DC Public Safety (Transcripts)» Criminal Justice

Sexual Exploitation of Children-DC Public Safety-US Department of Justice

Len — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:02:15 +0000

Sexual Exploitation of Children – “DC Public Safety”

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

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Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/07/sexual-exploitation-of-children-dc-public-safety/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi, everybody. Welcome to D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s show is about sexual exploitation of children, and you know what? It’s really about a rescue mission. The FBI estimates that on any given day there’s a million pedophiles online looking for your children. The attorney general, Eric Holder, what he did was to frame a national effort to look at what we can do, what we in the criminal justice system can do, and to look at what you as parents can do. To discuss this on the first half of the program, we have Francey Hakes. She is the national coordinator for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction from the U.S. Department of Justice, and we have Dr. Michael Bourke, chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office, and to Francey, and to Michael, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Francey Hakes: Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes: All right, did I frame all this issue? I mean, we have a lot of people, a lot of concern, a lot of individuals involved in exploiting our children. So can you frame it for me a little bit, Francey? And can you give me a sense as to the national effort as announced by the attorney general, Eric Holder?

Francey Hakes: Of course. Some people have described the sexual exploitation of our children as an epidemic. I would certainly describe the explosion of child pornography that way. So last August, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced our national strategy for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction. It’s the first ever national strategy by any government in the world, and it’s certainly our first. It’s supposed to have three prongs: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction. What we decided to do is bring together all of the federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, all our prevention partners, all our sex offender management partners, our court partners, and most importantly, our parents and community groups together to bring this effort under one umbrella so that we can fight child sexual exploitation on all fronts.

Len Sipes: The numbers that I’m talking about, they’re going up dramatically. The numbers are astounding. We’re talking about a huge number of individuals trying to violate our kids on a day to day basis, and when I say violate, we’re talking about psychological and physical bondage, are we not?

Francey Hakes: Unfortunately, the children that are being sexually abused, especially the ones whose images are being traded like baseball cards across the internet, across the world, are being violated in increasingly violent ways, and we’re seeing increasingly younger and younger children being violated that way, and that is the reason that the attorney general and all of our partners decided to get together and start this effort, so that we could do something about it, and our ultimate goal is to eradicate child exploitation ultimately.

Len Sipes: Michael, you’re the chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office. You are an expert. You understand these individuals; child sexual predators probably better than anybody else. Who are they?

Michael Bourke: Well, for eight years, prior to coming to the Marshal Service, I treated these men in federal prison, and the truth is there isn’t really one mind of a predator, you know, so to speak. These men come in from all walks of life, they’re from all socioeconomic groups, they’re both genders, frankly, and these men tend not to burn out like other types of offenders do. So really, when we talk about what is the sex offender, they, they’re folks that are our neighbors; they’re folks that are our coaches and civic leaders in our communities in some cases. So they, most individuals that offend against children are actually known to those children and some have a very positive relationship in other ways with those children.

Len Sipes: Well, help me frame it Michael, because on one hand, we have, according to the FBI, a million pedophiles online, and they’re trying to entice these kids into meetings, and they’re trying to entice them to exchange images. These images are going to haunt them for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, most sexual exploitations involved people who were known to the victim. They’re the neighbor. They’re the uncle. They’re the coach. I mean, what do you say to parents? I mean, the numbers seem to be overwhelming. What are the chief lessons to be learned here, and what prevention lessons can we put on the table?

Michael Bourke: Yeah, I think, and Francey may have something to add to this, but from my experience, parents need to be aware of what their children are doing online. They need to be aware of who their friends are online, with whom they’re chatting at night, they should be paying as close attention to those friends as they do if their child’s going to go spend the night at someone’s home, and frankly, a lot of parents are a little intimidated by some of this advanced technology on the internet, children have a lot of access and avenues by which to access the internet, including mobile devices, and parents need to just get a little, get some additional education, and they need to pay attention to what these kids are doing online. It’s a very dangerous place.

Len Sipes: They’ve got to be aggressive. We run, by the way, in this program, we run a commercial about parents intervening with their kids and their online experiences, but the parents need to be aggressive. Is that the bottom line? I mean that’s the principal prevention method, if parents are aggressive in terms of what their kids are doing, and keeping an open line of communication, so if that child is approached, he can go to the parent and tell the parent about this experience. Am I right or wrong?

Michael Bourke: Yes, I think that’s accurate. And also that relationship is very important between the parent and child as well. For the parent to have a relationship with the child where the child feels comfortable coming to the parent and saying, someone attempted to solicit, or asked me to send them a dirty picture.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: or something like that, so that the parent can take action because so much can occur despite parents best efforts…

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: these children can access the internet in a number of locations in a number of ways.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: so building that relationship and that type of rapport with the child is very important.

Len Sipes: Francey, you mentioned at the beginning of the program that The Department of Justice, for the first time, is bringing a coordination of effort in terms of parents, in terms of community organizations, in terms of law enforcement, in terms of everybody within the criminal justice system. What is the bottom line behind that coordination, is it to be a more effective tool for prevention, a more effective tool for apprehension and prosecution? What is it?

Francey Hakes: Well, like I said, in the beginning, it’s really three prongs. There are three main focuses of the national strategy: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction. Interdiction is traditional law enforcement investigation and prosecution. I’m a federal prosecutor, and I’ve been prosecuting these cases for 15 years. That’s obviously very important and will continue to be very important. But we’re never going to investigate and prosecute our way out of the problem. The numbers are simply too large. So deterrence is very important, and that’s where the United States Marshal Service and others, our state and local partners, through their sex offender management and monitoring, they are so key, and one of our best tools is going to be prevention. We’d rather not have the victims to have to rescue in the first place. We’d rather the children be empowered to protect themselves. We’d rather the parents have the tools that they need to know how to protect their children, and so that’s why organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Netsmarts, these organizations give out free materials, they have websites, they give out free materials for parents, teachers, students, and groups to obtain the information that they need to protect themselves online. It’s not just the parents, it’s not just the students, it’s not just the teachers. It’s all of those groups, plus our community groups, that need to have the materials necessary to protect themselves, not just online, but in their day to day activities, I think sometimes in this internet world, we’ve become, and Dr. Burke is correct, that children have access to the internet through so many devices now that it’s, sometimes, I think, a little terrifying. But we also have to remember that the majority of children who are being sexually abused are being abused by those that they know, and so arming them with the knowledge, the empowerment, the understanding of what is right and what’s wrong and what’s okay to tell, who to go to, a trusted adult, those things are very important.

Len Sipes: Having those age appropriate conversations with the kids, informing them, but not scaring them.

Francey Hakes: Exactly right.

Len Sipes: Now, so all these statistics that I mentioned at the beginning of the program, one million pedophiles, and a 914% increase in the number of child prostitution cases, do we have the capacity to deal with this? Is the criminal justice system at the federal, state, and local level overwhelmed by this process? Do we have the wherewithal to deal with this effectively, or are we fighting an uphill battle?

Francey Hakes: Well I think, sometimes in prosecution, we always used to call it shoveling smoke because it seems like the more you shovel, the more that there is. And I think with respect to child sexual abuse it’s been around for a long time, we hope that we can eradicate it, and where I think, we’ve started well, we’re on a good path. Are we somewhat overwhelmed? I think it’s overwhelming. I don’t think we’re overwhelmed. There are huge amounts of effort going on at the federal, state, and local level, but the key here is what the national strategy was designed to produce, and that is partnerships, collaboration, and cooperation at all levels of government, including globally. This has become, of course, an international problem with the advent of the internet.

Len Sipes: A global issue, right.

Francey Hakes: It is an absolutely global issue. And so we’re working with industry on ways to solve the problem. You probably heard the announcement last week from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Facebook and Microsoft. Microsoft has invented a new technology called Photo DNA. They donated it to the National Center. The National Center, in turn, gave it to Facebook, and Facebook is going to employ this technology throughout their systems which will search for and find known images of child pornography so that they can be eradicated from their systems.

Len Sipes: Wonderful. Michael -

Francey Hakes: So these are things that we have to do to work together and really think creatively between law enforcement, community, and industry.

Len Sipes: Michael, can we persuade people who are child sex offenders, who are pedophiles, not to get involved in this, or is that drive, that’s going to be with them for the rest of their lives–can the system have an impact on their behavior? Can we persuade them not to do this–that we’re taking sufficient actions that’s likely for them to get caught, can we persuade them not to do this?

Michael Bourke: Yeah, it’s a great question, Leonard. I think the answer is, it’s fairly multifaceted, but the short answer is that there is no cure for pedophilia. There’s no cure for these fantasies and these drives, per se. There is, however, for any of these individuals, a possibility of managing that behavior. This is not something inevitable, this is a choice, these men are responsible for those choices, and women, and we can assist them in doing that with creative external management. By that, I mean things like the registrations and outpatient treatment programs and things like that. With proper external management and proper internal management, these men are capable of living a life in which they never harm a child.

Len Sipes: Right, so treatment does work. That’s one of the things I did want to get across. Treatment does work, and we within the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, our sex offender agency, we’re going to talk about that with two people involved in that unit on the second half, but treatment does work, we can really persuade individuals who are on the edge. The commercial that will run between the first and second half, we’ll talk about ìwhen did you become a child sex predator?î Obviously, we’re under the opinion that we can persuade people who are on the edge not to do this. This is wrong; you’re going to get locked up. We can meaningfully intervene.

Michael Bourke: Right, well there are individuals that, with those proper things in place, have a choice not to re-offend.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Michael Bourke: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: The final part of it is aggressive prosecution. We need to go after them in every way shape and form and that’s what we’re trying to do with the federal, state, and local level, is to set up these dummy operations to pretend that you’re the 14 year old, the 13 year old, to monitor whatever it is that we can monitor, and to go after these people and arrest them and prosecute them. Is that correct?

Francey Hakes: Well that’s right, and that’s one of the reasons why we place such a high emphasis on technology and training for our law enforcement and for our prosecutors, because this is often a very high-tech crime, and we need a high tech solution, and that’s why we’re working with industry on things like I talked about, the Photo DNA initiative, but there are lots of other tools that law enforcement uses to keep up with the bad guys who are trying to assault our children. There are very sophisticated groups out there that have banded together to discuss their deviant fantasies and to plan ways to sexually assault children, and we have to find ways to be just as sophisticated to break their encryption, to get into their passwords, to find a way to infiltrate these groups, and we are doing that at the national level in order to make clear to these would-be predators that they have nowhere to hide, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have very strong, firm sentences as well, because that is part of our deterrent prong.

Len Sipes: Okay, we have one minute. So through the national effort, for what attorney general Eric Holder announced, the Office of Justice Programs, US Marshals Office, Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, we can look them in the eye and say that we’re gaining ground, that we have the wherewithal to come after you guys. Stop it.

Francey Hakes: I think the message is, to the would-be pedophile out there is you’re probably talking to a law enforcement officer, and watch out for the knock at your door.

Len Sipes: Cool. Michael?

Michael Bourke: I agree. United States Marshal Service has also set up what we call the National Sex Offender Targeting Center. It’s a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary intel and operational hub. We’re looking in all corners for these men. We are going after them when they fail to register, and we’re putting all of our efforts toward this problem.

Len Sipes: We have to close now. I really appreciate this stimulating conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, Francey Hakes, National Coordinator for the Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction from the US Department of Justice, Dr. Michael Bourke, Chief Psychologist for the United States Marshals Office. Stay with us on the second half of the program as we talk to individual parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers, who supervise sex offenders on a day to day basis. Please stay with us.

[Music Playing]

Len Sipes: Welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes, and we continue to explore this topic of sexual exploitation of children. The first half, we talked to two individuals from the Department of Justice, and we framed the numbers, and the numbers are truly staggering, but what does that mean in terms of the local level? We talked about the importance of partnerships, and we talked about the importance of people at the local level enforcing laws and providing treatment services. To talk about what it is that we do here within the District of Columbia; we have two principals with us today. We have Ashley Natoli, a community supervision officer for the sex offender unit of my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Kevin Jones, another community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, and to Ashley and Kevin welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Ashley Natoli: Thank you.

Kevin Jones: Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes: All right, Ashley, give me a sense as to this issue of the sex offender unit. What is it that we do? What is it that we do in the District of Columbia that’s unique?

Ashley Natoli: Well, we supervise offenders who have either been convicted of a sex offense, had an arrest for a sex offense, or an offense that is sexual in nature. They come to our unit and are supervised in our unit. There is roughly about 450 active cases in our unit right now, about 670 total of all sex offenders right now.

Len Sipes: Now, the interesting thing is what we at CSOSA do, and this is different from a lot of parole and probation agencies throughout the country, is that if you’ve had a sexual conviction in the past, not your current charge, but 15 years ago, if you had a sexual conviction, or if you had an arrest, you come to the sex offender unit, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: All right. Kevin, I want to talk to you. This is something that’s intrigued me from the very beginning of my time in corrections, that is, is that so many of the offenders on the sex offender unit are so compliant. They dress well, they work, they show up on time, they dot their I’s, they cross their T’s, and they give every appearance of people who are compliant vs. other offenders, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that they have issues. With the sex offender unit, the sex offenders, they can give the impression that nothing’s wrong with me, just spend your time with more troublesome people. You don’t have to really spend that much amount of time with me, look at me, I do everything right. Am I in the ballpark?

Kevin Jones: You’re in the ballpark exactly, Leonard. These guys are the most compliant guys on our caseloads. They actually drug test as scheduled, always on appointments, on time. They’re in the office, they appear to be, have all their ducks in a row. I think our main focus is, what are you after you leave our office? So that’s why we use a lot of our safety tactics, are that, we have a lot of collateral contacts with the offenders and the offenders’ families, and we really get to see what kind of guys they are once they leave our office.

Len Sipes: Now, I guess I shouldn’t brag, but then again, I am the host of the program, and this is our agency, so I am going to brag. We have one of the best sex offender units in the country, in my opinion, and what I’ve heard that from a lot of people, one of the best sex offender units. We have very high levels of contact. We drug test the dickens out of them, we submit them, they have to submit to lie detector tests, polygraphs. We put them in treatment, sometimes through the treatment process we find out about other things, we search their computers. We put them under surveillance, if necessary; we work with local law enforcement in terms of joint supervisions. We go to their home unannounced. You guys do it, and sometimes with our partners in the Metropolitan Police Department, they’re under a lot of supervision, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: Okay, and what does that do for that person, either one of you?

Kevin Jones: That person, as we do unscheduled contacts, it kind of keeps them off balance. Again, he has to be held accountable for, if he has no contact with minors, we assure that by doing home visits, and when we’re in home visits, we’re actually looking for things that might kind of be off the beat, maybe a possible toy, things of that nature in someone’s home, and at that point, they’re questioned.

Len Sipes: Now it’s also extraordinarily difficult, at the same time, with handheld computers, commonly known as smartphones. I mean, the smartphone that I carry every day is as powerful as a desktop computer five years ago. You can do anything you want with a smartphone. So yeah, we have the right to search their computers, but they may not be operating off their computers. They may be operating off of a portable device, correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: How do you deal with that?

Ashley Natoli: We look at the smartphones and the handheld devices similar to a computer. We have the ability to search those just as we would a computer, and in most instances, the offenders will be having these handheld devices as opposed to having a computer,

Len Sipes: Right. And the other thing that we are aware of too is a lot of the gaming consoles, such as Play Station 3′s, can be manipulated into being a computer as well, so we have to be looking out for a lot more than just a laptop in the home. We have to be looking into what they’re using as a phone, what they have, and then we’re asking the questions and following up with the searches. And that becomes the intriguing part of this, because it truly is a cat and mouse game. Now I don’t want to overplay my hand here. These individuals, in many cases, are compliant. You’re supervising them, they are in treatment, treatment does work, you can take individuals, and they can control their impulses. They don’t necessarily have to be out there offending. But this is truly the, Dr. Bourke mentioned it in the first half, this is the master psychological game. It is a psychological game, is it not, of cat and mouse, of looking for nuances of listening to individual little things that may not mean that much to another community supervision officer, but to you, means a lot. Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Kevin Jones: Yeah, that’s correct.

Ashley Natoli: A lot of these offenders, they are masters of manipulation and deception, and that’s, in most instances, in a lot of instances, how they ended up offending in the first place, because they have an incredible ability to groom these victims, and they’ve mastered the art of manipulation, and so we have to be aware of that so we aren’t taken advantage of.

Len Sipes: Well, tell me a little bit about the grooming of the victims, because we didn’t get involved in that in the first half. They will go online with them, and they will have, not just hours of conversations, but days or weeks or months of conversation before they ask for a photograph, or then that photograph moves on to a more sexually suggestive photograph. This is a process. They’re very patient individuals. Correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct. A lot of the guys that are in the grooming process while on sex offender treatment, a lot of that comes out in the treatment process, and once you find out that a guy might be on supervision, an offender might be on supervision for one offense, during that sex offender treatment process, you will find out that this offender has had multiple victims that he has proposed and that he has groomed, and this makes this offender a little more dangerous than what, from the outside, what it looks like to just this one victim.

Len Sipes: And again, I mean, the idea of going in unannounced, putting on a GPS tracking device, but all of that, we talk about the technology, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself with the technology, it strikes me, the most important ingredient we have here in terms of protecting the public is the savviness of the people who are supervising these sex offenders. Do I have it right? It really doesn’t matter about the computer part, the GPS, and the tracking devices, and the lie detector tests, what really matters is your ability to read the tea leaves as to whether or not this person is truly compliant or not. Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct. You have to be very patient and very thorough and leave no detail unturned. Like with the GPS, we’re not just looking at, are they complying with their curfew, are they charging their device, we’re looking at, where are they going during the daytime. So you actually look at all their tracks so you can know, did this offender go to the park, or was this offender near a school, so we’re aware of that, and we can put alerts on there so it helps us to identify that, but we have all this information, and if we’re not doing the right thing with it, then

Len Sipes: And the neat thing about it is we can overlay Google Earth, so we’re taking a look at that intersection, and we’re not quite sure he’s hanging out at the intersection, but when we overlay Google Earth, a-ha, there’s a playground that didn’t show up on a regular map. So we do have the technology tools to try and keep up with the individuals, but it’s really is more understanding who that person is. How long does it take until you get a sense as to that sex offender? How long does it take before you feel that you’re inside that person’s head, that person’s mind, that person’s modus operandi?

Kevin Jones: Well, again, with the treatment modal-, coupled with the GPS, you can probably feel your offender out, I guess, in about two months, maybe, to that nature, and a lot of it is, you’re questioning his every move, which makes him uncomfortable, which is, at the same time, holds him accountable for where he’s going, so as long as he’s knows that he’s being tracked, and that we have exclusion zones from the zoo, from parks, and things of that nature, then that kind of keeps him in compliance.

Len Sipes: And we’ll get word from the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement partners that we saw the guy spending way too much time outside of the St. Francis School. It was a block away, and maybe he has a legitimate reason for being there, maybe he doesn’t, but that’s also the law enforcement partnership feeding us information, right?

Kevin Jones: Yes.

Ashley Natoli: Yeah, definitely.

Kevin Jones: And apart with the law enforcement contact, we do unscheduled accountability tours, and that’s with our partnership with Metropolitan Police Department, and at that time, we also have what we call GPS clean sweep tours, where we will come do unscheduled accountability tours on an offender who has a GPS curfew of 7:00, just to make sure that they’re in place, that there’s no type of shielding, anything of that nature, and we also are really big on the Halloween project, where, that we will come to the offender’s home between the hours of 3 and 11, and he is to be in that home at that particular time.

Len Sipes: Right, and we have found violations on the Halloween tour. We have found kids inside the home, and we have found them, they’re not supposed to be giving out candy, they’re not supposed to be decorating homes.

Kevin Jones: Lights supposed to be off.

Len Sipes: We roll up to the house, and there’s decorations, and there’s candy, so we’re trying to protect the public in that way. The other major thing that we’re trying to do is look at social media, look at Facebook, but there are literally hundreds of sites that kids go onto. I was reading this morning about going onto gaming sites. You know, it’s not a chat room, it’s not Facebook, it’s now gaming sites. So we’re now in the process of taking a look at social media and tracking that person through the social media process, correct?

Ashley Natoli: Yes.

Kevin Jones: That is correct.

Len Sipes: Okay, and there’s a certain point where we are going to be expanding this to other offenders beyond sex offenders, but that’s part of their world, and that’s part of the experience of kids, and if they’re going to be there, we need to be there, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Kevin Jones: Yeah, and we actually have a mechanism where we are monitoring Facebook, and we’ve had situations where we’ve seen our offenders who may have no contact with minors, and in his profile sheet, he’ll be holding

Len Sipes: Right!

Kevin Jones: a child.

Len Sipes: Right.

Ashley Natoli: And it’s not as simple as just searching them by their name. You’re searching their aliases; you’re looking, searching by email addresses and different things, because a lot of it is not going to just be given to us. We have to find the information. It’s there if we search for it, deep enough.

Len Sipes: Right. We’re not going to give away our secrets in terms of how we’ve figured this out, but Cool Breeze was his moniker, nickname seven years ago, and son of a gun if he’s not using Cool Breeze in terms of his Facebook interactions, so there are all sorts of ways of getting at this issue. So the bottom line is this. What do we tell parents? I mean, you guys are there protecting their kids, you’re protecting all of society, just not the kids, but you’re protecting society, protecting kids from further activities on the part of these individuals. You know them better than just about anybody else in the criminal justice system. What do we tell parents? One of my chief messages is having an open conversation, so if somebody approaches that child, that child talks to the parents.

Ashley Natoli: I agree, and I also think parents need to be aware that this is something real and that happens every day, and that a lot of people think, oh, it won’t happen to me, or it won’t happen to my children, but you need to be aware that it is a problem and it will happen, and you need to know what’s going on so that you can educate your children appropriately and know that this is real.

Len Sipes: Well, the FBI is saying one million predators. That’s just an unbelievable number of people. I mean, they’re attacking your kids, correct, Kevin?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct. And a lot of it is, just like we were stating, collateral contacts. You have to build a collateral contact with the offenders’ family members.

Len Sipes: Right, and employers and friends.

Kevin Jones: Employers, friends, significant others.

Len Sipes: The bottom line is that you’ve got to get, and we’re going to close with this question, you’ve got to get a complete psychological profile of who that person is. You’ve got to know that person better than their own mother knows that person, correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: All right, we’re going to close on that. Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Jones, community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Ashley Natoli, the community supervision officer, again, with the sex offender unit. Thank you very much for watching, and please, protect your children. Please have an open and honest conversation and age appropriate conversation with your children. Watch for us next time when we explore another very important topic in our criminal justice system. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Video Ends]

Faith Based Partnerships and Offenders – UDC Sound Advice

Len — Thu, 26 May 2011 19:45:16 +0000

Faith Based Partnerships and Offenders – “UDC Sound Advice”

“Faith Based Partnerships and Offenders” features a discussion with a policy maker within the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, a Cluster Coordinator with CSOSA’s Mentoring Faith Based Program and an individual currently under CSOSA supervision.

Guests for this program:

Cedric Hendricks, Associate Director, Office of Legislative, Intergovernmental and Public Affairs – Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA)
Reverend Kelly Wilkins, Cluster A Coordinator for CSOSA’s Faith Based Mentoring Program
Tonya Mackey, an offender on CSOSA Supervision.

The show is hosted by Shelly Broderick, Dean of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) David A. Clarke School of Law.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our radio shows, blog and transcripts.

Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/05/faith-based-partnerships-and-offenders-udc-sound-advice/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

Shelly Broderick: Hello, I’m Shelley Broderick, Dean of the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law and your host for Sound Advice. In the District of Columbia, approximately 70% of convicted offenders serve some portion of their sentence in the community. As such, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (or CSOSA)’s effective supervision of convicted offenders provides a crucial service to the courts and paroling authority and is critical to public safety. Establishing partnerships with other criminal justice agencies, faith institutions, and community organizations is very important in order to facilitate close supervision of the offenders in the community, and to leverage the diverse resources of local law enforcement, human service agencies, and other local community groups. Approximately 2,500 men and women return home to the District of Columbia from prison every year. Among the challenges they face are the need for housing, health care, education, and employment. With me today to discuss how CSOSA meets these challenges are Cedric Hendricks, Associate Director, Reverend Kelly Wilkins, Cluster A Coordinator, and Tonya Mackey, successful returned citizen and day care assistant. Welcome.

Cedric Hendricks: Thank you.

Shelly Broderick: Let me start with you, Cedric. We go back many years. It’s so nice to have you on the show.

Cedric Hendricks: Thank you.

