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Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/11/sexual-exploitation-of-children-us-dept-of-justicefbi-dc-public-safety-radio/

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 DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today to talk about sexual exploitation of children and when I say that we have two of the premier national experts to talk to us today, I’m not kidding. Francey Hicks, National Coordinator of Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction from the United States Department of Justice and Nickolas Savage, Supervisory Special Agent Acting Section Chief of the Cyber Division of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One million people – that’s the estimate – one million people are online at any given time and they’re looking for your child or they’re looking for images of your child; a million people online and your children online. Your eight-year-old is online. Your twelve-year-old is online and you’ve got a million people to contend with. It’s a bit of a scary problem, but one of the really interesting things is that for the first time, the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has put together a national strategy and has convened a whole bunch of meetings with a whole bunch of experts and we’re here to talk about that. So that’s a long introduction to reintroduce Francey Hicks and Nickolas Savage. Welcome to DC Public Safety.

Francey Hicks:  Thanks for having me, Len.

Len Sipes:  All right. Francey, first of all, the national strategy, we now have for the first time a national strategy under the auspices of the U.S. Attorney General. Tell me about that.

Francey Hicks:  Well, Len, not only do we have a national strategy, but we’ve seen its gradual implementation over the last year. Back in August of 2010, as you said, the Attorney General launched the first ever-national strategy for child exploitation prevention and interdiction. It’s the first of its kind anywhere in the world and in that document, which is available on our website at www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

Len Sipes:  Thank you.

Francey Hicks:  We have three different parts. So the first part is the first ever threat assessment that was conducted to gauge the threat our children face from a variety of harms on the internet and in the physical world as it relates to child pornography, as it relates to child sex tourism, as it relates to being enticed online and as it relates to child prostitution.  Second part of the national strategy is a full review of all the actions of the federal government at every level with every agency possible that you can imagine who have a piece in child protection and that includes the investigative agencies. That includes the grant funders who are funding Internet safety programs, for example, and that includes all of those who are engaged in tracking sex offenders. The third part of the national strategy is, if you will, our pledge. Our pledge of how we are going to tackle this problem going forward and we’ve spent the last year attempting to fulfill the pledges in the national strategy to collaborate better with our federal, state, local and international partners. For example, to collaborate better with industry to come up with new technologies to fight the scourge of child exploitation, to equip our investigators and our prosecutors with more sophisticated and innovative training. Those are just a few examples of the things that we promise to do that we have carried through on this last year.

Len Sipes:  So the whole idea is an across the board cooperation of federal, state and local agencies. So we’re all pretty much singing from the same sheet of music. We’re all pretty much moving in the same direction. We’ve all uniformly defined the problem. We all uniformly understand what it takes to deal with the problem. That’s the whole idea behind what Attorney General Eric Holder has done, correct?

Francey Hicks:  That’s right.  So many people were engaging in great work fighting child exploitation, but they were doing it separately. Now, we’re doing it together.

Len Sipes:  Right and we’re going to switch over to Nickolas because, Nick, the cyber division of the FBI, I can’t imagine a more exciting division to be in and in a more interesting division to be in. I mean I’ve been in my entire life, professional life since the age of 18 in the criminal justice system and I would think that it would be the profiling division, profiling hard core very violent criminals or it would be the cyber division. Those two, to me, seem to be the two tech premier organizations within the FBI. So what is that you guys do?

Nickolas Savage:  Well, the cyber division certainly has grown a lot over the last decade. I mean, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody the number of computers that are now in the home and how it’s really just revolutionary in the sense that it’s just changed our everyday life.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Nickolas Savage:  Unfortunately, as technology emerges, we have individuals out there that use that technology to exploit our children.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Nickolas Savage:  And certainly the FBI has taken a stance to really to protect our children and to echo what Francey has just said, in today’s day and age, there are so many more children that are online than ever before. There are more offenders that out there. So certainly there are more opportunities for them. It is through this coordinated effort and this way of doing things more effectively that really is ultimately what we’re here to do and to try and thwart this problem.

Len Sipes:  Now, your program, I think, is Innocent Images?

Nickolas Savage:  Yes, sir.

Len Sipes:  Tell me about that.

Nickolas Savage:  Innocent Images is an undercover operation and we have currently 43 throughout the United States that specifically go online to target those individuals who are targeting our children. We work those individuals who attempt to meet children online. Either travel to meet children or to get children to travel to them. We also work with matters regarding child, images of child abuse – child pornography. Those are predominantly our two biggest areas that Innocent Images really addresses.

Len Sipes:  So the whole idea is that the perpetrator is online, searching for a minor. He could be talking to an FBI agent. He could be talking to a member of the State police. He could be talking to a member of the local law enforcement agency.

Nickolas Savage:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  That, to me, is wonderful.

Nickolas Savage:  It’s a very good thing and certainly we try to, you know, we want that to be in the conscience of the country because I think it gives parents a feeling knowing that law enforcement has taken this effort to protect your children as well as letting individuals who want to target these children. It certainly plants this seed that, in fact, they could be talking to a law enforcement officer.

Len Sipes:  I’ve been this program, this kind of program, for a lot of years and I have talked to people under supervision who have said, “I saw the TV program.” Not necessarily the one we did, Francey, but I’ve seen a television program. I’ve listened to a radio program and that worries me, the fact that Sally who was 12 years old could be an FBI agent and so, obviously this is a deterrent. It plants something in the mind of the offender of, number one, I shouldn’t be doing this to begin with, but number two, who am I really talking to.

Nickolas Savage:  I think it’s a deterrent for some. Unfortunately, it’s not enough of a deterrent as anybody is familiar with some of the shows that have highlighted this problem, many…

Len Sipes:  Some of the television shows, yeah. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Nickolas Savage:  I think it did a good job of highlighting this problem, but also the sense that when these individuals are caught, they’re often not surprised that it is law enforcement. I think the dangerous thing that we need to take away from that is the fact that these individuals, even knowing or thinking that it could be someone in law enforcement, still decided to take the chance and travel anyway.

Len Sipes:  Well, then let’s get down to the larger problem and then this becomes a more interesting part of the program. We do need Francey to get to deterrents. We do need to talk about prevention and we do need to talk about new technologies, but the average parent listening to this program, whether it’s a Mayor of a city or somebody from Congress, I mean they’re going to be parents too and they’re sitting there listening to this program going, “Wait a minute.” I mean my eight-year-old is online. My twelve-year-old is online. A million people out there are trying to target my kid, what in the name of God do I say to my kid? What in the name of Heavens can I do to prevent my child from being sucked into this because sexual predators are extraordinarily powerful in terms of how they conduct their business? They can suck that child in pretty easily. They know what to say. They know the buttons to push. So isn’t this all about first of all, from a prevention point of view, parents sitting down with their kids and letting their kids clearly know without scaring them half to death, letting them very clearly understand that there are people online who can do them harm, Francey?

Francey Hicks:  Well, you’re right, Len. That is actually critical and what I would say first is that we’d rather have a whole lot of prevention and a whole lot less investigation and prosecution. We’d rather see fewer victims rather than see more cases, obviously. So the more we can prevent, the fewer cases there are. The most important thing I think for parents and educators to take away is that it’s actually not that difficult. They just have to have a conversation with their child. The most important, the single most important thing they can do as a parent, is know what their children are doing online.

Len Sipes:  But they won’t. Let me stop you there. I’ve seen the commercials. I run the commercials on my television program where the father walks into the bedroom. People don’t do that and handheld computers are now called Smartphones.

Francey Hicks:  That’s right.

Len Sipes:  So, okay, so the eight-year-old, nine-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old’s walking around with an iPhone or Droid and so they can access whatever they want from that little device. How can a parent control that access?

Francey Hicks:  Well, a parent needs to understand what their child is doing and what the smart parent is doing is going in after their child and checking to see what it is their child is doing. In addition to having the conversation that you mentioned, that is actually arming the child with the knowledge that will help the child be a more sophisticated consumer, be a more sophisticated user and be armed with sort of the defense against a predator who would prey upon, but also they need to make sure they understand what their children are doing and while you’re right. There are definitely going to be some parents, unfortunately, who simply will not talk to their child or will not go behind to see what their child are doing, I hope the large majority of parents, in fact, will. I mean this is your child’s innocence, sometimes tragically their life at stake. So what’s more important to you?

Len Sipes:  Well, you know, Nick, every child is vulnerable to a certain degree. You can have a perfectly fine stable child doing good in school, respectful, everything about that child is fine and yet that child will find vulnerabilities in their lives and the offenders that you deal with are experts at exploiting whatever vulnerabilities they are and in the life of every young person, there are going to be vulnerabilities.

Nickolas Savage:  Well, Len, you make an excellent point and one that I was going to make at some time later on down the line. I like to tell people that we’re all vulnerable, not just children. All of us have vulnerabilities to some point and you’re right. These individuals are very good and they’re patient at exploiting those vulnerabilities and, unfortunately, I can remember years ago I worked a case with a little twelve-year-old girl that was just simply gorgeous, was a straight A student, had a perfect home life. Unbeknownst to her parents, she in fact was victimized from an individual from Georgia. The shame of it was, was that she had developed early in her life and people didn’t see her as even a potential victim. The problem was she was seen as a sexual object by many of her peers and along came an individual that just simply wanted to “love her,” that didn’t treat her like all the other boys and it was just a way for him to exploit that vulnerability and just to follow up something that Francey had said, I think we have I think three, at least three problems. One, with respect to home is parents often look over and they see their children in the confines of their own home and there is a certain safety associated with being able to see my children in this environment, in that home environment. So parents think that my child is safe because I can see them. The other thing is that parents of this generation really think they’re tech savvy. I thought it was dangerous a generation ago where parents knew very little and kids could run circles around their parents. Today, I find that parents are often much more in a bad situation because, well, they’re not afraid by technology and they use it themselves. Therefore, they think they’re as equal as or even smarter than their kids. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Kids today can run circles around most adults when it comes to the internet and what’s going on and I think parents are just simply afraid to ask the tough questions.  I often tell parents, if you don’t talk to your children, there are a lot of people online who are willing to talk to your kids.

Len Sipes:  Bottom line, I think, in terms of this long decades discussion of child safety is to keep an open and honest conversation going with your kids and have an open and honest conversation. The second thing is is that as you have both said this is not a one shot deal. This is the person who is going to be working your child piece by piece by piece. This not a one-contact event; this is a multiple, multiple contact event, which should give a parent an opportunity to figure this out at a certain point, correct?

Nickolas Savage:  Well, oftentimes, kids are reluctant to even say anything for two…they have two fears. Number one, that that computer, which is often their lifeline, is going to be taken away from them.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Nickolas Savage:  The other thing is that parents often rush to judgment that somehow the child did something wrong, not that their child was a potential victim. So children are afraid to say anything because oftentimes when they do, parents over react and assume that the child did something wrong.

Len Sipes:  We’re halfway through the program and the program flies by like wildfire whenever we touch the subject. Francey Hicks, National Coordinator Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction for the United States Department of Justice – www.projectsafechildhood.gov, www.projectsafechildhood.gov. Nickolas Savage is a supervisory special agent with the cyber division at the FBI – www.fbi.gov, www.fbi.gov. By the way, if you’ve never been on the FBI’s website, they are probably the most sophisticated of any of the criminal justice agencies, whether it’s federal, state level in terms of the amount of information that they put out there – really good in terms of social media. So let’s pick up with some of these larger questions again. We just went through an incident. Joe Paterno, University Penn State or…I forget.

Francey Hicks:  Penn State.

