Drug Treatment

Drug Courts in Washington, D.C. “DC Public Safety”

January 3, 2011 By Len 2 Comments

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[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From our nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk about drug courts. Drug courts seem to have a pretty impressive research history from the U.S. Department of Justice and other sources essentially stating that people involved in the drug court process do well, better than the people who do not go to drug court, people involved in substance abuse, they go to drug court, they interact with the judge, they interact with supervision staff, and generally speaking, the outcomes are positive. To talk about the program that we have here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, we have two principals with us today. Carline Claudomir and Amanda Rocha, they’re both community supervision officers assigned to our drug court, but before we get into the program, our usual commercial, we are up to 220,000 requests for DC Public Safety radio, television, blog, and transcripts. If you need to get in touch with us, and we really appreciate all of the emails, we really appreciate all of the comments in the comment line, and whether it’s criticisms, or whether it’s platitudes, we embrace whatever it is that you have to say to us, and we take it very seriously, and we appreciate all the suggestions in terms of future programs, you can get in touch with me directly via email: Leonard, L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-sipes – S-I-P-E-S – @csosa.gov, or you can follow us via twitter at twitter.com/lensipes or you can go to the site itself, www.csosa.gov and look for the radio and television programs, or you can go to media.csosa.gov directly and take a look at these programs and comment through the comment line and back to our guests, Carline Claudomir and Amanda Rocha, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Carline Claudomir: Hi, Len.

Amanda Rocha: Hi, Len.

Len Sipes: All right, Carline. How many times did I butcher that first name? And last name? Carline Claudomir!

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay. And I know I’m going to get the emails saying, Leonard, you can not pronounce names correctly! Amanda, you’ve been before our microphones before, correct?

Amanda Rocha: I have, Len.

Len Sipes: You’ve done some other stuff for us.

Amanda Rocha: Yes, I have.

Len Sipes: All right, so you’re star of stage and screen.

Amanda Rocha: Oh, no!

Len Sipes: And you’re very used to the microphone process. Drug courts. You know, ladies, the research on drug courts is positive, Carline, and the first question’s going to go to you. The research is positive. Drug courts do seem to work. Individuals going into the drug court process do seem to do fairly well. The whole idea behind, or the history of drug courts, for the audience, was to try to provide an alternative to incarceration, and an alternative to doing nothing. If you take a look at national research, out of all of the offenders caught up in the criminal justice system, 11% get drug treatment.

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: Now, the overwhelming majority of people caught up in the criminal justice system do not get drug treatment. That’s amazing to me. That’s amazing to me, considering all the social ills that are out there. But here, what we do is provide drug treatment, and in some cases, we simply provide supervision services. We do whatever is necessary to stabilize that person with a substance abuse history, correct?

Carline Claudomir: You’re correct.

Len Sipes: All right, tell me about it.

Carline Claudomir: My name is Carline Claudomir, and I work with the STAR/HIDTA team. STAR/HIDTA stands for Sanction Team for Addiction Recovery. Our program entails the clients being assigned by either their judge and their attorney, or coming through transfer from other teams at CSOSA, or through our pre-trial drug program. Once they come to STAR/HIDTA, they are signing a contract stating that there are a number of things that they will and will not do while on probation, and they understand that there’s immediate consequences for any positive drug test or noncompliant behavior.

Len Sipes: Okay, so if they screw up, there are immediate consequences –

Carline Claudomir: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: – and that’s what seems to work, correctly?

Carline Claudomir: Yes, it’s the blessing and the curse for some of the clients.

Len Sipes: Because we need to understand that people with substance abuse histories, shall I say, always screw up. Recovery, problems are part of the recovery process, so it’s not, go to drug court and never do drugs again. It’s go to drug court and work with that person as that person faces their addiction history and relearns how to live life without drugs.

Carline Claudomir: Yes, and a lot of times, when they come to us, they sit, stand up in court before the judge and say, Your Honor, yes, I want to do probation, Your Honor, yes, I want treatment, then they come to the office, and then they reread the contract and realize it’s not only treatment!

Len Sipes: Oh, my heavens! What have I gotten myself involved in?

Carline Claudomir: Yes, it’s treatment and sanctions, so if you continue to use drugs, unfortunately, there are jail sanctions involved, which are treatment, tough love all the way.