Shelly Broderick: And I don’t get complacent, we’ll get you back, too! Because you have a lot to talk about. Tell us what CSOSA’s mission is and what its reach is, because it’s hugely important in the District of Columbia.

Cedric Hendricks: CSOSA is a public safety agency responsible for supervising men and women on probation, parole, and supervised release. So we have about 16,000 individuals under supervision on any given day, and about 60% of them are on probation, meaning that they went to court, were sentenced, and went home, and then about 40% are on parole or supervised release, meaning that they experienced a period of incarceration and have come back home.

Shelly Broderick: Okay. And what are, and you know, it’s such a crime what we do, because when we send people to prison, we don’t provide education, we don’t help people get the housing they need, and we don’t, you know, we just don’t take care of business, and so often, people come back and don’t make it. And so that safety net that CSOSA is helping to provide is just critical to people being able to succeed. So how many folks work at CSOSA?

Cedric Hendricks: We have about 900 employees that work at the agency, and we’re a fairly unique federal agency because our mission is focused solely on the District of Columbia, and so the men and women that we supervise, for the most part, are residents here, and what we are trying to help them do is successfully complete their periods of supervision which can involve a few months to several years, and so what we see across the board, and this is what those who are on probation as well as those who have returned home is that, as you’ve indicated, housing, health care, education, and employment are the major challenges that they face, and so we’re very active in trying to partner with the District government, the faith community, and nonprofit resource and service providers to try and help those we supervise meet the needs that they have.

Shelly Broderick: Okay. Tonya, let me turn to you. You’re a returned citizen.

Tonya Mackey: Yes.

Shelly Broderick: You were locked up for how long?

Tonya Mackey: For about five years.

Shelly Broderick: And you came back to the District of Columbia?

Tonya Mackey: Yes.

Shelly Broderick: All set, you were ready to go, everything was perfect?

Tonya Mackey: Not -

Shelly Broderick: No, okay. It’s not surprising. How did you, you went to CSOSA, because you were required to -

Tonya Mackey: Exactly, for reentry.

Shelly Broderick: And tell me what advice they gave you.

Tonya Mackey: The advice they gave me was just some little simple things that, at first, didn’t sound so simple, but I knew I wanted my freedom and I wanted to be on the street, and so I did what was necessary. It took, it wasn’t all good, but at the end, I’m on top because I’m successfully completed, and through CSOSA, what they told me was, is that I needed to, I needed to get some help from some other women, and a lot of times, women like me never really wanted to communicate with other women because we didn’t, I didn’t think that we had anything in common but being a woman, but thank god that CSOSA sent me to a faith based program where I met Reverend Kelley, who is now my spiritual guidance, and I have a mentor from a program which is from women based empowerment, it’s a program called Empowerment for Women. Ms. Mignonne who teaches it, I got a whole lot out of it, and what they help me to do was deal with my mom, coming home in society, dealing with other women, dealing with getting an education, dealing with how to ask someone how you get housing, where to go and ask, believing in myself again and believing in God, and -

Shelly Broderick: Talk about your mom. Talk about your mom.

Tonya Mackey: My mom, who has been there with me for my whole entire life, she, I have always done, I felt like I have always done wrong to her, and now I’m trying to make a difference in her life and my life, actually my life first, and then her life, because that’s the only way I can do it. My mom is a cancer survivor, she’s been diagnosed, she just -

Shelly Broderick: She just found out.

Tonya Mackey: – just found out she was diagnosed with cancer, and I went on actually my first cancer walk with her last year, so -

Shelly Broderick: Wow.

Tonya Mackey: – to be, the grace of God, and I always say, to be, to God, because without him, I know that I wouldn’t be on this journey, and other people that help me along the way so far, CSOSA, and faith based led program.

Shelly Broderick: So you came out of all this in West Virginia -

Tonya Mackey: Yes.

Shelly Broderick: – and you came back, and one of the first things that happened is you found out your mom had cancer.

Tonya Mackey: Yes.

Shelly Broderick: Now is that the kind of stress that can really -
Tonya Mackey: – take me back out, or would have.

Shelly Broderick: That’s right.

Tonya Mackey: Would have.

Shelly Broderick: I mean, that’s the kind of thing that makes people go back on drugs.

Tonya Mackey: Exactly.

Shelly Broderick: As one of my friends, a drinker, says, what’s so great about reality? You know, right? So it’s one of those things that can just turn you upside down.

Tonya Mackey: Exactly.

Shelly Broderick: Reverend Wilkins. You met Tonya around that time.

Kelly Wilkins: Yes, actually, I did, and Tonya, when I first met her, she came to the group. It was Purpose Empowerment, women’s empowerment group. She came to the group, and she really was not participating that much. You know, she really didn’t want to be there. She didn’t really see the reason why she needed to be around a bunch of women because she had never really had any bonding relationships with women before, and so I would say about, let’s say two months into the program, they started in December, somewhere about February, we had that, we had awful snow in the District of Columbia, and I remember people in the group calling me saying, is there a way we can still meet at the church? And I’m thinking, like, no, there’s no way!

Tonya Mackey: We can’t get there!

Kelly Wilkins: So the facilitator who was just, she created the program, and she’s completely committed to it, figured out a way for them to talk on the phone, to really deal with whatever stresses they were dealing with, being locked in the house because of the snow, so I mean, awesome support for Tonya, and I saw her grow. I mean, she just grew so phenomenally from December, and she graduated in May, the first week of May. So yeah, it was a 17-week program at that time.

Shelly Broderick: What does that feel like? Was it hard at first?

Tonya Mackey: At first, yes. I was like, didn’t want to be there, I wasn’t going to participate, I was going to go pass and go through -

Shelly Broderick: Check it off your list.

Tonya Mackey: Right, right.

Shelly Broderick: Check it off.

Tonya Mackey: But after a while, you know, even after I finished the program, now I’m returning back. So it was real, it was a real blessing to me because now I have, like Ms. Kelly says, I have women that I can call, we can talk, we can bond. We can talk about anything that’s going on.

Shelly Broderick: What kinds of things?

Tonya Mackey: We talk about how we hurt our families, we talk about how we can make a difference in other people’s lives, how I can come back, and this right here is even a blessing to me, because I was like, oh wow, somebody’s calling me and asking me to be a power attraction to someone else, whereas I had low self esteem, low self worth, didn’t think that I could become better than what I am today, and I feel real good about where I am today, and where I’m at today is that I’m helping my mom, even with her cancer, the part of surviving, you still have to go back and get treatments, but I’ve been able to be accountable today. You know, I’m not stealing her money today. I’m not lying today. You know, it feels real good. You know, a lot of times, she still may have doubt, but that’s not up to me. As long as I stay on this path, I know that everything’s going to be all right, because she’s along with me to take care of her children today, that she had just started her business, her own day care business, so now I am an assistant to her, and it feels real good, and like I said, I graduated from the empowerment, women’s empowerment program, and I still go back, and I still constantly go down to the courts every now and again, and just to hear cases, and to find out how I used to be and how I can go back, and I don’t want to go back. I want to stay where I’m at today, and being here with you guys makes me feel so good, lets me know that I’m accomplishing something.

Shelly Broderick: It lifted me up, I’ll tell you that! I was a defense attorney for a long time, and I watched some of my clients go away for a good long period of time, and it’s heartbreaking, and sometimes you can feel like it can be a good thing, just put a stop in the action, get away, it’s not a good place you ever want to send anybody, but get to a place where you’re out of this environment and get it together and come back and make it work, and you know, for so many people, it doesn’t work because they come back and they don’t have the safety net and the support system and the help. You come back, you can’t get into housing. You can’t get public housing. Okay, where are you supposed to, oh, back in the old neighborhood!

Kelly Wilkins: Yeah, and let me just say, support is very critical to recovery and reentry. Without support, we can’t do it by ourselves. Even the faith, the faith based community can’t assist returning citizens by themselves. That’s why we need Court Services to be a partner with us.

Shelly Broderick: Tell me what the partnership looks like. How do you enter in?

Cedric Hendricks: We came to recognize at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency that we couldn’t do it by ourselves, and that we really needed to have solid partnerships with the natural resources, the natural systems in the community. There are many neighborhoods in the District of Columbia where you can find a church on every block, and all of these faith institutions have ministries. They’re about the business of serving their congregations and their communities in a wide variety of ways, and so what we saw to do was tap into that network. So back in 2002, we put out a call to the faith community through using a strategy called re-entry Sunday, and through having collaboration, communication with faith institutions, we were able to build a network that was willing to work with us, and from the congregations of those faith institutions, many men and women came forward to serve as mentors for those men and women who had come home from prison. So that work continues to this day, and we continue to match men and women who are coming home with mentors so that they can have someone to talk to, as Tonya indicated, many of our mentors are returned citizens as well, and we’re allied with faith institutions across the city who are opening their doors to be helpful in so many wonderful ways.

Shelly Broderick: That’s fantastic. So my first job at a college was at Lorton Prison doing group therapy with inmates. Now why did they hire a 21-year-old white girl? I don’t know! What were they thinking? But anyway, you know, I learned way more than I taught, and I had an opportunity to meet a lot of guys who it was clear to me didn’t need to be there. Guys who got in trouble when they were real young, just 20 to life, right? 20 to life is what everybody got. And they just did maybe 15 years of that, no education, no job training, just, and they were poets: smart, interesting, thoughtful people being wasted, and I think it had a huge amount to do. Actually in college, I worked at a halfway house on Euclid Street for inmates within six months of release. I was at AU, I didn’t know anything. But I was interested. I don’t know why. And then I ultimately went to law school and became a defense attorney. So this is a world that I care very deeply about, and I’m so glad to hear, because it really, it’s so important to put these families back together, because what happens is the kids don’t know Dad or Mom, and there, it’s just, it’s destructive forever if we can’t make this kind of connection and help you make it work.

Tonya Mackey: That’s what, actually, I was getting ready to say something on that part right there about you saying that a lot of times, the parents, you know, don’t really have the time to be there, and then they get subjected to some things you might have just one father, one mother trying to do the best that they can, and a lot of times, we make our own decisions too, you know, but when we get the help that we need. I know it’ll be a lot more than me that would do better than they’re doing. It’s just that we have to want to do the best that we can, and today, I’m just choosing, saying, I wasn’t great, I wasn’t good all my life, and that’s why I’m here saying that if we put forth the effort, we can be the best people that, we can be whatever we want to be.

Shelly Broderick: It’s a wonderful think. So Reverend Wilkins, talk about your church and how this came about for you and -

Kelly Wilkins: Okay. Well -

Shelly Broderick: We love your church, and we want to give them full credit.

Kelly Wilkins: I attend Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ, which is on South Capitol Street SW. My pastors are Drs. Christine and Dennis Wiley, and at our church, I serve as the associate minister of social justice and reentry, and we also have a nonprofit, which is called Covenant Full Potential Development Center, and that’s really how we are able to work with Court Services is through our nonprofit organization, and our church, we have a, we’re a very progressive church. We have a very strong social justice stance in our community, so we, this is our area. We believe that helping the least of these is our calling and our job. We’re located in Ward 8, and Ward 8, which most of the returning citizens return home to Ward 8, a large portion of them, and it’s a lot of poverty in Ward 8, and -

Shelly Broderick: And not very many jobs.

Kelly Wilkins: Not many jobs -

Shelly Broderick: Not housing that -

Kelly Wilkins: That’s right.

Shelly Broderick: – folks have access to.

Kelly Wilkins: But they’re good people in Ward 8, and they just need the support, and they need the support of our faith community as well as our federal agencies, and I think advocacy is really at the top, and when we look at returning citizens, I think the environment, the whole attitude towards returning citizens has begun to change because of advocacy in the community. There are plenty of advocacy groups, and our church tries to partner with as many as possible so people know that, you know, just because you were incarcerated doesn’t mean that you’re not a person, that you’re not human, that you don’t deserve a second chance, that you did pay your dues, so it’s time to allow people to have a second chance, and so our church takes that stand as the lead institution for 7 and 8. When you say Cluster A coordinator, that means I actually recruit mentors and services for 7 and 8, but we do a lot of citywide events and services as well, and so part of our church’s stance on returning citizens is, not to be silent about it. Let’s not be silent about incarceration anymore. I think the, particularly, African American community has felt ashamed about incarceration, where you talk about the number of years that people went away, and we didn’t know the impact of that in our own families. It has exacerbated our families in our communities.

Shelly Broderick: It’s so true.

Kelly Wilkins: And so we didn’t know what the impact of that was going to be, but what has happened is, particularly the black church, but our faith institutions, have always had a strong social justice stance, and so incarceration wasn’t a part of that. So it is the tendency for churches and faith institutions to be silent about it. So we want our partners to talk about incarceration: the pain, the struggle of the family, the needs, all of that. We want to educate pastors and tell them, look, don’t be quiet about incarceration in your family. You have people in your pews who are returning home or families who are struggling because of a family member missing, and so that’s the kind of things that we want to educate our community and our faith partners on as well.

Shelly Broderick: It really, you know, when I was a little girl in Maine, there was a prison called Thomason Prison, and they had a store. They had people doing crafts. And so every time we went past there, we used to go into the store, they had prison inmates working in the store, you know, getting close to getting out, so I grew up thinking prisoners were all white, because in Maine, they’re all white, and they’re really good at crafts! I still have this set of three paintings that we got. I still have the stool in my kitchen made at the prison. My sister gave us each Christmas stocking gifts last summer, all from the prison, because that was my conception as a kid. You know, and because the prisoners I knew were getting close to coming out, it was just all very natural and, you know, we don’t do that. We send our prisoners a million miles away. They are completely hidden from society, and we don’t have that kind of easy give and take back and forth that I experienced.

Cedric Hendricks: Well, you know, one of the challenging things about the District of Columbia is that the District’s prison, Lorton, that you mentioned you worked at closed back in 2001, and all of our inmates were dispersed across the United States. And that has made it, I think, extremely difficult to maintain contact with your loved ones. So if you were locked up in Louisiana, Idaho, you’re not going to get visits from your family. It’s even going to be challenging to get phone calls from your family, and if you’re away for five years, as you’ve mentioned, and you don’t have regular contact with your support system, it does create, I think, challenges to come back, and so it is essential that we have mentors from faith institutions to kind of step in while folks are coming back trying to reestablish connections with the community, because sometimes families are slow to embrace their loved ones when they come home.

Kelly Wilkins: They’re mad. Sometimes they’re mad because you left them.

Tonya Mackey: – you took my stuff and, hey, I just don’t want to be bothered with you, I felt you have to prove a point to me, and I’ve been there, because that in and out of, coming out of jail and nobody believing in you because you said it over and over again, so when do you change? When do we stop? It has to.
Shelly Broderick: Well, you make a good point -

Tonya Mackey: But you have to make a community.

Shelly Broderick: First of all, Alderson is, what, six hours away? You were just right around the corner in West Virginia, but six hours, that’s crazy! You can’t, like, there’s no plane there. It is a trek! It is so hard.

Kelly Wilkins: And if you have children, how do they eat in the ride going down there, when they get down there, do you drive six hours, and then you visit an hour, and then you drive six hours back?

Shelly Broderick: And can you afford to stay in a hotel? Is there a hotel anywhere nearby? A motel or anything? No, it’s crazy. And then, they don’t lock women up very often unless they’ve got a history, so you -

Tonya Mackey: Yeah, I had a history.

Shelly Broderick: You did, in and out -

Tonya Mackey: In and out of jail.

Shelly Broderick: – locally and all that. So you had a mountain to climb.

Tonya Mackey: Exactly.

Shelly Broderick: You had a mountain to climb.

Tonya Mackey: Exactly.

Shelly Broderick: So talk to me about your mentor.

Tonya Mackey: Well, what happens is, a lot of times, when I go to my other program, Empowered by Women, we stay in touch, me and Ms. Mignonne, and me and Ms., my mentor, we stay in touch, Ms. Kelly, and what happens is, just like she called me today, and she was like, well, I need to kind of like, help me out. I’m in a spot. Not a problem, and that’s what it’s about, me being accountable today. Even though I was at work -

Shelly Broderick: I see that. I’m guessing you don’t wear that on Saturday.

Tonya Mackey: But thank god that I’m able to do that today! You know, thank god I was able, like I said, not just come home and get a job, because I still have some things that I have to do, but I’m just helping my mom, because like, she’s going through her cancer situation, which I know God already having, and I’m her only child to speak about it, so I took my mom, when I got locked up, she was locked up, and a lot of us don’t realize that until after we get a certain amount of clean time, people in our life who we can share the real gut level things about how you treated your moms when you was on the street, and then a lot of people don’t have their mom, so I’m real grateful today that I have my mom to talk to, and like I said, I talked to Ms. Willis and them, and Ms. Kelly, like, on a regular, because it’s like, I need people in my life to keep me on the right track when I need to stay outside of myself, when I get angry, and it feels like there’s nobody in my corner, you know, I’ve learned how to pray. I mean, it’s like, I talk to God, at first I was like, I don’t know how, I don’t know where, but I’m like, God, can you just help me. Next thing I know, there’ll be a phone call. I’m here. And that’s only through the grace of God, because, hey, I always wanted to become a positive role model. I just didn’t know how. So today, I’ve learned how to become a better person and a better human being.

Shelly Broderick: We’ve got about four more minutes. You’ve got two, and you’ve got two.

Kelly Wilkins: Okay, great!

Shelly Broderick: What else do we need to know?

Kelly Wilkins: Through the faith-based initiative, we look for faith partners. I’m always…

Shelly Broderick: You’re recruiting right now.

Kelly Wilkins: I guess, I’m always recruiting mentors, and I’m always trying to recruit services that will help our returning citizens -

Shelly Broderick: How do you become a mentor? Somebody who actually wants to, hey, you know what, I’d like to work with somebody like Tonya! I think I could do that! I like her, and I could do that.

Kelly Wilkins: Be a concerned citizen. We are looking for concerned citizens. We have a mentor training that, a mandatory mentor training that we ask that you go through. There’s the application and interview process, and then once you complete that process, then what happens on a regular basis is CSOSA refers clients to me. Their parole officers, or what they call Community Supervision Officers, refer clients to us, and we will match those clients with a concerned citizen in the community, and that person, just an hour or two a week, just to make sure they’re talking to their mentees and making sure, maybe they may have certain needs. We create a mentor plan for them, each individual in the mentor plan. So making sure their needs are getting met -

Shelly Broderick: I lied. We only have one more minute.

Kelly Wilkins: You only have one more minute? Okay.

Shelly Broderick: I’m going to give it to you -

Kelly Wilkins: No problem.

Shelly Broderick: And then you’re going to have to come back.

Kelly Wilkins: Okay, no problem.

Shelly Broderick: That’s what it’s going to have to take.

Cedric Hendricks: Well, let me just say, at CSOSA, what we’re after are people successfully completing their community supervision, and that’s why Tonya’s here with us as an example of what is possible. And so we want to let the community know that, in order to realize the success, we need help. We partnered with the faith community, we actively partnered with the District of Columbia government, so anybody listening who wants to join this effort, they should contact me at 220-5300, and we’ll pull them into the network of help and support.

Shelly Broderick: Absolutely fantastic. I am so glad, especially you, Tonya, but for both of you, just to have you on and let people know there are so many positive things going on, and there is a place to get help and to get support.

Tonya Mackey: There’s hope. There’s hope.

Shelly Broderick: If you are interested in learning about CSOSA and reentry programs regarding men and women returning home from prison, please visit CSOSA’s website at www.csosa.gov and click on the offender reentry link or call Cedric Hendrick’s at 202-220-5300. CSOSA and their faith partners, partnerships, are committed to assisting our returning citizens come home and stay home. They invite the public to assist them with achieving that goal. I’m Shelley Broderick. Thanks for watching, and please join me next time for more Sound Advice.

[Video Ends]

Women Offenders – DC Public Safety Television 2011

Len — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:31:48 +0000

Women Offenders – “DC Public Safety”

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our radio shows, blog and transcripts.

Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/05/women-offenders-%E2%80%93-dc-public-safety-television-2011/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi and welcome to DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s program is on women offenders, and one of the reasons we’re doing today’s program is the fact that there are more women coming into the criminal justice system, both in Washington, D.C., and throughout the country. Now the other issue is the fact that women offenders have higher rates of HIV, of substance abuse, of mental health problems. But the thing that really astounds me is the difference between sexual violence when they are directed towards women offenders as children. There’s a huge difference between the women coming into the criminal justice system, and male offenders. To talk about what we’re doing here in Washington, D.C., and the what’s going on throughout the country, we have two principals with us today. From my agency, we have Dr. Debra Kafami. She is the Executive Assistant for my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. We also have Ashley McSwain, the Executive Director from Our Place, DC. And to Debra and Ashley, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Thank you.

Ashley McSwain: Thank you.

Len Sipes: All right. Well ladies, we have this issue of offenders coming into the criminal justice system, and of greatly concern to us. And they’re different from male offenders, and we need to say that straight from the beginning, that there’s a big difference between male and female offenders, people caught up in the criminal justice system. Debra, our agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, we’re reorganizing everything that we do around women offenders. Why are we doing this?

Dr. Debra Kafami: Well, CSOSA is an evidence-based organization, and a lot of research coming out has shown that women are very, very different from male offenders. And we started to look at what were we doing for female offenders. And they were kind of like just in with the men, and we weren’t doing a whole lot of specialized programming for women, yet they have very different needs and they have very different pathways into crime. So we started to realize that the numbers are also increasing. We had probably about 12% of our population ten years ago that were female offenders, and now we’re up to around 16%. And nationally, the women entering the criminal justice system have outpaced the men.

Len Sipes: Right.

Dr. Debra Kafami: From 5% to about 3.3% since 1995.

Len Sipes: Right. Now on the second half of the program, we’re going to have Dr. Willa Butler, she runs women groups for us, and we’re going to have an individual currently under supervision. So she’ll talk more about the practical reality of what we do at CSOSA in terms of dealing with women offenders. But one of the things that Willa’s group has been able to demonstrate is that they have a pretty good success rate, once you take women offenders, put them into a program, put them into a group setting where they can talk through these issues, where they can sort of help and heal each other. So we’re reorganizing in CSOSA, in Washington, D.C., around these groups, correct? And we’re going to add a day reporting component, and all women offenders are going to be reporting to one field agency.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Exactly.

Len Sipes: So we’re just reorganizing everything we do!

Dr. Debra Kafami: Yes. What we decided to do was to create three teams at one of our field sites, centrally located near Union Station and have the women report there. We’re establishing a day reporting center, just for female offenders, so they can come in one place and get services. And their programming will be completely separate from the male offenders, which we did not have before. Women behave differently even when they’re in groups, and they’re less likely to open up when they’re in groups with male offenders.

Len Sipes: Yeah, I’ve attended a couple of Willa’s groups, and I have to ask permission to come in, and the women have to get to know me and like me before they even allowed me inside the group. But once there, it was a really extraordinary experience.

Dr. Debra Kafami: We’re also especially training our staff to work with female offender.

Len Sipes: In terms of the gender specific?

Dr. Debra Kafami: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay. Ashley McSwain, Executive Director of Our Place, DC. First of all, Our Place — and I’ve said this constantly — is maybe the most comprehensive one-stop service for women coming out of the prison system anywhere in the United States. It’s amazing! Instead of sending the people coming out of the prison system over here for legal assistance, over there for clothing, over there for HIV, you’ve got all of these services under one roof. I have no idea as to how you do it. And I’ve heard so many women caught up in the criminal justice system speak so highly of Our Place, DC. So tell me a little bit, what is Our Place, DC?

Ashley McSwain: Okay. We work with women who are currently and formerly incarcerated. So we actually go into the facilities and we offer employment workshops, legal clinics, HIV programming, and we offer case management prior to women ever being released. So we have really good relationships with the prisons, the jails, the half-way house. In addition, when a woman is released, she can come to Our Place and we have a drop-in center where she can just drop in, and we offer her tokens for the metro. We offer birth certificates, identification. We have a clothing boutique where she can get clothing. We have HIV prevention and awareness programming, so she can get condoms, and we have a HIV 101 that every woman is subject to. We have an employment department to help women get resumes. We actually have a legal department, so we have two full-time attorneys on staff, which is one of our biggest programs. We take collect calls from women. We get five hundred calls a month. We have a case management program so we work with women four months before they’re released, and then we work with them after they’re released. So it’s very, very comprehensive. We have a visitation program where we take family members to various facilities to visit their loved ones. So, yeah, we do quite a bit at Our Place.

Len Sipes: That is amazing. We did a radio show a little while ago, and I said, during the radio show, that if anybody out there is looking for a wonderful 501c3 tax exempt organization where they can donate money, they need to look at Our Place, DC. And the website for Our Place DC is going to be shown constantly throughout the television program.

