader conversations. Champions help anti-memes find traction beyond their niche communities.

She writes:
“But to the right champion, even the most labyrinthine system feels like an invitation to create something extraordinary... You will know it when looking at the problem makes your heart expand with possibilities, rather than shrink away.”

If you’re reading this, you might be that champion. Because prevention faces many challenges —we need people willing to carry the message.

A Final Note

The ideas in the roadmap aren’t always easy to share. They’re disruptive. They challenge deeply held beliefs. They’re anti-memes. But they also carry the potential to transform lives and communities.
 
This year, we've been highlighting Changemakers within the ATSA community. Members who have embraced the challenge of sharing the message of sexual abuse treatment and prevention to transform their communities.  I hope you'll join them in sharing these ideas with conviction, even when they're difficult to express. ATSA has your back with evidence-based resources and professional media support when needed—that's how change begins.

Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids

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Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids

About the Author

Chris Yadon, MPA

Managing Director

As Saprea’s first employee and Executive Director, Chris Yadon collaborated closely with the organization’s founders to launch and establish its operations in 2015. Chris now serves as the Managing Director, leading the organization’s public efforts to drive societal change around the issue of child sexual abuse. He has previously held executive leadership positions for start-up tech and healthcare organizations. Chris is committed to driving broad societal change to address child sexual abuse and uses his influence as a thought leader and strategist to inspire others to take action. He firmly believes we can collectively create a better future for our children. A sought-after speaker, Chris inspires audiences with timely topics such as overcoming emotional numbing by learning how to feel again, protecting children from child sexual abuse in a hypersexualized world, and how to intentionally drive societal change. He has been featured across several media platforms where he is requested to contribute as an industry leader and subject matter expert. Chris received a BA and an MPA degree from Brigham Young University. He is the grateful father of six children: three boys and three girls. He and his wife, Christy, have been married for 28 years.

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Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids

Like many of you, the stats of sexual abuse had never sunk in before all my loved ones shared their experiences, but then and now, these figures scream at me. I can no longer look the other way. I can’t discount the discomfort by saying the research must be wrong or that the research responses must have come from somewhere else and someone else.

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The post Child Sexual Abuse – Turning Statistics into Action and Protecting Kids appeared first on Saprea.

Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Protecting Kids: Navigating a Hypersexualized World and Reducing Pornography Exposure.

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Protecting Kids: Navigating a Hypersexualized World and Reducing Pornography Exposure.

About the Author

Chris Yadon

Managing Director

Chris Yadon is the Managing Director of Saprea, and is responsible for managing all operations and services of Saprea in both Utah and Georgia. Yadon has spent most of his professional career in start-up executive management with an emphasis in operations, marketing, and sales. Since joining Saprea in 2015, Yadon has brought a valuable skillset to the organization and is committed to addressing the epidemic of child sexual abuse. His expertise centers on increasing awareness arond this epidemic and educating the public on best practices for prevention and the healing services available to survivors. Yadon has been featured across several regional and national media platforms where he is often requested as an industry thought leader and expert.

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Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Breaking the Link Between Child Sexual Abuse and Incarceration: A Path to Healing

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Breaking the Link Between Child Sexual Abuse and Incarceration: A Path to Healing

The Link Between Child Abuse and Incarceration

Research reveals a striking pattern among incarcerated women: up to 66% report experiencing childhood sexual abuse,¹ more than double the rate found in the general female population (31%).² While multiple factors contribute to incarceration, this dramatic statistical disparity demands attention. The consistency and magnitude of this relationship across studies point to childhood sexual abuse as a significant risk factor in women's pathways to imprisonment. As the saying goes, “Correlation is not causation.” But this level of high correlation should give us pause.

How Trauma Shapes Coping Mechanisms

The line between child sexual abuse and incarceration is not hard to draw. When a child experiences abuse, their safety is violated. The natural response from their brain is to seek safety. The survival part of their brain will not discern between constructive and destructive coping behaviors. As a natural consequence, a child may attach to harmful or maladaptive coping behaviors such as substance use, eating disorders, or suicidal ideation. This becomes more likely as they grow into their teenage and adult years. Using substances as an example, the survivor, now addicted, resorts to criminal activity to feed the addiction, eventually finding themselves involved with the justice system.