Len Sipes: You’re tough love all the way, but that’s what is necessary. Amanda Rocha, in terms of that sense of tough love, correct?

Amanda Rocha: Yes, absolutely. It really does help to have that median sanctioning, because it puts a little fear in the offenders so that they don’t go back and use, it gives them that second thought before deciding to use, oh, that’s three nights in jail if I go ahead and do that, or oh, you know what? I’m on my fourth sanction or fifth sanction, and now it’s seven nights in jail. So they don’t want to continue going back and forth. It gets old for them to have to do that, and so kind of helps them along the way a little bit.

Len Sipes: Well, I think it’s important for people to understand just that, because, you know, this whole concept of treatment, the research is pretty clear that the reason why most people don’t get drug treatment is not its availability or lack of availability. The principal reason for why people don’t get drug treatment is that they don’t feel they need drug treatment, and in many cases, in terms of the criminal justice system, we basically coerce them into a) getting drug treatment, b) sticking with it because of the sanctions along the way. If you have a positive urine, we don’t care if it’s for marijuana, we don’t care what it’s for. If you have a positive urine, this is what’s going to happen to you, and those punishments, if you will, are going to increase as you continue your substance abuse, correct?

Carline Claudomir: It’s the accountability factor, and a lot of times, they come to us never having to be held accountable for their drug use, never had to be held accountable for their actions, and when they come to us, they realize every time they mess up, there is no passes, there are no passes, so immediately, you go see the judge, and you can explain to the judge why you felt it was okay to make this decision, regardless of the consequences.

Len Sipes: You know, the interesting thing is that there’s an increasing number of research programs out there, studies that, interestingly enough, it’s the judge who seems to be at the centerpoint of a lot of these mental health courts, substance abuse courts, reentry courts, there’s something magical about the judge being involved in this process, I think.

Carline Claudomir: It’s the authority, because if I say he needs treatment and the judge says he needs treatment, that holds a lot of weight. You don’t want to go to a judge and say, no, he doesn’t need treatment. No, it doesn’t work that way. The judge says he needs it, then you’re going to listen, because they’re in the midst of the battle.

Len Sipes: Okay. Now it’s extraordinarily confusing for the people of this audience, because it goes way beyond Washington D.C. 20% of our audience is international, and the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area is not our top city in terms of people listening to this program. So we have to explain that under the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, administratively, we have an entity called pre-trial services who are their own independent agency with their own board and their own mission, but they fall under the generic auspices of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, both are federalized, and they also have a drug court program focusing on pretrial individuals, correct?

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay, and I know you can’t speak for them, but in essence, the gig is that the person goes before a judge, and if he completes, or she completes the provisions of the drug court program, the charges are dropped.

Carline Claudomir: It has an affect on the charges or what is actually ending sentencing.

Len Sipes: All right, there you go. It has an effect. You should be a public affairs officer. But ours, what we’re talking about is post-conviction. We’re talking about probationers.

Amanda Rocha: Yes.

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay, and the probationers, we’re talking about, the incentive here is early termination, it’s where the judge or the attorney feels that this person has a substance abuse background, not necessarily currently doing drugs, but having a substance abuse background, and this person may not be new to the criminal justice system. This person may have multiple arrests and multiple contacts with the criminal justice system, correct?

Amanda Rocha: That is correct. We have people who are 18-years-old up until, well into their 60s, so yeah, it could be somebody who is their first charge, or it could be somebody who’s, it’s their 20th.

Len Sipes: Right, and that part, by the way, the process in terms of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and older. I’ve had a chance to encounter them, in terms of the write-alongs that I’ve done with our folks, and that’s sad, don’t you think? I mean, when you walk into this apartment of this guy who’s been through heroin, who’s been through crack, I mean, these older heroin addicts, these older coke guys, you know, they just have the hardest time staying away from drugs. It’s just amazing to me to go into the home of a 50-year-old and 60-year-old because they continue to do drugs.

Carline Claudomir: Can I go back to the incentive process?

Len Sipes: Yes.

Carline Claudomir: I always hear the biggest incentives for our program is the fact that you can come off of drugs, and you can be successful in the community without using illicit substances. We actually have a client right now, he is part of the TAP program, but we also see some of those clients sometimes, and he’s working, he’s successful, he’s drug free. That is the biggest incentive. Most of our clients, however, see early termination, and that’s their goal, and they don’t actually think of, to get there, I have to also be drug free.