Len Sipes: All right, so CSOSA, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Debra, our agency, we’re a Federal Parole and Probation Agency. Women are a part of who we supervise, Ashley. Women come into Our Place, D.C. and get all of these comprehensive services. I love the fact that you’re inside the prison system, making contact with women long before they come out. So let’s get to the broader philosophical issues of women offenders, if we could for a second. There’s a huge difference between men and women. Certainly one of those issues is the fact that the great majority of women coming out have kids.

Ashley McSwain: Yes.

Len Sipes: And so, I don’t want to be overly stereotypical, and I’ll probably get phone calls, but the sense that I get from a lot of the male offenders is that they don’t see themselves as responsible. The sense that I get from the women offenders is they want their kids back.

Ashley McSwain: Yes.

Len Sipes: How do you do that? How do you come out of the prison system with all the baggage that you have to carry, in terms of finding work and re-establishing yourself, and taking care of a couple kids? That, to me, almost seems to be impossible. Ashley?

Ashley McSwain: Yes, it’s extremely difficult. And one of the things that’s happening now, since we’re looking at gender-specific issues, is this idea that women have to not only build a foundation for themselves when they’re released, but they also have to build foundation for their children. And acknowledging that as being their reality is helpful, as we help them prepare for their future. It’s very difficult. What we do at Our Place is try to build some of the basic foundations, you know, so housing, and dealing with whatever the underlying legal issues are, and helping them identifying jobs. And then we tackle this issue of getting custody of children and identifying visitation, and those kinds of very serious issues.

Len Sipes: We talked about higher rates of substance abuse, Debra.
We talked about higher rates of HIV. We talked about higher rates of mental health problems, and this astounding issue of the rate of sexual violence being directed towards them when they were younger, a lot of cases by family members and friends. Most of the women offenders that I’ve come into contact with throughout my career have got a rock-hard crust. If we’re going to have any hopes of — I mean, public safety is our first priority. We’re not going to hesitate putting anybody back in prison if that’s going to protect public safety. But if we’re going to really succeed in terms of getting these individuals through supervision successfully, we have to have programs. For the programs to be successful, we’ve got to break through that hard crust. How do we do that?

Dr. Debra Kafami: Well it’s not an easy job, that’s for sure, and that’s where our specialized programming comes into play, with our specially-trained staff that we have. I know Dr. Butler will talk about the Women in Control Again Program, but that’s just one example. We also want to address the substance abuse issues. Many of them don’t get enough treatment while they’re incarcerated, and they need that. We also work with them on traumatization and victimization issues. Housing — housing is another big issue for the women, trying to find stable housing.

Len Sipes: Especially in Washington, D.C.!

Dr. Debra Kafami: They face, really, an insurmountable — almost — number of problems. — And family reunification is another very big one.

Len Sipes: Right. But I mean, getting, breaking through that hard crust, I mean, sometimes they can be as hard as nails. When they come out of the prison system, they don’t trust you. Why should they trust us? We just put them in prison. Why should they trust government? Ashley, isn’t that one of the most difficult things when a woman comes out of the prison system and gets into Our Place, isn’t that one of the most difficult things that you have to deal with, and your staff?

Ashley McSwain: Well, one of the things that happens is that because we are working with the woman prior to her release, we’re actually establishing a relationship, a trusting relationship, with her before she’s released. Our Place has a really good reputation of being a safe place, and so when the women come here, there’s this welcoming environment that says that it’s a safe place, a safe space to be. And not only that, it’s a place where you can trust what it is that you’re sharing is confidential. We don’t send people back to prison. We don’t have those kinds of authorities, and so the dynamics are a little different. So we can build a trusting relationship in a way that CSOSA and other organizations may not be able to.

Len Sipes: Yeah. We would have a hard time because we’re a law enforcement agency, and at the same time we’re trying to break down those barriers and help them in terms of programs. We all agree, the three of us agree, that substance abuse programs, mental health programs, HIV programs, and programs to deal specifically with this history of sexual violence, are all necessary if that individual is going to successfully complete supervision. Am I right or wrong?

Ashley McSwain: Yeah, that’s correct.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Definitely.

Len Sipes: I mean, we’re living in a day and age of cutbacks. We’re living in a day and age of limited government. So we’ve got to be able to tell people that these programs save tax dollars. You know, one of the programs that we have, the great majority of people successfully complete the program, which means they don’t go back to prison, which means they save tax-paid dollars, and in some cases hundreds of thousands of tax-paid dollars. So there’s an economic incentive as well as a social incentive to be doing these things, correct?

Ashley McSwain: Yes. I would also say that Our Place helps a woman begin to implement a plan. So many of the women, while they’re incarcerated, they don’t know where to begin. And so this idea of saving tax-payer dollars, you know, someone has to have a plan in which to begin to develop in order to stay out of prison. And so that’s one of the really important services I think we offer is the ability to work with a woman so that she has some hope and some ideas about what her next steps are going to be.

Len Sipes: Okay. And Debra, the national research does show that if you’re gender-specific in terms of your approach of dealing with women offenders, you’re going to have a much higher rate of success in terms of them successfully completing supervision.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Yes, and better outcomes. And I did want to add that when the offender comes to CSOSA, the first thing we do is a risk-and-needs assessment, and we also come up with a prescriptive supervision or an intervention plan. We work very closely with Our Place staff too, so our Community Supervision Officers are on the same team, with Our Place staff, to try and help guide the offender.

Ashley McSwain: I just want to say, one of the things we do is that we don’t actually create release plans. We help implement the plans that were created by CSOSA and the Bureau of Prisons, which is really helpful for the women.

Dr. Debra Kafami: And sharing information.

Len Sipes: And sharing information. It just strikes me that — and Debra, you and I come from the same system in the State of Maryland — the women offenders just came home and they were home. That’s all there was to it. I mean, there were no programs specifically for them. There were no efforts. We have CSOSA and we have Our Place DC. I mean, there really is a focus now on making sure that that individual woman gets the programs and assistance that she needs, and if we do that, fewer crimes are going to be committed and fewer people are going to go back to prison, saving a ton of tax-paid dollars.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Well, not to mention too, that the women, most of them have children, and that separation from their children is not good for the children or the mother, and if we can help the women be successful and not go back to prison, it’s going to only help their children.

Len Sipes: Right, by every woman offender we help, we’re helping two or three or more other individuals have a much greater chance of having a pro-social life. Research is clear that the rates of the children going into the criminal justice system or having problems in school are much higher if a parent is incarcerated. So this is not only dealing with her, it’s dealing with three or four other human beings.

Ashley McSwain: Right. And that also speaks to this issue of gender-specific. When a woman goes to prison, you’re not only dealing with that person — woman being a mother, she’s someone’s daughter, you know. So all of these people are impacted when she’s incarcerated, and also they’re impacted when she’s released.

Len Sipes: Right. So I think we’re going to out the program with that. I really appreciate the fact that you two were here and set up this whole program. On the second half, ladies and gentlemen, what we’re going to do is talk to Dr. Willa Butler. She runs groups for women offenders, and we’re going to talk to an individual currently under supervision. Please stay with us as we explore this larger issue of women offenders in the criminal justice system. We’ll be right back.

[Music Playing]

Len Sipes: Welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes. We continue to have a conversation about women offenders. In the first half we did talk about the fact that there are more women coming into the criminal justice system, and the question becomes what is our agency, the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, doing about it, and what’s happening throughout the country. With the bottom line behind all of that are gender-specific programs, and the research is pretty clear that if you have these gender-specific programs, programs and treatment specifically designed for women offenders, they have much better outcomes. And we have two individuals to talk about much better outcomes, Dr. Willa Butler, she’s a group facilitator for my agency, the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, and Talynthia Jones is a person currently under supervision by my agency. And to Dr. Butler, to Willa, and to Talynthia, welcome back to D.C. Public Safety.

Dr. Willa Butler: Thank you.

Len Sipes: Willa, this whole process with the group — you’ve run the group. I have seen some of the groups. It is an amazing place to be when the women under your supervision open up. Some of the stuff that they talk about is scary. I always like to refer to it as a trip to Mars, because their experience probably is not your experience. It certainly hasn’t been my experience in terms of all of the issues that they have had to deal with in life. A lot of these individuals come to us battered and bruised, and we’re not making excuses for their criminality, and we’re not saying we’re not going to send them back to prison. We will in a heartbeat if that’s going to protect public safety. But your group has a good track record of getting them through supervision successfully, and considering the issues they bring to the table, I find that astounding. So tell me a little bit about this group process.

Dr. Willa Butler: What it is, WICA — Women in Control Again. It’s a group that I developed some years ago for the agency, and it deals with the issues and concerns of the female offender. — Their pathways to crime, how they got started in the criminal justice system, and knowing how they got started lets us know how we can keep them from returning and breaking that cycle of pain. And what we deal with in group, we deal with first of all we start with who they are. And a lot of women don’t know exactly who they are, because they’ve been out in the drinking and drugging for so long, and at such an early age, it’s like, “I really don’t know who I am today. And now that I’m clean, I’m trying to find myself”, in a sense. And that’s what we deal with, things of that nature. And we deal with the substance abuse, and the whole gamut, the parenting skills, housing, whatever issues that concerns them. That’s mainly what we deal with. There’s basically seventeen critical issues that we deal with in that group process. But the main thing is showing empathy, showing that you care, and developing a trusting environment, where they can not only trust you, but trust each other.

Len Sipes: The criminologists call it cognitive restructuring, and there is plenty of research out there that indicates that that works. Now “cognitive restructuring” to the average person listening to this program is helping individuals think differently about who they are and what they are. My guess is that a lot of the women involved in your groups have never dealt with that subject before in their lives, have never had an opportunity to say, “Who am I? What do I want to do? Where do I need to go?” Is that correct?

Dr. Willa Butler: That’s correct. And when you talk about cognitive restructuring, it’s basically getting to the core, getting to the core factor as to why I do the things that I do. And once we find that out, then we can start changing, because that begins to empower the person. And we know what our limitations are, and we also know what our assets are as well, and it helps us to develop.

Len Sipes: I’m going to go over to Talynthia in a couple seconds. But you and I have had other programs together about this topic, and my favorite story is when I was with the Maryland Correctional System and sitting down with a bunch of women offenders, and they actually told me that prison, in this pre-release center, was preferable to going home at times. And I always found that astounding, why would an individual find prison to be preferable to life on the outside. And they said to me that they’ve never felt safer. They’re getting their GED. They were getting at that point a food certificate, a culinary arts certificate. And they were running groups. And for the first time in their lives, they weren’t trying to figure out who they were and where they were going with their lives. And also, it was safer in prison because they had been so beaten up on the outside. So there’s a larger, really societal issue that is at play here that we’re not going to be able to solve. But Talynthia, over to you. Thank you very much for being on the program.

Talynthia Jones: You’re welcome.

Len Sipes: I really appreciate it. Now you’re currently under supervision by my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and you’re currently involved in a lot of groups.

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay. Does that group process work for you?

Talynthia Jones: It’s working very well for me. Dr. Butler is a good counselor. She’s helping me to deal with me, to learn me, to get inside myself, to know what’s going on with me and why I keep using, why I keep doing the things that I’m doing to go back in the system. And I’ve been doing this for too long. And as we do the group sessions and the work papers that we do, you know, in the groups, it’s helping us to not just wonder how dominate we can be to stay strong, but how dominate that we can put ourselves into another place, to learn how getting your life together is much better than to just cover it up with some mess. And I’ve just been feeling good about myself here lately.

Len Sipes: Wonderful.

Talynthia Jones: And I love, I love every minute. I get up early in the morning, I’m always there early, because I can’t wait to talk about me. Because I’m tired of just having all this bottled-up junk inside me that’s keeping me going back into the places and the phases that I’ve been doing.

Len Sipes: Is this the first time in your life that you’ve had an opportunity to really sit down and talk with other people about everything that’s happened in your past?

Talynthia Jones: Yes. It’s actually been the very first time that I’ve actually even dealt with women, because I have women issues. And Dr. Butler is teaching me how to communicate with women, how to communicate period. And it is very good, it’s very good.

Len Sipes: Now in terms of sharing that information, I mean, was I right before in the program where I said that a lot of women who come out of the prison system were rock-hard. They don’t trust anybody. They don’t trust any one for any reason. How did Dr. Butler break through that barrier to get to you?

Talynthia Jones: She broke the barrier with me because I don’t see Dr. Butler as a Court Service Agency. I see her as a mother figure.

Len Sipes: Right.

Talynthia Jones: Because she don’t look at us as criminals. She look on us at people, as children, you know, children of God, you know. And she loves us unconditionally, and she’s willing to help us. When other people out in society, they look at us, “Well, she’s nothing but a drug addict. She’s nothing but a criminal. She keeps doing this and she keep doing that.” But Dr. Butler doesn’t see us that way.

Len Sipes: And in terms of this group process, if you weren’t involved in this group process, where would be now? If you came from the prison system and all we did was supervise you and put you under GPS and drug test you and hold you accountable for your actions — if that’s all we did, we didn’t supply this gender-specific approach, this group process, where would be now?

Talynthia Jones: I would be still using. I would be back in the penal system. Because all drugging do is cover up your feelings, covering up your emotions. It’s covering up what you dealing with instead of you dealing with it on your own, or dealing with it with someone that’s going to help you to get involved with yourself, to let all these emotions out so that you won’t cover it up with drugs.

Len Sipes: Right. And how to cope with life without turning to drugs.

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

Len Sipes: And so, you said you had women’s issues or issues with dealing with other women, how difficult was that? — Because you’re in these groups, you share that experience. You share all these ugly things that have happened to you throughout your life, sharing that with a group of women. Was that easy or difficult or what?

Talynthia Jones: It was difficult when I first got in, until I saw Dr. Butler, because I was able to talk to Dr. Butler before. And she really lets you know that it’s okay. It’s okay to talk about what’s going on with you. And see, I’m a person that’s afraid to talk about what’s going on with me because I’m afraid of what somebody going to think of me. And that’s what most women think, you know. And doing the things that we do, if we talk about it, somebody won’t think something bad about us. It’s always come to me and my attention, as brought up, that what I did was my fault. And I know everything that I do is not my fault.

Len Sipes: Right. Well, before we get back to Dr. Butler for the close of the program, getting back to that whole issue of how other people think about you — most people, you’re coming out of the prison system, they’re going to say, “You’re a criminal. I don’t want to fund programs for criminals. I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Let’s give it to the church. Let’s give it to the PTAs. I don’t want programs for criminals, and I don’t want to hire criminals.” Okay, you’re a criminal, technically.

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay. That stereotype — that’s the difference between what people have in their mind of criminal, and there you are, a pretty young woman who’s successfully dealing with all the issues in her life. How do you feel about that?

Talynthia Jones: Well, it makes me feel bad for the people out there, because they don’t realize that the women here are dealing with so much emotional things, and because they are dealing with it in the wrong way, and the people don’t want to help them, it shows that they only think of themselves. They’re worrying about themselves. They’re not caring about what we feeling and what we going through, why we’re doing this.

Len Sipes: And you’re not that stereotype, is the bottom line.

Talynthia Jones: I’m not that stereotype. I want the help. And some women are out here that don’t want the help, they just want to get off paper. But me, I want the help. I know I need the help, not for me, but for my family. And I have to think about me first, because if I don’t care of me, I can’t take care of no one else.

Len Sipes: Understood. Completely understood.

Talynthia Jones: And see, and that’s what the society needs to know, that if we get the help that we need, and not only from the government, well maybe from family members, the support that we need, the love, the care and affection that we didn’t get back in our childhood that causes us to grow up in adulthood to do the things that we do.

Len Sipes: Right. Willa, the great majority of the people that are in your groups complete them successfully.

Dr. Willa Butler: Yes.

Len Sipes: The rate of successful completion is much higher than it is for men. It’s much higher than it is for everybody combined. I think what Talynthia just said, and it was very impressive and I thank you for sharing that story, is the heart and soul of it. She’s getting the help she needs and she’s doing fine because she’s getting the help she needs. Is that the bottom line behind this?

Dr. Willa Butler: Yes. And that is the main bottom line behind, like you say, is to give them the help and support; but not only that, but to have an understanding of what’s happening. Most of the women who have been through the criminal justice system have been raped or molested at a very early age, and that’s something that comes out in the group process. And it gives them an understanding, like Talynthia said, and why we drug through that. We’re not using it as an excuse, but when you’ve gone through a trauma like that, and then there’s no one out there to help you or assist you, and that’s one thing that the women don’t have as children, they didn’t have that support, that healthy network and system. So they turn within by using drugs or whatever else was out there, and then they ended up in the criminal justice system, because they’re trying to support their habit or whatever, and live out of the normal society.

Len Sipes: And you’ve got the final word. First of all, thank you very much, ladies, for being on the program. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching us as we explored this issue of women offenders. Look for us next time as we look at another important topic in today’s criminal justice system. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Video Ends]

Successful Offenders – “DC Public Safety”

Len — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:39:10 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts. We now average 200,000 requests a month.

Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/01/successful-offenders-%E2%80%93-dc-public-safety-television/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi, and welcome to D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. You know, every year, over 700,000 human beings are released from prison systems throughout the United States, and you’re well aware of the failures, the 50% within 3 years who are returned to the prison systems. You read about them in your newspapers, you’re exposed to them through radio and television, but the question is, what about the other 50%? The 50% who do not return back to the prison system? To talk about the successes, if you will, we have four individuals under supervision with my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in Washington, D.C. We’re a federal parole and probation agency. We’re going to talk to four individuals currently under supervision for people who have turned the corner, who have crossed that bridge, who are now successes, who are no longer tax burdens, they are now taxpayers. And on our first segment, I want to introduce India Frazier and Tracy Marlow, and to India and to Tracy, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Tracy Marlow: Thank you, Len.

Len Sipes: All right, we’ve had a wonderful conversation before the television show, before filming this show today, about what it is, the stereotypes, when people think of the term “criminal,” “convict,” and they have this image that immediately comes to their mind in terms of what ex-offenders are. Now in the first segment, the two of you, then we’ll have a couple guys in the second segment, but that’s the issue, is it not, Tracy? That stereotype that people have of you. I was watching the other night a couple television shows, just flipping through the channel: National Geographic and A&E, and they had shows about people in prison, and the public comes away with that, saying, thinking that everybody who touches the prison system, they don’t want to hire them, they don’t want to fund programs for them, they don’t want to give them a second chance, they stereotype them. Are you that person that they stereotype?

Tracy Marlow: Yes I am. I’m one of those people that they stereotype. Society always publicizes what we have done, the bad things we have done, but nobody shows what the good things we are doing now. What I was, and what I am today is two different people. I have my own business now.

Len Sipes: You’re going for your third ice cream truck.

Tracy Marlow: My third ice cream truck.

Len Sipes: Your third ice cream truck. You’re your own business owner! You have gone from prison to owning your own businesses!

Tracy Marlow: Yes, yes.

Len Sipes: That’s amazing!

Tracy Marlow: With the help of CSOSA and some groups and other people backing me up in my life, it was not on my own that I done this. It’s not because, I’ve been turned down on jobs so many times, but one person gave me a chance on a job.

India Frazier: But when you go through your struggles in life, if anything’s ever given to you so quickly, so fast, and easy, you’re not going to appreciate it. You’re not going to hold onto it, you’re not going to build to the next step. You know what I’m saying? So you have to go through your struggles. You have to be patient. And see, that’s what you were.

Tracy Marlow: It comes in believing in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, self-esteem is so important coming out of prison. I didn’t believe in myself. I thought what people, society say, you’re nothing, you’ve been in jail, you’re never going to be nothing. I believed that for so many years until one day, I can’t tell you when I woke up, when I woke up and knew that I was somebody, and I worked on this, and I worked on this now, I’m my own business person. I have people that work for me today, and I have to interview them now. So now, the roles have changed, and I have people that’s been locked up, and you work with money with me, because I have ice cream trucks, and I don’t want to be like the public was with me. So I have to interview these people, and I have to give them a chance, and you deal with a lot of money some days, and I say, wow, God, just give me the strength. Now I haven’t been robbed. And some ones have been good and bad, but somebody gave them a chance like they gave me.

Len Sipes: And I think that’s the point, in terms of the fact that, okay, 50% do go back, 50% don’t, but nobody ever tells the story of the 50% that don’t, and that’s what we’re going to start doing today. India, set up a little bit about your experience, if you will, please.

India Frazier: Well, my experience is, my experience came when I was, first and foremost, I asked God to change my life. Give me a direction that I needed to go into. And I set goals in my life, and then when I came home and I looked into the eyes of my grandson, it was not an option for me to go back to the streets. It was so easy, it’s so easy to fall back into that life, you know what I’m saying? And like I was telling Tracy a minute ago, you have to go through trials and tribulations and struggles to get where you need to go or get where you need to be, so I went through my changes, you know, but unlike you, I’ve always believed in me. I knew I was supposed to accomplish the things that I am accomplishing today. As of right now, I’m driving, I work through the leaf season and snow season for DPW, the Department of Public Works.

Len Sipes: DPW, the Department of Public Works.

India Frazier: Yes, sir.

Len Sipes: In the city of Washington D.C.

India Frazier: In the city of Washington D.C, and I have a CDL Class A –

Len Sipes: Okay, Commercial Driver’s License.

India Frazier: Yes, sir.

Len Sipes: Go ahead.

India Frazier: Yes, sir. And I know I can drive. I love doing what I do. You know what I’m saying? And I love coming home to my family and seeing that my grandson and my daughter’s okay, and I love knowing that my grandmother’s fine. These are the people that believed in me and pushed me to do and be all that I can be, and then I have, Dr. Butler and Miss Ishman, who is my direct parole officer, and she inspires me. I mean, it’s not a point in time that I can’t pick up that phone and call Miss Ishman and say, Miss Ishman, so and so, and so and so, well, Miss Frazier, let’s look at it like this. I might be upset, and then I’ll call her, and then she’ll just get it, she’ll just iron things out for me.

Tracy Marlow: You built a network up.

India Frazier: I built my network.

Tracy Marlow: And that’s what we need to know in society is you can make it if you build a network up.

India Frazier: – people believe in you and give you that chance. See, this is it. You can’t look at me based on a television program, or you can’t understand who I am until you get to know who I am, until you sit down and talk to me and find out who I am, and that despite something happening 10 years ago, it’s where I’m standing at today.

Len Sipes: But society doesn’t give us that opportunity. If society is going to say ex-con, criminal, I don’t like you, I’m not funding programs for you, I’m not going to give you a second chance, I don’t want you in this job, and I understand, all three of us understand the fears of the public. How can you not watch evening television without understanding the fears of the public? But what do you want to tell the public directly? What are the key things that you need the public to understand, because you’re not one of the failures, you’re one of the successes, but yet, you’re still facing the same baggage. So what do you want to tell the public?

Tracy Marlow: I want to tell the public, don’t look at what I’ve done, look at what I’m doing. My past is my past, and only we’re going to leave it behind if you give me a chance. All I’m asking for is a chance. I’m not saying that I’m going to be perfect. I’m not going to sit here and tell this, oh, I’m going to be a perfect and never do this, but I’m going to live for today and try to do the best I can do in society under society laws. It’s not breaking up anymore.

Len Sipes: Right. India? And what do you tell society?

India Frazier: I have to tell society that you can’t base my life today on my past. I’m a totally different person. I’ve worked hard to get where I am today, and don’t look at me and make a judgment call on what’s on paper. Look at me and make a judgment call on how I carry myself.

Len Sipes: We only have a couple minutes left. My heavens, this segment just flew by like wildfire! What is instrumental in your lives? Was it programs, you mentioned, Tracy, the group, or India, you mentioned the group process through Dr. Butler. What is it, drug treatment programs, job programs, what is it that we need to help you and others like you cross that bridge?

Tracy Marlow: Drug treatment first, program, and aftercare. After we come out of treatment, you need some aftercare. You need sessions, groups. The group that Dr. Butler runs is wonderful. Somebody’s talking about everyday life. We need to know about every, going on in your life, this life, productive other people in life. We need groups and more programs.

Len Sipes: If we had sufficient numbers of programs, how many additional people could we create, if you will, taxpayers instead of tax burdens? How many additional people would cross that bridge over to the taxpaying side of the coin?

India Frazier: You would probably have, maybe, at least 25% more instead of a 50% going back in, you might have 25% more. I’m not going to say 50%, because, you know, like Tracy said, it’s not, everybody’s not perfect. Everybody’s not ready to live that right life. You know what I’m saying? Everybody’s trying, some people try to find the easy way out. But you would have at least 25% turnover. I would say at least 60-75% wouldn’t go back.

