Photo: San Quentin State Penitentiary (by Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA )

Brother’s Keepers is a peer support training program housed at San Quentin State Penitentiary, focused on crisis intervention and suicide prevention. Graduates of the program provide peer support to other incarcerated individuals in acute crisis. The training’s components include the basics of peer counseling, trauma-informed care, grief and loss counseling, rape crisis counseling, suicide prevention, and cultural humility. The program also includes ongoing, regular case conferences with its graduates. Brother’s Keepers has demonstrated success not only in reducing the suicide rate in San Quentin but also aiding its graduates on the path to parole. The program has trained dozens of incarcerated men who, in turn, have provided peer support and crisis intervention to hundreds more of their fellows.

Brother’s Keepers is run by Shanti staff member David Jordan (Lead Facilitator/Curriculum Development) and Ladybird Morgan (Executive Director, Humane Prison Hospice Project).