I met Saskia Niño de Rivera a couple of months ago, while I was building 4Women, a program based on a proprietary methodology to create, empower and promote collaboration among women with the goal of creating a replicable model to reduce the gender gap in the working environment. While doing this, one of the main tasks, was identifying women, who are thriving in complex areas professionally, while at the same time, developing a personal life.
The idea was simple, if we find this women, and identify patterns, we will be able to focus in specific skills to promote collaboration and personal development.
A good friend of mine introduce me to Saskia, and I immediately realized two things: she is clearly by heart a social entrepreneur, and second she is doing a job nobody wants to do in a place few want to be: Saskia founded Reinserta, a non-profit organization that aims to transform the nation’s jails cycle; This is not an easy task by any means, first, most of Reinserta operations happen inside prisons, involve jail administration authorities and a complex understanding of law, human rights and empathy for others, even convicted criminals.
One of the biggest areas of action is children, Mexican law allows children to live with their mothers in prison until up to 6 years old in some areas, and there are more than 300 infants locked up across a country with the seventh highest inmate population in the world.
Yesterday I spoke to Saskia to get into the details of Reinserta, following is an edited version of our conversation:
Q: Why did you start Reinserta?
In Mexico, the criminal justice system does not consider that the prison is not the last stop in an offender’s life, which also explains why there is a high criminal relapse rate. Furthermore, prison conditions do not favor reintegration programs, detention centers are overwhelmingly crowded, and a number of prisoners consider that, once released, the criminal conditions are the same as, or even worse, than the ones when imprisoned.
Concerned about the insecurity in Mexico, the Reinserta foundation was created with the purpose of improving the country’s security by working with the penitentiary system to have a better criminal justice system that respects the inmates’ human rights.
Q: How do you measure success in the organization?
We understand that changing the world has to be done one life at a time.
When you see a young that was deprived of his or her liberty creating a project far from crime and he or she is doing fine; when you know that the actions that you do are working to change the law in order to recognize the rights of the children that are born and raised in prison so they can have a better quality of life and satisfy all of their basic needs, or when the day finally arrives when an innocent imprisoned individual is freed, we see how all the effort that we do day by day is working and we can say that we are helping in the construction of a better country, we know we are being successful.
Q: What is the number one priority and the number one need in the organization?
Our priority is the people: The people with whom we work with to look for their well-being and to have life far from crime and with justice. The people who work with us in the organization and put all their effort in a creative and enthusiastic manner to work to build a better country, and all the people who support us to make this possible.
Our main concern is that we need more allies who can join our project, so we can have a stronger voice to keep changing our criminal justice system, defend the inmates’ rights and keep working with the youth who has been given with a second chance to live outside of the crime.
Q= Reinserta’s areas of action are tough, prisons, corrupted systems, miss conceptions in law and human rights, how do the organization deal with that, without losing the passion and the drive to keep making things better?
It is precisely the fact that nobody does anything to change these situations our motivation to work more passionately in subjects that even though most people do not want to see, they affect us all. Plus, the successful cases we have had so far, even the smallest ones, have shown us that it is worth the hard work and, sometimes, to go against the flow, when we get to have an incidence for better in someone else’s life, knowing that this is also helping to change the situation of our country little by little.
Saskia is definitely an inspiration and a great example of taking matters into your own hands, regardless of your reality, you can always make a positive change in the world.