Founded in 2002, the mission of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC) is to provide direct support to incarcerated Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) and raise awareness about the negative impacts of mass incarceration and deportation in the AAPI community. APSC’s vision is rooted on centering the leadership of currently and formerly incarcerated people and developing a “prison-to-leadership pipeline.”
APSC’s flagship program, Restoring Our Original True Selves (“ROOTS”) in San Quentin, has served over 250 participants through a curriculum to increase understanding about immigrant/refugee history, intergenerational trauma, leadership development, and reentry planning. APSC provides peer-led, culturally rooted reentry programs (care management, support groups, employment pathways, and more) to recently released people from state prisons, Santa Rita County Jail, and Immigration jails, with a recidivism rate of less than 5%. APSC also leads and supports anti-deportation freedom campaigns, which has led to the release of over 24 people in the past 18 months.
During the prison boom of the 1990s, the AAPI prisoner population grew by 250%. AAPIs are officially categorized as “Others” in the prison system, a fitting description for a population that is so often overlooked. The "Other" category has an imprisonment rate of 1,257 per 100,000 residents, which is about 3 times more than the rate for white people (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2017).
