THE PEOPLE WE AIM TO SERVE

There's a myth that says “only bad people commit crimes” or “only bad people are in prison”, but day-to-day life and the realities of prison present a different picture. From the daily news, or by looking into the mirror, we know that not everyone who commits a crime goes to prison. All criminals don't get caught, and some that do have enough money to buy their way out of going to jail or prison.

We know also that society tends to assign the label of ‘convict’ to every prosecuted criminal. But THOR agrees with Reverend Harold Trulear (Washington, D.C.) that there's a difference between an inmate and a convict. An inmate is someone who, like any one of us or someone we love, fuc-ed up. Convicts, on the other hand, are people for whom crime is a lifestyle. They leave prison with the intention of coming back, because prison is home.

THOR‘s mission concentrates on the residential needs of inmates, not convicts. 

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​The majority of people leaving prison have routinely encountered social biases of one form or another. They are primarily poor people of color, poorly educated, familiar with abuse, and have survived circumstances most of us know nothing about.

What imprisonment does is to remove these groups of people from our daily line of sight (be they innocent or guilty of a crime) and systematically drain them of spirit, value and relevance, before finally releasing them back into a society which expects them to succeed according to the rules and policies put in place by people who oftentimes embrace the myth that only “bad” people are in prison.

 

THOR is determined to help reframe this narrative because we understand the difference between an inmate and a convict, and the difference between home and housing.