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In 1996, Carol Shapiro attended a ride-along with the New York Police Department, looking for a suitable home for a family support agency that would work in partnership with law enforcement agencies to improve outcomes for the success of individual under community justice supervision and family well being. On the corner of 3rd Street and Avenue C, in the heart of the Lower East Side, or Loisaida, she found an abandoned bodega (grocery), the site of a recent shoot-out that left New York City Police Officer Keith Prunty paralyzed and an alleged drug dealer dead. With generous in-kind contributions from the construction and building industries, major renovations transformed the space from a dilapidated tenement into the home of La Bodega de la Familia, originally a project of the Vera Institute of Justice and now a critical program of Family Justice.
Although many of Loisaida's residents lack adequate health resources and often suffer from the shame and stigma of criminal justice involvement, the Loisaida community also offers abundant resources. Community- and faith-based organizations, settlement houses, schools, health care facilities, and close-knit families provide a web of support through good and bad times. Learning from the experience of family case managers, supervision officers, and participants, an award winning model of family case management, later coined the Bodega Model, was formed.
Subsequent research proved that engaging and supporting the families of drug users under community-based justice supervision can improve the success of outpatient drug treatment and compliance with community supervision mandates;
reduce the use of incarceration to punish relapse; and reduce the intrafamilial harms
often associated with substance abuse and criminal justice involvement
(e.g., domestic violence, truancy, eviction, and HIV/AIDS).
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