Trauma and Incarceration
As a trauma-informed professional, Christine speaks about the ways incarceration compounds childhood trauma, perpetuating the criminal justice cycle we have today in the United States.
In 2024, Christine appeared on the Transforming Trauma podcast to discuss the intersection of trauma and incarceration.
About Christine
Christine decided she wanted to be a writer when her first grade teacher at Miami Heights Elementary in Southwest Ohio applauded the story she wrote about a horse on the grass (word count: twenty-two) and took her to all the second grade classrooms to share it aloud.
Fast forward a hundred years and Christine began visiting with the incarcerated in 2002 while raising her children in suburban Cincinnati. As a prison instructor, chaplain, and the director of prison ministries for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Christine met with the sheep most lost inside men’s and a women’s prisons and learned quickly that she was only not them by grace and good fortune.
As she studied the intersection between incarceration and faith, Christine witnessed the chasm between the love that those in the pews declare and the love they withhold from those society has declared beyond hope. In the greatest of ironies and in growing the prison ministry in the Cincinnati diocese, Christine met hundreds of champions of the faith behind bars and encountered opposition and indifference from those bearing the highest titles in the Catholic community.
A native of Cincinnati, Christine spent years in the corporate world with USA Today newspaper and has been a freelance writer for numerous publications over the years. Her greatest opportunity has been to raise her five children—Timmy, Colin, Mackenzie, Jack, Natalie—and to expose them to travel, dialogue, resilience, and the God that makes all of that possible.
After fifteen years working with the incarcerated and teaching criminal justice for Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, Christine and her husband, Todd, started Damascus—a non-profit reentry staffing organization that provides pre-release trauma curriculum in high-security prisons, as well as social support and sustainable employment post-release with the Damascus Model. Over the last decade, Damascus has educated and placed into employment thousands of individuals, each of them with a felony background.
(www.teamdamascus.com).
After thousands of hours talking to, praying for, problem-solving with, and laughing alongside men and women in prison, Christine believes the solution to mass incarceration and recidivism is possible only by changing the larger narrative, refocusing the lens, and engaging stakeholders (read: legislators, judges, prosecutors, families, educators, individuals) in a brand-new way. She’s expecting a fair amount of resistance—perhaps even from those tasked to solve the problems—and welcomes the challenge.
After three decades of bylines in local newspapers and niche publications, Good Lookin’ Out: Chapel Girl in Prison is Christine's first published book and a leaping off point in demonstrating what can happen when we confront our bias, examine our own stories, decide to be part of the change, and love people out loud.
Contact Christine Marallen here.