Learn More About How Trauma Impacts Childhood Development

The effects of Child Sexual Abuse

About the Author

Chris Yadon

Managing Director

Chris Yadon is the Managing Director of Saprea, and is responsible for managing all operations and services of Saprea in both Utah and Georgia. Yadon has spent most of his professional career in start-up executive management with an emphasis in operations, marketing, and sales. Since joining Saprea in 2015, Yadon has brought a valuable skillset to the organization and is committed to addressing the epidemic of child sexual abuse. His expertise centers on increasing awareness arond this epidemic and educating the public on best practices for prevention and the healing services available to survivors. Yadon has been featured across several regional and national media platforms where he is often requested as an industry thought leader and expert.

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Research reveals a striking pattern among incarcerated women: up to 66% report experiencing childhood sexual abuse, more than double the rate found in the general female population (31%). While multiple factors contribute to incarceration, this dramatic statistical disparity demands attention.

Read this article

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Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > Why Parents Don’t See Child Sexual Abuse as a Problem—And How Proximity Can Fix It

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Why Parents Don’t See Child Sexual Abuse as a Problem—And How Proximity Can Fix It

Turning Proximity into Urgent Action

Reflecting on the experience with my eight-year-old son, it becomes evident how proximity and urgency intersect to drive meaningful change. The presenter's reference to research on early exposure to sexually explicit content, coupled with firsthand accounts from loved ones, brought the issue uncomfortably close to home. This proximity created a sense of urgency that compelled my wife and me to initiate "the talk" despite our apprehensions. Our urgency was motivated by the proximate risk to our son, and that urgency overcame our conflicting thoughts about whether that moment was the right time.

I wish I could say I nailed that “big talk,” but like most things in parenting, the first time didn’t go so well. Yet eighteen years later, my twenty-six-year-old son has a healthy perspective about his sexuality - formed by hundreds of subsequent “little talks” with us as parents. Like me, he also heard about sex through media, jokes from friends, and a grossly inadequate, awkward health class, but he was equipped to handle it because he had our balancing voice. Proximity and urgency had met, changing our parenting behavior when he was eight years old.

Reduce the Risk of Child Sexual Abuse

When parents are actively engaged in prevention education, the risk of child sexual abuse can significantly decrease.

Start the Conversation

Any significant change, whether a broad societal issue like child sexual abuse or an uncomfortable talk with my eight-year-old, requires urgency to motivate new patterns of behavior. Child sexual abuse is more prevelant in our lives that we might admit. Creating urgency through proximity can protect our kids. Start the conversation with your loved ones today and explore more parenting resources here.

About the Author

Chris Yadon

Managing Director

Chris Yadon is the Managing Director of Saprea, and is responsible for managing all operations and services of Saprea in both Utah and Georgia. Yadon has spent most of his professional career in start-up executive management with an emphasis in operations, marketing, and sales. Since joining Saprea in 2015, Yadon has brought a valuable skillset to the organization and is committed to addressing the epidemic of child sexual abuse. His expertise centers on increasing awareness arond this epidemic and educating the public on best practices for prevention and the healing services available to survivors. Yadon has been featured across several regional and national media platforms where he is often requested as an industry thought leader and expert.

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Why Parents Don’t See Child Sexual Abuse as a Problem—And How Proximity Can Fix It

In my work addressing child sexual abuse, I see this phenomenon daily. Despite extensive research highlighting that child sexual abuse is a significant issue in every community, many parents and caregivers dismiss it as a distant problem, believing it happens to someone else, somewhere else. Read more.

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Saprea > Blog > All Blogs > The Myth of the Abused Becoming Abusers

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The Myth of the Abused Becoming Abusers

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Common Symptoms Experienced by Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Childhood sexual abuse can have long-lasting debilitating effects throughout the life of a survivor. The impacts of sexual trauma are profound and far-reaching, affecting every aspect of an individual’s life—physically, psychologically, cognitively, and socially. But why is this so?

Read this article

Statute of Limitations on Sexual Abuse

In our work with individuals who were sexually abused, they often discuss the burden that comes with weighing difficult questions about when to come forward with details of the abuse they experienced. They wonder if they should take legal action or if that is even an option when the abuse occurred many years in the past.

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Effects of Child Sexual Abuse

As a clinician on the Saprea Clinical Intake team, I am often the first point of contact for anyone seeking one of our services. This gives me the opportunity to talk to many survivors of child sexual abuse. I’m often asked about specific effects of sexual abuse that the women I talk to are experiencing.

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