We build community
with people.
Not for them. Founded in 2023, the Peaceful Prisons Project is a grassroots, privately funded 501(c)(3) working alongside correctional facilities nationwide.
The Peaceful Prisons Project exists because the system asks people to change while leaving the conditions around them unchanged.
It asks incarcerated people to prepare for a different life without giving them enough connection, purpose, support, or opportunity to practice that life. It asks families to absorb the impact of incarceration with little help. It asks correctional staff to carry enormous responsibility, conflict, and emotional weight while treating their own humanity as secondary. It asks communities to live with the consequences while keeping them at a distance.
That is not transformation. That is isolation with better language.
We believe the entire system needs community. Not just the people serving time, not just the people coming home, and not just the people harmed by incarceration. Everyone touched by the system needs places to be seen, supported, challenged, and connected to something larger than their role inside it.
We believe communities are strongest when nobody is reduced to a role, a record, a uniform, or a problem to be managed.
We believe the whole system matters.
A note from the founder.
I didn’t set out to start P3. I wasn’t looking to build an organization, write a mission statement, or take down the criminal justice system.
I just couldn’t stop thinking about people.
An entire system, not one part of it
The more I paid attention, the more I understood that this was never only about one part of an institution. It was about an entire system asking people to survive what no one should have to lift alone.
People inside, trying to hold on to their humanity while being reduced to a number.
Mothers and fathers waiting for a phone call.
Children growing up with an empty chair at the table.
Families learning how to love someone through glass, concrete, silence, and rules they never asked for.
People coming home carrying a record, a stigma, and a thousand things nobody ever taught them how to do.
And the people working inside those walls, correctional staff who walk into work carrying fear, anger, grief, and other people’s trauma, then walk back out and try to be husbands, wives, parents, friends.
And somehow, we accept this as normal. I don’t think that’s just a prison problem. It’s a community failure.
How P3 began
That realization became the beginning of P3. I didn’t want to build another organization that talked about people from a safe distance. I wanted to build something that showed up in the places where people are hurting.
Something practical. Something human. Something that could make one impossible day feel survivable, create connection where there had only been isolation, and help people practice what comes next instead of simply being told to do better.
Because people don’t change when they are abandoned. They change when someone sees them clearly, tells them the truth, gives them a real chance, and stays long enough to help them take the next step.
What my role is, and isn’t
I also knew what my role was not. I have never been incarcerated. I will never pretend that I understand what that experience feels like.
My job is to listen. To open doors. To connect people who need one another. To bring resources into places they are not reaching. And to make sure people with lived experience are not spoken about while everyone else controls the conversation.
The belief underneath it all
P3 is built on a simple belief:
Healing people can heal people, and that doesn’t happen alone.
That includes people inside, their families, people coming home, correctional staff, and the communities beyond the prison walls. Because incarceration doesn’t end at the gate. It moves through families, neighborhoods, and generations.
This work is about showing up, making room for repair, and refusing to leave people alone during some of the hardest parts of their lives. No one is beyond dignity, accountability, connection, or hope.
We can do better.
We have to.
And we’re going to.
— Abbe Marten, Founder, Peaceful Prisons Project
Three commitments.
People first
We stay completely hands-off on policy and legislation. Our focus is right-now, human-level support.
Facility led
Each facility chooses the programs that fit its population and staff. One at a time or all at once.
Both sides
Residents, families, and staff all need support. We work with both sides of the community.
Everyone in the same shelter, on the same afternoon.
EIN 93-4872363 · Cedarburg, Wisconsin · Serving correctional facilities nationwide