Len Sipes: If society was willing to look at you as individuals, especially in terms of jobs, and if the programs were available, would that make a significant difference in terms of how many people go back to prison and how many people commit additional crimes?

Tracy Marlow: Of course.

India Frazier: Definitely, yes!

Tracy Marlow: Definitely!

India Frazier: I mean, you have jobs in the District of Columbia that, for real, for real, could save a lot of people’s lives. People gotta eat! You’ve got to feed your family! You know what I’m saying? You’ve got to pay your rent! You know, the rent lady don’t want to hear about, you can’t pay your rent because you couldn’t find a job. You’ve got to pay your rent. So what you going to do? You’re going to go out there and do something stupid and go right back to where you were. So if you have these openings within the District for these ex-offenders, or parole, probation, you know what I’m saying, that would gear them towards working harder toward accomplishing things they need to accomplish, the goals they need to accomplish. It worked for me.

Len Sipes: I think the point is, is that, again, we hear the failures. We are never exposed to the successes. I’ve spent 40 years in the criminal justice system, 30 years talking to people caught up in the criminal justice system. I see a lot of success stories. But those success stories are simply never told. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing this program today, is to talk about the fact that there are successes.

Tracy Marlow: Yes, it is. It is. And I’m definitely one of them, and the best is yet to come! Because I’m not finished. I have kids, I’m raising kids, and they are not going through the system! They are not going to go through the system. I am raising them to understand that, if you break the law, these are the options that happen. We have to break the cycle. The cycle has to be broken.

Len Sipes: And the cycle is broken when mom comes out of the prison system, gets programs, gets treatment, gets a job, and the case, your case, your own three ice cream trucks, you didn’t let anybody stand in your way, Tracy! And you’re saving, not just yourself, you’re saving your kids. India, you’re doing the same thing.

India Frazier: Yeah, I love my family. I love my family, and my grandson, he’s the most inspirational power, power behind every move I make, because I want him, I don’t want him to go through what I went through, you know what I’m saying? I can’t make the choices for him down the line, but I don’t want him to go through what I went through, and I’m going to give him and push him, I say, lead by example, and the rest will follow.

Len Sipes: Right. Now, again, so many people come out of the prison system, and they say, Mr. Sipes, or Leonard, I’m not going to go back. I’m not going back, I’m not going back, I’m not going back. 6 months later, they’re back. Now that’s a reality. There are individuals who cannot make it, or they’re not ready to make it in society, and they go back to the prison system. So we have to acknowledge that. Again, part of the fears and the perceptions on the part of the public, but I’ve encountered, again, hundreds, thousands of people just like yourselves. One out of every 45 individuals caught up in the criminal justice system are in, I’m sorry, one out of every 45 people in the community are caught up currently in the criminal justice system. That’s like one out of 20 minimum, if you count people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system in the past. That means that all of us are running into offenders and ex-offenders and people caught up in the criminal justice system every day! By the scores! We’re running into lots of people. I mean, is the question, do we want them to get the mental health treatment, do we want them to have drug treatment, do we want them to be involved in programs, do we want them to be employed, or do we want to interact with these individuals without those programs, and without those skills?

India Frazier: Well, if you don’t implement programs, if you don’t implement treatment, you don’t set aside a certain amount of money or set aside programs to help these people take their life and create a new person within, you know what I’m saying, or guide them, or steer them towards the goals they need to go towards, you’re going to keep on having a return rate of 50%, you know what I’m saying? So yeah, we need mental health. We need drug treatment. We need voc rehab. We need certain little groups that Dr. Butler be having. You know, you need all of these things because they’re reconditioning your mind to go towards what you need to go towards to be a better person.

Len Sipes: The final minute, Tracy, in terms of, we’ve heard Dr. Willa Butler several times throughout the program. She runs a women’s group where people who have been in the prison system as women offenders, they come together, they talk about their issues, they talk about how to solve their issues, that’s tough. You’ve got only a couple seconds.

Tracy Marlow: Yes it is. Yes, because that is very powerful, because women need women, and when you talk in them groups, you get real deep. You talk about some personal things that’s going on, because one thing, to deal with a person that’s on mental health status, is really something, because first thing society, oh, they crazy! People have complications, anxieties, pressures in the world, and they can’t cope with it and deal with it, all they need is somebody to talk to, and these groups are very important.

Len Sipes: And that’s the point that I wanted to make. Thank you, ladies, for being on the first segment. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for sticking with us as we explore this whole issue of offenders coming out of the prison system who make it, who become taxpayers, not tax burdens. Look for us in the second segment as we continue to explore this topic with two additional guests. Please stay with us.

[music playing]

Len Sipes: Hi, welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes. Our guests today on the second segment are Cortez McDaniel and Donald Zimmerman, both individuals currently under the supervision of my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. As I explained in the first segment, we are a federally funded, a parole and probation agency here in Washington, D.C. The concept is people being released from prison. 50% go back after 3 years, they go back to the prison system, but 50% don’t. The story of the 50% who don’t go back just doesn’t seem to be told. Again, you’re exposed every day to the media about the stories of people caught up in the criminal justice system who do go back, you’re never exposed to the fact that there are lots of individuals who don’t. To talk about that, Cortez and Donald, welcome to D.C. Public Safety, and Cortez, we’re going to start with you in terms of the second segment, and what is it that you think the public needs to understand about people coming back from the prison system? I mean, they say the word convict, they say the word ex-con, they have another vision in their mind. I’m not quite sure they have you in mind. Correct or incorrect?

Cortez McDaniel: That’s probably correct. What I would have the public to think about is how they’d like to be associated with us as homecomers. We like to refer to returning citizens as homecomers, and understand that these folks are coming home anyway, whether you like it or whether you don’t. Now how the public is associated with them is kind of up to the society as to how they accept them back. They need to understand the impact that we’re capable of having on society in a positive way, the value that we have, the talent that we have is a very, very large talent pool, and a large number of men who are very capable of being productive members of society.

Len Sipes: Okay, and I think one of the reasons, in terms of doing this program, they come to my mind, is employment. There’s literally thousands of individuals under our supervision at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency who would make perfectly good employees out of the 16,000 on any given day. They are years away from their crimes, they are years away from their last substance, positive substance abuse test. But they can’t find work, and they’re having trouble finding work, and that makes it difficult for them, it makes it difficult for us. To me, that stereotype of ex-con, ex-offender, is the barrier. So what do you say to people in terms of, in terms of that? They have this sense that, you’ve been in the prison system, I don’t want to hire you, that’s all there is to it. I’ve got lots of people to choose from, you were there, you’re not getting this job. What do you say to that person?

Cortez McDaniel: Well, I would ask them to actually look at forgiveness and what that encompasses. If a person has served their amount of time that they’ve been given to serve in prison, if they’ve done that, and they’ve successfully completed that, and they come out, and they do the things that they need to be doing in terms of supervision, then there’s absolutely no reason why this person doesn’t deserve to be able to experience some quality of life themselves.

Len Sipes: Now Cortez, I’m completely at fault, I didn’t properly introduce you when you came onto the program. You were with who? What is your job today?

Cortez McDaniel: Again, my name is Cortez McDaniel, I’m a transitional coordinator with the Father McKenna Center.

Len Sipes: Okay, and what is the Father McKenna Center?

Cortez McDaniel: The Father McKenna Center is a daytime service for homeless men, underprivileged men of Washington, D.C., predominantly African American men who come in for our services during the course of a day. What we do is we assess men, and we act as a triage to link people up with whatever their needs might be, whether it be drug and alcohol rehabilitation, whether it be mental health services, housing issues, whatever the issues might be, we try to work with them and link them up with agencies that will help them in that direction.

Len Sipes: Did you have a hard time getting that job?

Cortez McDaniel: Actually, the way I got that job is I’m also core counsel person on the, with the Phelps Stokes National Homecomers’ Academy, and we were asked, as a result of a newspaper article, to send some people over to speak to that group of men, and once we were there, the people, the administration in place there were pretty impressed with what we had to offer, and so a relationship started with me there –

Len Sipes: And that’s how you ended up getting the job.

Cortez McDaniel: That’s exactly right.

Len Sipes: Okay, Donald, you’re with the same operation, correct?

Donald Zimmerman: Yes, sir.

Len Sipes: And tell me a little bit about your story. You came out of the prison system, and what happened?

Donald Zimmerman: Well, I came out of the prison system, and initially when I came home, I was a general manager of a trucking company –

Len Sipes: Before or after?

Donald Zimmerman: This was after my incarceration.

Len Sipes: Okay. How did you get a job as a general manager of a trucking company?

Donald Zimmerman: Some friends of the family, you know, they just –

Len Sipes: Okay. You had family connections.

Donald Zimmerman: Yeah. They just hired me on, and I learned the business, and I was doing that for a while until the economy folded, and then I went to school to be a chef, so now I’m currently working at a Hospital through a temporary agency called Food Team, and I do temporary cook positions there, but –

Len Sipes: Can I get into the larger issue? I started off with the larger issue before a proper introduction of both of you, of once again, the stereotype. Now I’m not going to be upset with society about their stereotypes. With the ladies on the first segment, I was watching television, I turned to the National Geographic channel of all channels, and then there was a story about guys in prison, and then I’m flipping through the channels, and there’s the Arts & Entertainment channel, there’s another story about guys in prison, and I sat back and said, you know, if that’s the public’s perception of people caught up in the criminal justice system, there’s no hope. The story they’re telling was a perfectly accurate story. They weren’t being dishonest, but it scares people. The evening news scares people. What happens when they read their newspapers scares people, and then we have the two of you, and you’re not scary. So what does the public need to understand about this issue of people coming out of the prison system? What does the public need to understand to get them to support programs or to get them to give you a chance at a job?

Donald Zimmerman: The first thing that the public needs to realize is that we’re human, and that we have made mistakes like everyone in life, and we have learned to overcome our mistakes. They have to learn to accept us and give us that second chance, as if, like a parent would do with their child. They say, once you finish your prison sentence, that your debt is paid to society. But is that truly happening? We tend to have labels put on us like ex-cons and ex-felons, see, but the thing is, you have to take all them labels away and recognize that I am a man and I am a woman and I will stand for something, and I will push, by any means necessary, I will be accepted, and with that positive attitude, only good things will happen.

Cortez McDaniel: I don’t want to take away from that, the homecomer’s obligation to change their whole approach to life, their whole thought process, and matter of fact, before I came home, about three years actually before I came home, I wrote a book called recidivism prevention workbook. For people that don’t know, recidivism is commonly used to describe the tendency of a person who’s been convicted of a crime to relapse or return back to criminal behavior.

Len Sipes: That’s a wonderful –

Cortez McDaniel: So I thought about that through my own life, and I thought of how valuable it could be to a lot of men. So in a sense, in my own life, I realize that my whole thought process had deteriorated into how my approach to life was a way of criminal thinking, and so I had to change my principal system, my moral judgment, everything about that had to be looked at, and I had to be man enough and willing to change that. So I started, I don’t like to use program again, because it’s beginning and end to that, but I started this class that encompassed criminal thinking and criminal behavior, and it was very successful in prison, and I came out here in society with the same ideology that we are capable of being refocused, and that we have a responsibility to approach life differently.

Len Sipes: How many people who come out of the prison system come out of the prison system with that understanding? Lots of people who have told me, I’m getting out, and when I used to work inside the prison system, I’m getting out, and I’m not going back, came back.

Donald Zimmerman: Well you have a lot of –

Len Sipes: Came back pretty quickly.

Donald Zimmerman: Well, you have a lot of men and women who come out with the intent that they’re not going to go back, but when they get out and they see the situation that they’re, no jobs, or they don’t want to accept a job, because I have the notion that there are jobs, people just don’t want to go work at McDonald’s, don’t want to go work at Wendy’s, whereas when you were in the federal prison system, you work for $5.25 a month. So with that being said, they see their situations, and they don’t have that support system on the outside that will reeducate. See, one, you have to reeducate yourself into, like, your morals and your values, saying, you know, positive things to you, like, you know, you can do better, you can find a job. It’s not how much money you make, it’s what you do with the money you make. You know, when you start to understand the simpler things in life and start, you know, understanding true happiness and just knowing that you have to, you know, first, that you’re on probation or parole, you have to first comply, take it one situation at a time, then you can move to the next step. Once you start to comply, then you can start going to your meetings, then you can start building relationships, and then eventually, as time progress, you will start to reeducate yourself with better understanding and more.

Len Sipes: Okay, so the point in all of this is that, if you are willing to go through that process, and if you’re willing to seek help, you can cross that bridge. You can go from the tax burden to the taxpayer. You can be employed, but it’s really upon you if you, and how much –

Cortez McDaniel: Well, the support system is very, very necessary.

Len Sipes: That’s the point I want –

Cortez McDaniel: And that’s, with Phelps Stokes, that’s what we’re all about at Phelps Stokes, the Homecomers’ Academy. That’s what we’re all about is providing a support system for a homecomer that lets them understand that, and helps to reinforce these ideologies in him and helps him understand that he has certain responsibilities that he needs to live up to, but also that he’s not alone, that he has some support and some assistance in getting to where he needs to get to. A lot of times, people will come out of prison with, have purposed themselves never to go back, but they get out, and the support falls through. A lot of times people have become estranged from their families for different reasons, and they don’t, they lack people who care or people who are willing to take a chance on them.

Len Sipes: And that’s what the ladies said during the first segment. If you’ve got that group of people who can support you emotionally and get you through this process, that really does increase the chances of you doing well.

Cortez McDaniel: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: Okay. So the point is this. The final minutes of the program is that what I said on the first segment is that there are thousands of you guys out there struggling, but they’re ready to make that move. They’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. They’re sick and tired of being caught up in the criminal justice system. They would be good employees, they would be good citizens. There’s a certain point where society does have to recognize who is at risk and who’s trying, who’s struggling and who’s trying to make it, correct? I mean, that is incumbent upon employers and incumbent upon people, I mean, we have to fund a certain amount of programs to help people cross that bridge. Am I right or wrong?

Cortez McDaniel: Well, yeah. I think we have to have entities. Like I said, I don’t like to use the word program, because when I talk about a program, I’m talking about a beginning and an end.

Len Sipes: And this is lifelong.

Cortez McDaniel: But we believe in relationships, and we believe in those relationships being everlasting –

Donald Zimmerman: Brotherhoods and sisterhoods.

Cortez McDaniel: The dynamic may change as things evolve, but we believe those relationships are important –

Len Sipes: And the same with the research on Delancey Street out in San Francisco 25 years ago. That’s exactly what they said in terms of the former offenders coming together as a group to help each other out. So that’s the bottom line.

Donald Zimmerman: What we need is real people dealing with real problems trying to find real solutions.

Len Sipes: Okay. And you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve come in contact with Cortez McDaniel and Donald Zimmerman. This is D.C. Public Safety. We really appreciate the fact that you’ve been with us today to explore this very important topic of people who are successes who have come out of the prison system, and yet at the same time made successes of themselves. We appreciate your attention, and please stick with us and watch for us next time as we explore another very important topic in the criminal justice system. Have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Video Ends]

Hiring People on Community Supervision-DC Public Safety

Len — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:51:10 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – Radio and Television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts. We now average 225,000 requests a month.

This radio program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2010/08/hiring-people-on-community-supervision-dc-public-safety/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today we’re going to be interviewing Alex Vincent. He is with the D.C. Department of Employment Services, Manpower Development Specialist, but the interesting thing about Alex is that he is currently under the supervision of my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. He came to us with an armed robbery charge out of prison, and he has an amazing story of leaving the prison system, struggling within himself in terms of the employment issue, gaining employment, eventually becoming, again, the Manpower Development Specialist for the D.C. Department of Employment Services, and this is all part of a series of radio and televisions shows that we’re doing here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency on the Employment Issue. We are crowd sourcing this issue, if you will. We are asking employers or anybody else who has an opinion to give us information as to what it takes to hire somebody under supervision, and with that introduction, Alex Vincent, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Alex Vincent: Thank you.

Len Sipes: Alex, again, you’ve served time in prison, you came out, and you came under our supervision here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, you’re charged with armed robbery, and you hit the streets, and what happened in terms of your issue regarding employment?

Alex Vincent: Well, in terms of my issue in searching for employment when I came home, it definitely was a struggle. I went to several places, tried to find gainful employment. Unfortunately, I was turned away or turned down for the same reasons that a lot of ex-offenders are turned down or turned away from employment. The stereotype that’s attached to ex-offenders is that they’re not going to work, or they’re serious, they’re still dangerous people, and of course, a lot of times, when you fill out an application, they do ask, have you been convicted in a certain amount of time. Some ask the basic question: have you ever been convicted. And with that being said, I definitely answer the question honestly saying yes, and when you answer that question yes, the next question behind that is, give some details about your conviction or whatever you were incarcerated for, and a lot of times, as you said earlier, coming back with an armed robbery, which is considered a violent crime, definitely the employers look at that, or that’s definitely an obstacle, and employers immediately, that’s a negative, and something’s negative attached to that.

Len Sipes: Of course. And you know, at the same time, in the 20 years that I’ve been doing this and talking to people under supervision, you know, most of them end up with employment, and some of these folks have had some fairly serious charges in their lives, and yet, they’re selling insurance, they’re driving trucks, they’re hiring other people to drive trucks for them, they’re business owners, somewhere along the line, they do make that transition from tax burden to taxpayer, and what we’re trying to do in the 10 minute program that we’re doing today is to figure out what are the key issues that help a person go from tax burden to taxpayer. So what do you think, Alex, in terms of, because right now, you not only had this personal experience, but now you help people just, who are in the same shoes that you were in when you came out of prison.

Alex Vincent: Definitely, definitely. I do help others that’s under supervision as well, but one of the major things that help others to make that transition is that support: family support, some religious, religious background, upbringing, those are things, are key things to help individuals, but one of the things I think that, community support, and what I mean by community support is those employers, because you have a sense, you feel a sense of confidence when you can go get up and know that you’re a taxpaying citizen and feel that the community supports you coming back to the community, and gaining employment gives you that sense of confidence, especially if you go to an employer, you do an application, and right away, that’s not realistic, but the first person you go to employment gives you an opportunity, and you get it, that’s definitely a confidence booster that makes you want to do the right thing.

Len Sipes: All you hear on the evening news broadcast, or if you read the paper, are the negatives about people who are from the prison system out in the community, and they commit other crimes.

Alex Vincent: Exactly. Exactly.

Len Sipes: Yet at the same time, I’ve talked to, in 20 years of doing this, literally hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of individuals who have the same charge you did who are out there gainfully employed, and so what do you say to employers? I mean, they have that stereotype? They read the paper, they watch the evening news, and so suddenly, someone representing that demographic, if you will, person out of prison is standing in front of them and is asking them for a job, and to overcome that stereotype is probably pretty difficult for some employers.

Alex Vincent: Yes, I would find it being difficult for some employers, but what I would say to those employers is that some of the problems or issues that you think you may be faced with are not so much, you won’t be faced with as much –

Len Sipes: It’s not as bad as they’re making it out to be.

Alex Vincent: Exactly. And I mean, it’s not very different from hiring employers or hiring employees or hiring persons from the regular community, from the street. You’ll get some of the, some of the people that come from supervision or come from those backgrounds that’ll work just as hard, if not harder, and be more dedicated to doing, you know, doing the job and being, you know, a productive, and definitely make your business organization, be an asset to it.

Len Sipes: The website is www.csosa.gov where we talk about tax credits depending upon circumstances, bonding programs, incentives to hire people under supervision, www.csosa.gov, and Alex, you know, it is, the point is this, is that I’ve talked to employers who have basically said that in some ways, hiring somebody under supervision was preferable to hiring from the larger community, because they had an ally in that parole and probation agent, what we call community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia, they had an ally that, if there was an issue that they could turn to to help them with this individual, and some people really like that combination.

Alex Vincent: Exactly, and I agree, some people do like that combination, because one of the things that we know that clients that’s under the supervision, one of the main things to remain in society under supervision is that you have employment, and a lot of times, most persons coming from incarceration, they want to get to the lowest supervision that they can get to, and how you get there is through employment, and so when they go to employers and they try to seek employment or find employment, they try to maintain that employment just for those reasons, and as you said also, employers know that as well, and they know that if this guy’s coming to work, or if he on supervision, he’s going to see his probation officer, or his parole officer.

Len Sipes: And all he has to do is pick up the call, he or she has to do is pick up the telephone and call the parole and probation agent or the community supervision officer, in our case, and basically say, hey, I have an issue, can you help me solve this issue?

Alex Vincent: Exactly.

Len Sipes: And that could solve whatever’s going on real quickly.

Alex Vincent: Exactly. Get right to the point.

Len Sipes: But the bottom line is, and again, getting back to the stereotype, the overwhelming majority of people, regardless of the recidivism rates, the overwhelming majority of people who come out of prison don’t want to go back. They don’t want to go back to mugging and thuging, they desperately want to be able to be part of regular society. Am I right, or am I wrong?

Alex Vincent: I think it, very right. I think you’re right. But one of the things that I think leads to a large, that leads to the recidivism rate being so large is that most persons under supervision find it so difficult to find employment, and like I said, that’s also a confidence booster for those persons. If you come to society, if you come back to the community, and you have that support of local businesses, government agencies, nonprofit, whomever it may be that you’re seeking employment from, it gives you the confidence to say, you know, okay, the community accepts me, that I’ve done my crime, I’ve paid my debt to society, and I’m being accepted back into the community.

Len Sipes: But at the same time, the people who we encounter under our supervision, or you with the Department of Employment Services with the district government, basically what you’re saying is no bullcrap, show up, be quiet, give 8 hours work, give 10 hours work, give whatever’s necessary, we don’t want to hear whatever issues you have. You’re there to be employed, and you’re there to do a job, and that’s basically, you need to show up ready for work. No issues, no bullcrap, no nothing, you need to go to work and show up for work and do whatever the employer wants you to do. Is that our message?

Alex Vincent: That’s definitely our message. Show up, be ready for work, and be ready to go to work.

Len Sipes: And I think we’re going to leave it there, because I think that that’s probably the best advice that you can give, and at the same time, we’re telling employers, look, please give our folks a chance, we can lower the crime rate, we can make a safer society, we can, we’ll spend less money out of our own pockets in terms of our own tax dollars by hiring people under supervision.

Alex Vincent: Yep.

Len Sipes: And that’s the bottom line. Alex Vincent, the DC Department of Employment Services. He is currently the manpower development specialist, currently under our supervision here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, again, the ongoing series of radio shows talking about employment. We will be interviewing people under supervision, talking about their struggles, and we will be interviewing employers. The website is www.csosa.gov where we’re asking you to go there and either call or leave messages for individuals telling us why you will either hire or not hire people under our supervision. We want your opinion, and we want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

American Probation and Parole Association-Update-35th Annual Training Conference

Len — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:39:48 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts. We now average 225,000 requests a month.

This radio program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2010/06/american-probation-and-parole-association-update-35th-annual-training-conference/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s guest is Diane Kincaid. Diane is the Deputy Director for the American Probation and Parole Association. They are the leading organization promoting the issues in parole and probation in this country. They are at the forefront of virtually everything that’s going on throughout the United States, and for, to some degree, throughout the world in terms of anything involving community supervision services. Their website, www.appa-net.org. Before talking to Diane, our usual commercials. We’re up to 200,000 requests a month for D.C. Public Safety, radio, television, blog, and transcripts. Once again, we are really appreciative of all the guidance that you give us, and we will take it all, criticisms and guidance, whatever is on your mind, please get back in touch with us. If you want to get in touch with me directly, it’s Leonard – L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-sipes – S-I-P-E-S, @csosa.gov. CSOSA is the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, a federal parole and probation agency in Washington D.C. You can follow us via twitter at www.twitter.com/lensipes, or you can comment, as most of you do, within the comment boxes of, again, D.C. Public Safety at Media, M-E-D-I-A, dot-csosa.gov, the radio show, television shows, blog, and transcripts. Back at Diane Kincaid, Diane, how’ve you been?

Diane Kincaid: Good, how are you, Len?

Len Sipes: I’m fine, fine, fine. Diane, you know, one of the things that I said when you, I’m a member, by the way, of the American Probation and Parole Association, and they were kind enough to give us, Tim Barnes and myself an award for our community outreach efforts, and from the podium, what I did was to thank Diane Kincaid because there are people all throughout the United States who depend upon Diane Kincaid to answer their questions and provide them with information and feedback about parole and probation, so she’s probably better known than anybody in the country in terms of parole and probation issues, and I thanked Diane from the podium, because she’s been there for years, and she really does know more than anybody else in the country regarding parole and probation efforts, so Diane, once again, thank you for everything that you do for those of us in the corrections community.