Len Sipes:  Penn State, thank you. You just saved me. And the allegations…and I know we can’t specifically about the allegations, but the allegations are that employees saw child sexual exploitation at its meanest, nastiest, basest level.  Saw it and didn’t report it. Now, whether or not that’s true or not true is not what I want to discuss, but there’s a certain point where we tend to gloss over or afraid to touch some of these issues regarding exploitation of children and sometimes I get the sense that that’s our biggest problem. It’s not necessarily technology. It’s not necessarily parents. It’s not necessarily music. Sometimes we’re just scared to death to deal with this issue.

Francey Hicks:  Well, I think that actually brings up a great point. So we talked a few minutes ago about the dangers children face online and how absolutely determined, as Agent Savage said, these pedophiles and some predators are to make contact with, travel to see, encourage your child to produce child pornography etc., but the danger, at least statistically, is much greater to your child from someone within your child’s circle of trust.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

Francey Hicks:  And that I think is the thing that is most difficult for us as parents or community leaders or educators to recognize and to do anything about and that is that the people who have multiple contacts with your child all the time, whether it’s the teacher or whether it’s the police officer, whether it’s the soccer coach, whether it’s the football coach and whether it’s the karate instructor. These people all have access to your child and vast majority of all of those people are dedicated to making your child’s life happier, more full, enriched, etc., but there is certainly a certain portion of them that are in those positions because those positions allow them access to children.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Francey Hicks:  And that’s the danger here and I think what you’re talking about, at least what the news report’s saying…I’m not commenting on the facts…

Len Sipes:  Of course.

Francey Hicks:  Of the case and what’s true and what’s not, but if you look just simply at what is the right thing to do versus what is the legal thing to do, I think all states, have mandatory reporting laws and that is people who are medical professionals and education professionals and certain others are required by law to report suspected child abuse. It’s not even reporting confirmed child abuse. It’s if they suspect child abuse they are required by law to…

Len Sipes:  Right and I want to make clear it’s not Joe Paterno that’s alleged to be involved in this directly. It’s that he was part of the chain of people who supposedly knew about this and didn’t report it.

Francey Hicks:  Right.  Well, so obviously I’m not commenting specifically on that –

Len Sipes:  Of course.

Francey Hicks:  The facts of that case.

Len Sipes:  But it just wanted to make it clear. I brought up Joe Paterno’s name and he’s not directly involved in the actual act. He was involved in not reporting it. That’s the allegation.

Francey Hicks:  Right. So you have laws that require people to report, which are slightly different in every state, but fairly basic and then you have what really boils down something that makes, I think, people sometimes uncomfortable is the moral question of what’s the right thing to do. There’s the legal thing to do and what’s the right thing to do and  I think that’s what’s driving the conversation from this particular scandal going on at Penn State is, what was the right thing to do and was the right thing done? And for those people who believe the right thing wasn’t done, that is that act of sexual abuse, if it was occurring, was not stopped and that act was apparently, at least allegedly, not reported to the police and so when it comes to other cases that are similar, I think we all have to ask ourselves are we prepared to do the right thing no matter how difficult it is and I think part of the difficulty is in accepting that your child’s molester may very well be someone you know well. It may be someone you’re living with. It could be your spouse, your brother, your mother, your sister. It could be an aunt or a coach and oftentimes those people are in such positions of trust. It’s very difficult to accept they would do it, much less that they did it.

Len Sipes:  And, Nick, this is why again we get back to the age appropriate conversation with the child because Francey is right. I mean the great majority of the individuals involved in sexually exploiting a child. Here we are talking about online individuals, strangers if you will, but the majority of victims, they know the person who is doing the victimizing and so we have to have those age appropriate conversations with the child. We cannot scare the child. We have to keep an open line of communication at all times, but somehow, some way, we got to convey to that child that people who know you may do you harm. They may look innocent. They may act innocent. They may befriend you, but they could do you harm. That’s an awfully difficult conversation to have.

Nickolas Savage:  Well, I think we’ve, to some degree, almost done a disservice to our children. We’ve always warned of stranger danger and we never really have to worry about kids around strangers per se. It is often these pillars of the community who have access to our children that everybody is shocked when the allegations are made public. That they just can’t conceive of an individual whether it is somebody in a trust…most who are in a trust of position actually having done something like this. An interesting thing with respect to being online is that we found a lot of our victim who were victimized online, again, getting back to these individuals being good at befriending these victims. Oftentimes, these kids don’t see their victimizer as an individual who was a stranger. They often associate them…

Len Sipes:  Good point.

Nickolas Savage:  As a friend.

Len Sipes:  Excellent point. Excellent point. All right, so the general three things – deterrents, prevention, new technologies, what haven’t we covered, Francey, in the final ten minutes of the program?

Francey Hicks:  Well, I think it’s important to note that recently the Attorney General hosted a call to action, a summit, discussing child exploitation where we brought together three separate panels of internationally renowned experts to discuss preventing, deterring and interdicting this crime and when it came to prevention, we talked specifically about these kinds of problems and how do we address this and everyone agreed that while there are lots of great prevention programs out there. We’re obviously missing the message because children are continuing to be sexually abused by people in their circle of trust. So we need to inspire a movement and treat this much more as a public health issue and make a much stronger push to educate children properly, not with the old stranger danger model – not that there’s not some validity to it. There certainly is and children need to beware of strangers, but we need to pass the message along to children about the circle of trust and make sure they understand what it is that they need to arm themselves against.

Len Sipes:  Okay and I think we also get to yell at the larger society for some of the quasi issues in terms of movies and advertising and music that sort of, to some people, in their own minds, sort of gives them a bit of a green light, that if it’s perfectly fine to put this image on a billboard in Times Square, it’s perfectly fine for me to do what it is I’m thinking about doing. I mean, what’s the stronger message to society? You’re a complete jerk and if you act on these thoughts…

Francey Hicks:  Well, I think it’s very important to note that sexualisation of children is a big concern. It’s a big concern of researchers. There’s been lots of research done about the early and too young sexualisation of children. What exactly that is, we could debate, I think, for hours.

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Francey Hicks:  But there definitely is a concern that media and industry should at least be aware of the message that they’re sending in sexualizing young children.

Len Sipes:  Talk about the new technologies. I mean one of the things that really interested…either one of you can take this. The photo DNA. I think, we have new technologies that are coming on board that allows us to identify people involved, allows us to identify the children involved, allows us to identify the offenders involved.  So there’s new technology coming on board. Some of it was can talk about. Some of it we can’t talk about, but to offenders who would happen to be listening to this program, we have developed an array of new tools to track you down.

Francey Hicks:  Well, that’s right and one of the most exciting to come in a long time was a tool that was developed by Microsoft in conjunction with a man named Dr. Hany Farid at Dartmouth College. It’s called photo DNA and it’s very exciting because it takes images that we know are child pornography images and allows a company like Facebook, which has just adopted the technology and started using it on their system, to search out and find on their system, images of known child pornography that are the worst of the worst in a way that we were never able to do before. So old technology was sort of like a digital fingerprint, but if one tiny little pixel was off, that digital fingerprint was different and we couldn’t necessarily find the very same image even if they were sitting next to each other. Now, this new technology allows these companies to search for these images in a much more efficient and much more thorough way and we’re already getting cases from those.

Len Sipes:  So we can identify both the victim and we can identify both the perpetrator, Nick?

Nickolas Savage:  Well, it’s certainly one of the things that we’re working toward. One of the goals of law enforcement is to try and identify who these children are so that the abuse, the exploitation stops. So we’re very excited to be partnering with non-government agencies with the private industry to be able to use this technology to, again, just to help keep children safe.

Francey Hicks:  Well, and to interrupt the traffic and I think it’s important to note just a little bit of a scary statistic, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children charged by Congress with trying to identify children has reviewed more than 35 million images of suspected child pornography over a period of time and these, unfortunately, these numbers are simply getting larger every year. So technology that will aid industry and law enforcement in interrupting the traffic of these images, which of course just perpetuates the abuse of the children, is going to be critical to our effort to clean the internet up and, hopefully, one day eradicate this kind of image from the internet altogether.

Len Sipes:  Well, there’s a certain point where this person lives sort of anonymously. We do know that every case that comes to our attention is certainly not the full degree of this person’s involvement. For every case that comes to our attention, we speculate certainly that this person has been doing it to other children as well. So one person, one case oftentimes with one victim does, in fact, represent multiple victims in terms of the past. I can’t imagine a person who has that view of life, who takes these steps, are just out there doing it once or twice. Nick?

Nickolas Savage:  I’d agree. I try to couch it in terms of adult sexuality in that it would be like saying, “I’ve only had one girlfriend or one boyfriend or one partner throughout my entire lifetime.” Individuals who are sexually attracted to children are attracted to children.

Len Sipes:  And that sexual attraction to children doesn’t go away.

Nickolas Savage:  It does not and if you are working in an online undercover capacity, if an individual happens to be engaged in conversation with an undercover law enforcement officer, it is more than fair to assume that there are other kids that are being targeted by this individual. It’s just not happenstance that an individual attracted to children just happens to engage their first conversation with a law enforcement officer.

Len Sipes:  Alright, so let me summarize because we only have a couple of minutes left in the program and that is you need to have age appropriate conversations with your kids. You gotta, gotta, gotta know where your kids are going on the internet. I mean you’ve really do have to do that. If you’re going to be a good and responsible parent, you have to get thoroughly involved in the life of your child and if your child doesn’t like it, tough. You’ve got to be a good parent, but still have…to keep open that line of communication. A lot of kids don’t report this because they’re afraid the parents are going to take away the computer, so that could be part of it. That there’s a wide array of new technologies that we’re bringing on board, a national strategy that we’re bringing on board to hunt down the perpetrators, to bring them to justice, to put them in prison, to take care of it. What am I missing here?

Francey Hicks:  I think that’s pretty summary, Len. I think it’s important for offenders who might be listening to this conversation to understand that we are doing everything in our considerable power to find you and to bring you to justice and to see that you don’t sexually abuse children and that’s our main goal and it always will be.

Len Sipes:  And across the board, I forgot one thing. Again, it is not simply a matter of stranger danger. You’ve got to have that conversation with that child in terms of making sure that he or she understands that the person close them, that they know, could be the victimizer.

Nickolas Savage:  Parents can’t start too early. I mean if there’s a take-away that I’d also like to mention, it’s that parents shouldn’t be afraid of technology and the Internet. The Internet is a wonderful thing and we need to teach our children to be good cyber citizens. So it’s a matter of parents, they cannot start too early. Engage them in conversation as soon you can.

Len Sipes:  Nick, you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. I’ve been your host, Leonard Sipes. Our guests today – really, really, really honored to have them both at our microphones – Francey Hicks, National Coordinator of Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction with the US Department of Justice, www.projectsafechildhood.gov, Nickolas Savage, Supervisory Special Agent Acting Section Chief or an Acting Section Chief for the Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, www.fbi.gov and again, thank you. We really appreciate your calls, your letters, your comments via email for future show suggestions and whatever else that you have on your mind and please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio End]

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/10/application-of-crime-research-to-cities-and-states-the-urban-institute-dc-public-safety-radio/

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 DC Public Safety.  I am your host, Leonard Sipes.  A real treat for us, ladies and gentlemen, today, John Roman, he’s the Senior Fellow of the Urban Institute.  The Urban Institute has been around since 1968.  They offer an endless array of good quality research.  It’s one of the most respected organizations in the United States in terms of dealing with research and urban problems, specifically crime problems.  John is the executive director of the DC Crime Policy Institute.  He is also a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.  One of the things we’re going to discuss today is the application of crime research to cities and states; what does it mean?

