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Understanding and Responding to Mass Incarceration (URMI): Home

Understanding and Responding to Mass Incarceration (URMI) 2022: The "Sex Offender": Why Should We Care?

Join us for the eighth annual forum on Understanding and Responding to Mass Incarceration (URMI) as we seek to understand and evaluate community and legislative responses to sexual violence, with a special focus on the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), a little-known civil commitment program through which 740 people in Minnesota are currently confined – after serving their prison sentences – with very little hope of release.

 URMI 2022 will break from simplified media narratives of the “sex offender” to ask: how can communities reinvest in restorative justice and primary prevention to address root causes of sexual violence, while also transforming our current ineffective system of prevention?

This in-person conference on Friday, April 8 will include keynote addresses, presentations by subject experts, panel discussions, breakout sessions, and more. Topics covered will include:

  • Public Health Approaches to Sexual Violence Prevention
  • Addressing Biases and Broken Systems
  • Restoring Harm and Breaking the Cycle
  • The Re-Entry Solution: What Does It Look Like?
  • An Introduction to Civil Commitment
  • The Intersection of State and Sexual Violence
  • Legislation Stagnation
  • Shadow Prisons: What Are They?
  • Sexual Orientation, Race, and Minority Overrepresentation at MSOP

Register today for The "Sex Offender": Why Should We Care? on Friday, April 8 at Metro State University’s Saint Paul campus. Free and open to the public. Co-hosted by Metro State University, End MSOP, and the Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

 Questions? Contact raj, Associate Professor in the School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, at raj.sethuraju@metrostate.edu, or Dr. Therissa Libby, Associate Professor in Human Services, at therissa.libby@metrostate.edu. If you need disability-related accommodations to make this event accessible, please contact the Center for Accessibility Resources at accessibility.resources@metrostate.edu or call 651-793-1549.

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