Holistic Mental Health & Wellness — Life After Justice
Mental Health & Wellness
Holistic Mental Health & Wellness Empowerment Pilot Program

Building a New Standard
of Care After Wrongful Conviction.

A deliberately structured, evidence-building initiative designed to build, test, and refine a survivor-created model of trauma-informed care for people harmed by wrongful incarceration and their loved ones.

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"Healing-centered, survivor-designed support that helps individuals and families process trauma, rebuild stability, and move forward after wrongful incarceration."
Life After Justice · Holistic Mental Health Program
Empowering Restoration Beyond Release
Not Just to Survive — But to Thrive.

The Holistic Mental Health & Wellness Pilot is designed to support people harmed by wrongful incarceration as they rebuild their lives after release — not just to survive, but to move toward stability, restoration, and long-term well-being.

Rather than treating healing as a short-term intervention, the pilot supports participants across multiple dimensions of life, including mental and emotional health, relationships, physical well-being, and personal and professional growth. Participants are paired with LAJ-trained mental health providers for weekly psychotherapy, with access to additional wellness supports as appropriate.

This pilot is both a source of care and a learning phase — helping Life After Justice identify what meaningful, effective support truly looks like after wrongful incarceration.

Why This Pilot Exists
Traditional Mental Health Systems Often Fail OUR Community.

This pilot exists because traditional mental health systems often fail OUR community — through cost, access barriers, stigma, and a lack of understanding of wrongful incarceration trauma.

Life After Justice's Holistic Mental Health & Wellness Pilot is a deliberately structured, evidence-building initiative designed to build, test, and refine a survivor-created model of trauma-informed care for people harmed by wrongful incarceration and their loved ones.

Rather than creating a permanent service program, LAJ is building, evaluating, and refining a model of care grounded in lived experience that can be scaled and adopted nationally. We are working alongside survivors, families, and licensed providers to learn what meaningful, effective support actually looks like.

Through this pilot, we are delivering trauma-informed care, listening closely to participant experiences, and evaluating outcomes. What we learn will inform a scalable, survivor-centered framework that can be adopted more widely — helping ensure people harmed by wrongful incarceration have access to care that supports long-term healing, stability, and the ability to rebuild life after release.

Life After Justice's Holistic Mental Health & Wellness Pilot was created in direct response to a gap that survivors have identified again and again: traditional mental health systems are not built to address the trauma of wrongful incarceration.

This pilot is grounded in the lived experience of LAJ's leadership and Board of Directors — individuals who collectively spent 93 years wrongfully incarcerated. Drawing from their own journeys, they recognized the need to design a healing model that goes beyond traditional approaches and removes the barriers that too often prevent survivors from accessing care.

Their insight shaped a program rooted in dignity, access, and understanding — one designed not only to support participants today, but to inform a scalable model of care that can be adopted more broadly in the future.

The pilot supports participants across multiple dimensions of life — mental and emotional health, relationships, physical well-being, and personal and professional growth. Participants are paired with LAJ-trained mental health providers for weekly psychotherapy, with access to additional wellness supports as appropriate.

What Makes This Different
Lived Experience at the Center.

This pilot is grounded in the lived experience of LAJ's leadership — individuals who collectively spent 93 years wrongfully incarcerated. Their insight shaped every aspect of this program.

What Care Looks Like in Practice
Two Core Components

The Pilot Program is built around two foundational principles — removing barriers to access and creating a genuinely safe space for healing.

Component 01

Access Without Barriers

We remove common obstacles that prevent people from receiving mental health and wellness care. No participant is excluded due to cost, location, or lack of prior access to care.