In fact most cities and most states throughout the United States pretty much fly by the seat of their pants in terms of the decisions they make regarding crime policy.  In the District of Columbia, what the city and what the Urban Institute is trying to do is to take a look at a wide array of research, existing research, new research, to guide city government in the District of Columbia.  But it’s not about DC.  The larger issue is, like I said, the title: application of crime research to cities and states, and with that long introduction, John Roman, senior fellow Urban Institute.  Welcome to DC Public Safety.

John Roman:  Thanks for having me on.

Len Sipes:  John, it’s been a real pleasure.  You know, I’ve been reading your research over the course of years, and in essence what I’m getting from all of this is that what the District of Columbia, and this lesson again applies to every other city in the country, every other state in the country, what the District of Columbia is trying to do is to take your research from the Urban Institute, one of the most respected research organizations in the country, and say to themselves:  Is there any way that we can use research to better do what we do to increase public safety?  To reduce our costs?  To make us more efficient?  Do I have it?

John Roman:  That’s it in a nutshell.

Len Sipes:  Okay, and what does that do?  What does that mean?  Can you give me a sense as to what it is you do on a day-to-day basis?  You look at existing research?  You’re doing original research?

John Roman:  We’re doing both.  So the idea is that we want to work as a partner to the local and federal agencies who operate in DC, and that’s all the criminal justice agencies and youth agencies and family serving agencies, and think about crime as a problem that exists in a city that’s about the city and about the people there, and it’s not specific to specific actors or specific places or specific kinds of people.  It’s just a phenomenon that exists, and you need to think about it holistically if you’re going to do anything about it.

So if you’re thinking about juvenile justice, you have to think about the schools.  You have to think about families, peers – It’s not just about, you know, the facility that you take the worst kid to and lock them up for a period of time.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  So what we try and do is we try and do a couple of different things, so we think about what is going on in the research community at large.  We think about what other people have learned, other places and other times, about what’s been effective for solving particular problems, and we try to figure out what it would cost to do those things in the District of Columbia, and what the expected benefits would be to the citizens of DC if we did those things here and try and make recommendation to the mayor’s office and to all the partner agencies about what we think we could do here to actually have less crime for less money, more public safety for less of an investment.

Len Sipes:  When I was starting off the program, I said most states fly by the seat of their pants.  When I was the Director of Public Information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, I was in with the Secretary of Public Safety when the Governor of the State of Maryland called and said, “You know what?  I saw this ABC Special on boot camps.  I really like this thing.  We should do this.”

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And the decision to do boot camps in the state of Maryland was made instantaneously in terms of a 30 second phone call between the Governor and the Secretary of Public Safety.  That’s how most criminal justice, criminological decisions, criminal justice decisions are made in most states and most cities throughout this country.  That’s a guess on my part.  Is there, is it a very large guess?

John Roman:  Um, that’s absolutely right.  I mean, I don’t think there’s much of a research base in most public agencies, whether they’re state level or municipal.  They don’t have the capacity to do their own research, and in many instances, they’re really not interested in doing their own research, but the problem that you just highlighted about boot camps is sort of just the classic example that for every difficult problem there’s a solution that is simple, intuitive, and wrong.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  The thing that is apparently easiest to sell to your constituents are – There are two kind of things, and neither of them work.  One, are these very simple solutions.  Things like Scared Straight; let’s bring some kids into prison and try to show them how bad prison life is.  Let’s do D.A.R.E.  Let’s bring a police officer into the schools and show them how dangerous drugs are.  Boot camps, let’s get kids up at dawn and make them do pushups.

None of that stuff works, because none of it addresses the underlying reasons why kids become involved in crime.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And then you have, on the other hand, you have deep deep-end solutions like mandatory minimums, three strikes, truth in sentencing.  Long prison sentences that lead to mass incarceration that lead to tremendous drains on state and local governments budgets, that miss the entire point of incarceration which is, there’s a huge body of research that says people make decisions about whether they’re going to commit crime or not depending on whether or not they think they will get caught.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  The size of the penalty doesn’t matter.  Am I going to get six months, a year, two years, ten years?  That doesn’t make any difference in my decision making.  I just want to know if I’m going to get caught.

John Roman:  Uh-huh.

Len Sipes:  So huge investments in mass incarceration, long prison sentences.  That doesn’t work either, and there’s lots of stuff in the middle that does work.  People have to be open to the research to hear it.

John Roman:  You’re funded by the Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.  It’s where the city gets the money to contract with the Urban Institute to do these things.  You know, there’s an awful lot of things that are intuitive.  There’s an awful lot of things that people, from a very gut level, feel that could work, should work. D.A.R.E is one example.  I mean, D.A.R.E is where you have the police officers in the schools.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  You’re teaching them drug education, and we’ve said over and over again that the research indicates that these programs do not work, and yet they’re very popular. D.A.R.E programs, there’s a lot of people who say, “I don’t care what the research has to say, I like it.”  There’s a lot of people out there who say “I don’t care what the research has to say, I believe a person should serve 20, 30, years in prison for a very serious crime.”  How do you overcome that?

John Roman:  Well, let me talk about D.A.R.E because it’s such a classic example of what goes wrong in the system, and let me talk about what we should do to overcome that.

So with respect to D.A.R.E, so what D.A.R.E does is, it depends on where you are, whether it’s fifth or sixth or seventh or eighth graders.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And a police officer comes in.  He’s got his suitcase full of drugs.  He opens up the drugs, and he says, “This is cocaine.  This is heroine.  This is crack.  This is marijuana.  These are the instruments you use to smoke these, to ingest this, to inhale them, to do whatever with them.”

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And what you are in fact doing is demystifying drugs for young people who have probably never been exposed to them before.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  So it takes some of the fear out of it and makes it just a little less costly for them to start using because they have got some information.  They’re not as afraid.  Now places that like this model will say, “Well, okay, so it doesn’t reduce drug use, but it does have a couple of benefits.  One of the benefits is it reduces, it improves the legitimacy, it improves how students, school kids, see police officers because they see a police officer in a non-confrontational setting.

Len Sipes:  Correct.

John Roman:  And that makes them just a little more open to what the police officers say to them on the streets.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  And the opposite happens where the police officers get to talk to somebody who isn’t in trouble with the law.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  Who’s normal, and that makes them a little better at their job.  But it’s solving a problem that it doesn’t intend to solve, and there might be better ways to do that.

Len Sipes:  We have a question for today’s show, very interesting, coming from Robert Pierre, an editor at the Washington Post.  He asked me the other day, via email, the percentage of the DC population behind bars, and throughout my seventeen-and-a-half years in the District of Columbia, first ten years with the two national organizations and 14 years in Maryland, back for seven-and-a-half years, I’ve constantly seen this reference to 60 percent of the population has spent time behind bars, or certainly over 50 percent of the population has spent time in prison.

Is there a valid basis for that observation?  I’ve never seen the methodology behind those observations, and I’ve never seen something come along and say, this is what we base that estimate on.  So how can you prove it or disprove it?

John Roman:  Right, I mean the way you’d have to answer that question is you’d have to get data from the Department of Corrections in DC, which is the DC Jail, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons – if you are sentenced on a felony in the District of Columbia, you go into the federal system.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  If you have a misdemeanor, you go into the local system, so you need to go to a federal database and a local database.  You need to pull decades worth of data, and you need to figure out how many people went in once, and how many people went over and over and over again.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  The way people do this, to try and answer this question, is they say, well, there were 50,000 arrests in DC, and over a 10 year period, that means half of all DC citizens must have been arrested, and it’s just not correct.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  That’s just wrong.  People get arrested over and over again.  I did a study of the Philadelphia prison system a few years back and found that 80 percent of the people who spent time in the Philadelphia Jail were there more than once.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  And so that means a very small percentage of the population gets into jails.

Len Sipes:  There’s a lot of turnover.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And my response to Robert Pierre, that I mentioned, is: There’s a lot of turnover within the system.

John Roman:  Yes, so, let’s say you have these people – they’re referred to as frequent flyers -

Len Sipes:  Yes.

John Roman:  cyclers, whatever you want to call them.  Now there is a real issue in the District of Columbia, the Pew Charitable Foundation released a report last year that said that 1 in 31 Americans was somehow, on any given day – which is a kind of different question -

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  on any given day, was somehow involved in the criminal justice system via they were incarcerated or they were under some kind of supervision, either post release from prison or awaiting a trial.

Len Sipes:  Right, and BJS has put out the same figures, the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

John Roman:  Right, and in some places, they find that the number – that for Africa American men between 20 and 34, those numbers are as small as 1 in 6, or 1 in 7, or 1 in 8.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  So clearly in a city like DC, you have lot of young men who are going to be involved in the criminal justice system on any given day, and that’s an important story.  Sort of making up a number to try and, you know, make it seem like a bigger problem than it is – I don’t think this is the way to get this into the debate, into the public discourse, about trying to do something about this issue.

Len Sipes:  The whole idea is to bust myths in terms of using criminology, using criminological data, using hard data, to come up with good clear solutions instead of, again, flying by the seat of your pants.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  In terms of dealing with something that gets you some coverage, it certainly gets you some attention if you come out and say, quote a statistic that grabs people by the intellectual throat, but there are better ways of doing it, and that’s hard, cold, clear, research, and that’s what you’re advocating.

John Roman:  Right, and I think I can give you a bunch of different examples of this, and why this is important.  I heard an add on the radio last night, and I can’t remember the name of the – it’s an alarm company that responds to burglaries, and I can’t remember their name which is good.  I don’t want to give them any publicity, but the add starts with this sort of ominous message from the announcer saying, “The economy is terrible, and crime continues to increase, and thus you should get our product.”

Well, the reality is that crime has been going down since 1991.  It’s been going down for two decades, and the crime decline has actually accelerated the last couple of years.

Len Sipes:  Almost continuously, and that’s a -

John Roman:  Almost continuously, and we are at crime levels now that we haven’t seen since Richard Nixon was President.

Len Sipes:  Since the 1970′s.

John Roman:  Right, or mid-to-late 60′s.  So if you were 40 years old today, you are probably safer today than you have ever been in your life, and I don’t think that message is getting out, and I think it has one particular consequence which is really too bad.  So the if it bleeds it leads on the news -

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And every time there’s a – crime is very volatile.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  So you’ll see a rash of burglaries in one place and then nothing.  You’ll see a deadly weekend where there’s three, four, homicides, and then nothing.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And people only hear about these, these little mini crime waves in their neighborhood or their part of the city, or in the city as a whole, and they use it to conclude that everything is spiraling out of control.

Len Sipes:  Spiraling out of control.  Let’s put up the bars.  Let’s put up alarms, and let’s run for the suburbs.

John Roman:  And let’s pay to have people incarcerated for 30 years.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

John Roman:  When we don’t need to.

Len Sipes:  Okay.  Well the whole idea is to get over those myths.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  I mean in the District of Columbia, it is like the national crime scene.  Crime has gone down, certainly not by the national levels or the same amount as the national levels, but crime has steadily decreased in the District of Columbia.  Violent crime has steadily decreased in the District of Columbia, but if you watch the evening news, if you read the paper, it doesn’t apply to DC; it applies to any city in the United States; you’re going to get the impression that crime is going up.

When I tell my wife that crime is continuously, almost continuously, gone down for the last 20 years, she looks at me as if I had three heads.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  If you go and do a public forum, if you say that crime has almost continuously down for the last 20 years, again, you have gasps.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  It’s just inconceivable to imagine.  If you watch the network, and it’s amazing, and E has it, The History Channel has it.  Lots of these big cable channels have these shows.  Hard Time, or other sort of – Gangland or other sort of shows, if you – your exposure to the media tells you that you are in danger, and you want these people put in prison for the longest possible period of time, and then you can’t blame people for feeling that way.

