In this episode of Cardinal Direction, host Jessica Dobrinsky is joined by Brianna Neufer, Chief Operating Officer at Americans for Public Safety, to unpack one of the most polarized issues in American life: public safety.

Brianna shares how her work across the criminal justice landscape, from managing national strategy and grants at Stand Together to helping launch a new organization focused on policy and elections, has shaped her view that public safety is not a partisan talking point, but a foundational public obligation. Together, they discuss how communities can rebuild trust between citizens and law enforcement, why constitutional protections are essential to a fair justice system, and what practical reforms can reduce crime while strengthening the rule of law, including risk-based pretrial detention, smarter policing strategies, and more effective rehabilitation behind bars.

Host Jessica Dobrinsky sits down with Beverly Sharpe, a former federal prison officer and administrator who spent 30 years inside the corrections system before turning her experience toward reentry and reform through West Virginia’s REACH Initiative. Together, they explore what happens after the sentence ends, when people returning home face hundreds of “collateral consequences” that block housing, work, education, and even basic stability, often setting them up to fail before they’ve had a chance to start over.

Sharpe explains how REACH operates like a “triage nurse” for reentry: meeting people where they are, mobilizing a statewide network of reentry councils and community partners, and cutting through red tape to solve urgent needs in real time. The conversation also digs into the school-to-prison and foster-care-to-prison pipelines, the role employers and the faith community can play in restoring dignity, and why second chances are not soft on accountability—they’re essential to safer, stronger communities.

In this episode of Cardinal Direction, host Jessica Dobrinsky sits down with Vikrant Reddy, senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, to explore one of the most consequential and complicated issues in American life: how we punish, how we forgive, and what justice actually requires. Drawing on his experience launching the Right on Crime initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Reddy explains how criminal justice reform can resonate with conservatives and libertarians, especially through the lens of overcriminalization, in which regulatory violations can land ordinary people in the criminal justice system.

The conversation moves from big-picture principles to practical takeaways for states like West Virginia. Reddy argues that public safety and constitutional rights are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones—and that effective reform starts with “swift and certain” accountability rather than simply harsher sentences. They also discuss policing, rural-versus-urban realities, and why opioid and drug policy challenges should not default to an ever-expanding criminal justice response.