The Osborne Association offers opportunities for individuals who have been in conflict with the law to transform their lives through innovative, effective, and replicable programs that serve the community by reducing crime and its human and economic costs.

We offer opportunities for reform and rehabilitation through public education, advocacy, and alternatives to incarceration that respect the dignity of people and honor their capacity to change as they achieve self-sufficiency, adopt healthy lifestyles, enter the workforce, form and rebuild families, and rejoin their communities.

Description and/or History:
The Osborne Association operates a broad range of treatment, educational, and vocational services for people involved in criminal justice system, including incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, their children, and other family members. We serve more than 6,00 people annually in the greater New York region- at sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Beacon, on Rikers Island, and in more than 17 New York State Prisons. Our program models demonstrate that employment and family services, chemical dependency treatment, access to HIV/health care, and constructive and supervised alternatives to incarceration can reduce crime, decrease violence, and address the concerns of victims.

The Osborne Association has over 150 staff members and some 40 volunteers, more than 80% of whom are African-American, Caribbean-American, Latino, and Asian, and many of whom are former prisoners, family of prisoners, people in recovery, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

In January 2001, the Osborne Association merged with The South Forty Corporation, the oldest employment organization in New York State exclusively for individuals involved in the criminal justice system, became Osborne's Employment and Training Services that places hundreds of men and women into jobs annually.

Founded in 1931, the Osborne Association furthers the work and the goals of Thomas Mott Osborne, an industrialist and former mayor of Auburn, NY. In 1913, Mr. Osborne spent a week in Auburn prison as inmate "Tom Brown," #33,333x. He lived just as other prisoners did, and left that harrowing experience determined to see America's prisons transformed from "human scrap heaps into human repair shops."

Committed to the ideal of a criminal justice system that "restores to society the largest number of intelligent, forceful, honest citizens," he went on to become a progressive warden at Sing Sing, where the majority of his prisoners did not return to prison after release. He later founded the Mutual Welfare League, which helped discharged prisoners obtain employment, and the National Society of Penal Information, which studied federal and state prisons to obtain information on housing, administration, discipline, and other matters. Through his work, Mr. Osborne became known as "the pioneer and prophet of prison reform."

Contact person: Keenan Pace, Development Assistant, (718) 707-2653, (email)

Address:

809 Westchester Ave Bronx, NY 10455 (See a map)

Directions:

Nearest Metro/Subway Stop: Prospect Av (2, 5),   Walk distance (in minutes): 2