John Roman:  So I did an interview last month for The Guardian, which is a distinguished paper in England, and going through all the reasons, explanations for why crime has declined, and there’s actually 15 or 20 different things that we could talk about to explain some of the crime decline, and we sort of walked through all of these things, and this article got a ton of response, hundreds if not thousands of comments, and the overall majority of them were “Well, I don’t believe this.  They don’t know what they’re talking about.  Crime is going up.”  So if you can’t – if you can’t understand the nature of a problem, you cannot solve it.

Len Sipes:  John Roman, senior fellow of the Urban Institute.  They have been around, ladies and gentlemen, since 1960.  It is one of the most respected institutions to look at urban problems, study urban problems, study crime problems.  They have been around since 1960.  John is also the executive director of the DC Crime Policy Institute.

What we’re trying to do is look at the application of crime research to cities and states, not just in the District of Columbia, but throughout the United States, and then try to find the lessons learned.  All right John so -

John Roman:  If I might, I just want to correct one thing you said.

Len Sipes:  Please, please.

John Roman:  So at the peak of the crack epidemic in the late 80′s and early 90′s when crime, violent crime in particular, peaked in the United States.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

John Roman:  There were little more than 24,000 homicides.  Last year there were less than 15,000.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  So that’s a pretty substantial drop.  Not quite 50 percent.  In the District of Columbia, at the height of the crack epidemic, there were more than 500 homicides, almost 500 homicides.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  This year, DC is on track to about quarter, about 108.

Len Sipes:  That’s amazing.

John Roman:  So that’s a decline of 75 percent or more.

Len Sipes:  That’s unbelievable.

John Roman:  Twice as much as the decline nationally, so a lot of good things have happened in this city.

Len Sipes:  You know, I remember this city being, back early when I was working for the National Crime Prevention Council, and the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, and I remember – we’re going back 30 years now, and you were afraid.  I mean, I’m a former state trooper in Maryland, newly minted with a master’s degree, and coming down and working for these organizations, and being afraid to walk the streets.  DC has changed.  A lot of cities have changed.  You have cities like New York.

Len Sipes:  Right, where you can touch and feel it and smell it, but if you go into Baltimore, Cleveland, lots of cities throughout the United States, and again, if you say that crime has gone down nationally, and crime, in fact, has gone down in your particular city which it has in Baltimore, that people are just going to look at you as if you have 25 heads.

John Roman:  Right, and so it’s really interesting.  If you look at the top – there’s something coming out next week.  I’ll give myself a commercial. WWW.URBAN.ORG, where we look at the top -

Len Sipes:  Oh, I have not mentioned the website, WWW.URBAN.ORG, WWW.URBAN.ORG.  It’s one of the reasons I write these things down, so I will repeat that.  I’ll have it in the show notes, and I’ll repeat it a couple of times throughout the course of the program.  Go ahead John.

John Roman:  So Urban Institute has a blog.  I have a post coming out next week where we look at the top 25 cities in the United States, and compare their peak homicide rates to the homicide rate in 2000, to the homicide rate in 2010, and it declines in all 25 cities, and it declines pretty uniformly.  There are some exceptional success stories, Washington DC, New York City as you mentioned, Dallas – are exceptional success stories, but otherwise, you see this incredibly consistent trend across cities in the United States.  You see a couple of cities, like Milwaukee for one, where crime has gone back up since 2000, but overwhelmingly, the crime decline is a national story.

Some cities have been even more successful than the average city in the United States, but crime is down everywhere, and it’s down substantially.

Len Sipes:  And it’s interesting that there are many in the criminological community who will suggest that crime is an international story.  The decline – that it’s also going down in Great Britain.  It’s also going down in New Zealand.

John Roman:  Yep.

Len Sipes:  It’s also going down in Australia, it’s also going down in Germany, that we have not just a phenomenon for the United States.  We have a phenomenon for the western industrialized world.

John Roman: And it’s a wonderful insight, and it calls into question a lot of explanations that we have in the United States because we only look at the United States for why crime declined, and we miss these stories, and so, for instance, the mass incarceration phenomenon is a US phenomenon.  These other nations you mentioned haven’t experienced it, and yet they see similar kinds of crime decline that we have seen here.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  There’s been a lot of changes in how police – police that occur internationally, and that makes you say, well, the policing story has more credibility to me than the prison story.  Maybe all of this incarceration hasn’t bought us that much because in other industrialized nations, they have gotten the same crime decline without this incredible – I mean we have four times as many as people in prison today as we did 30 years ago.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And the effect on state budgets are just astronomical, and here we are in the midst of this great recession, the financial collapse, state budgets are under tremendous pressure.  The federal government budget is under tremendous pressure, likely to make the state situation even worse, and yet we aren’t talking very much at all about, about state spending on corrections, which makes up an enormous percentage of state budgets in most places.

Len Sipes:  Well the states – virtually every state in the United States is complaining bitterly about the amount of money that it puts into corrections, and states throughout the United States are struggling.  I mean it’s the dominant topic within the media and crime and justice for the last two years, the fact that the states are saying, we can no longer afford the level of incarceration.  Now we’re not going to get into a debate as to – is that good or bad from a criminological point of view.  It simply is saying that the states are saying that they can no longer afford it.  So we within the criminal justice system have to come up with something to kind of guide them, and I think Urban and Pew and the Department of Justice and the National Institute of Corrections are doing just that.

Len Sipes:  And I think, we have learned a lot in the last three decades from a research perspective about what works.  Let’s talk about some of that, because we have been talking – we’re two-thirds of the way through the program, and we haven’t talked about what does work yet.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  We’ve talked about what the problems -

John Roman:  Right, and I think, you know, there’s a lot of good things happening in the District of Columbia.  It’s a great example of things that work.  You have a police chief here, Cathy Lanier, who is very open to research.  She reads the research.  She can talk knowledgeably about some pretty obscure pieces that are very important about how you figure out who’s most risky, and who the police need to target their scarce resources to.

I think policing, changes in policing have been effective: more professional policing, more problem oriented policing, more proactive policing.  Hopefully in the next generation, we’ll get into a more forensically oriented police force.

Len Sipes:  You mean, somehow, some way, we live up to all the nonsense that people see on television?

John Roman:  Let me take a 60 second digression.  We could go on for the next five years about that.

Len Sipes:  That’s my pet peeve, but go ahead, please.

John Roman:  And nothing you see on CSI is true.

Len Sipes:  Really.

John Roman:  Nothing you see on CSI is true.

Len Sipes:  It’s shocking.

John Roman:  Yeah, I know it’s shocking.

Len Sipes:  That’s shocking.

John Roman:  So it tends to take months for a piece of evidence to get through from beginning to end, but the most important takeaway is:  In this country, almost no suspects are identified by forensic evidence.  We use forensic evidence in this country -

Len Sipes:  to back up the arrest we’ve already made.

John Roman:  to back up the arrest we’ve currently made.  So coming back, so what else works?  Well, we know a lot about alternatives to incarceration programs.  It’s taken us decades to learn something that should be patently obvious which is that if you are somebody who has a substantial problem that causes you not to be able to contribute to society: You have a mental health problem; you have a substance abuse problem; you have family problems.  Whatever these things are that cause you to commit crimes in support of these problems that if you address the underlying problem, in many cases, you can keep people from committing crime.

Len Sipes:  You are four times more likely to be caught up in the criminal justice system if you have a mental health issue.  I’m not saying that everybody with a mental health issue has contact with the criminal justice system, but the odds, the pure stats, is that they’re four times more likely to become involved.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  So why is it, when I take a look at the stats, the overwhelming majority of the stats say that the overwhelming majority of the people caught up in the criminal justice system do not get mental health treatment? do not get the substance abuse treatment?  There’s a dichotomy.

John Roman:  Right.  So the problem is – the story is a little better on the mental health side because correctional systems have a responsibility by law to provide medication to people who have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.  Now, there’s a lot more that needs to be done for those folks other than just to medicate them.

The drug story is far worse.  We provide almost no treatment to people while they’re incarcerated, which is a real missed opportunity.  If I get you for two years -

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  and can give you residential treatment, your chances of getting out and doing better are just vastly improved.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Roman:  The problem is that it would take a big upfront investment.  We did a study a couple of years ago, and we looked at what the upfront investment would be to treat everybody going into the correctional system for their drug abuse problem rather than incarcerate them, and the estimated cost – US 10 or 15 billion dollars to create the infrastructure to do that.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  The returns though would be 50 billion dollars in terms of crime rates going down even further from where they are, from not needing to use criminal justice resources to investigate, arrest, and incarcerate folks because they don’t need it, because they’re not committing crimes, because they’re not using, and then you have all these other benefits like our correctional systems are places where HIV, aids, tuberculosis, hep-C, all these really chronic horribly expensive conditions, where the rates of – are just, 3, 5, 10 times the rates that you see in the population.

The correctional systems have to spend money to care for those folks, and then they come out, and they have to use public health resources.  And keeping people out of prison, stopping them from using, from sharing needles, and getting hep-C and HIV, all of these things are far more cost effective than just mass incarceration and just housing people.

Len Sipes:  WWW.URBAN.ORG, WWWW.URBAN.ORG.  So it’s basically, we know what to do in law enforcement.

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  We know what we should be doing in terms of treatment of people caught up in the criminal justice system.  We know that we can probably provide alternatives that are maybe more cost effective and that may protect public safety better in the long run in terms of – depending upon the risk of the offender.  So those
are three things that you’ve mentioned right there, that are lessons learned, that are, kind of can be applied to DC, can be applied to Milwaukee, can be applied to anyplace.  What else?

John Roman:  I mean there’s a laundry list of things we can do.  We have people who leave prison, and they have been inside prison, for a year, two years or more, and they’re completely unprepared.  They come out.  They don’t have any identification.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  So it’s impossible for them, you know – How do you even get into a government building to meet your probation officer, right?  Much less go and get a job.  They come out without any medication.  So they were being treated for their mental health problem, and they come out, and 48 hours later, they’re in crisis because they didn’t have – they didn’t have a prescription with them the day they left.

Len Sipes:  Okay, but let me take -

John Roman:  They didn’t have a place to stay.

Len Sipes:  you in a different direction in terms of the limited time that we have left.  So we have to have programs for offenders, and they have been proven to be cost effective through a variety of things.  We know that we have to be more aggressive in terms of law enforcement and working with the community, and the way that you apply law enforcement to places and people, specifically targeting -

John Roman:  Right.

Len Sipes:  rather than mass efforts are more effective.  Drug courts.  Let’s go over to the judiciary.

John Roman:  Okay, so, drug courts, again, this is a place where I think this is part of the explanation for why DC has been more successful than average, and you see this in New York as well, where they have really – Here they had the Superior Court Drug Intervention Program, which is a program that I evaluated back in 1999.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And found that it was effective in preventing recidivism.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

John Roman:  And it’s been going on here for 12 years, and the basic idea is that if you take drug involved arrestees and instead of incarcerating them for their crimes, you put them through this 12 to 18 month program where they get intensive judicial supervision, intensive treatment supervised by a judge and a case manager, where they work through their – they work through relapses such that if they actually relapse, they don’t just go back to prison like you would under most parole arrangements or probation arrangements.

Len Sipes:  They are supervised by us.  That’s my commercial.  Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency and Pretrial Services.  Yes, go ahead.

John Roman:  And the idea is, people who are in recovery relapse, and you need to get people through relapse to get long-term recovery, and the data suggests that not just in DC, but around the country, we just finished the National Drug Court Evaluation at the Urban Institute.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

John Roman:  Last month.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

John Roman:  And you know, the story is that it’s pretty effective.  It reduces recidivism 10 or 15 percent.  It’s not a magic bullet.  It’s not going to reduce it by half or something, nothing will.  But if you do all of these things together, you can really reduce crime in a major way.