  • Covering treatment costs for participants without insurance
  • Offering virtual care when needed, including technology support
  • Supporting access to forms of care beyond traditional therapy, such as:
    • — nutrition support
    • — yoga and movement practices
    • — art-based therapeutic services
  • Access to Technology: We provide each participant with the technology and support needed to access virtual sessions — including a laptop or tablet with Wi-Fi capability and dedicated technical support — ensuring nothing stands in the way of consistent care.
  • On-going Support: Each participant is paired with an Empowerment Resource Coach who provides consistent, weekly check-ins throughout the program. This dedicated support creates a steady point of connection, helping participants stay engaged in their care and navigate their individualized plan with clarity and confidence.
Component 02

Creating a Safe Space for Healing

To prevent retraumatization and ensure appropriate informed care, all providers participating in the pilot receive specialized training focused on the realities of wrongful incarceration.

This training was developed in partnership with Dr. Darlene Perry, a clinical and forensic psychologist with extensive experience working with trauma survivors and specifically wrongfully convicted individuals and their loved ones. Together, we created a first-of-its-kind curriculum that equips psychologists, counselors, and social workers with a deeper understanding of:

  • The psychological impact of wrongful incarceration
  • Best practices for treatment
  • The importance of cultural and contextual understanding

Through this work, Life After Justice is building a growing network of trained providers — expanding capacity while setting a higher standard for how care is delivered to people harmed by wrongful conviction.

Healing-centered, survivor-designed care — because freedom must mean more than survival.
Life After Justice — Holistic Mental Health & Wellness
Early Progress & Growing Demand
Launched October 2022. Demand Exceeds Capacity.

The pilot launched in October 2022. While it currently serves a limited number of participants, demand for the program significantly exceeds capacity — with a waiting list of individuals seeking support.

Support the Pilot

Specialized Provider Training — Developed and delivered training for licensed psychologists, therapists, and social workers focused on the unique trauma of wrongful incarceration.

Growing Provider Network — Built a network of trained providers prepared to deliver trauma-informed, survivor-centered care.

Matched Care — Matched trained providers with pilot participants for individualized therapy and wellness support.

Comprehensive Assessments — Conducted comprehensive assessments to inform personalized care plans and ongoing learning.

This early momentum underscores both the urgent need for this work and the importance of expanding the pilot to generate the data, insights, and evidence required to refine the model and scale it responsibly. With additional support, we can expand the pilot, train more providers, welcome more participants, and build the evidence needed to scale this model.

Creating Lasting Change
What Happens After the Pilot

The pilot is a learning phase — not the end of the work. Our goal is not to be the sole provider of services, but to ensure that wherever someone lives, support after wrongful incarceration is informed by lived experience.

Once the pilot concludes, Life After Justice will analyze outcomes, survivor feedback, and provider data to determine which approaches most effectively support healing, stability, and reintegration for people harmed by wrongful incarceration and their loved ones.

Those findings will be used to refine a survivor-centered model of mental health and wellness care that can be shared, scaled, and adopted beyond Life After Justice. This includes developing best-practice guidelines, training tools, and outcome metrics that can be adopted by mental health providers, public systems, and policymakers nationwide.

This approach ensures that investment helps create a scalable framework capable of improving care across communities, influencing funding decisions, and shaping policy — delivering lasting impact while reducing the need for repeated isolated interventions.

For Providers
Join Our Care Network.

Life After Justice partners with licensed mental health professionals and wellness providers who are committed to trauma-informed, healing-centered care for people and families impacted by wrongful incarceration.

Providers work alongside Life After Justice to deliver care that meets people where they are — and help to shape a model of support that promotes long-term healing and stability beyond release.

If this work aligns with your practice and values, we welcome the opportunity to connect.

Let's Connect
Who We Seek

Licensed Providers

Licensed therapists, psychologists, social workers, wellness practitioners committed to trauma-informed care for people harmed by wrongful incarceration.

What You'll Do

Deliver & Shape Care

Providers deliver care directly to participants and help shape a model of support that promotes long-term healing and stability beyond release.

What We Provide

Specialized Training

All providers receive specialized training developed with Dr. Darlene Perry — equipping you to deli