Diane Kincaid: Thanks, Len, I really appreciate that, and I want to say, too, that doing what I do. I truly appreciate the job that you do as far as outreach, because that’s not easy, and you do a wonderful job, so our association certainly appreciates it.

Len Sipes: Well, compliments are going both ways, but without APPA, we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be there, and we wouldn’t have the strategies that we have today. A variety of things that we want to talk about today, the 35th annual training institute coming up in Washington D.C. on August 15-18, that’s why I’m going to be repeating the website address throughout the program, www.appa-net.org, and talking about the training institute, talking about the marketing strategies, talking about a variety of resolutions that the American Probation and Parole Association has on their plate. Parole and Probation Officer Week is coming up on July 18 through July 24. A force for positive change is a logo that APPA produced a couple years ago to help the rest of us out in terms of our public relations effort, and also support for the second chance act, so that’s a long list of different things we have to do within a half hour. First of all, let’s talk about the 35th annual training institute in Washington D.C. on August 15 and 18.

Diane Kincaid: Yeah, we’re really excited about being in the capital. We’ve never had one of our annual institutes in the capital of our nation, so it’s going to be really exciting. We have a lot of wonderful activities planned, and CSOSA, as co-host agency is doing a wonderful job in helping us bring in some wonderful workshops and good presentations. It’s going to be really good. You know, we’re hoping to have a good crowd. With the travel situation the way it is for many agencies, it’s difficult, and we understand that. You know, it can be hard to have a budget for training, let alone for travel as well. Hopefully, the location there in D.C. is going to be easy enough for people all along the east coast to get to, many people are going to be able to drive in, so that’s going to help out a whole lot.

Len Sipes: If people have an opportunity to come to Washington D.C., bring your family if at all humanly possible, there are, you can spend days and days and days in Washington D.C. going to all of the free events, the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museum, the World War II Memorial. My wife and I, just the other day, were talking about going down and seeing the Holocaust Memorial. I mean, there are an endless array of things and events that are all free. D.C. is a very family oriented place, and did I say free? So if you come to D.C., there is just a ton of things to do, cultural and historical and otherwise, it’s just an amazing city, and I’m privileged to work here, so I really encourage anybody to, who’s listening to this program, to pay attention to the website, www.appa-net.org in terms of the 35th Annual Training Institute. Diane, I think one of the real wonderful things about your training institutes are the courses, but more importantly, just the ability to network with other people just like yourself.

Diane Kincaid: Absolutely. You have multiple opportunities at our conferences to go into the expo hall, to look at some of the new technologies coming out for supervision, just to talk to people, just to meet people, just to make contacts from people across the country who, more than likely, are facing some of the same situations that you are.

Len Sipes: I spent time at the last training institute that I was at, I spent a half hour with an individual who was involved in promoting their parole and probation agency and representing that agency, and I just sat there and listened to this person for a half hour talk about his experiences, and it was just fascinating in terms of the different things that he was doing and employing, and I came out of that with, wow, saying to myself, wow, if I would just have this opportunity more often, just to talk to different people and pick their brains for ideas, the exhibitors area is always amazing, because you have people who set up their wares, commercial companies and otherwise, who set up the different booths, and talk about the technology and how it’s having an impact on parole and probation, correct?

Diane Kincaid: That’s correct. We generally have a couple or three new ones come in, the technology is always advancing, so there are a lot of new things coming out, and our exhibit hall, unlike some other conferences, is not huge. Attendees absolutely have every opportunity to visit every booth and speak to the representatives of those companies. So it’s not overwhelming, it’s not a huge crowd, we have a very friendly crowd, and what amazes me is how excited people are about the work that they do. That really helps people do my job, just to see how involved they are, and how much they do really want to help people.

Len Sipes: Well, this is a hard job. I mean, working directly with offenders, working with people under supervision, it’s a hard job, and sometimes you come out of it reinvigorated when you talk to other people and strategies that they’re using and listen to their experiences, I think sometimes it’s an opportunity to recharge your batteries when you go to an APPA conference.

Diane Kincaid: I think so, and you know, we have the opportunity as well, joining committees on a number of different topics. Our website will give you an idea of the different types of committees that we have, just join up, get involved, and you can get a lot of information in our conferences. It’s only a few days long, but you meet a lot of people, and you get a lot of new ideas.

Len Sipes: And it’s in Washington D.C. which, boy, if you bring your family and you bring your kids, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime in terms of seeing everything that D.C. has to offer. Again, all of this is on the website, www.appa-net.org. Also wanted to tell you that we will be on the floor doing recordings, radio recordings of people on the floor of the conference, who are going to be, in essence, asking people why are they successful, or why their program is successful, or why their programs contribute to public safety, and so we’re just going to have a smorgasbord of people on the front lines, the parole and probation agents, and the other people who work on the front lines of community supervision and just get a sense as to why they’re successful, so if you want to be included in that, please show up and track us down. Also, what we want to do, Diane, is talk about the marketing strategies part of it, the fact that we have a force for positive change as being the logo, and we have a website, an entirely different website. Now you can gain access to the website, the marketing website, through the main website of APPA, or you can go to, and I’ll repeat this a couple times, www.ccmarketingstrategies – one word – dot-org, that’s www.ccmarketingstrategies.org. I would imagine CC is Community Corrections?

Diane Kincaid: Correct.

Len Sipes: Okay. And why did we do this, Diane?

Diane Kincaid: Well this is a project that began several years ago, and of course, you remember being a member of the working group that got together to decide how we would best approach marketing community corrections as an outreach activity for agencies across the country, and one of the final deliverables that we had on this project is this website. We have a number of different target groups that we use examples of tools that you can use for these groups to create outreach opportunities for your agency. We also were able to produce a number of really nice videos. There are videos of officers speaking about their job and what they do. There are other videos of offenders speaking about their experience being on community supervision, so we were real excited to get those out, and we hope that people will take an opportunity to look at it. I want to mention to that this entire project was funded through the bureau of justice assistance. It was a small grant that we received to do this work for them, because they realized that outreach for community corrections agencies was sometimes difficult. You simply don’t have time or the budget to have a full time public information officer, and many smaller agencies simply don’t have that.

Len Sipes: And in essence, the website makes it easy for you to gain new ideas and to, more or less, figure out for yourself what it is that you can do within your agency.

Diane Kincaid: That’s correct, and alongside that, as a sort of partner project, we did one on our own where the force for positive change came from. That’s also available on our website with other tools. They’re kind of linked projects, but they are pushing that same idea that you want to be prepared in your community for questions about the job that you’re doing.

Len Sipes: Now it strikes me that the most important part of all this, because I’ve talked to, and you’ve talked to a lot of people throughout the country, and we’ve had people throughout the world, I mean, we’ve had a big contingent from England to come in and take a look at what we were doing with radio shows and the television shows and the blog, and talking about, this is something that we want to do. But two things come to mind, it strikes me, in terms of marketing, community corrections, and marketing parole and probation. Number one, most of us don’t do it, and I would like to ask your opinion as to why we don’t do it, and I suppose the second part of it is, well, let’s just stick with that for a moment. Why don’t we market?

Diane Kincaid: Well, it’s a difficult job to market yourself in a profession where it sometimes is difficult to actually explain what you do, and the professionals who do this type of work, for the most part, are just too busy to do outreach. They keep their heads down, they take care of their clients, they report to a judge, they’re going to court, they just don’t have time to sit down and think about what they need to tell the community, or what they need to tell the media, but it’s very important that they do that, because unfortunately, situations will arise where something happens. You may have an offender who does something on supervision, and everyone will turn around and look at that probation or parole department and want to know, you know, how did this happen, why did this happen? But if you have that background, if you have that support of your community or support of the media. They understand more about what you’re trying to do, and they understand that, while you’re trying to help offenders straighten out their lives and get a second chance, some people just have a lot harder time doing that than others.

Len Sipes: Well, look. Parole and probation agencies, it’s difficult. You and I are going to agree to that, and everybody else listening to the program is probably going to agree to it, because it is inevitable that people coming out of the prison system, whether by parole or by mandatory release, are people who are on probation, they’re going to go out and do some terrible things. It’s been that way in the 20 years that I have been associated with community corrections, and so it really doesn’t matter. It, from the standpoint that, whether you want to market, or whether you want to work with the media or not work with the media, about 5 or 6 times throughout the course of the year, the media is going to say, why did that parolee, that parolee who committed that murder, was he properly supervised? How many times did you come into contact with the individual, did he go to drug treatment, I’ve read his pre-sentence report, and he was supposed to get treatment for mental health treatment, did he? I mean, that’s a difficult process for most parole and probation agencies, and what we’re saying is transparency is probably the best way to go, and there’s nothing more transparent than to explain what it is that you’re doing throughout the course of the year rather than what you’re doing within the context of something terrible happening.

Diane Kincaid: That’s true, and in the community, and policymakers need to understand that none of this happens in a vacuum. Funding must be provided for programs to help offenders. You can’t simply release someone out into the community who has a substance abuse problem, who may have a mental illness, and expect them to just, do just fine. They do need services, and the funding for that has to be provided.

Len Sipes: Right, but I mean, to explain that whole process, it’s a lot better to explain that process in the context of, not being in the context of all heck breaking loose. When a parolee goes out and commits a series of murders, and he may have been properly supervised, not properly supervise, to explain all of this in that context, your message never gets across. All people want to know is, are you protecting my safety. Where there are hundreds of other issues that we should be talking about throughout the course of the year, so the media and the public has a better understanding of what it is that we do on a day to day basis.

Diane Kincaid: Well, and a lot of times, reporters will write these stories without speaking to anyone, any of the officials, or any of those authorized to speak to the media from community corrections. They assume they know facts that may not be true. They glean reports from here and there, but they really need to have that contact to get the correct information.

Len Sipes: Diane Kincaid is the deputy director of the American Probation and Parole Association. She’s been with the organization, how long, Diana? 150 years?

Diane Kincaid: I’m not quite that old!

Len Sipes: No!

Diane Kincaid: But about 10 years or so.

Len Sipes: But you’ve been there, you’ve been there for a solid decade, and she is, in essence, what all of us need information as I needed information yesterday, somebody was asking me what the average caseload of parole and probation agencies throughout the country was, I said contact Diane Kincaid. I don’t know if the person has contacted you as of yet, but Diane is the, when somebody says, I need to know this information, my response is, Diane Kincaid, and here’s her telephone number. www.appa-net.org is the website. Again, we’ve been talking about the 35th annual training institute coming up in Washington D.C., August 15th through 18th, and we’ve also been talking about the new website APPA has put up in terms of promoting community corrections, www.ccmarketingstrategies.org, all one word, ccmarketingstrategies.org, or to access the site through the website address that I’ve given probably now a dozen times, but I mean, a force for positive change. What that says from APPA and for the rest of us is that we’re there to improve your life. We’re there to have a positive impact on the community.

Diane Kincaid: And to also support public safety. That’s one of the primary functions of community supervision.

Len Sipes: Right. And that’s one of the things that I find most difficult, because when our response to practically everything, why are you doing this, and why are you doing that, it’s all a matter of public safety, it’s all a matter of keeping people safe, how many times throughout the 20 years that I have been speaking for both, you know, in some cases, both law enforcement and correctional, and community correctional organizations, I mean, the common theme is safety. I mean, reporters want to know what you’re doing to keep them safe, their families safe, their communities safe. Everybody wants to know what you’re doing to create a safer environment for them, correct?

Diane Kincaid: That’s right, and they really need to understand that community corrections does provide that function. You know, without them, I can’t imagine what types of things would happen, and how ill people, some of those offenders may be, and you know, it’s keeping the community safe, but also providing opportunities for offenders to change their behavior.

Len Sipes: And the weird thing about it is, I think there’s research from the bureau of justice assistance – I’m sorry, statistics, bureau of justice statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, talking about the fact that I think one in every 40 Americans is under some form of community supervision, either probation, which is probably 85% of them, or parole or supervised release, which means you come out of the prison system, or on pre-trial, or on some sort of juvenile supervision. I think it’s 1 out of every 40, now that’s currently under supervision. If you count everybody who’s been in contact with the criminal justice system, it’s got to be at least 1 out of every 20, so the point is that anybody living in any metropolitan area anywhere within the United States or anywhere in this world, they’re going to encounter on a day to day basis a lot of people who are either currently caught up in the criminal justice system or been somehow some way have had contact in the past with the criminal justice system, and I suppose the question is, is that if that person has a mental health issue, do you want that person under treatment being, you’re interacting with that person every day, or do you want that person who needs treatment without treatment? Isn’t that the question? Isn’t that the inference that with these programs, we are safer?

Diane Kincaid: That’s absolutely true. For those people with mental illness, unfortunately, a lot of times, they are caught up in situations where they’re arrested for a crime, they’re jailed, if they were on some sort of medication, they’re more than likely not going to have that when they go to jail, so their situation deteriorates. Back and forth, that entire process of going through the criminal justice system is difficult for a lot of people, so having that support system in between, you know, we’re talking about pretrial supervision, investigations, all the way through, they need that support to help them as well as to help the community.

Len Sipes: I’ve seen a variety of research on drug treatment, and it’s not encouraging, that out of people caught up in the criminal justice system, I have seen figures ranging from 1 in 11 to 1 in 20. I’m sorry, let me go back. Either 11% get drug treatment, ranging from between 11% and 20% of people who need drug treatment caught up in the criminal justice system get drug treatment. So what that’s saying is, very clearly, is that the overwhelming majority of people who need drug treatment don’t get it, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the bureau of justice assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice funded the American Probation and Parole Association to create marketingstrategies.org, so it’s just not them who are talking about these issues, it is us here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, it is the people in Albuquerque, the people in Amarillo, the people in San Francisco, the people in Minnesota, all of us collectively are talking to our media about the need for programs.

Diane Kincaid: True, and you know, a good place to find out about these programs are in, our website has some examples of these things, there are a number of federal websites for all sorts of programs that have been, they’re evidence based, they’ve been proven to work, and can be altered if they need to be for various agencies across the country. It never hurts to ask questions. You know, it goes, everything from technology and information sharing, the global justice information sharing project is a fabulous place if someone is looking for sharing offender information across jurisdictions with law enforcement, with, from community corrections to jails and prisons, there’s so much information out there that all you need to do is look for it or ask for it.

Len Sipes: And I think that’s one of the interesting things, because we have you, and now you’re a membership based organization, and I am a member, have been a member for the last couple years, but so, you don’t have to be a member to go to the website, and to take a look at either APPA’s website, or the marketing strategies website, and to glean an awful lot of good information just from the websites.

Diane Kincaid: Right, and I provide information to nonmembers as well as members. I don’t, when somebody gives me a call, I don’t look them up and say, oh, you’re not a member, I can’t help you.

Len Sipes: There you go, and that’s what I like about APPA. You help everybody, but I did not want to put those words in your mouth, so I appreciate the fact that you guys do that, believe me. Okay, so the parole and probation officers week, I’m, do I have that correctly, July 18-24, that’s what I call it, but it’s had another name?

Diane Kincaid: We refer to it as the probation, parole, and community supervision week. We want to include as many groups involved in a very detailed profession as we can.

Len Sipes: Right, because you have pre-trial, you have juvenile.

Diane Kincaid: Right, right.

Len Sipes: Okay, and what is that all about?

Diane Kincaid: Well, we celebrate a week every July, it’s generally the second week in July, second or third week, looks like. We produce a website, we produce a new poster every year with a theme, this year’s theme is support for a second chance, reflecting, you know, all of the funding that has come from the federal government into the second chance act, and it’s, you know, most people think of the second chance for parolees, but unfortunately, there are a number of people who need a second chance who have been in and out of a jail, a community jail, or community transitional housing, so those services are needed for others besides just parolees.

Len Sipes: Well, the second chance act, did you want to explain what the second chance act is?

Diane Kincaid: The second chance act is a federally legislated funding program, was first passed through Congress, and then a year or so later received some funding from the U.S. Congress to provide grant funds for various agencies for things like jobs programs for offenders, treatment services for offenders, mental health programs, just a myriad of programs to assist offenders coming out of prisons and jails, just to get their lives on track and to make sure that they are getting the services that they need to become law abiding citizens.

Len Sipes: And I think that that’s an amazing thing, because you have legislation from the federal government. We’ve had bits and pieces of it in the past, but certainly this is significant. There are hundreds of millions of dollars involved for community organizations, for parole and probation agencies, for a wide variety of groups to actually apply for funds, and to do reentry programs, offender reentry programs in their own communities, and it doesn’t, to my knowledge, I don’t think it has to be limited to solely to people coming out of the prison system, although I may be wrong about that. IT has to do with community supervision across the board.

Diane Kincaid: Pretty much. I mean, they, the first set of funding proposals that were sent out, have covered a number of different programs. I think, like I said earlier, most people do think about parole, parole release as that second chance, and giving services to parolees to get back into the communities, but I don’t know that it is specifically limited just for that. It’s a pretty wide net.

Len Sipes: But I think it is significant that there are hundreds of millions of dollars now coming from the federal government that weren’t there before, and hopefully, we can evaluate some of these programs and get a sense as to, a) do they work as well as everybody suggested that they do, and b) what are the specific strategies that make programs, some programs stronger than others?

Diane Kincaid: Right, and what the federal government also urges is that these programs be evidence based, so that they are replicated, they can be replicated across different agencies and different areas, different jurisdictions. You know, there are some pretty stringent rules on when they hand out money, and what the reporting process is for that.

Len Sipes: Diane, we only have a couple minutes left in the program. I did want to touch upon the resolutions. You have one, on pre-trial supervision, victim restitution, restitution of voting rights, and felony tax refund intercept. These are four resolutions that are going to be sent out to the membership of APPA?

Diane Kincaid: We have recently had several of these resolutions passed on and reviewed by our executive committee and board of directors. There are a number of different things that come out of federal initiatives that we support, oftentimes, our representative or a senator at the federal level will introduce a bill, and we will see that as something that is encouraging for community corrections, and we will write a resolution for our membership supporting that. That happened for restoration of voting rights, and actually, our executive director was in D.C. a month or so ago, actually a couple months ago, and presented testimony in front of a House subcommittee supporting that legislation and emphasizing how important restoring rights is to offenders.

Len Sipes: Sorry we didn’t get to the other three in terms of an explanation, but we are out of time, and I would, Diane, again, I want to thank you for all of the services that you provide to thousands of individuals every year, simply in terms of answering the questions and being sort of the front person for the American Probation and Parole Association, so we are grateful. Ladies and gentlemen, today we’ve been talking to Diane Kincaid, the Deputy Director of the American Parole, Probation and Parole Association, two websites, www.appa-net.org is the principal website. The marketing website is www.ccmarketingstrategies.org. Ladies and gentlemen, like I said before, we’re up to 200,000 requests on a monthly basis for D.C. Public Safety. For the television shows, for the radio shows, for the blog and the transcripts, you can go to media – M-E-D-I-A – dot-csosa – C-S-O-S-A – dot-gov to access those four services. You can comment in the comments section, and we do get about 10-12 comments out of the comments section every single day. You can contact me directly, Leonard, L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-sipes – S-I-P-E-S – @csosa.gov. You can follow us on twitter at twitter.com/lensipes, L-E-N-S-I-P-E-S one word, we’ll take all of your comments, whether they are positive or negative, and we appreciate your suggestions in terms of future programs, and you have yourselves a very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

What Works: Evidence-Based Practices in Community Corrections

Len — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:17:32 +0000

“What Works: Evidence-Based Practices in Community Corrections” is part of the” DC Public Safety” television series.

Please see http://media.csosa.gov for our radio shows. See www.twitter.com/lensipes.

We welcome your comments and suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov.

This show provides an overview of “what works” in community corrections through an examination of research-based practices. Participants include:

Nancy G. LaVigne, Ph.D. Director, Justice Policy Center, The Urban Institute
Thomas Williams, Associate Director, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency
Debra Kafami, Ph.D, Executive Assistant, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency

The program is offered by the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, a federal executive branch entity in Washington, D.C.

This television program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2010/11/what-works-evidence-based-practices-in-community-corrections/

The show is hosted by Leonard Sipes. Timothy Barnes is the Producer.

Transcript available at

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi. And welcome to DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. You know, today’s program is pretty interesting. It’s about what works in community based corrections or evidence-based corrections. There’s quite a bit of research out there now that indicates that you can reduce crime, you can reduce recidivism, you can help the cost to states in terms of the criminal justice system, that you can take tax burdens and turn them into tax payers. But the problem on the part of the practitioner throughout the country is that they are having a hard time taking all of this research and turning it into day-to-day practice.

And to talk about that whole concept of taking the research and turning into day-to-day practice, we have three principals with us today. We have Dr. Nancy La Vigne. She’s the Director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. We have Thomas Williams. He is the Associate Director of Community Supervision Services for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, my agency. And we have Debra Kafami. Dr. Kafami is the Executive Assistant in Community Supervision Services at Court Services, and Offender Supervision Agency too. Nancy, and to Tom, and to Deb, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Debra Kafami: Thanks, great to be here.

Thomas Williams: Thank you Len, glad to be here.

Len Sipes: We have this really interesting conversation that all four of us have had over the course of years of taking this massive amount of research from the Department of Justice, from the Urban Institute, from Pew, from lots of other organizations, and the struggle that we have to make it practical, to make it real, to read through all the volumes of material, and to get down and take a look at it, and say, “Boom, okay, this is something I can use at the state or local level.” Nancy, now the Urban Institute– You sort of specialize in that. And you’ve been doing this sort of research for decades.

Nancy Lavigne: That’s right. The Urban Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization based in Washington as you know. We’ve got policy centers across a wide array of topics from education policy to health policy to tax policy. And as director of the Justice Policy Center in the Urban Institute, I direct evaluation and research, a team of over 35 researchers. And one of our main goals is to find out the truth, what does work, and why does it work? And on what populations? And in what context?

Len Sipes: Right. And so the average person sitting– I’ve give you an example of a couple years ago. Tom, and I, and Deb, all three of us come from the Maryland Department of Public Safety. I’m sitting there in the Secretary of Public Safety’s office, and he says, “I got off the phone with the governor. The governor saw this program about boot camp on ABC Evening News. And now he wants us to do boot camps.” And I’m sitting there going, “Well, what is the evidence on boot camps? What is the research?” It was the governor who came along, and said, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s do boot camps,” rather than the research pushing us in that direction. That’s how the criminal justice system seems to work correct?

Nancy Lavigne: Right. And that’s an interesting example because of all the different kinds of interventions out there. I think the research is most definitive on boot camps and that they don’t work. I know that as a researcher, but does the practitioner community know that? I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re getting the word out the way we need to be.

Len Sipes: And one of the things, interestingly enough, you take a look at the DARE Program, which is a police-oriented, police-run program for kids to teach them about the dangers of substance abuse. Now the DARE research seems to be pretty negative, yet DARE thrives. So there are other dimensions here. There is the evidence-based part of it, and there’s the practical, reality base to interpret what people want, what they’re comfortable with. Tom, now you went to China to talk about evidence-based procedures. You lectured in that country. You’ve written articles. You’ve gone to conferences throughout the country talking about evidence-based procedures. I know you’ve had this conversation with people in the field in terms of how you take all of this research and make it practical to make it real.

Thomas Williams: Well, that’s correct, Len. I was in China three years ago lecturing on evidence-based practices. And actually, part of my discussion with the Chinese there, the delegation, was actually giving a historical perspective about evidence-based practices. As you know, some of your viewers probably know as well, prior to Lipton, Martin and Wilks coming out with the “Nothing Works” document that actually revolutionized basically the way that we deal with offenders in a criminal justice way, we had a single theory with regards how we manage offenders basically from a prison standpoint. And that is an indeterminate sentencing. So you went into prison, you got rehabilitated hopefully and you came out and that continued.

But unfortunately with that “Nothing Works” theory that came out, that really revolutionized things for which it was a whole metamorphosis of now we just put a man and through away the key.

Len Sipes: That was during the 1970s, correct?

Thomas Williams: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: With landmark research basically suggested that they took a look at all the evaluations and they came to the conclusion– Now he would say that that conclusion was exaggerated. But there was a point where the consensus from the criminal justice systems and in criminology was that there’s no sense trying to help individuals while in prison, and while they come out of prison, commonly know as re-entry. Because nothing does work. But we’ve moved way beyond that now, correct?