Len Sipes:  I’m going to stop you right there and ask you the final question before we close the show.  The average person out there says to themselves:  I can’t keep up with all this.  I get stuff from Urban; I get stuff from the different criminological institutes; I get stuff from BJS; I get stuff from the FBI; I get stuff from the National Institute of Corrections; I get stuff from the National Institute of Justice; I get stuff from the Office of Justice Programs.  I can’t deal with all of this.  How can I simplify it?  and how can I find out these lessons learned?

John Roman:  I actually think there are actually some public media outlook, Gangland and Lock-Up, and all those shows infuriate me as much as they do anybody else because if you watch Gangland, you’re looking at 1990 footage, so that’s annoying, but there are actually shows like PBS FRONTLINE that do a terrific job, and they have covered many of those issues over the years, and they do podcasts, and NPR does wonderful podcasts.

Len Sipes:  But the average police chief is not going to be listening to -

John Roman:  Well, but the average police – so -

Len Sipes:  Watching FRONTLINE, the average mark out there in the criminal justice system, how do they keep abreast of all this research?

John Roman:  Well, I would say though, that you could go to NPR or FRONTLINE.  I did a study that found that if you collected forensic evidence, and you use it to aid a burglary investigation, you could ten-fold increase the likelihood that you get an arrest.  I went to the International Association of Chiefs of Police meeting, 17,000 police chiefs, and we had maybe a hundred in the room.  You have to start by being open to what the research says, and then it’s pretty easy to go out and find places that can tell you what’s important.

Len Sipes:  Are we doing the best job that we can do within the criminological community to distill it down to the barest bones?

John Roman:  Absolutely not.

Len Sipes:  And apply lessons learned?

John Roman:  No, I mean, I think there’s a lot of work that can be done, but there are a lot more groups like Pew and Urban that are trying to be more translators than evidence creators.

Len Sipes:  And I think it’s obvious in terms of the publications you put out and the publications Pew puts out and the Office of Justice Programs is making that transition as we speak trying to make it simpler because the big complaint is that:  I’m overwhelmed by the data.

John Roman:  Right, I mean National Institutes of Justice has National Institute Journal.  Nancy Ritter is the writer there.  She does a terrific job, and it’s a wonderful resource, probably a great place to start.

Len Sipes:  John, you’ve been a blast to have on the program.  John Roman, senior fellow of the Urban Institute, WWW.URBAN.ORG, WWW.URBAN.ORG.  He is the executive director of the DC Crime Policy Institute.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  We do appreciate your calls; we do appreciate your emails; we appreciate your criticisms; we appreciate your compliments, and we appreciate your suggestions in terms of future show topics, and please, please, have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/09/national-institute-of-corrections-and-dc-pretrial-measuring-what-matters-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 DC Public Safety.  I’m your host Leonard Sipes back after a three-month hiatus due to flipping a motorcycle and being injured, and finally back to doing weekly radio programs.  For those of you who have been kind enough to inquire, “Where you been, Len?”  Well, that’s where I’ve been.  I’ve been laid up telecommuting and away from the microphones, but we do have a really interesting show today, ladies and gentlemen, on pretrial.  The whole concept is measuring what pretrial does, and so pretrial agencies, both in Washington DC and throughout the country can do a better job of pretrial supervision.  We have two experts with us today.  Spurgeon Kennedy, he is the director of research analysis and development of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia.  WWW.DCPSA.GOV .  I’ll be giving those website addresses throughout the program.  Lori Eville, the correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections, and the National Institute of Corrections is part of the Bureau of Prisons, US Department of Justice, WWW.NICIC.GOV , and to Spurgeon and to Lori, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Thank you Len.

Lori Eville: Yes, thanks for having us.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  And welcome back.

Len Sipes:  Thank very much.  Spurgeon, the first question is going to go to you.  There’s a lot of people out there in the criminal justice system who listen to this program on a regular basis, and they’re going to know exactly what pretrial is, and they’re going to know exactly what jails are, but there are people from mayors offices or citizens or community organizations that listen to this program and they’re not quite sure what we mean by pretrial.  What is pretrial supervision?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well, simple answer is that pretrial services agencies help their local jurisdictions meet the requirements their state bail laws.  Most bail laws across the country have a presumption of release for most defendants except those charged with capital offenses or very serious crimes.  Pretrial agencies across the country help assess the various levels of risk that these defendants present and offer appropriate releases supervisions conditions that meet those risk levels.

Len Sipes:  Now you do know because I’ve been to community meetings.  You’ve been to community meetings throughout our career.  You go into community meetings and somebody says, “He got arrested, and he was back on the street in six hours, and that’s wrong.  You know, he did a crime, and he’s back in the community.  What gives with that?”  And the point in all of this is it not that people who are arrested are considered innocent until proven guilty.  Until a judge or a jury finds them guilty and sentence has been pronounced, so up until that point, technically, that person is a “innocent” person, and somebody’s got to make an assessment based upon two things, whether or not he or she is going to return to trial on their own with supervision or with bail or with some other arrangement, or B, they’re a risk to public safety.  So do I have – is that summation correct?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Yeah, you’re absolutely right.  There’s a huge difference between a convicted defendant and a pretrial defendant, and what we deal with on the pretrial level are those persons who are still considered to be innocent or presumed innocent until that point of disposition.  What we’ve found over the last decade, especially when you look at the risk of defendants who are released back into the community, and certainly that’s a legitimate concern.  Public safety is always a concern for anybody in the criminal justice business, but what we have found is that defendants by and large who are released pretrial present a low to medium level of risk of failure to appear or to commit another offense while on supervision, so by identifying this risk and offering supervision levels.  Pretrial agencies across the country actually help their jurisdictions manage that risk, and to make sure that defendants who are released are not presenting an overly concern to public safety.

Len Sipes:  And the last question before going over to Lori is the sense that people need to understand, I think, that it is literally mathematically impossible.  There are tens of millions of arrests in the United States every year.  There aren’t tens of millions of jail beds, so it is, even if we didn’t have the presumption of innocence.  Even if we didn’t have a presumption of release on a pretrial basis, it’s mathematically impossible to keep all people arrested behind bars until trial, correct.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  You’re absolutely right.  In 2010, the National Center for State Courts estimated there were 21 million filings of felony and misdemeanor cases across the country at local courts.  Our jail population cannot support that.

Len Sipes:  No, no.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  And the risk, again that most pretrial defendants present, and the laws that we live under really don’t allow us to consider jail first.  So again, we need a system that identifies those defendants appropriate for release according to the law and those that should be detained pretrial, and that really is the basis of what pretrial programs -

Len Sipes:  And the final thing I did want to mention in terms of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, one of the things that I noticed years ago, is that you have an 88 percent return rate.  The overwhelming majority of people on your case loads show up for trial.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  True.

Len Sipes:  And it’s a much higher return rate than the national average as measured by The Bureau of Justice Statistics, so first of all congratulations, on doing a very good job.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well, thank you.

Len Sipes:  Lori Eville, correctional program specialist for the National Institute of Corrections.  What is the National Institute of Corrections, Lori?

Lori Eville:  Well, the National Institute of Corrections, as you said, is within the Department of Justice, and it’s primary function is to the provide support to federal, state, and local correctional agencies throughout the United States.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lori Eville:  We do that through technical assistance, through education, an information center in which people can go to a vast library to get information that is particular to issues that they’re dealing with, and NIC is also a leader in developing policy and practices, and looking sort of a step ahead.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lori Eville:  Of where corrections agencies and criminal justice agencies need to move or are moving, and give them support, and it’s really one of the primary purposes why NIC is interested in pretrial services because it is a distinct function within a criminal justice system, but it’s an essential contributor to the efficiency of a criminal justice system, as you said.  Not a fiscal efficiency, but as well as a case processing efficiency.

Len Sipes:  Well, we do have to talk about the fiscal part of it because the principle subject of my reading criminal justice literature newspaper articles and radio reports, television reports over the last two years is the fiscals, dire fiscal shape that states and localities find themselves in, so, you know, you just can’t lock up everybody.  It is just mathematically impossible.  It is fiscally impossible to lock up everybody, so one of the things that you did in terms of this report, and the report is measuring what matters from the National Institute of Corrections Outcomes and Performance Measures for the Pretrial Services Field.  What you’re trying to do is to frame this whole concept of pretrial, to get everybody to measure what it is they’re doing so they can figure out how they’re doing and how they can improve.

Lori Eville:  That’s correct, and it’s also distinguishing pretrial outcomes and measures from other criminal justices functions such as probation, jails, and we don’t have a document like this.  We have these established measures for other criminal justice functions, but we don’t in pretrial and as front end of the system, functions are becoming more evident in their need.  That’s why we sought to develop a consistent set of recommended outcomes and measures along with the definitions so we can get to comparing different jurisdictional functioning.  Looking at nation averages, and then also focusing on those things that pretrial services should produce and that is appearance rates.  That’s what a primary function was, a pretrial services should be, is that they have good appearance rates to court, and that they have good public safety records.

Len Sipes:  Okay.  Getting them to court.  That’s the bottom line in protecting public safety.

Lori Eville:  That’s the bottom line in pretrial.

Len Sipes:  Before you go on, I do want to mention, the National Institute of Corrections is the place where the rest of us go to get information.

Lori Eville:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  I mean that’s the, you know, I’ve been involved in the criminal justice system for 42 years.  I’ve been doing public relations for 30.  I’ve been doing corrections for 20, and it was interesting that when I first became a public affairs officer for a large agency in the State of Maryland that had corrections he as well as laws enforcement, as well as the fire Marshall’s office, as well as lots of other agencies, I realized that I didn’t have any formal training as a public affairs director, and the first thing NIC did was to put me in Boulder, Colorado for a couple weeks of training.  All throughout my career, when we said we needed research, or we needed funding, or we needed to look at this issue, we picked up the phone and called the National Institute of Corrections, so I want to thank you in terms of my own experience, and my own criminal justice career.  I’m not quite sure how, if a lot of people know the National Institute of Corrections.  WWW.NICIC.GOV, but a certainly thank you to NIC for all the help that you’ve given me, and the agencies that I’ve represented throughout my career.  Okay.  So we’re going to get back to larger issues in terms of measuring what matters.  The average person is going to sit back, and he’s going to listen to this program, or she’s going to listen to this program, and they’re going to say, what are we talking about?  This is 2011 we’re, you know, I thought you guys were doing this for decades.  We in the criminal justice system, Spurgeon, don’t do a very good job of measuring things, do we?  I mean most of the criminal justice agencies have a hard time coming to grips with measurement, correct?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  It is, unless you’re a nerd like me, talking about numbers and measures will put you to sleep as quickly as anything.  Here’s the thing though, and you’re right, we’ve been very slow to come to the table.  Businesses across the world have used outcome and performance measures almost since the mid 50s.  This is something that just became popular within criminal justice in the mid 1990′s.  1995, in fact, the American Probation and Parole Association along with the National Institute of Justice put out what I think was the first article about outcome and performance measures or if the probation field.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  That was followed by a larger publications looking at outcome and performance measures for the entire criminal justice system that NIJ did.  So it’s really been since the mid 90s that this whole ideas of measuring what you do, especially measuring against what you have out there is as your mission and your goal has become popular within criminal justice agencies.  Pretrial programs, as Lori mentioned, are just getting into the idea across the country, of measuring their performance and knowing what that performance ought to be.

Len Sipes:  Before the program, we sort of set the stage for this.  When the state of Maryland took over the Baltimore City Jail was my first real exposure.  I mean as a former police officer, I’d been in and out of jails.  I’d been in and out of booking situations.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Professionally maybe.

