Pacific Islander advocacy group launches effort to aid Utah prison inmates

SALT LAKE CITY — After just one session, Susi Feltch-Malohifo’ou thinks an initiative meant to foster violence prevention, healing and growth among inmates in the Utah State Correctional Facility is yielding results.

Feltch-Malohifo’ou helped facilitate the first peer-group session sponsored by Pacific Island Knowledge 2 Action Resources, which she leads and said a prison administrator who took part was impressed with the results.

“She said to me when we left, ‘I have never seen anything like this. … They opened up so quickly to you and shared,'” said Feltch-Malohifo’ou.

The KAVA Talks UP effort — KAVA stands for Knowledge Above Violence Always and UP stands for Utah Prisons — is a new prison offshoot of her group’s support and education initiative, KAVA Talks. KAVA Talks sessions are geared primarily toward Pacific Islander men and aim, in part, to curb the use of violence as a means of dealing with problems.

Like KAVA Talks, the prison offshoot — which held its first weekly meeting at the Salt Lake County prison on Nov. 22 — is open to anyone, and Feltch-Malohifo’ou said the initial session drew 14 participants, including white inmates and others of Pacific Island, Mexican, Albanian and Iranian descent. While the program is rooted in Pacific Island culture — Pacific Island Knowledge 2 Action Resources, or PIK2AR, is an advocacy group focused on curbing violence in the community — it can serve a broader cross-section of people.

“Our values are usually God, family, and community,” Feltch-Malohifo’ou said. “We’ve found that through years of doing this, that it’s very transferable. Our Pacific Island culture matches up with most immigrants. They’re going through the same issues.”

When PIK2AR launched its KAVA Talks session some 10 years ago, a long-term goal was to implement the programming in the prison system. Pacific Islanders represent perhaps 1% of Utah’s population, Feltch-Malohifo’ou said, but 5% of those caught in the state’s prison and legal system. Reconnecting people to their “cultural strengths and values,” she went on, can help boost their self-worth and aid in combatting such figures.

“We felt self-value, a lack of self-value, was where a lot of these issues were coming from,” said Feltch-Malohifo’ou, herself an ex-felon. “We’re Polynesian, but when you’re raised here, where do you fit? We’re too brown to be here, we’re too white to be over here. Often people that come from different cultures don’t mesh.”

Apart from weekly peer group sessions, a financial literacy workshop is taught to help participating inmates develop money-management skills. The program also includes a segment focused on violence prevention.

“The program empowers participants to understand violence prevention, intervention and healing, to hold themselves and others accountable to live violence-free, and to be part of the solution, not the problem,” reads a press release about the new program.