Thomas Williams: Well, and that’s the point I was getting ready to make the next point, is that there’s been a whole body of research now that basically says that when you provide intensive supervision services, in addition to special design programs, you are going to have dramatic reductions in re-arrests and also recidivism rates, recidivism meaning those persons who go back to prison. So that whole body of knowledge now is a wealth of knowledge that’s out there that a lot of criminal justice professionals are now using to develop programs within their own individuals entities.

Len Sipes: And what I want to do is briefly run over, take 15 seconds and go over some of the programs that have worked. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy in 2006, they came a long with a very brief, but a very comprehensive piece of research taking a look at the individual programs in terms of what works and what doesn’t. And also, at the same time, talking about the percentage reductions. But beyond that, we’ve had drugs courts, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is teaching individuals how to think differently about their own lives, Project Hope in Hawaii. We’ve had re-entry programs in San Diego, jobs through the Department of Labor, jobs programs, substance abuse treatment, mental health courts. All of these programs have shown that it’s possible to reduce recidivism, it’s possible to reduce crime, not by leaps and bounds. Because the research seems to indicate that there’s a 10 to 20 percent reduction in recidivism. So the possibility is there. Debra?

Debra Kafami: What we seem to be talking about is results-based management. What gets measures gets done. And it’s so important because if you can look at your results, you can distinguish your successes from your failures.

Len Sipes: And that’s one of the things that I’m really impressed by. You’re in charge of our SMART System. You’re the basically the person who has helped design the SMART System which is our own book-keeping system which has our own internal management system. And all the way throughout this process in the 6.5 years I’ve been with CSOSA, you’ve said, “Unless you measure it, it doesn’t happen.” What happens, what gets done is what gets measured. Correct?

Debra Kafami: Correct. And like I said, it’s so important so you can distinguish the successes from the failures. Because if something is successful, it can be replicated. And if it’s a failure, they want to know so you can go back and fix it.

Len Sipes: Right.

Debra Kafami: Sometimes a very good program works well in one area of the country, but you bring it to another place and implement it the same exact way and it may not work. So you may not want to just totally throw the program away. But you can work and figure out what went wrong, and try and correct it and make it work.

Len Sipes: And boy did you just hit the nail on the head, Dr. Kafami or Debbie. Because that’s the conversation I have with practitioners all the time. And any one of you can jump in on this. It’s that Project Hope in Hawaii, where you take probationers who have a meth problem. And if they mess up, you immediately put them in a local incarcerated setting. And you do provide treatment. And eventually they have good outcomes. And different people are saying, “Well, Leonard, you know that’s a wonderful idea. But I don’t have the jail space to move people in there every time they mess up while they’re on community supervision.” So as Debbie said, because it works in Hawaii, doesn’t mean it’s going to work in DC, doesn’t mean it’s going to work in Rhode Island. And that’s the frustration on the part of parole or probation people throughout the country. How do I take all this research and distill it and apply it to my particular situation?

Thomas Williams: Right. But I don’t think this argument, on the one hand, jail or prison versus community corrections. Certainly I think we need both. I mean, there’s a certain segment of the population for which they do, unfortunately, need to be incarcerated. Because they won’t change, they’re not willing to change, and they have no desire to change. For that group with regards to the accountability that we need, in community corrections, need to have with regards to the public, and also letting the public know that we’re serious about quote-unquote changing behaviors. We do need to, unfortunately, incarcerate that segment of the population.

Len Sipes: There’s no question that we have to incarcerate. There’s no question that there are people out there who pose a clear and present danger to our society. And they have to go to prison. There’s no doubt about that. But the overwhelming majority of the people under correctional supervision in this country are on community supervision, they’re supervised by parole and probation agencies. Like 85 percent are being supervised by parole and probation agencies.

So when people think of corrections, prisons, which is the first thing that comes to their mind, is a tiny part of it. The overwhelming majority of people under correctional supervision belong to us. And the practitioners are saying, “What do I do with all these people?”

Nancy Lavigne: Right. Well, I think we can take this apart into different pieces of the challenges that practitioners face and trying to digest all the research that’s out there and use it in a meaningful way. For one, as a researcher and an academic, I know what the research is because I get the journals in the mail and I can read them and understand them. For practitioners, they may see a study here or there. It’s usually not written in a way that’s accessible.

And in addition, there’s just a bunch of different studies, and some say something works, and some say the same thing doesn’t. And so it’s very hard for someone to say, “In the balance, what really does work and why and how and on what population?” So one thing we’re doing at the Urban Institute is trying to cull all the research out there on the topic of prisoner re-entry. Now it sounds narrow, prisoner re-entry. But as you know, prisoner re-entry encompasses everything.

Len Sipes: It’s huge.

Nancy Lavigne: It’s housing, it’s mental house treatment, it’s substance abuse. It’s everything. It’s in-prison programs. It’s programs after release. It’s programs for literacy, for employment and so forth. So we’ve identified over 1,000 individual studies that fall under this umbrella of re-entry. And those are studies that are truly evaluative in nature. Now what we’re doing is reviewing each and every study and rating it according to its level of rigor. Because that’s another challenge for the practitioner community. They see a study and it says something works, and they don’t have the knowledge to understand whether that’s a definitive–

Len Sipes: It’s methodologically correct or not? Yes.

Nancy Lavigne: Of course. So we’re reading them and we’re going to compile all that information and develop it into an online, searchable website that’s part of the National Reentry Resource Center. So this is all funded under the Second Chance Act.

Len Sipes: Right. And it’s all being funded by Department of Justice and the Assistant Attorney General.

Nancy Lavigne: Yes.

Len Sipes: She’s really focusing on making the research come alive.

Nancy Lavigne: Yes.

Thomas Williams: Let me just cut in. What we just touched on just a minute ago are the challenges that folks who are coming back from prison have with regards to trying to reestablish themselves within a community. Issues of substance abuse, issues of employment, issues of housing are major issues, interpersonal relationships, and who do I associate with when I do come back to the community?

We’ve got all bodies of research now on those individual topics and collectively to kind of help the practitioner. And I think one of the things that kind of argues against a practitioner sometimes is, how do I actually take this research and apply it to my day-to-day job? And then number two, how do I actually target the right population? Because you could have a program that you think is good because you read the research, but then if you target the wrong person, then you’re not going to have the results that’s expected.

Len Sipes: And that’s my point, again, going back to our Maryland Department of Public Safety days when the public safety secretary– A new piece of research would come out from the National Institute of Justice. He’d plop it on my desk, and go, “Sipes, give me a two-page summation on this.” Because he didn’t want to go through this telephone-sized book filled with facts and figures and the methodological review. He just wanted to know what the lessons were and how we could apply those lessons within the Maryland Department of Public Safety. And Deb, I think the practitioner community is overwhelmed by the research. And they just don’t understand how to use everything that’s before them. It’s like having this gigantic feast and you have toothpicks to eat. I mean, you just can’t distill all of this information.

Debra Kafami: You can’t do everything at once. You just don’t have the resources to do everything. And there’s not just one magic bullet: “Do this program; everything will be better.” And it takes time. And many times you just don’t have that luxury. People want to see the results, they want to see it now. But sometimes it could take three years at least from beginning of a program to start to see some tangible results.

Len Sipes: Okay. And we’re going to be talking about resources on the second part of it. Because the other big complaint on the part of the practitioner community throughout the country is, I don’t have the resources to implement all of this. First, they’ve got to get through the research. They’ve got to understand the research. They’ve got to understand how to apply the research. And then they’ve got to come up with the resources. And ladies and gentlemen, we’ll discuss that resource question when the second segment of DC Public Safety– Stay right there, we’ll be back with this intriguing conversation on what works in terms of community-based corrections. We’ll be right back.

[Music Playing]

Hi, welcome back to DC Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes. Our guests continue in the second half of the segment.

Dr. Nancy La Vigne. She’s the Director of the Justice Policy Center for the Urban Institute. Thomas Williams, he is the Associate Director of Supervision Services from my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Dr. Debra Kafami, Executive Assistant again for Court Services and Offender Supervision. And to Nancy, and to Tom, and to Deb, welcome back to DC Public Safety.

Debra Kafami: Thank you very much.

Len Sipes: All right. So in terms of this discussion, it’s going to be seen in the District of Columbia, it’s going to be seen throughout the country. So what we have, and Debra talked about it, at the end of the first half is, okay, so we have all these studies. And Nancy, Urban Institute is doing a wonderful job and Department of Justice and the National Resource Center, everybody’s doing a wonderful job of taking all of this evidence and distilling it down into useful lessons for practitioners in the field. So that’s lesson number one, correct? Okay.

Lesson number two is when I talk to my peers in the field, they say, “Leonard, okay fine. The evidence says that you need to design a program around that individual. No more cookie-cutter drug treatment. If that woman has had a history of sexual abuse in her younger years, which is not unusual for the female offenders that we have under our supervision, the reason for doing drugs is tied into the fact that she was sexually molested at nine and ten years of age. That substance abuse program needs to be designed with her specific conditions in mind. They can’t be cookie cutter. But I don’t have the money to do it. I refer her to a community health program. And four months down the road, they put her into a group program that meets twice a week for one hour at a time. And it’s cookie cutter and it’s not designed for her. So I know the evidence that design a program specifically for her but I don’t have the money to do it.” What do we tell a person under those circumstances?

Nancy Lavigne: I think you’re thinking too big. I don’t think you should be thinking about new programs. I think you should be thinking about how we can advise the field on using existing resources and programs more wisely.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Nancy Lavigne: We do a lot of partnerships with practitioners and it’s often to evaluate existing programs or to assist people in measuring success. They say, “We can’t measure success. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the expertise.” And I said, “Well, how do you know you’re even serving the right population to begin with? You should be collecting that data to begin with. Because that’s the same data we need to evaluate the program.” “Oh, well yeah, I guess we’re not collecting that.” And when we go back and look and see whether there’s a one-per-one match between people who have, for example, histories of substance abuse and whether they’re getting treatment, we’ve been stunned to find that as many as 50 percent of people who are enrolled in treatment don’t have those extensive histories. So there’s a mismatch and–

Len Sipes: We may be taking the wrong people to go in to begin with.

Nancy Lavigne: –and resource allocation. And that’s another way that you can use evidence to improve practices that doesn’t require new resources.

Len Sipes: So the evidence says, “Be sure you pick the right people to go into the right programs to begin with?”

Nancy Lavigne: That’s right. It’s being smarter with the resources you currently have.

Thomas Williams: Well, if you think about the Drug Court movement over ten years ago, that’s basically how the Drug Court movement got started. Certainly there was a little bit of money that came from the federal government to help support that.

Len Sipes: Right.

Thomas Williams: But there’s the whole issue of collaboration. And as we just discussed here a few minutes ago is targeting the right people for the right program, and making sure that the program fits the needs that you’re trying to address. So one way that you can do that is basically having a good assessment system, a good assessment protocol where you’re actually trying to identify the risk to re-offend, and how do you minimize that risk to re-offend? By the same token, identifying the particular needs that are specific to that group or that population that you’re looking for, and put that person in that particular program. Then you can match up those two things and then have most of the literature saying that you will have. But the whole issue of collaboration is important, because one entity can’t do it alone. Criminal justice entities cannot do it by itself. It needs the collaboration of the systems that are out there to help support what we’re trying to do in terms of that behavior change. But also as important as that is the social support that needs to come following that. So as we have the services, as we’re providing the services, as we’re now having that level of success, what is following that program either by the family members or the community that’s going to help sustain that success that we have?

Len Sipes: Okay. And I think you just summarized the principal findings in terms of the evidence-based process. Somebody said some time ago that in terms of the substance abuse end of it, that the National Institute on Drug Abuse and SAMSA has had the last four decades to think through this process.

And they do give out very specific guidelines in terms of how to handle the individual, how to assess the individual, how to design a program for that specific individual, follow up. So they are very, very specific.

And supposedly we, in community corrections, are in our infancy in terms of developing this evidence-based approach. But SAMSA, in the National Institute of Drug Abuse, they’re the leaders, so to speak, in terms of taking a population in need and figuring it out, exactly what works for them. And so what we have to do is do that for mental health, what we have to do in terms of jobs, what we have to do in terms of supervision techniques. And what you’re saying at the same time is that not everybody gets the same levels of services.

Thomas Williams: And they don’t and they shouldn’t get it. Anyone that assesses at the high level of supervision with intensive or maximum, whatever it’s called. But wherever the high level is, that’s the group that you want to target. And you want to put those persons into your high-end, costly programming. The low-end of the spectrum that’s a low-level supervision, you might just want to provide life skills to them at best. But the literature really tells us that if you have someone who’s assessed at the low level, you really shouldn’t be spending any resources on them at all.

Nancy Lavigne: That’s right. In fact it can actually be harmful. If you look at the literature on halfway houses, it’s pretty definitive that the lowest level offenders who are coming back to the community do worse off when they have to go into halfway houses. And the theory is that it’s preventing them from finding jobs, keeping jobs, reuniting with family in a way that’s detrimental.

Len Sipes: Well, there was a book years ago called Radical Non-Intervention, and the message of that book and this is a book that’s 40-years-old, was be careful as to who you put into particular programs. You may not want to intervene in the lives of certain people. They’re marginally involved in the criminal justice system, you do as little with them as you possibly can. The more you try to help them, the more you try to supervise them, the more they get sucked into the criminal justice system. So it’s picking the right person to receive the right services, correct?

Debra Kafami: It’s not so much picking but identifying the right person through a validated risk and needs assessment instrument like Tom said. You want to focus on those high risk offenders, and you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Thomas Williams: Let me go back to the 1980s to the RAN study that was done on intensive supervision where basically because the staff were able to have a lower case load and follow people more closely, they had high levels of re-arrest, or re-offending, technical violations I should say.

Len Sipes: Right. They put more people back in prison.

Thomas Williams: Right. But the important thing about that is that the services weren’t there. So they had high-level folks that they were monitoring, which they should be doing, trying to keep tabs on what they were up to and trying to make sure they were reporting for their appointments and things like that, or going to services. But the more they watched them, the more technical violations actually were recorded, which eventually led them to be revoked. But the problem was that the services for these high-end folks was not provided.

Len Sipes: Right. And that’s the same research that applies to boot camp, that you can’t just supervise people intensely because the more you supervise them, the more violate them. There’s got to be a combination of supervision and programs. And that’s what seems to work, correct?

Debra Kafami: Yes. And the programs really need to be cognitive-based programs.

Len Sipes: Cognitive-base, and I talked a little bit about that at the beginning of the program, means helping them think through their issues to be sure that they see the world better, make better decisions.

Debra Kafami: Yeah. It’s a program where there’s a lot of role-playing and skill development for the offenders. They have to be able to go out in the community and deal with issues in an appropriate manner. And they need skills to do that.

Len Sipes: So in the closing minutes of the program, is there today one document – and I know Nancy, you were talking about Urban is working on it, Justice is working on it, the National Center is working on it – but in essence we’re working towards one comprehensive approach. So it’s no longer the people in Milwaukee or in Alaska or wherever they happen to be; they’re going to be able to have resources in the near future that gives them the best available evidence in terms of how to proceed, correct?

Nancy Lavigne: Yes. But my fear is that once we get all this evidence out there, the Project Hope is a perfect example of this. Everyone’s latching on to it as this silver bullet that’s going to reduce recidivism. And I think that’s really ill-advised. It gets back to this validated risk and needs assessment tool. You really need to know what population you’re dealing with. And each person has different needs and risks. And Project Hope may work for some but not others. I fear that once we get all this wonderful information out there, people are going to pick and choose, “I want to do this program because it has the biggest impact on recidivism,” rather than, “This is the population I’m trying to deal with. Now what program fits their issues and their needs?”

Len Sipes: So the lesson seems to be from the three of you as that, A, we are going to have that assessment, we just need to provide guidance in terms of how to use the evidence; and B, Tom you mentioned the partnerships, the parole and probation agencies aren’t there by themselves. They really have to coalesce with the people providing the mental health services, the people providing the job services. There really has to be that. I think they will begin to coalesce once the research is placed in one easy-to-read venue, correct? Look, the jobs people, they’re burdened. They’re under and enormous burden. And you go them, as we did at Maryland Public Safety, and they’re not overly-enthusiastic about taking on a new role.

Thomas Williams: I just want to kind of dovetail a little bit on what Nancy said, I think the hope or the future for those who are managing or directing criminal justice agencies is pretty good. I think we’re in a pretty good space right now. The research is coming out. I think there’s a lot of interest in Congress now about those offenders who are returning and what do we do to put them on a different plane so that they can then be successfully in the community. And I think from the standpoint of the Justice Department, the various agencies under the Justice Department, are actually giving guidance on this whole issue, I think is so fundamentally important.

So even though a probation director may want to do something, as Nancy indicated before and Debbie, you many not have to do it on a larger scale. But you can target your population on those persons who are the most riskiest to re-offend And then once you target on that most risky population, using the research and using the funds that will be coming from Congress. We will start to see dramatic effects. I would like to go back to the 70′s when we had a single theory in this country for managing offenders within the country.

Len Sipes: It seems to me now that with President Obama’s Administration there is strong support for re-entry. It seems to be with Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson over at the Department of Justice, she’s a strong proponent of the evidence-based process, and research, and reentry. The Second Chance Act that went through Congress, we now have hundreds of billions of dollars for states and jurisdictions throughout the country to implement re-entry based programs. Match all that up with the fact that the states can no longer afford to incarcerate. In fact, states are cutting back on their budget by, again, tens of millions of dollars in individual states.

They can no longer afford the level of incarceration. So we now seem to be at an appropriate time where evidence-based and re-entry practices now just come together at a very opportune time. But the individual practitioners are still saying, “Len, help me understand this research and where am I going to get the money?” So it’s still coming down to that. What we’re saying to them is that there’s hope in terms of the coalescing of the research; there’s hope hopefully in terms of the money. But you have to do partnerships, you have to take this research and get together with your fellow agencies and make it come alive. Is that it, Deb?

Debra Kafami: Exactly. The collaboration is key to implementing evidence-based practices successfully.

Len Sipes: Right. Parole and probation agencies are just not going to do it on their own. It has to be the governor of that particular state coming together, and saying, “You guys have got to get together and do this.”

Thomas Williams: As well as the community stepping up as well. When that person comes back to that community, he wants to feel apart of that community. And the family support that’s actually needed to support that person once they go through the various programmings is so fundamentally important.

Len Sipes: Okay. Tom, you had the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for being with us on DC Public Safety as we explore this whole concept as to what works in corrections, evidence-based corrections. Watch for us next time as we explore another very important part of our criminal justice system. And please have yourself a very, very pleasant day.

[Video Ends]

Series Meta terms: Criminal, Justice, what, works, drug, treatment, educational, vocational, assistance, employment, interviews, policy, makers, staff, probation, parole, reentry

Women Offenders-DC Public Safety-220,000 Requests a Month

Len — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:12:12 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts.

This radio program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2010/04/women-offenders-dc-public-safety-220000-requests-a-month/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s program is about women offenders and we have an event coming up on May 1st in Washington, D.C. dealing with women offenders. And this radio program is designed to provide clarity to that event and possibly promote the event a little bit.
At our microphones today, Dr. Willa Butler. Dr. Butler is a supervisory community supervision officer. She runs groups of women offenders. And we also have on our microphones Tracy Marlow. She is under–currently under the supervision of my agency, the court services and offender supervision agency. She’s about eight months away from her full release from our supervision. She’s also in the process of starting her own business. And so, to talk about women offenders, we’re going to have, again, Willa and Tracy to do that, but right for the moment, we’re going to be talking about the fact that we are extraordinarily grateful for the fact of all of your letters, emails, principally emails. You’re following us on Twitter. All the suggestions you provide, the criticisms, we really, really, really do appreciate them.
You can get in contact with us at media.csosa.gov and simply comment in the comments box. Or you can contact me directly, leonard.sipes@csosa.gov. Or you can follow us by Twitter, which is twitter.com/lensipes.
Back to our guest Tracy Marlow, and Dr. Willa Butler. Willa and Tracy, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Willa Butler: Thank you, Leonard.

Len Sipes: Tracy, I just want to–I’m sorry, we’re going to start off with Dr. Butler. Willa, now you’ve run groups of offenders here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, groups of women offenders, people under supervision. Give me a sense as to that process. Why do we have special groups for women offenders?

Willa Butler: Well, the group is Women in Control Again, WICA, which is a group started–it’s been maybe 12 years now, because we found out that women are different from men. And we knew there was a–we knew they were different, but we didn’t know why. So during studies, we found out that they needed a little more attention. Women are, I don’t want to say needy, but women have more serious problems than men. Not to say they are serious. They have the same problems, but women adapt differently than men. And when you look at the profile of the women or the characteristics, there’s usually child abuse, either sexual or physical abuse, substance abuse, little or no education, and a financial deficit there.
And then they grow up. And they grow up–they start off with I could say dysfunctional, because we all come a little dysfunctional. But then they end up somehow in the criminal justice system, because there was no one there to respond to their needs. And that’s why they end up there, because what they had to go or the way that they chose to go to make it through life was outside of the norm, or outside of society’s norm, which led them into the criminal justice system. In order to survive a lot of them, they end up doing prostitution or selling drugs or whatever have you. And that’s how they ended up in the system. And it seems like once in the system, it’s just so hard to get out of it.
And one thing that we notice is that now we need to hear from these women. And we need to answer their cry. What are the barriers? And that’s what we’re addressing in our group. What are the barriers? You say women in control again. I mean, we’re going to give them back the power that was taken from them at such an early age. And they develop low self esteem, low self worth and value. And you start getting into all their emotions and what exactly that they need. And now it’s the time that we’re coming to the fore front in trying to address these needs. And that’s what we’re all about.

Len Sipes: The statistics aren’t very good. Now when you compare the statistics regarding male offenders, female offenders, women have higher rates of substance abuse. Women have higher rates of mental health problems, but it’s really what you’ve just mentioned the astoundingly high rates of sexual abuse as children.
Now if you take a look at the data, you’ll find astoundingly high rates of abuse and neglect for both male and females, who come under our supervision, who come out of the prison system, come under our supervision, come to us on probation. But it’s the women offenders that really is startling in terms of that level of sexual abuse.
They come out of the prison system. And they have, in most cases, 70 percent of cases, I think it is, they’re mothers. So they’ve got to come back and deal with child related issues, and sometimes multiple children. So it’s just not all the issues dealing with male offenders, which is tough enough. But it’s all of the issues dealing with male offenders in terms of mental health, in terms of drugs, in terms of not having a high school education in terms of having a terrible job history, in terms of all of that. But it’s even more so with women offenders. And they’ve got to come out and raise and hopefully reunite with their children, and become mothers. Again, that is an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances to overcome.

Willa Butler: Yes, it is, because a lot of times, the mothers never really raised their children. Then there’s some guilt feelings there. And there’s some hurt and angry feelings coming from the children. And then the mother have to adjust to that. And a lot of times, they’re manipulation in that relationship. And the mothers feel that they have to do what the children want them to do in order to gain their respect or gain some type of relationship with them again. And that can be detrimental, too, because we’re trying to live a better lifestyle, but yet we’re still going through a stage of manipulation in order to get the things that we had before we were incarcerated, which are our children. And then you look at the other things that’s related to that. We need housing, transportation, and like I say programs that would deal with the disorders. We need integrated programs that’s going to deal with substance abuse and mental health, because a lot of the women, they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, you know? And that’s something that needs to be addressed. And when you couple that with using drugs, then you really have something on your hand and that’s what we want to look at today and talk about.

Len Sipes: Willa, you’ve been through this for how many years? You’ve been running these groups for women under supervision for how many years?

Willa Butler: Since 1995.

Len Sipes: And so you have seen literally thousands of women come through the criminal justice system. At what point does it simply become overwhelming? Because when I sit down, and I talk to women offenders, I’m simply overwhelmed by the complexity that they bring to the table. I mean, the guys are hard enough, but the women with the increased levels of substance abuse and mental health problems, employment issues, anger issues, issues stemming mostly from their own childhoods that to me would become simply overwhelming at a certain point.

Willa Butler: Well, doing this job, you have to be a passionate person and have compassion for this population that you’re working with. And knowing that I came away today, and I helped somebody, I gave somebody some good advice, it makes me feel good. Sometimes I do. I just want to throw up my hands and give up. But then, there’s always somebody that’s saying, Ms. Butler, if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here today. Or Ms. Butler, you helped me today and it makes me want to go on and do what I’ve been called to do. It’s not an easy job, but it’s a job that I guess I’ve been chosen to do. And I guess I don’t know what to say. It’s just–it’s always tell my staff just do it, meaning just do it, meaning if you took time and thought about what you had to do, and the consequences of what you were doing, you wouldn’t do it. So you just go on and know that you are going to make it, and God is with you.