Len Sipes: Here’s my guess, and either one of you, feel free to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. My guess is that they think that they’re entering this program, and the early termination is the only thing that’s on their mind, and getting off of drugs is way, way, way, way, way back on the list of –

Carline Claudomir: – priorities.

Len Sipes: Yeah, priorities, because a lot of people, they’ve done drugs the good part of their lives. You know, 12, 13 years old, starting alcohol, 14, 15, starting marijuana, 16, 17, graduating to the harder drugs, a lot of these individuals that we supervise here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and this applies to any parole and probation agency in the country. You know, they work with people who don’t know how to live life without self-medication.

Carline Claudomir: And unfortunately, in their minds, they believe it’s recreational, even though they have a 20-year history of drug abuse and treatment situations, they still believe it’s recreational, I can stop at any point in time.

Len Sipes: I can handle this.

Carline Claudomir: And unfortunately, when they get in front of, into the STAR/HIDTA program, and there’s consequences, and they realize, well I’m just going to jail because I can’t stop using, is that really worth it? And that’s when it may click in their mind, okay, I really do, I have a problem. I can’t do this on my own.

Len Sipes: We, we have this come to reality be, again, I’ve used other terms, but I don’t want to be disrespectful. Where that becomes a defining moment in their lives, does it not, that they have lived their life with the needle, lived their life with a powdery substance, lived their life smoking reefer, they really don’t know what to do without drugs.

Amanda Rocha: And I think, for example, we have somebody assigned to us right now. Her grandmother had a history, apparently she’s not using now, but of use. Her mother is actively using, and she’s a young girl, 19 years old, and is using, so that, not only has she been using for a good amount of her short life that she has had so far, but she also has been living with this substance abuse through her generations.

Len Sipes: Right. I guess that’s the point that I’m trying to get across to the audience, because we have this extraordinarily simplistic sense as to the problem that we have with people, the 16,000 people that we supervise on any given day, and most of the people in the audience that I talk to understand that out of the 7 million people under correctional supervision, 5 of those 7 million are on community supervision. So when we talk about corrections in this country, the overwhelming majority of these individuals are in the community being supervised in the community. The overwhelming majority of these individuals have substance abuse histories. The overwhelming majority of these individuals just don’t smoke a joint every couple weeks. That investment in drugs is a long term early age of onset life altering experience, but they don’t know how to have a life without drugs. So every time the boss gets in their face, they smoke a joint. Every time life takes a turn, the needle goes in their arm. That’s who they are, that’s what they are in terms of their own self definition. Now am I exaggerating, or am I in the ballpark?

Carline Claudomir: No, even when they’re successful, the way they celebrate is by using drugs!

Len Sipes: That’s right! They reward themselves. We had a case one time when I was with the Maryland Department of Public Safety. The guy comes out of prison, reunited with his family, he’s going to drug treatment, he’s working, he’s getting along with the kids, and he’s doing so well, that what he does is fire up a joint to celebrate! And he kept pulling positives for marijuana! First positive, second positive, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. Now there’s a certain point where we’re sitting down and saying, my man, you’re very close to going back to prison, and your wife let you come home, and the kids, you’re getting along with the kids, and you’re working every single day, and you’re going to drug treatment, and the drug treatment folks say that you’re progressing, and you’re within a hair’s breadth of going back to the prison system! What’s up with you?

Carline Claudomir: Well I have clients like that right now in my caseload. I had a client who, by some confusion, believed that her termination date was a month earlier, and so when I called her in, I said, I need you to come in and drug test, because I’m sorry, you actually terminate in May instead of April, and that drug test was positive for marijuana, and her explanation was, I thought I was off of probation! But she had not tested positive in close to 7 months!

Len Sipes: But that’s not the point!

Carline Claudomir: It’s not the point!

Len Sipes: So you, the criminal justice system, in essence, in these drug courts or other modalities that we have here at CSOSA, when we involve people in long term residential group substance abuse, that is, for the first time in their lives many of these individuals come face to face with the prospect of never using drugs again, and facing the prospect as to why they use drugs to begin with. That is a pretty scary place to be, is it not?