Len Sipes:  Professionally, yes.  Thank you for clarifying that.  But I mean spending a lot of time within a jail, wow, what a chaotic setting.  You’ve got thousands of people being arrested.  They’re moving in the institutions.  They’re moving out of the institution.  It’s chaotic.  It’s dangerous.  You’ve got people who are high on some sort of substance.  You’re processing them.  You’re booking them.  You’re making decisions in terms of who to keep and who not to keep.  It’s a very chaotic, loud, noisy situation, and I sat there as people made decisions based upon instruments as to who they’re going to let go on bail.  Who they’re going to let go on pretrial supervision, who they’re going to let go on their GPS or home monitoring, and, you know, we’re not talking about a business offices where it’s nice and quiet and sedate.  We’re talking about a very loud noisy chaotic place, and in that very loud noisy and chaotic place, we’re making decisions that could have an impact not just on public safety, but as to whether or not that person returns for trial.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Uh-huh.  That’s a wonderful point that you bring up because when we put this document together, and now the folks who helped us draft it, or the people who actually did draft it are the Pretrial Directors Network of NIC.  One of the questions that came us is can you measure performance if you don’t have the things in place to make that performance happen?

Len Sipes:  Right.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  For example, if you are screening defendants for release consideration, if you aren’t using a validated risk assessment…  Something that takes into account factors that have been shown my research to be related.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  The failure to appear and re-arrest.  Can you really make this measure?  And so part of what we’re trying to do with the measuring what matters document is to say to pretrial programs out there, you have to adopt good business practices.  It’s not just putting a number and a target out there.  It’s also sayings, we need to have in place the things that will make us meet these targets and do a job, and so that validated risk scale that helps you identify who the good risks are, who the bad defendants who need to be incarcerated pretrial are.  You have to have those things in place so that that was something that was very much a part of this document.

Len Sipes:  Lori, we’re going to go over to you for a second in terms of talking about that risk assessment instrument, but amazingly, we’re halfway through the program.  These programs go by awfully quickly.  Spurgeon Kennedy, director of research, analysis and development for the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, is our guest, WWW.DCPSA.GOV, an 88 percent return rate here in the District of Columbia, one of the highest in the United States.  Lori Eville, correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections of the US Department of Justice is our other guest, WWW.NICIC.GOV.  Okay Lori, so we’re going to go over to you in terms of talking about instruments.  I’ve been in the system for 42 years.  This whole concept of an objective series of measurement has always confused me.  It’s not my background.  It’s not my forte, but it’s bottom line seems to be from the criminological community, from NIC, is that we really can, through objective instruments, objective questions, figure out who’s a danger to society.  Who’s not.  Who’s a danger as to whether or not that person is going to return for trial?  Who’s not going to return for trial.  These instruments give us a lot of information about that individual, correct?

Lori Eville:  That’s correct, and it gives us objective information that has a body of research or tested, so that we can make statistical probabilities of whether this person will appear in court or they’re a public safety threat, if you will.  You know, I liked your, what you said about jail being this chaotic place in which you’re having to make these very difficult decisions around release, and I think one thing that objective validated risk, assessment tools do for people working in jails and pretrial programs is that they serve to provide some objectiveness to sort of coral this chaos so that people are not left to think own subjective thoughts around a person’s risk.

Len Sipes:  Right, right.

Lori Eville:  And one of the things that often I think are misunderstood around validated assessments is that we’ve given all of our discretion to this piece of paper.  That this piece of paper, these measures are telling us who’s safe and who’s not, and I think that what we need to understand is that it is a tool within the overall tool box to help make good sound release decisions that are in the public’s interest, and again to make the connection to the document.  If we then have local measures and systems set up, we can then see if in fact we are making good decisions on release.

Len Sipes:  Right.  Just a point of clarification, either one of you can come in on this.  We create these instruments and we do this analysis in this noisy chaotic overcrowded place, and then that information is presented to a Commissioner, an Officer of the Court, and he or she uses that recommendation based upon that instrument to decide whether or not that person is released or kept.  If the person is kept, generally speaking, in most states, you have twenty-four hours to present yourself before a judge, and the judge reviews the evidence, reviews the case, and then makes another decision as to whether or not you’re kept or released or the conditions of the release.  Do I have that correct?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  Okay.  So it’s not just us within the criminological community or us as correctional professionals, so it’s not us making the decisions.  Basically what we’re doing is preparing the paperwork for the courts.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Right.  We’re helping the court make a more informed decision about release and detention.

Len Sipes:  And in essence, to go back to what we did before measuring what matters in the National Institute of Corrections, WWW.NICIC.GOV.  You can get the document there, is to basically guess.  Is that fair or unfair?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  There has always been criteria that courts have used.  There have always been criteria that pretrial programs have used.  Up until recently, I think you can make the argument, and I would, that those criteria, may not have been related to failure to appear and re-arrest as much as we tended to believe.

Len Sipes:  But unless, Lori would say, that unless it’s a validated risk assessment instrument, a validated instrument uses the board, it’s still guessing.  Now guessing may be an unfair term, but in essence, you know, without a validated instrument to guide us, it really is a matter of presumption, again.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well like to call that clinical assessments, but that’s still guessing.

Lori Eville:  Correct, yes.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  And with a we’ve found and there’s about 60 years of research on this, is that a good validated risk assessment beats clinical judgment about these decisions every time.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  It’s beyond a debate now.  One of the things that I’ll put out there, and there’s an organization that would really be helpful for your listeners to know is the Pretrial Justice Institute.  They have put out a couple of publications on the state of science in pretrial programming.  One of them looks at risk assessments and recommendations, and it’s really a summary of risk assessment of research that has been done over the last ten, perhaps 15 years, and it shows you the common factors that have been coming out of these risk evaluations and shows you that the risk levels that have been coming out, and the factors that predict failure really are becoming common among a lot of jurisdictions, and it’s a good read for people who are really interested in what we’re finding out about risk.

Len Sipes:  Well, let’s talk about those because the audience is going to want to know, well what are the findings?  First of all there are a certain category of people who in all probability are going to be kept.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  You commit murder.  You commit rape.  You commit domestic violence.  You’re going to stay in all probability.  You’re not going to be released in pretrial.  You’re going to be held in the jail setting.  You’re going to be held in the jail setting, by the way, let me clarify jails.  Jails are also places to hold people on a pretrial basis.  They also are places where people serve short sentences.  Prison is where they ordinarily serve sentences of a year or more, so within that jail, it’s just not pretrial people, it’s people serving short sentences so that limits the amount of beds that you have.  I wanted to make that clarification.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  You also have people, excuse me.

Len Sipes:  No, please.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Who are also waiting transfer to prisons.

Len Sipes: To prisons.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  In jails and that’s becoming a much larger population as state prisons becoming over crowded.

Len Sipes:  Well, thank you for bringing that up because in a lot of states, it’s a very serious issue.  I mean, 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent of your population could be people waiting transfers to state prisons because state prisons are crowded.  Okay, so having said that, what are the other factors?  Okay, so they’re predictive and after years of looking at this, we know that they’re predictive.  What predicts a person returning for trial and not posing a risk to public safety, and I would imagine if he or she has family in the community, owns a home in the community, has a job in the community, that person, more than likely, is going to return for trial.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well, community information is not as correlated to failure as we believed.

Len Sipes:  Really?

Lori Eville:  In the early beginnings, that’s correct.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  In the early beginnings of pretrial programs, in the early 1960s, the risk classifications tools that were used relied very heavily on what were very middle class values.

Len Sipes:  Yeah.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  If you looked like me, and if I was middle class, and you wouldn’t be a risk to be released.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  What we’re finding is that a lot of the factors associated with risk are things such as prior failures to appear, substance abuse usage, mental health issues.

Len Sipes:  Okay, if you haven’t appeared, if you skipped your trial in the past, that indicates that you’re going to do it again.  If you’re on drugs when you were arrested and have a drug history.  That’s then a greater chance of not complying.  I think I saw a statistic from Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia that there’s a huge difference in the success between those on drugs and those not on drugs.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Right.  Those who are nondrug users have much better failure – I’m sorry, appearance rates, and also safety rates.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  than those who are drug users.

Len Sipes:  What are some of the others, either one of you?

Lori Eville:  Well, actually your criminal history is one of them.  Okay.  So if you have convictions in the past, is that on one of them?  The interesting thing you had mentioned about a home.  That is another one that is not necessarily a predictor.

Len Sipes:  That’s interesting.

Lori Eville:  And in fact some of the local validated assessments have actually taken that out.

Len Sipes:  That’s interesting.

Lori Eville:  Because they have not shown that they have a predictive quality to appearing.

Len Sipes:  That’s interesting.  What else has a predictive quality?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well those are the big ones.  I think there are about seven or eight that you sees in most of these validated studies, but the question for the local jurisdictions are, A, how do you define these factors.  In Washington DC, for example, a prior failure to appear might be defined a little differently than other jurisdictions depending on how you get data from your court.  The other is whether or not you weight these criteria the same.  A prior failure to appear might be one of the main factors in my jurisdiction.  It might be a lesser factor at other jurisdictions.  So while we see these factors in most risk validation studies, how they’re defined, and how they’re weighted in the final assessment -

Len Sipes:  So one size is not going to fit all in terms of a measurement instrument.  The measurement instrument could be looking at the same variables in Kansas City and San Diego and Washington DC, but yet be interpreted and applied differently.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Much differently.

Lori Eville:  Based on local culture, differences in jurisdictions, absolutely.

Len Sipes:  That’s interesting.  So everybody – it’s not just one size fits all.  Everybody gets to take a look at this and measure.  But even with that measurement, there’s still a human being that says, I don’t like this outcome.  I think the person should stay.  I think the person is a flight risk, or a public safety risk.  The person can override the instrument, correct?

Lori Eville:  Absolutely.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  One of the performance measures in our measuring with [PH] Matters Peace, in fact, how often the pretrial program actually complies with their own wrist assessment.  We suggest anywhere between a 12 to 15 percent override rate.  If you find yourself in that range of overrides of risk assessment, we think you’re okay.  Because you’re right, risk assessments tools, as great as they are, do not put all defendants in think proper risk places.

Len Sipes:  Well I imagine it’s also going to be concerns regarding race, gender, income, and objective instruments sort of evens everybody out.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  So if you’re suddenly making exceptions for, you know, 30 percent range for income, you get to ask the question, why?  So the whole idea behind all of this is to generate data and ask questions of yourself as to why you’re getting the results you’re getting, and are people showing up for trial, and are we protecting public safety.  It allows the individual jurisdictions to take a good hard long look at themselves and to improve.

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Exactly.

Lori Eville:  Absolutely.

Len Sipes:  And that’s the bottom line behind what NIC is trying to do across the board in materials of correctional tracking, is to take a good hard long look at yourself and improve.

Lori Eville:  Correct, and you know, this actually – the document, one of the purposes, I mean there are many as we’ve talked about today, but NIC provides a training, as you said, in Colorado for new pretrial directors, and we’ve found that we had new pretrial directors that were being put into these departments and didn’t know really what should they be measuring.  What were their guiding principles, and so it’s part of what NIC is also doing to help bring on new directors and shaping really how pretrial is functioning across the United States.

Len Sipes:  Well, we’re just about at the two minute warning level.  Any final thoughts?  Any quick final thoughts?  Spurgeon?

Spurgeon Kennedy:  Well, only that I really encourage not only pretrial programs, but also any policy maker, or any criminal justice practitioner to take a look at this document.  It should show you how your pretrial programming should work in your local jurisdictions.  It should help you determine what your goals and missions are and how to make sure that you’re doing the best job that you can in order to ensure public safety, and to help the court operate as efficiently as it can.