Len Sipes: But we do talk to more than just a couple women offenders, who have made it.

Willa Butler: Yes.

Len Sipes: An awful lot do end up making it. And awful lot do end up being taxpayers instead of tax burdens. An awful lot end up being the mothers of their children once again. They are productive. They are working. You know, this is just not about her. It’s about her children. So we’re not just talking about one human being. We’re talking about multiple human beings.
And you know, the fact that so many do make it is, I think, just a testimony, because you know, ordinarily, women involved in the criminal justice system, even in programs, they do better than the guys–

Willa Butler: Yes.

Len Sipes: –that go through the programs. And so to talk to one of our success stories today, Tracy Marlow. Tracy, you’re going to start your own business soon. You’re–what an ice cream truck?

Tracy Marlow: Well, I’m not going to start it. I have it.

Len Sipes: You have it.

Tracy Marlow: I’m about to buy a second ice cream truck.

Len Sipes: That is incredible. And so you’re your own business woman. You’re your own entrepreneur.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: That is so great. That’s so cool. I want to point out that Tracy is under our supervision for distribution of crack cocaine. She was–been locked up in the federal prison system 1991. She came out to us and been under supervision since 1995. Tracy, now give me a sense of your history? Everything that I just said to Willa, and Willa just said to me, is that realistic? Is that a accurate portrayal of women caught up in the criminal justice system?

Tracy Marlow: Oh, yes, it is, sir. Yes, it is. When I came out to my family, I had no one to stand and guidance because I was angry because I was locked up. I thought you all was the wrong people. And I was the right people. And we come with this idea, because we angry because our childhood. I was molested and raped ever since I was five years old. So–

Len Sipes: And that’s a tragedy.

Tracy Marlow: Yes, and long before drugs came along, I was sick. And my mother didn’t give me the help because she didn’t understand. She was an alcoholic. And my father was an alcoholic. So they did what they thought they was doing best was just sending off to school. Don’t tell nobody what happened in the house. Keep this a secret. This is a family secret. And that’s what I did. I kept things a secret, but it was killing me inside.

Len Sipes: But that’s exactly what happens.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: Women keep these things secret. Women don’t go out to get help. Girls don’t go out to get help and it just rips them apart internally.

Tracy Marlow: It makes us grow up to do bigger crime. And bigger crime became using drugs, selling myself, selling things out the house, abusing my kids, because I didn’t understand why. Then mental health came apart, depression, not understanding that didn’t have a coping skill to cope with these things, because there was nobody to go to. It was nothing designed. You put your back out in the street and tell you to make it with your family. How could I make it if I don’t have the tools to make it with?

Len Sipes: Right.

Tracy Marlow: I need to have some guidance. I needed that.

Len Sipes: Right.

Tracy Marlow: But what held me on, I had some good parole officers. I’m going to say all them was good. It was me that wasn’t ready. And as I went on learning life, I got a job in 2002 at Greyhound. I still have some anger problems. I still was going back and forth, but I just believed in a God greater than myself. And people like Ms. Butler, Ms. White, some good parole officers, Ms. Wallop, they just stuck with me. They sent me to groups. They sent me to after care meetings. And that pulled me on, but a lot of us won’t take it, because we don’t believe in it, because we think it’s a setup. We think the system is trying to set us up.

Len Sipes: Well, I mean, considering everything, we’re not exactly the most believable people on the face of the earth. I mean, we’re there because we have to be there.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: We’re there because we’re paid to be there. And people just think that we’re just going to set them up. They don’t trust us. And they don’t trust their own families. They don’t trust their own friends. Why would they trust the criminal justice system for the love of heavens?

Tracy Marlow: And you’re right about that. And for a long time, I didn’t trust you. I really didn’t, but there’s so many programs you all got going now, but you need more. You need to have–when a person step out of prison, you sent him to the halfway house. You need to have something when they step out into their family. Counseling, groups with their family, the way to welcome them back with their kids. You just send them out to failure, because they go home and they’re not taking their kids, because they didn’t know how to take their selves. So how could you send me back to three kids, but no home?

Len Sipes: Most of the criminal justice systems in this country do not have programs for either men or women. Most–in most states, I mean, there was just research the other day that what are we saying, 70 to 90 percent of offenders caught up in the criminal justice system have a substance abuse background?

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: 11 percent get treatment. 11 percent. And we’re not talking about treatment designed specifically for that person. We’re just talking about treatment of any kind. So 11 percent.
So what we’re saying is is that 89 percent of people caught up in the criminal justice system, who end up in the prison system, who have substance abuse backgrounds don’t get drug treatment. So people, number one, need to understand, who are listening to this program, that the vast majority of offenders don’t get the programs they need to make that transition from prison out into the community. They should be getting these programs in the prison system, correct, Willa and–

Willa Butler: Yes.

Len Sipes: That should seamlessly follow them in the community. But there aren’t programs for most offenders in most places in this country, whether it’s employment, whether it’s substance abuse, whether it’s mental health. We, because we’re federally funded, do a lot better than most. But even our programs as far as I’m concerned are not sufficient in terms of the sheer number. For instance, we have 25 percent funding for 25 percent of the most heavily addicted individuals in terms of providing them with really good substance abuse therapy. What about the other 75 percent?
So we struggle with that every single day, as most parole and probation agencies struggle with it. I mean, the rest are taken care of either by the District of Columbia or the Veterans Administration, or faith based organizations, but you see my point. The point is is that programs really aren’t there for people caught up in the prison system and they’re really not there throughout the country for women who come out. Now why is that? Either one of you can chime in. Why don’t we have those programs?

Tracy Marlow: Because somebody need to speak and tell them, let them know. It need to be known. If it’s one person, we could catch her, one, that’s a fight–it’s a fight for. But if nobody knows, and we don’t believe, but if you put something out there, and we could see it, then might one or two will come along.
If I say one, another will come. If I get two, another will come. All of us is not going to make it, so who could choose which ones are? So let’s help them all.

Len Sipes: Okay, but–

Tracy Marlow: Let’s help them all with more programs, more designs for this here. Teach us while we in jail about family meeting, family planning. Teach us. Your carcerate person, and then you send them back out. Teach them why they in there. And teach them while they out. Make programs. They make everything else up. They send rockets to the moon. Help make more programs. Do something.

Len Sipes: Our guest today halfway through the program, and we’re really rocketing through this. Sometimes, Willa, I–when we do these programs, I’d rather them be an open ended program. So you know, we don’t have a time limit reintroducing, I guess, Dr. Willa Butler, supervisory community supervision officer for the court services and offender supervision agency. My agency, she runs groups for women offenders. Tracy Marlow has been on our supervision since 1995. And she has started her own business, too, and bought her second ice cream truck. Tracy is an example of what programs do in terms of helping human beings cross that bridge from prison into the community.
I’m going to go back to the same question, and because I hear what you’ve said, Tracy, but again, there’s got to be an explanation as to why people–why if I just described the fact that there aren’t enough programs, or aren’t nearly enough programs throughout this country. I–is it what, prejudice against people caught up in the criminal justice system, the fact that people are saying to themselves, hey, let’s send the money to the schools, let’s send the money to the elderly, let’s not give it to the offenders. They’re the ones who have caused us all this grief. Why should we give them any money? What’s the reason why we don’t have the programs we need?

Willa Butler: Well, one reason, when you look at history, women were not–were looked on as not being intelligent enough to commit crimes. So therefore, they were not thought about as being criminals. And as they began to get in the criminal justice system, only back in 1998 when the drug trafficking laws were increased, that women really started going to prison more and more. And then, we come out with–we have a deficit in a sense, because we don’t have anywhere to put these women or what to do with them.
But they were going through a treatment modality that was designed for men. And like we said, women are different. So now we see the difference. And now we have a–we’re trying to develop a treatment modality that’s more designed for women that’s going to address all of their needs and not just part of their needs. When I say part, just a substance abuse. We need to address the substance abuse, the mental illness, the spiritual aspect of the person, the emotional aspect. And not only that, to integrate it so that their children are involved. We need programs where when the women comes out and goes to treatment, her children can go with her, because a lot of times, when women are in treatment, or when they’re away from their children, their mind is on their children. And therefore, they can’t really concentrate on what they need to do, because part of them is thinking about what are their children doing, especially if the parents or someone from home is calling them, and telling them that Johnny or Sue is acting up, etcetera, etcetera. What am I going to do? The first thing they’ll want to do is leave the program. Sometimes they do. And then what–they’re right back in the system again, because it’s a violation.

Len Sipes: I ask you this question every time you’re on these microphones in front of these microphones, Willa. If we had, and Tracy, you’re more than welcome to chime in on this as well, if we had sufficient programs for women offenders, because women caught up in the criminal justice system always do better than men if you put the programs in place. The question becomes if we had all the programs in place, the woman goes to prison, she gets substance abuse counseling, she gets mental health issues, she gets parenting classes, she gets employment readiness, or they train her for a job. She gets her GED. She comes out to a parole and probation system, where all of that is continued, but it’s continued in the community. Your mental health issues, your mental–your substance abuse issues, your trailing issues. And eventually, the idea behind all of this is that the majority of the people who we try to supervise and assist go in and start being reunited with their kids. They start taking care of their kids. They start becoming taxpayers. If we had all of that in place, and none of that exist anywhere in this country. There are different states who are doing a better job than others in terms of trying to do that, but if you had all that in place, what percentage of women under supervision do you think would be successful? Willa, start–you start first.

Willa Butler: I would–I believe–I’m going to say 60 percent. I really do believe that, because they have a better start in trying to live their life again. In other words, they have substance. They have something to bring to the table, something that I can do, something that’s going to build me up, and let me know that I can do this thing. And I’m already pretty much got a great start. And then I can come out with a job, with a place to stay, be able to take care of my children, and feel worthy of what I’m doing because a lot of times, when they come home now, they’re right back in the situation. They’re in a situation. They’re living with someone who they have to depend on. And when you have to depend on someone else, it puts you in a precarious situation, because what, you’re vulnerable. You have to do what they want you to do. But when you have your own, your name on the lease, this is mine, it builds your self esteem and your self worth up. And you can do better. I believe you can.

Len Sipes: Tracy, do you believe the majority of people, women caught up in the criminal justice system, if they had these programs both in prison and in the community, what is your percentage of women who would make it, who would not go back to the criminal justice system, take care of their kids, and end up paying taxes?

Tracy Marlow: I’m going to go a little higher than 60. I believe about 70.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Tracy Marlow: And the reason I say that, because I’m a woman of such, that I’m just that person, that if there’s more out there, what helped me to grip on, I just believed in something. Somebody told me something, and I just stuck to it and believed in it. But it took me many years for that. So if there’s more set out, more women will gravitate to it, because women are caregivers.

Len Sipes: Right.

Tracy Marlow: We are caregivers. So if we don’t break this cycle with these children to let them know that they don’t have to do what we did, the world will get better. It will be more programs. We’d get home for these children, because self esteem is a big issue, too. If we don’t have self worth, we are filled zero. We got to believe that you could buy ice cream truck and start your own business. You could be a president of the United States.

Len Sipes: And that is a foreign concept to the vast majority of women caught up in the criminal justice system.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: Right? They’re nowhere even near that sense of themselves.

Tracy Marlow: No, they’re never nowhere near.

Len Sipes: So if you have an individual who’s been sexually abused, who’s been neglected as a child, and many cases, the women I’ve talked to repeatedly so, they come out of that set of–I mean, I–you can take a person, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of their race, regardless of their income, regardless of who they are and what they are, just being repeatedly sexually violated. Give them every other benefit on the face of the earth. Just take that particular factor. And they will struggle throughout life in many, many, many instances. In other words, they will use drugs. They will have very, very–

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: You add that to everything else that people who get caught up in the criminal justice system go through in terms of dropping out of school, in terms of not having a job history, in terms of an extraordinary low level self esteem, in terms of poverty, if you put all that together, the cards are so heavily stacked against you, that it seems almost inevitable that you will fail.

Tracy Marlow: Yes. You’re set for failure. It’s a setup for failure when you have all that stacked against you. All this is stacked against you. And in the side, you say you can make it. Give me some materials to make it with. Give me some programs. Give me a job. Give me a place. Start me out with a corner. I’m not asking for a mansion. Give me a little place with my three bedroom for my kids, a one bedroom. Give me something to start and see what I do with it. Give me a chance. Make more programs. Everybody might don’t be successful as I did. I’m coming out of it in eight months.

Len Sipes: But yours wasn’t a straight success.

Tracy Marlow: No, mine wasn’t straight success, because–

Len Sipes: I mean, you–

Tracy Marlow: –it’s still a fighting matter. But I have a place. I came out and got a place, got a job. First time I ever had a job 2002. I’ve never worked, because nobody would give me a chance to work. They wouldn’t hire criminals.

Len Sipes: Because of what?

Tracy Marlow: They wouldn’t hire criminals.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Tracy Marlow: Women criminals.

Len Sipes: All right.

Tracy Marlow: You know, we didn’t talk strong enough. They didn’t–oh, what? They’ll push us to the side. But it was just that one person on this job, this one person. I’m going to give you a chance. All jobs don’t do that.

Len Sipes: Who gave you the chance, by the way?

Tracy Marlow: Jeff Biebenton gave me a chance at Greyhound.

Len Sipes: At Greyhound.

Tracy Marlow: Gave me a chance. And it was the day after they hired people. It was finished. It was over with, but I called him. And he said come in. Just come in. You didn call me so much, come in. And I came. And he did it. He opened the door for me. And I didn’t let him down. I became a good worker and one of the best workers. You know, but somebody gave me a chance, but I didn’t believe in myself. I had to build it and believe in myself. I got one child at a time. My mother wouldn’t give me all my kids. Thank God for grandmothers. My mother gave me one child at a time. Every year, she gave me another one.

Len Sipes: How many children?

Tracy Marlow: I have five.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Tracy Marlow: She gave me one at a time until I became strong. And she knew I can handle it.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Tracy Marlow: Then she went on to heaven. And I’ve been fighting the battle every since, having good people like Ms. Butler, Ms. Wallop, Ms. Tracy White just holding me on. But every woman don’t get that.

Len Sipes: Well, that’s my point.

Tracy Marlow: Every one don’t get it.

Len Sipes: That’s my point.

Tracy Marlow: So we got to make something better, because everybody–if we don’t break this cycle for the children, then the system going to be bigger with a lot more women in jail.

Len Sipes: And the research is pretty clear that women, I’m sorry, the children–

Tracy Marlow: The children.

Len Sipes: –they have higher rates of criminal involvement.

Tracy Marlow: The younger girls now are getting–they are going to jail left and right. They are–I know they’re high, because I go and do volunteer work. And the girls in the youth places are more than the guys now, because the parents can’t break the cycle. The children are mimicking what the parents did.

Len Sipes: Right.

Tracy Marlow: Their mothers.

Len Sipes: Well, they’re doing exactly what they know.

Tracy Marlow: What they know.

Len Sipes: And that knowledge base is not very good.

Tracy Marlow: No.

Len Sipes: No. Willa?

Willa Butler: And that’s true. And that’s what we need to do is break the cycle of pain, because girls are ending up in the criminal justice system more now. And they’re starting off early. And it’s like they need the identity, and say–they’re trying to identify with each other and with the wrong peer groups.

Len Sipes: Yes.

Willa Butler: And that’s the problem that we’re seeing. And the sad part about it is the characteristics are the same. A lot of them, they’re running away from home because they have been abused, you know, molested at home. And that’s the beginning of it. They run away. And then somebody pick them up. And they start them out to prostitution at an early age.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Willa Butler: And that’s how some of them get in the criminal justice system, because they’re predators out there more ways than one. And they’re looking at these children. When, you know, that’s what they’re there for. They’re designed to get them.

Len Sipes: And this is happening in every day in every city throughout the United States. And yet there’s no collective scream. There’s no collective outcry. There’s no collective sense of just sheer and unadulterated anger that this happens to human beings day in, day out. And then, they get caught up in the criminal justice system.
But we do have society that at certain points, there–this is almost–people are too cavalier. They’re not carrying enough by in terms of what’s happening, in terms of the immense amount of child abuse that’s going on inside of homes. I mean, you know, Tracy, you have a sense of whether I’m right or wrong?

Tracy Marlow: Oh, you’re right, because how many kids are keeping it a secret, because I was told to keep it a secret? How many kids are getting molested and won’t tell because the parents told them not to tell? I’m one of them. I’m a victim of that. My mother said you don’t tell what goes on out this house. Keep it a secret. I was molested since five. And I kept it a secret.
But my secrets kept me going till I became uncontrollable. And now I’m crying out to the other ones. It’s not a secret, tell it. Tell somebody. Help, help. Get more programs. Get more groups. Talk one on one, a group, something, because these kids are going to mimic. And when you’ve been abused, you become abuser sometimes.

Len Sipes: Yeah, you do, because it’s what you know.

Tracy Marlow: It’s what you know.

Len Sipes: It’s what you know.

Tracy Marlow: Jesus.

Len Sipes: I mean, how many of my friends throughout my times, who have been children of alcoholics end up marrying alcoholics?

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: It’s what they know. It’s their comfort level. And that comfort level is destructive.

Tracy Marlow: That’s what my mother and father did. They both was alcoholics. But they was functional. They worked. They worked every day, but they thought that was right, because they didn’t know better. They only knew what they was taught. So it’s not their fault. We got to break the cycle.

Len Sipes: We’re in the final minutes of the program. I need a quick answer from both of you. And, you know, every time we do these programs, Willa, I’m just, you know, shivering in terms of hearing from individuals like Tracy, who tell their stories so honestly and so passionately. It’s just–it absolutely blows my mind. I mean, I love doing these shows, because of the passion your folks bring to these microphones. But at the same time, it’s frightening to hear. And I want to say it over and over again that there’s not enough programs. And there’s just not enough caring on the part of the larger society. Final comments, Willa?

Willa Butler: That’s true, Leonard. I just want to say that we do need more programs out here for women, not only that we need more programs, but we need some preventive programs in the community where the mothers, the children, they can go and find refuge. And come together with their children.
If they had some type of counseling when this first happened as far as the rape and molestation was going on, that would prevent a lot of this. But I’m looking forward to our program that’s going to be this weekend, Saturday at the Temple of Praise and 700 Southern Avenue. And a lot of this will come out there. And I thank you for inviting us today.

Len Sipes: Well, Willa and Tracy, I want to thank you very much. Tracy, thank you very much for telling me your story. I’d love for you to come back six months from now and give me a sense as to where you are in terms of your own business. I am so enthralled. And, Lord, just listening to you, I just want to hug you, which I will do after the program. And just, you know, I think you’re the very epitome of what we in the criminal justice system can do, given the resources. I just thank God for your recovery and the fact that you’re out there, and the fact that you’re now helping others make it through.

Tracy Marlow: Yes.

Len Sipes: So God bless you for doing that.

Tracy Marlow: Thank you for having me.

Len Sipes: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a very emotional D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Our guest today, Dr. Willa Butler, supervisory community supervision officer from my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Willa, as you well know at this point, runs groups for women offenders. Tracy Marlow is a person under our supervision and she started her own business, her second ice cream truck.
Again, thanks to both of you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. If you want to comment about this program, any other program, give suggestions, comments, criticisms, the email directly to me is Leonard, leonard.sipes@csosa.gov. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/lensipes. Or go to the website where all of these programs are, www.media.csosa.gov and simply comment in the comments box, as so many of you do. And please, everybody, have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Community Based Support for Offenders and Their Families

Len — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:54:03 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts.

This television program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2010/07/community-based-support-for-offenders-and-their-families/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

NARRATOR: In January 1997, former President Bill Clinton outlined their vision to revitalize Washington D.C. From this vision, CSOSA was created by the National Capital Revitalization and Self Government Improvement Act of 1997. The central mission of CSOSA is to increase public safety, prevent crime, reduce recidivism, and develop collaboration with the community to expand the capacity to assist offenders and their families.

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: Hello, this is Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. We are very fortunate in this city to have a fully funded federal agency, CSOSA, which supervises our residents on probation or returning to us from prison, and they do a lot more. That residential treatment center, built from federal appropriation from the Congress, is very important, because it not only takes people off of drugs, it keeps them from going back to prison. That leaves a lot more, a lot more than only community and faith based groups can do. There‚Äôs a lot you can do. There‚Äôs a lot that‚Äôs already being done by faith based groups, by community groups, and helping with job training, even with jobs, with housing, with mentoring, with reaching out to these D.C. residents. Won‚Äôt you help us?

NARRATOR: CSOSA provides probation and post-incarceration supervision for approximately 16,000 adult offenders in Washington, D.C, and provides comprehensive public safety oriented programming and treatment services combining strict accountability with meaningful opportunity. Each year, approximately 650,000 offenders return from federal and state correctional institutions throughout the country. Approximately 2,000 offenders return to the District of Columbia each year. Most need supervision, services, and support to remain drug and crime free. An individual‚Äôs passage through the criminal justice system from arrest to prosecution to sentencing through incarceration and release involves several agencies. Judge Satterfield recognizes the need for innovative collaboration of the entire community.

LEE SATTERFIELD: When it comes to the individuals that we see more often in our family court and in our criminal division, they typically are young people, they typically are male, and they typically have a host of number of issues that, if they could get resolved, could help them stay out of the system, and I‚Äôm talking about things such as education, many have dropped out of high school, have been truant since they were in middle school, so they lack the type of education that would help them maintain employment. I‚Äôm talking about employment. Employment is a necessary thing for anybody, and for anybody to become a productive citizen, employment is always something that is necessary. And then many of our people that come before us, whether in our adult court or in our family court may have issues involving substance abuse, that they need drug treatment for the drug addiction that they have. In addition to education, mental health, drug treatment, and those factors, we have things such as housing that‚Äôs also important as well, and so these are the kinds of things that I would ask the community to focus on in helping us help others who are coming back to our community having gone through the criminal justice system or the juvenile justice system. Your help is needed to help all of our citizens here in the District of Columbia.

NARRATOR: The results CSOSA seeks depend in part on cooperation from and effective collaboration with community based organizations. Partnerships with community based organizations result in increased employment, training, and support programming for such services as housing, food distribution, healthcare, and clothing distribution, to name a few.

ASHLEY MCSWAIN: Basically, Our Place was brought into existence to provide supports for women who were being released after a period of incarceration, and so Our Place provides baseline support, so when you are released from custody, you need clothing, identification, you need resources, access, and relationships. We have a clothing boutique where the women come in who don‚Äôt have a lot of options for clothing. We have a boutique that provides those things. If a woman is interviewing for a job, she can come in and get clothing for that interview. We also provide legal support. We have a full time lawyer on staff. We provide supports around employment, and we also provide HIV and AIDS awareness programs.

DAWN: Our Place offers women that are coming back into the community many different things. It gives you a lot of opportunities to get your life back together, but other things, there are other needs that women like me have.

PATRICIA: When I came here for the first time, they, I did my intake, they‚Äôre very warm and welcome, which is very helpful, because getting back to society, it‚Äôs kind of hard, so they make you feel like that you are welcome back.

NARRATOR: These resources create a bond between the offender and his or her community and a chance to interact with the community in a positive way.

BRENDA JONES: Our current program is called Moving On: A Life Changing Program. This program targets adults and parents living east of the river, and also ex-offenders and their families. We provide workshops, year round workshops, weekly workshops, parenting, and also on empowering oneself. We do that for the sole purpose, again, of helping persons who have made decisions in the past that might have gotten them in difficult situations now, helping them to make better decisions in the future.

DARYL SANDERS: So, a few of our services that we provide, particularly around this area, is our fatherhood initiative, where we are training and working with fathers to become better fathers. At first, you want to do that by working with them to become better men. So the collaborative has trained all of the men within our organization to work with this population, to strengthen them, become better fathers, of course will make them stronger and better men, so that‚Äôs one particular area. We also have housing programs for this population as well. We have an intake program, so all of our services are provided through our intake department, but again, more services are needed. The collaboratives cannot do this alone. The issues are so, so intricate, and again, people think that, oh yes, yeah, they‚Äôre home, and things are fine. No, there are many, many supports that are needed, there are many, many connections that need to happen that have been severed, and more support and more services are needed in this area for sure.

DERON TAYLOR: Our program is geared toward assisting men and women who have had challenges, either obtaining or maintaining employment due to a criminal history or substance abuse history. Our goal is to place these men and women with community agencies that are willing to help them in providing job service training or workshops for one year.

