NJRC 2026 Annual Reentry Conference “Trauma"

On Holy Thursday, April 2, 2026, the New Jersey Reentry Corporation will host its Annual Reentry Conference on Trauma at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. To reserve your place, please click the red ‘Reserve a Spot’ button.

The Conference is grounded in a clear policy judgment: trauma is a neurobiological condition that directly affects cognition, judgment, emotional regulation, and decision-making. Today’s criminal justice system increasingly encounters individuals whose behavior reflects unresolved neurological injury arising from violence, chronic stress, addiction, and deprivation. Absent clinical intervention, legal responses tend to manage symptoms rather than address underlying neurological injury, missing a critical opportunity to intervene in the systemic drivers of criminal behavior.

The Conference brings together nationally recognized medical and psychiatric leaders to examine trauma with scientific rigor. Keynote speaker Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, will anchor the discussion by explaining how brain injury and trauma alter perception, impulse control, and reasoning. She will be joined by Petros Levounis, former President of the American Psychiatric Association, and Elie Aoun, a four-board-certified psychiatrist on the faculty of Columbia University. Together, they will examine evidence-based clinical interventions, including cognitive behavioral and trauma-informed therapies, that restore neurological regulation and improve decision-making capacity.

The policy implications are direct. When trauma remains untreated, individuals often remain neurologically oriented toward survival responses that impair judgment and undermine compliance with court or supervisory expectations. Addressing trauma clinically is therefore not ancillary to justice policy; it is a prerequisite for healthy reentry, durable recovery, and public safety. The 2026 Annual Reentry Conference is intended to inform judges, policymakers, clinicians, and corrections leaders on how clinically grounded trauma treatment can be responsibly integrated into criminal justice practice, aligning legal authority with medical science to produce stable, successful reentry.

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Host or Publisher The New Jersey Reentry Corporation