Len Sipes:  Lori, 15 seconds.

Lori Eville:  I would say go find the document, at the NIC website.  Contact me.  NIC is here to answer any of your questions or help assist your jurisdiction in getting the outcomes that they want.

Len Sipes:  Thank you to the both of you.  Spurgeon Kennedy, director of research, analysis and development at the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia.  WWW.DCPSA.GOV.  Lori Eville, correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections for the US Department of Justice, WWW.NICIC.GOV, WWW.NICIC.GOV.  The document we’ve been talking about today is called Measuring What Matters:  Outcome and Performance Measures for the Pretrial Services Field.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  We appreciate all of the comments that you give us.  The letters, the phone calls, the emails.  Please contact us, feel free to contact us with suggestions, programs, program suggestions, criticisms, comments, and if you please, everybody, have yourselves a very, very, pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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

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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 DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. We have a very interesting guest today, ladies and gentlemen—Eugene Schneeberg. He is the director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships of the United States Department of Justice, to talk about the national faith-based initiative throughout the country, and there’s an awful lot of things going on. Before we start our program, the usual announcements–now that we’re doing announcements, I want to announce the fact that there is the National Reentry Resource Center, which is a project of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice programs. The U.S. Department of Justice, all things you ever wanted to know about the reentry concept – www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org. The American Probation and Parole Association want us to celebrate the issue of parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia. The actual week is in July, but we’re doing it early with all the radio and television programs that we’re doing, to really get people to focus on the sacrifices and what these individuals do to protect our safety every day. So again, that’s www.appa-net.org. Also, interestingly enough, in Louisiana, the Department of Corrections is also doing their own radio series on reentry, and they’re the only other ones in the country. Go to Louisiana Corrections. Their web site is way too long for me to give out, but Louisiana Division of Correction, if you go to that web site and look for the radio shows, you will see what they have to offer. And back to our guest, Eugene Schneeberg. He’s the Director for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, U.S. Department of Justice. Eugene, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well, thanks for having me Leonard. It’s great to be here.

Len Sipes:  Eugene, let’s set it up first in terms of Faith-Based initiatives.  Why Faith-Based initiatives?  I mean, we’re the government, we’re the criminal justice system, we’re the people who are supposed to be out there protecting the lives and wellbeing of partners, of citizens, of communities. Why are we even talking about Faith-Based initiatives?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well,  it’s a great question. Faith-Based organizations have been doing service delivery in our country for tens if not hundreds of years, and there’s a wide recognition that faith-based and community-based organizations have a great impact on the work that’s being done, particularly in local communities. Those are the folks with boots on the ground. They know the families, they know the individuals, and our president in this administration recognizes the value of partnerships, and it also recognizes that the federal government plays a large role in providing services, but can benefit of course from the partnerships of faith-based and community-based -

Len Sipes:  The ministers of [PH] Imanth, and the people within the Jewish faith, the – what am I thinking of? The -

Eugene Schneeberg:  Rabbi?

Len Sipes:  The rabbis. Geez, okay, here we go. Here come the comments from my friends in New York, from the rabbis, who I’ve talked to a lot of them. And they say, “You know, Leonard, we bring a legitimacy; we bring a legitimacy to this issue that you and government do not have. We bring an honesty, we bring a sense of perspective, we know the individuals who we’re trying to deal with. Government nibbles around the edges, we really deal with the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our communities.” Correct, or incorrect?

Eugene Schneeberg:   Well, you couldn’t be more correct, I think. The word that came to my mind is “credibility” and “moral authority”. There’s over 350,000 houses of worship in our country, and those combined are responsible for recruiting more than half of the volunteers in America.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  And so, in communities, when people are in trouble, most times when people need support, they oftentimes go to their houses of worship.

Len Sipes:  Right. And they have an understanding of these issues, that quite frankly, government – I mean, I’m paid to do a job. I’m paid to come to the criminal justice system every day, and I do what I do, and hundreds of thousands of police officers,  and parole and probations agents, and correctional officers, they come to their jobs every day. The individuals within a faith-based community, they do it out of love. They do it because their religious tenets tell them to do it. They do it because they think they can make a difference. They think that they can intervene in the life of somebody coming out of the prison system more meaningfully than we can; and quite frankly, they may be right.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well, I think – I would tend to agree with you as well, that oftentimes folks feel this is a calling. But I do want to make an important clarification, which is that our office doesn’t focus exclusively on faith-based groups, but also secular, nonprofit organizations. And of course they make huge contributions in every city and every town throughout this country.

Len Sipes:  Alright, let me get into the whole concept of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It’s under the U.S. Department of Justice, but it’s also at the same time under the Whitehouse. So, you have 13 federal faith-based centers. The Whitehouse Office of  Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the 13 centers throughout the country, and they’re designed to do what?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Sure. So each center is designed to coordinate, strengthen partnerships between their federal agency and faith-based and nonprofit organizations. And so, that plays out differently in different organizations. For instance, there’s a center at the U.S. Department of Agriculture that’s working on summer feeding programs, and connecting the programs that agriculture has with programs in the community. The Veterans Administration is working on connecting faith-based and community-based groups with work around preventing homelessness among veterans.  We have – there’s an office at the Housing and Urban Development that works on foreclosure prevention and first-time home buyer programs, and small business administration. The list goes on and on. The Department of Education is working on school turnaround. And again, in each and every case, they are strengthening partnerships with their agencies priorities partner with faith-based and nonprofit organizations, both locally and nationally.

Len Sipes:  So there are 13 federal centers out there designed to further this concept, to promote this concept, to be sure that faith-based and nonprofit organizations are welcomed into these issues. And the issues, I think, as we described them before the program, are offenders coming out of the prison system, responsible fathering initiatives and youth violence–those three issues.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Yeah, so those are the focus areas of my agency at the Department of Justice Center at DOJ; and each center, as I stated–and the federal agencies have their own priorities, and oftentimes they overlap. For instance, there’s a number of agencies that sit on the Interagency Reentry Council. So, there’s representatives from housing, because people that are coming home from incarceration need stable housing.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  There’s representatives from education that are part of the working group, because offenders, or formally incarcerated folks—excuse me—need to continue their education. So at our office, the priority areas which you’ve already mentioned are promoting effective and responsible prisoner reentry -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  – working on issues of youth violence prevention, and lastly, which I think, in my personal opinion, which is most important and cuts across all of these areas, is promoting responsible fatherhood.

Len Sipes:  You know, it’s interesting, because what government does is one thing, but I get the sense through these 13 faith-based centers, Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership Centers throughout the country, operate under the auspices of the United States Department of Justice; it takes the existing resources, it takes the existing fabric, what’s important to a community, and expands upon it and utilizes those resources to do a better job on those three subject areas that we’ve talked about. I mean, again, it’s the criminal justice system. We’re limited in terms of what it is we can do. Why not reach out to the nonprofits and get them involved? Why not reach out to the faith-based community and get them involved? It seems to me that this takes government and extends it 10-fold, 20-fold, 30-fold. So it’s just not how – the fact that they can do a better job in many cases than the criminal justice system, it just expands the reach into these three priority areas—10-fold, 20-fold, 30-fold—because of what it is that you’re doing.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Yeah, and I think it’s not necessarily that these groups are doing a better job, but perhaps it’s that they’re doing it in conjunction with law enforcement, with the courts, with probation and parole; and that’s a large part of what – well, my job is to connect these groups with partners that oftentimes might even seem unlikely partners–clergy working with police; clergy working with sheriff’s departments. And you know, the federal government does a lot, and particularly around research and access to information and best practices, and that’s what we want to be able to share with the field. What’s working, what’s effective, what does the data say? So we spend a lot of time focusing on providing technical assistance, and also connecting folks. So if someone, like for instance, CSOSA’s faith-based initiative, which is very successful,  a very effective program; it’s working in D.C. and there’s a group that wants to launch a similar initiative in California.

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Eugene Schneeberg:  My office is uniquely positioned to help generate that kind of peer-to-peer learning, and this radio broadcast, and often kind of does the same thing.

Len Sipes:  Eugene, we discussed at the beginning of the show, a little bit about yourself and the fact that both of us worked in the field, both of us have a history of working with youth, working with younger people out in the field. So tell me a little bit about yourself. You came from Boston?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Sure. Yup, born and raised—was raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. And Roxbury, for those who might not know, is really, I would say, the roughest, toughest part of Boston.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  I was raised in the late eighties, crack epidemic, gangs kind of running rampant.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  And only by the grace of God didn’t join a gang. Was recruited to join a gang, recruited to sell drugs, and thanks to God and adults who were caring, was able to kind of be resilient and overcome some of those obstacles, and go on, and go to Boston University. Studied urban affairs. I actually  thought I was gonna be a city planner, go back and do something about all the vacant buildings and abandoned lots in my community. But my first job out of college was working for a juvenile detention facility, and it was there that I really fell in love with working with these young people, and where my mind was really changed about the perceptions I had, that these – the preconceived notions I had that these were these horrible kids with bad attitudes and -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  And when I met them and heard their stories, I really realized that they were indeed, in many cases, victims; and had tremendous potential that just wasn’t being tapped into. And so I fell in love with the work then, and went on to working for the state Juvenile Justice Agency, to working for a faith-based nonprofit called Straight Ahead Ministries -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  – that really focused on providing hope to these young people inside the facilities, and went on to run their reentry program, in helping these young people to make the successful transition from incarceration back into the community.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.  Those are tough assignments though. I mean, you fell in love with the concept as I fell in love with the concept. I always said those kids taught me far more than I taught them. I came to the same realization when I was on the streets doing gang counseling in Baltimore, that a lot of these kids were salvageable, that they weren’t the monsters – I mean, if you do the crime, you deserve the time. I mean, I’m not suggesting, and I’m quite sure we’re not suggesting if you do something nefarious or wrong or illegal, that you’re not held responsible for it. But a lot of these kids, even though they were either involved in criminal activity or on the edges of criminal activity, virtually all of them were salvageable. Virtually all of them, given the right guidance, given a fathering figure, given a firm hand and a come to you-know-what meeting from time to time, these were kids that could be plucked out, pulled out. But it was nevertheless an extraordinarily difficult assignment. I can’t imagine tougher work than the time that I spent working with young kids caught up in the criminal justice system.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well, it’s funny that you mention the need for having fathering figures. As I mentioned before, before we started, Leonard, that I grew up without my dad. I’m 33 years old today, and never met him a day in my life. And so I think I was able to connect with those young people and connect with their experiences, and I’ve seen firsthand the impact that fatherlessness has on a community. It was actually the norm for my friends and I to grow up without our dads, and that really had a disastrous effect on our neighborhood, our community. And I think that’s why I’m so proud and so excited to be working for this administration, working for this president who also understands the importance of responsible fatherhood. As you probably know, and your listeners probably know, the president only met his father once in his life.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Eugene Schneeberg:  And so his – being able to work on the President’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative is a great opportunity to reach out to some of the outstanding fatherhood groups throughout the country that are doing great work. You know, with Father’s Day looming in just over a month, we’re excited about the president doing his annual fatherhood speech -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  – and all the programming that’s associated with that.