SHAKIRA GANTT: And our mission is to reduce the incidence of childhood abuse and neglect. One of the ways that we do that is through supporting parents. The Georgia Avenue Collaborative offers many community based activities and fun events that will allow you to find out about resources, to get referrals, for job information, or even to develop your resume or to continue your education. Although the collaborative has been around for 10 years providing these services to our reentering citizens, we have found increasingly that what we provide is really not enough for the need that is coming in. We‚Äôve got an increase of residents coming in asking for these services, and the challenge has been figuring out how to really service them all, because things are so spread thinly that there just isn‚Äôt enough to go around, and so we‚Äôre really reaching out and asking for other organizations and agencies and entities to step forward.

Thomas Waters: Marshall Heights Community Development has been in existence in excess of 30 years. It provides wraparound services. It‚Äôs like a one-stop center.

RICHARD MAHAFFEY: I‚Äôm a Ward 7 resident and also an ex-offender. I‚Äôve lived in Ward 7 most of my life. My aunt lives in Ward 7 also, and she had told me about a program going on. I was told about a program and a wiring class, and I was called and told that I would be able to get into it, and I was pretty happy about that, me and my family, because with just my wife working, things have been a little rough, and this program has helped us out gratefully.

NARRATOR: When members of our community make unfavorable decisions and are held accountable by the criminal justice system, it is CSOSA‚Äôs commitment with assistance from the community to help rebuild lives, heal individuals, and bring restoration to families and the community. The Advisory Neighborhood Commissions play a vital role in the strategy as well by communicating the need to extend resources. Gaining their support is integral to CSOSA‚Äôs long term success in achieving their goal of reducing recidivism and reintegrating the offender into the community.

BETTY PAIR: The success of that program and the success of the people involved depends on education, training, and housing, and if those things are provided, the program will be successful.

MARK DIXON: We welcome them back in the community. We need to do more things for them. If we could have more people to come together, more churches come together, more community organizations, it would help, it would help this tremendously. Then they won‚Äôt try to go back. So we can do more things, the community could come together more and help support these people, work with CSOSA, work with other organizations that are out here, then we could help these brothers or sisters.

MARY JACKSON: I‚Äôve worked with CSOSA for quite a while. Matter of fact, since its conception. Ward 7 open its arms to CSOSA and its returning citizens years ago.

SANDRA ‚ÄúSS‚Äù SEEGARS: Some of the impediments that face the ex-offenders when they come back into the community is housing, not necessarily a criminal record, but credit worthiness, whereas they mess up their credit when they go in normally, and even ex-offenders who are not, who are not sex offenders, they‚Äôre welcome back into the community, but it‚Äôs the credit.

WILLIAM SHELTON: Most of the challenges that I really see are individuals staying home. I think that we really have to face a reality of whether or not, not only in this city, but if this country has really embraced the fact that our young people are going, they are incarcerated, and they are returning home, and whether or not we‚Äôre going to put together resources to really address and deal with that.

NARRATOR: Working collaboratively with CSOSA, the community has an opportunity to establish itself as a mighty cornerstone in a foundation of supportive reentry services. We have certainly been encouraged by the results of the participating organizations and institutions, and we look forward to expanding their capacity to provide value added services and include additional quality organizations. Please consider joining CSOSA as we work to rebuild lives, reestablish values, restore social order, strengthen families, and change the communities in which we live and cherish.

CEDRIC HENDRICKS: One of the very important jobs that I have is to work with our colleagues to build and strengthen partnerships with community based and faith based organizations, organizations that can help our clients meet their important social needs. Among those needs are obtaining employment, expanding the level of education, strengthening ties with family members, and putting behind them crime and incarceration going forward as productive, contributing members of this community. So I‚Äôm here to invite all community based and faith based organizations to join us in a partnership, expand the range of resources and services that we have to offer, and help make this city a safer place in which to live.

[Video Ends]

Information about crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

Meta terms: crime, criminals, criminal justice, parole, probation, prison, drug treatment, reentry, sex offenders.

Hiring People on Community Supervision

Len — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:08:15 +0000

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts.

This television program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2010/05/hiring-people-on-community-supervision/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

- Video begins -

Len Sipes: Hi, everybody, and welcome to D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. We have a really interesting show today. The show is about hiring people under community supervision and what we are doing with this show and a lot of the things that we’re doing in terms of radio shows and our website and our phone number is we’re crowd sourcing this issue. You in the business community, we want you to come and tell us how we can do it better; the people who hire the people from the community. We want you to tell us what we can do to do a better job of making sure, out of the 16,000 people under supervision in the District of Columbia on any given day, that as many of these individuals as possible have jobs. The research is very clear that the more of these individuals that have jobs, the less the recidivism rate, the less crime we have, and the less taxpayers have to shell out of their own pockets. So, it’s a win-win situation for everybody. To discuss this issue today, we have two principles with us: Eric Shuler, senior program analyst from my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and William Winchester, director of job training and green job development for housing evaluation plus. To Eric and William, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

William Winchester: Thank you very much, Leonard.

Eric Shuler: Thank you.

Len Sipes: Gentlemen, this is a tough topic. A lot of people have stereotypes and some of the stereotypes are justifiable about the 16,000 offenders that we have, people under supervision, under our supervision on any given day at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. But, Eric, the bottom line is that we do have thousands, thousands ready to go to work today who are beyond social issues, who are beyond substance abuse issues. They want to work. They would make good employees. They’re ready to go today. Correct?

Eric Shuler: Absolutely. And we have a need for employment opportunities for those thousands who are ready to go.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Eric Shuler: Through our process of partnerships with the community and the employers, we’re looking for those opportunities.

Len Sipes: And getting people to come to us and tell us how to do it better is going to be sort of the theme of the radio shows that we’re going to put up, the television shows that we’re going to put up. And, ladies and gentlemen, what I do want you to know; Eric is giving out his personal telephone number in terms of his desk, 202-442-1112, 202-442-1112. That’s Eric’s telephone number, www.csosa.gov. Look for hiring people under supervision. Go to that section in our website, as we have this conversation over the course of the next six or seven months. So, how can we convince people that to get beyond this stereotype of our individuals and the people under our supervision are just all unemployable? Is that a stereotype or not?

Eric Shuler: It is a stereotype and it’s one that we’re going to have to face head on. We have thousands of people who are qualified, skilled, have been assessed, and screened. And we’re interested in delivering our best people and letting people understand and employers understand specifically that we can be a reservoir of talent for their business.

Len Sipes: In essence, we’re not asking for a handout. What we’re saying to employers is that give us an opportunity to put our best people in your hands. We’re going to help you along the way. You can come back to us if there are issues. We’re going to be partners with you in finding that individual and while that individual is on the job. Correct?

Eric Shuler: Right. We have a system of assessment, counseling, matching, skills enhancement, and placement assistance that lets us be able to partner with employers and, when I say partner, I mean we work with them. It’s like a network; the Verizon network, for example. We have a network of people behind these individuals to manage, to work with, to teach them, to carry them along the path of being independent and successful within the employment arena and within their lives.

Len Sipes: Again, with the phone number, 202-442-1112, www.csosa.gov. William, you’re the person who basically does some hiring, does some training. What lessons from your part of the world, what instructions do you have to us in government in terms of making sure that as many individuals under our supervision are hired as possible?

William Winchester: Send us your best. Send us those individuals who you have screened that understand that we understand that they’ve had problems, that they’ve had issues. That’s not our issue. Come ready to work. Come diligent. Be truthful. Be forthright and we can go from there because we will train them. They don’t necessarily have to be totally qualified. Just come with the understanding of being able to be on time, show up every day, do some due diligence, and be there and be ready to go to work.

Len Sipes: I think most employers are going to tell us this: Exactly what you just said, William. I think most employers are going to say, you guarantee me that he or she will show up on time, sober. Give me my eight hours; don’t be distracted throughout the course of the day by phone calls or any other issues. Do what it is that I need you to do and I will employ you and I will train and I will set you up with a career, but you’ve got to bring, not necessarily construction skills, not necessarily truck driving skills, not necessarily specific job skills, you’ve got to bring the right attitude.

William Winchester: Correct. And attitude is most important. If you come willing to work and willing to learn and willing to accept whatever the circumstances are that has happened to you, we’re not judging you for those things. What we want is if we’re going to pay you for you to be able to help us to go to the next level.

Len Sipes: Eric, and that’s one of the things we were talking about before the show. I mean, we do have literally thousands. And isn’t that the dilemma? We have a public perception of offenders and I understand that public perception and I’m not going to disagree with that public perception. But, at the same time, the sort of tragedy, social tragedy, is that we have thousands who don’t fit that stereotype, who are ready to go today. William and I were talking about that attitude. They have that attitude. They’re ready and willing to go to work now.

Eric Shuler: Correct. And what we want to assure the public and the employers is that we have a system of qualifying, a system of, if you will, polishing the apple.

Len Sipes: Tell me about it. What do we do?

Eric Shuler: Well, we have a system that allows us to do an in depth assessment of their literacy skills. We have occupational assessments that we do, nationally recognized. And it gives them a certificate of employability. We also do the workshops that work on core skills, which most people call life skills, but they’re the core of the person, those things that are innate, that need to be present for you to be successful. And those are the things that William was alluding to that employers are looking for. Of course, employers will tell you, if you deliver me a person who’s willing, who is receptive, we’re willing to train them. And we have thousands who are far removed from their past, regressions, their crimes, who have paid their debt to society, they have worked very hard to acquire necessary marketable skills and we just need the opportunities to bring that about, that opportunity about. And I can say this: There are many benefits also to hiring from these individuals.

Len Sipes: Oh, thank you very much. And we’re going to have information about this on our website, right? Tax credits and bonding.

Eric Shuler: Correct. Tax credits and bonding. And in a short term, if people don’t understand what bonding does. It is provided for any person whose background usually leads employers to question whether or not they’re good employees.

Len Sipes: It limits their liability.

Eric Shuler: It limits their liability and at no cost to the employer or the employee.

Len Sipes: Right.

Eric Shuler: And the tax credits is something that is very valuable to an employer because it allows them to get an individual who’s going to come to help grow their business, help do the tasks that need to be done for them to be successful. And also it gives them a monetary incentive for hiring from our population of people.

Len Sipes: 202-442-1112 is the telephone number of that gentleman, Eric Shuler, of my agency, willing to give out his own telephone number. There will be others who will pick up if Eric’s not there. www.csosa.gov; look for hiring people under supervision. William, we’re going to be reaching out to business people and we want them to be honest with us. We’re not asking for anybody to pull any punches. We want them to say, Leonard, we’re going to hire your people because; we’re not going to hire because. We want an honest assessment from the business community. We want the business community to tell us how we can do it better. Are we opening ourselves up for, what are we opening ourselves up for?

William Winchester: Well, I don’t think you’re opening yourselves up for anything major, but what we would like is that, and we know that people slip; we know that things happen; we know that emergencies happen, so stick with us. Follow the person as well as we’re following them. If there is a problem, you stay in touch with them or you come back, even if they have to be replaced. Give us a person and make sure that that next person is as diligent as that first person versus us having to track them down and chase them down. If you do your due diligence, just to go down that road a little further, it makes us as employers a little more comfortable in picking up and bringing in somebody.

Len Sipes: But I do want to get over this point that we discussed before the show. It’s just not the people that we have under community supervision who we’re concerned about. Either one of you can jump in on this. I mean, look, my own kids drive me crazy in terms of their ability to say, yes sir and no sir, yes ma’am and no ma’am. Show up on time. I’m telling my kids. I said they don’t want to hear from you anything else besides you’re going to give them a productive eight hours. So, it’s just not the people under our supervision. Isn’t this a societal issue?

Eric Shuler: Absolutely, it is a societal issue and it’s something that is across the board. We just happen to have individuals who fall into some of that category, but I guarantee as a microcosm of society you could probably hire 20 people and out of that 20 people you’ll have some of those same issues. What our charge is at CSOSA is having a program, a process, a system of making sure and shoring up these individuals as they try to reintegrate into society and to seek gainful employment.

Len Sipes: But we do tell them the same thing I told my daughters, correct? Show up, and this is what I heard from an employer at a job fair one day, show up, shut up, do what I want you to do for eight hours. If you do that, we can train you, we can work with you, we can help you build a productive career, but you’ve got to show up and you’ve got to understand that for the next eight hours or more if I need you to, you’re mine.

Eric Shuler: That’s it.

Len Sipes: I mean, that’s what we tell our people, correct?

Eric Shuler: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s a simulation. It is integration. It is the understanding that the job is a part of you learning how to adjust to things. The job is a means to an end. A job is something that you go to. There’s a uniform that you wear, which is the office decor. There is a culture in any organization that you need to ascribe to and this is the important thing that I think William was eluding to that we all need to work very hard to make sure that those doors open, those opportunities are there for them to go in and purport themselves and to showcase their skills and abilities and their willingness to be a part of an organization.

Len Sipes: Now, William, I talk to people under our supervision and I’ve done so for years when I was with other agencies and they will tell me from time to time that I got turned down because of my criminal history. And sometimes I feel that that’s a tragedy because they are far from their criminal activities and a lot of them, their criminal activities were pretty minor. I mean, we do have probationers, people who haven’t been to prison, and I sometimes wonder if they want in with exactly the issues that we’re talking about; yes sir, no sir, yes ma’am, no ma’am, a nicely formatted resume, fully understanding that that person brings you those skills, not how to run a printing press, not how to drive a truck not how to lay concrete, those basic human skills. My guess is that the employer will probably hire that person, but that person’s presentation skills are extraordinarily important.

William Winchester: And that’s first and foremost and the other thing is that they have to understand that throughout their life every single day from 8:00 in the morning to midnight or however long people are looking at them and they will always be looking at them and sometimes, we had a situation where a young man was in the bank and he was hired because he was in the bank, he was acting very good, he wasn’t showing off, he wasn’t clowning, the person saw him, he heard in his conversation that he was looking for a job, the man was right behind him, he had a record; however, because he was showing some diligence, he was showing restraint, he was just out in public, he was hired because he was acting right, because he understood, because he was coming through our program that every single day somebody’s looking at you.

Len Sipes: Is the principal issue, attitude is the principal issue, job skills?

William Winchester: That’s the biggest; it’s attitude. It’s coming to work and understanding that basically you’re on somebody else’s time and you’re responsible for your actions from the time that you get there and even after that. We found out now even with the social networks and Facebook and things that people are looking on these social networks to see how people are responding and how people are reacting because there’s so many jobs and there’s so many opportunities that everybody’s looking at everybody all the time.

Len Sipes: And that becomes worrisome, too, because that presentation skill that you provide to that employer is the same presentation skill that you have to have on your Facebook page.

William Winchester: Correct.

Len Sipes: I mean, you’ve got to be the whole person. That employer is going to be checking into your background.

William Winchester: All the time.

Len Sipes: And so people just need to understand that. Eric, do our folks understand that?

Eric Shuler: They do understand that and it’s demonstrated daily. We have a unit called, the VOTE Unit. It stands for Vocational Opportunities Training and Employment. It is our way of polishing that apple. It is our way of getting them to understand, to modify behavior. And that just what you said, it’s not, I heard William say acting, but what you said was being, and that’s very important because you need to be the kind of person, we all need to be the kind of person that does the right thing when no one’s watching

Len Sipes: Right. Bring your A game everyday.

Eric Shuler: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s what the multitude of folks that we have, who have gone through the behavioral modification, who have corrected their attitudes towards work, towards society, and they’re just looking for that opportunity and we have thousands. And they’re being subjected to a broad brush painting of lumping all folks together.

Len Sipes: I met a man who was in his early 40s and he’d been, like, 10 years away from his crime. The crime was a non-violent crime. The guy had real presentation skills, so the guy had real occupational skills and he was telling me that he was being bounced, and this is a very tough economy to be out there looking for work, but he was being bounced time after time because of the fact that he had a criminal record. And I said to myself, now this is a shame. I mean, there really is an issue. I’m not going to dispute society’s stereotypes. I understand why they’re there and I’m not going to necessarily disagree with them, but I do understand at the same time him as a human being. He would have made a good employer.

Eric Shuler: Sure.

Len Sipes: Or good employee, I’m sorry.

Eric Shuler: A criminal past or a criminal record is something that you can’t get away from, but you can overcome.

Len Sipes: All right. We’re going to have to leave it there. We’re going to the next segment and we’ll continue this discussion. Ladies and gentlemen, 202-442-1112, 202-442-1112, www.csosa.gov; look for the “hire us” or “hire people under community supervision.” That part of the website we need your opinion. Stay with us. We’ll be right back as we explore this issue some more. Be right back with you.

[Music Playing]

Len Sipes: Hi, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes. And we continue to crowd source a very important issue; that is, hiring people under community supervision. We are looking for you, employer, you the person who hires people, you the person from the business sector, from the non-profit sector, from the government sector. We want you to come and tell us either by phone or via the website or through the radio shows that we’re going to be doing, the television shows that we’re going to be doing about this issue. We want you to tell us what it is that we need to do to do a better job of trying to hire as many people as possible, the people who are under our supervision on a day-to-day basis in the District of Columbia, 16,000, the research is clear. If they are hired, the more they work the fewer crimes they commit, the greater their chance for becoming taxpayers instead of tax burdens, the greater propensity of taking care of their kids; 70 percent are fathers and mothers. So, we all have a big stake in terms of what it is we’re doing here. 202-442-1112 is this gentlemen’s personal telephone number at his desk; www.csosa.gov, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, look for “hire people under community supervision.” Back with us, Eric Shuler, the senior program analyst for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency and also Alec Vincent, Manpower Development Specialist for the D.C. Department of Employment Services. Eric, Alec, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Eric Shuler: Thank you, Leonard.

Alec Vincent: Thank you.

Len Sipes: All right. We’re going to talk to you, Eric, first and then we’re going to go over to Alec because one of the things that I love about Alec’s background is that he’s currently under supervision with our agency and yet he’s been able to cross that bridge and not only find meaningful employment, he’s working with our folks on a day-to-day basis. The District of Columbia is providing the bulk of these employment services, correct, Eric?

Eric Shuler: Correct. Absolutely. And let me say this, Alec is an example of operating under the framework that most likely will render us able to successfully matriculate ex-offenders into entry level positions as well as the high demand growth opportunities.

Len Sipes: While you mentioned that, entry level high demand. I hear people saying we want living wage, we want living wage. Don’t we want to start off at least with basic work skills and maybe that’s not going to be living wage for the moment but, hopefully, it’ll progress into something that is living wage?

Eric Shuler: Well, absolutely, absolutely. And one of the things we understand at CSOSA and we impart that onto the participants at CSOSA and the people under supervision is that this is a marathon; it’s not a sprint. And it’s key to understanding that. You don’t throw away pennies for dollars and we work very hard to get them to understand the work ethic that allows them to understand that and operate under that guise.

Len Sipes: Okay. But it’s interesting, I know people, before I even came to CSOSA from my job in the state of Maryland who are ex-offenders, who make a lot of money, who are doing very well at their occupations and, in one case and he’ll never do a radio show or television show with me; although, I’ve invited him on many times, sells insurance. And he’s making more money than you and I put together.

Eric Shuler: Yes. Well, it’s funny, Leonard, because in daily life you would be surprised how many people in the walks of life that you pass by, that you interact with on a daily basis who are ex-offenders.

Len Sipes: It’s my contention that every 10 people, every 15 people within any urban metropolitan area, you’re going to encounter a person who’s been in the criminal justice system.

Eric Shuler: Absolutely, absolutely. And at CSOSA one of the things we’re keen on is behavior modification and polishing that apple, meaning directing them into skills, enhancement programs, being the ambassadors to employers, to ask for those opportunities. Let’s get this clear: We’re not asking for a handout. We’re asking for opportunity.

Len Sipes: And we’ve said that. We’ve said that we’re not asking for a handout. We have thousands of individuals ready to go right now whose apples have been polished.

Eric Shuler: Absolutely, absolutely.

Len Sipes: And who are having a struggle in terms of finding employment. That’s why we’re crowd sourcing this entire issue, 202, this gentlemen’s telephone number, 202-442-1112, www.csosa.gov; look for “hiring people under community supervision.” Alec, tell me a little bit about your story here. Currently under our supervision?

Alec Vincent: Yes, I’m currently under supervision at CSOSA and, well, basically, I cam out of prison in about ’04 and, when I came home from prison, of course, before I came home, I already understood that I was going to have to come back into society, implement myself into society successfully, so a part of that preparation for that was to go for higher education. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete my degree while I was in, but I started that while I was in to prepare myself.

Len Sipes: And D.C. offenders, to make it clear to the public, they go to the federal prisons, so you came out of the one of the federal prisons.

Alec Vincent: Yes. Came out of one of the federal prisons, actually in Louisiana.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Alec Vincent: So, came back to D.C. and immediately started looking for employment and, of course, I was faced with some of the obstacles that most offenders, or all offenders, are faced with. A lot of the places you go and knock on the door, fill out resumes, fill out applications, I’m sorry, get your resume together. Unfortunately, after being gone for so long, there’s very little that you can have on your resume. That’s one of the barriers that you face.

Len Sipes: How do you handle that question? Well, Mr. Johnson, where you been for the last five years? Prison? How do you do that?

Alec Vincent: Well, actually some cases, I mean, my thing is to be very honest and I’ve been on several interviews and actually was very honest and that a lot of times be the reason why you’re not getting hired and I’ve sat and I’ve seen others that come from that same situation lie about that, based on the fact that after going and knocking on so many doors. I mean, you go and you go to 15 different establishments, whether it be private sector, non-profit, or government, and all of those places you go and some of those places even you have the qualifications to get the job.

Len Sipes: Well, that’s part of the issue here and that’s one of the things I really struggle with because I know thousands of you. I know thousands of Alec’s. They’re in a suit, they’re yes, sir, no sir. They are willing to work. They want to work. There’s no reason why they can’t make wonderful employees. That’s our point; that there’s thousands of you, people just like you right now who are ready to go to work and be good employees. We’re not asking for handouts; we’re asking for tell us what we can do to get folks like you hired because there is a stereotype and that stereotype does cause some people not to be hired. Right or wrong?

Alec Vincent: You’re definitely right. And sometimes, and me personally, understandably those stereotypes because we have had some to come and be afforded opportunities and not take advantage of it and not excel. But you have so many more that’s ready to go or ready to go into those opportunities and take full advantage of it and because of what a few have done, we all kind of suffer.

Len Sipes: Well, that’s again what we were talking about before the show, the production of the show. Eric and I were saying that we remind the people under our supervision that they’re just not dealing with themselves. You’re representing everybody caught up in the criminal justice system and you don’t want to give that employer the reason to say, all right; that’s it. I’m not hiring anybody else under community supervision again.

Alec Vincent: Exactly. And one of the things I did want to speak to. I heard Eric say earlier about polishing the apple. That’s one of the things that’s real paramount, I think, when we talk about dealing with ex-offenders that’s coming back to society, going into the workforce, polishing that apple because some do be a little rough around the edges and don’t have certain skills or they lack certain skills and we’re not talking about hard skills, soft skills. Those things, some just have a problem with getting up in the morning. Those are the things that you have persons that work at CSOSA that’s able to help with those and we have programs, other programs that’s out there to help those individuals. I think that’s one of the things, probably one of the most important things that need to be said to those employers about those persons that’s coming back to society, that they have that support system.

Len Sipes: I’ll ask you the same question I asked William on the first segment. Is it the job skills or is it the whole human being that you bring to that job interview? If our people want in and gave that message, are they going to get hired? That becomes the bottom line, doesn’t it?

Alec Vincent: I think so; I think so. I think it’s a combination of both, but I think, like you said, those other things, those soft skills, of having people that want to come to work, that’s going to come to work and be on time, give you 110 percent at work, and work eight hours, even more if so, if need be.

Len Sipes: All right. Work 10 hours, work 12 hours; you do what is necessary

Alec Vincent: Exactly. And

Len Sipes: Go ahead.

Alec Vincent: Oh, excuse me.

Len Sipes: No, no, no. Go ahead.

Alec Vincent: In the field that I work in, I work for D.C. government, I work with the ex-offender population as well and helping them find employment and I work with other supervisors and part of my job is to meet with supervisors and CEOs and employers daily. And one of the things I find that’s said to me so often is that when we have someone go to that work site and they hire that person and they want another person to come, one of the main things they say is send me somebody that wants to work.

Len Sipes: Got it. And you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, again, 202-442-1112, 202-442-1112; that gentlemen’s telephone number on that desk. Brave enough to take on the entire metropolitan area in terms of tell us what we can do to be sure that our folks are ready for your employment. Give us whatever advice is necessary; www.csosa.gov, look for “hiring people under supervision” part of the website. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

Eric Shuler: Thank you, man.

- Video ends -

Series Meta terms: Employment, Offenders, Parole, Probation, vocational, training, career, guidance, counseling.