Len Sipes:  You know, it’s interesting, because this administration, and as well as the prior administration of President Bush, the concept of faith-based, the concept of utilizing those resources, the power of those resources, then also reaching out to individuals and reminding them of the rights and responsibilities as father, and how important fathering is, it seems to be an issue that goes across the political spectrum, that it’s not necessarily Republican or Democrat. These are all things that everybody can support. But having said that, it’s interesting that President Obama really has pushed this issue of prisoner reentry, really has cited the fact that we’ve got to do a better job in terms of the kids that are coming up through the criminal justice system and reaching out to them; is a very very very important factor in terms of getting them out of a life of crime.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well, absolutely. I mean, the president is working in Chicago. I saw this firsthand when he was in the Senate, and I think we’re at a point–and you mentioned this too–reentry has overwhelming bi-partisan support. It’s being smart on crime. It’s saving taxpayer dollars. You know, mass incarceration is just incredibly expensive, as you all know; and by being smart on crime, we can not only reduce our prison population and make wise investments in prevention and intervention and reentry.

Len Sipes:  And most states are backing off of their incarcerative policies now.  I’m not quite sure it’s philosophical, but they simply can’t afford to do it any longer. For the first time, the rate of incarceration in the United States is going down. And so, in states–and my Heaven’s newspaper articles that I read every single day–of states that can no longer afford a certain level of incarceration. Well, if we’re going to continue to have an impact on crime, there needs to be an outreach too, in terms of prisoner reentry, in terms of kids on the street, in terms of fatherhood. If we’re going to continue to reduce crime in America, we have to do those things.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Absolutely, and that’s an area where there’s, I think, an increasing interest on the part of faith-based and community-based groups to get involved in reentry.  They recognize we’re at crisis points. We recognize these folks are coming home, they’re coming home to our communities, and they need support. I also want to just call your attention–you mentioned the National Reentry Resource Center web site -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  – in your opening. I want to call your attention to fatherhood.gov, which is really a clearing house for all things that are fatherhood. And I also want to call your attention to an initiative that we’re working on called the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention. This is, at this point, a six-city initiative where city leadership, community-based, faith-based groups are working together to develop comprehensive violence prevention plans. Those cities are Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, San Jose and Salinas, California. And to find out more information about the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention, you can check out www.findyouthinfo.gov, that’s findyouthinfo.gov, and there’s a tab on there that says, “Youth Violence Prevention”.

Len Sipes:  I want to re-introduce our guest, ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Schneeberg. He is the director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the U.S. Department of Justice, as guided by the Whitehouse, which has been very, very, very influential in this effort. So we talked about fatherhood.gov, we talked about www.findyouthinformation.gov – all of this is designed to do what—is to energize communities and use whatever resources available to attack these problems? I think that’s the generic. We’ve pretty much substantiated that’s what it is that we’re trying to do. But put something on the [PH 00:17:20] boat. And so, okay, so the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention, what is involved in that?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Sure. Well, as you know, youth violence is a critical issue in cities and towns throughout our nation. And oftentimes, if you survey folks living in these cities, and you asked them, “What’s the most important issue?”, oftentimes youth violence bubbles up to the top. Obviously public safety and people feeling safe, and particularly the safety of our young people is of critical importance. The President, the Attorney General, Secretary of Education got together just over a year ago, and charged the federal agencies with coming up with some comprehensive approaches to addressing the issue of youth violence throughout the country. And so we started with the six cities that I mentioned earlier—Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis San Jose and Salinas. We did a series of listening sessions throughout the summer, to hear from folks in the communities what their concerns were, what was working, what wasn’t working, and I think one of the very important pieces is we have buy-in from the mayors, the chiefs of police, superintendents of schools, people from public health, and the community. And each of those cities work to develop these comprehensive youth violence prevention plans that have a lot of community input, and that information is available on findyouthinfo.com. So the plans are finished, and we’ve just transitioned, just in the latter part of April, to the implementation phase where these cities are now beginning to put these plans into action. So findyouthinfo.gov has a lot of good information for cities that weren’t able to participate in the national forum, to go there, to learn information because it’s definitely not these six cities that are the only ones that are struggling with the -

Len Sipes:  Oh, absolutely, absolutely! Now what’s the key ingredient? Are there key ingredients coming out of the experience of these various cities in terms of stopping youth violence or reducing it?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Absolutely. I think there’s some basic principles that the data shows, that the evidence shows, that you have to have a balanced approach. When you go into these with solely a law enforcement approach, you don’t get the results you want.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Obviously law enforcement police are critical components of youth violence prevention, but it has to be balanced. You have to have a strong prevention element. You need to reach young people before they get into trouble, before they get involved with the criminal justice system. Providing things like after school programs and tutoring programs and mentoring programs, all of which faith-based and community-based programs are uniquely suited to provide.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  You have to have a intervention component for those young people that have begun the process of having those brushes with the law or with the child welfare system, or what have you. Or those kids who may be eligible for a diversion program. You need to have a strong intervention program. As I said, enforcement is critical, you need the cops.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Eugene Schneeberg:  The cops play a critical role in getting the bad guys off the street, but you have to also – those guys are gonna come home, and so you need to have an effective and thoughtful reentry component. So the data shows you need to have a balanced approach, you need to have a multi-disciplinary approach. You need to have public health at the table, you need to have the schools at the table, you need to have law enforcement, faith-based, community-based, the business community. It really has to be a community-wide approach to this work.

Len Sipes:  I was reading a [PH] literature review some time ago and looking at the power of all of these different programs, and some are more powerful than others. And one of the most powerful programs was intervening in the lives of kids with social workers. The kids were acting out in school, they were starting to get involved in the criminal justice system, but we’re talking about young kids. We’re talking about preschool in some cases. We’re talking about very young individuals, and where social workers were going in to the homes and dealing principally with moms, because dad, in many cases, was not there. And talking about reading to your child 15 minutes a day, talking about effective parenting techniques, talking about what it takes to raise a child, and raise a child responsibly—basically saying, “Look, you know, you’ve got to be up before your kid, and that kid’s got to eat before going out of the house.” And that may sound simple, and that may sound—I don’t know–a bit oppressive on the part of government taking over the lives of moms and their kids. But what they’ve shown, what the data have shown, is that this may be the most powerful anti-crime program that we have at our disposal. Not saying anything is bad with prisons, not saying anything is wrong with law enforcement, but in terms of sheer prevention, intervening in the lives of individuals early on, and helping them in terms of how to raise that child, and what to do about that child, seems to be quite effective in terms of that child not going into the criminal justice system. So there’s good, hard data that says intervention programs do have an impact.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Absolutely. And I think the third principle that the national forum really espouses is that these strategies need to be data driven. They need to be looking at not only crime data but school data, social service data as well. We need to be thinking about outcomes and tracking outcomes and being thoughtful, and not just being kind of random in our approach.

Len Sipes:  Now the fatherhood initiative, can you summarize that? I mean, to a lot of people it’s confusing. What is a fatherhood initiative?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Sure. Well, there’s been fatherhood programs in our country for 30, 40 years -

Len Sipes:  Right.

Eugene Schneeberg:  – that have been effective. The president has been using the bully pulpit of his role as a public servant since his time in Illinois, every year, using Father’s Day as an opportunity to really lift up the importance of responsible fatherhood. And now, as the Commander in Chief, he’s used this opportunity to really promote this on a federal level. So his first year in office, the coordinator, by the way, Whitehouse Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under the leadership of Joshua DuBois, executive director, they held a series of town hall meetings all throughout the country with federal agency principals.  The Attorney General had a round table in Atlanta. The Secretary of Education did a round table in New Hampshire around education. The Veterans Affairs administrator did one with military dads and the like, and partnered with – there’s some outstanding fatherhood programs all throughout the country that are bringing – they’re doing excellent training for dads, they’re convening dads. I can’t really go into the specifics, but there’s just quite a few excellent programs out there in the community that are doing great work in charging dads, equipping dads to effectively parent their children. You know, being a dad is not an easy task.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  It’s probably the hardest job you’ll ever have.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  The president often talks about how being a dad is more challenging than being the president.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  But it’s also more rewarding. And so quite frankly, if we had more responsible dads at home, we would  need less federal programming.

Len Sipes:  How did we get to this? I mean, the kids when I was on the streets in the city of Baltimore doing gang counseling whether jail or job corps, or the groups that I ran in the prison system, routinely did not have fathers. You talked about your experience, you talked about the president’s experience. How in the name of heavens did we come up with a situation where the fathers are suddenly absent? Because I agree with you, if the fathers were there, steadfast, steady in the lives of their children, probably 50 percent of what it is that we’re talking about today in terms of today’s social ills, would disappear. So what happened? Why are we at this point where we have to instruct and sometimes use the bully pulpit to get people involved in the lives of their own children?

Eugene Schneeberg:  That’s a whole other broadcast -

Len Sipes:  Yes, it is.

Eugene Schneeberg:   – Leonard, and I’d be happy to kind of have that conversation. But I think, you know, there’s a whole lot of contributing factors to the crisis we face in fatherlessness in this country. The numbers are continuing the trend up, and the number of children born out of wedlock is steadily rising. But I think that, you know, it takes one person to change the destiny of a family.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Eugene Schneeberg:  You know, I grew up without my dad, but now I’ve been married for almost eight years, father of three, and training my children on how to be, you know, responsible parents.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Eugene Schneeberg:  My oldest is five years old. So I think, you know, I live by that mantra that one person can change a destiny.

Len Sipes:  Well, my oldest is 26, and let me tell you, it is the most challenging thing. I mean, I’ve been in the criminal justice system for 40 years in a variety of capacities, and there’s nothing that’s been as challenging as being a good father. But the bottom line is, is that once we get fathers reconnected with their children, ordinarily good things happen.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s, you know, to use a faith term, I believe that God has designed the family to meet the needs of children; and our biological families are supposed to do that. We’re supposed to nurture and protect and provide and train and teach. And when you remove a dad from that equation, you know, you’ve done damage to that family. So we’re looking to continue to promote responsible fatherhood, we’re continuing to lift up the efforts of the president and the attorney general, and there’s a ton of good information on fatherhood.gov. So I just really encourage your listeners to go check that out.

Len Sipes:  We only have about a minute left before we begin to close. What did we not hit, what needs to be hit, anything else? Or did we cover everything?

Eugene Schneeberg:  Well, I encourage folks to check out the Whitehouse Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.  If you go to whitehouse.gov, you can navigate fairly easy to the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. There’s a ton of work that’s being done all throughout the federal government, all throughout this country, to engage faith-based and community-based groups in the work that’s going on, particularly in this time of tough economic situations and budget cuts. We’re in a unique time where faith-based and community-based groups are being increasingly more called upon to provide services to the most needy in this country; and we’re looking forward to partnering. My office can be reached at partnerships@usdoj.gov. That’s partnerships@usdoj.gov. Looking forward to hearing from any of you listeners that might be interested in learning more.

Len Sipes:  And we’re gonna do all of these, all the notes that we mentioned within the show, we’re gonna put them into the show notes so people can – when they listen to the show, if they come through our web site, they will have steady access to them. Eugene Schneeberg, he is the director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the United States Department of Justice. Ladies and gentlemen, just to go over some of the things that Eugene said today, www.fatherhood.gov, www.findyouthinformatoin.gov.

Eugene Schneeberg:  Findyouthinfo.

Len Sipes:  Findyouthinfo.gov, www.usdoj.gov for the Department of Justice, whitehouse.gov and partnerships@usdoj.gov. We’ll put all of those within the show notes. We do want to remind everybody once again, before we close, about the National Reentry Resource Center, www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org, the American Probation and Parole Association, their efforts to celebrate the roles of parole and probation agents throughout the country, www.appa-net.org. And the Louisiana Department of Corrections, they have a whole series of interesting radio programs in terms of what it is that they do. If you go to the Louisiana Department of Corrections web site, you can find your way to the radio shows. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. Watch for us next time, or listen for us next time, as we explore another very important topic in our criminal justice system. Have yourselves a very very pleasant day.

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