Amanda Rocha: I would think so, yeah. Some of the offenders have already had drug treatment, though, and this is their second time coming around, because like you were saying, it is a scary thought, so maybe that first time they weren’t open to it. They didn’t really reap the full benefits of receiving that treatment, so here they are, back in the criminal justice system, and we’re giving them another chance, and we’re hoping that this time, they are receptive, and they do keep that open mind, and they aren’t so put off by the whole idea of addressing that issue.

Len Sipes: We’re halfway through the program, ladies and gentlemen. This is DC Public Safety today. We’re talking about drug courts. We have two principals with us. We have Carline, let’s see if I can actually pronounce Carline’s last name correctly, Claudomir, and Amanda Rocha, both community supervision officers with drug court. Again, there are two drug courts in the District of Columbia, ours under the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, which is post-adjudication, which means the person’s on probation, and we also have one on the pretrial side of it, and the whole idea is, when the judge or the attorney takes a look at this individual’s background, they say that this person’s involvement in criminal activity is principally due to substance abuse, and that person may not be new to the criminal justice system. This may be the person’s fifth, sixth, seventh, twelfth time, but he has a substance abuse history, she has a substance abuse history, and what we try to do is to get them involved in treatment, but the interesting part of it is that treatment may not be the first stop, correct? We have other, we assess the individual –

Carline Claudomir: When they come in to this, the HIDTA drug program, initially, some clients actually are [INDISCERNIBLE] from either the pretrial or from a request from their judge. A lot of our clients come in, and we assess their drug, their current drug test to see, what level they would actually go into. Some clients come in and never drug test positive, and they had dealt with their issues prior to coming to –

Len Sipes: Or they make the voluntary decision to stop as long as they’re under supervision. So the interesting part, this was the point I was trying to get to, and both of you were looking at me, so why did I, the interesting part of it is research years ago that basically said offenders take vacations from their drug use all the time. There’s a certain point where even the person involved in substance abuse will say, I’m doing it too much. I need my wife or my significant other, or for whatever reason, I’m going to be drug tested, I’ve got to stop for the next 3 or 4 months, and then oftentimes, the person goes right back to it. So this sense of an uncontrollable craving for drugs, that craving is always there, but the person can stop for a certain amount of time.

Carline Claudomir: It depends on the person, but yes, sometimes we do have clients who may have tested positive three or four times at the very beginning, and we never, and then complete their whole probation with no, with no positive drug tests, but then we’ll see them later on in court, and they got another charge, and they tested positive at some other point after they leave the STAR/HIDTA program.

Len Sipes: So with the criminal justice system has the wherewithal, and mothers have the wherewithal, and pardon my sexism, wives have the wherewithal, and in the case of women offenders, husbands have the wherewithal, people who have a certain amount of power regarding the offender, have the ability to get that offender to stop doing drugs, at least for a certain amount of time.

Carline Claudomir: Specifically when the consequences is jail time. A lot of our clients, after they sit, do their first sanction which is a jury box sanction for three days, and they see the judge stepping back, client after client after client for a positive drug test for three nights or seven nights or 14 nights or 28 nights, they look at that and say, oh, I’m not going to do 28 nights for a positive marijuana. I can stop for –

Len Sipes: That’s the point, isn’t it?

Carline Claudomir: Yeah.

Len Sipes: Isn’t that the point? I mean, it’s like we have these endless debates about substance abuse and what works and what doesn’t work. Well, holding a 28 day setback, as we refer to it, of spending 28 days in jail for smoking a joint seems to be an awfully heavy price to pay, and a lot of these individuals under our supervision consciously make the choice not to continue to smoke marijuana because they simply don’t want to spend 28 days in jail, correct?

Carline Claudomir: Correct, but the flipside is those who actually are in the grips of their addiction, no matter how many sanctions you provide, they’re not going to stop.

Len Sipes: They’re not going to stop.

Carline Claudomir: And those are the ones we really try to focus on and really try to get them out of the community immediately, because every time they pick up, they’re, one, they’re breaking the law, and they’re violating their probation contract, and they’re violating probation, and they’re hurting themselves, and they may become a threat to the community, so we try to get them out of the community as fast as we can through treatment.

Len Sipes: All right, and then some cases, through residential treatment.

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: Okay. So let’s walk through those steps, those sanction steps, because we have, sitting in the jury box for three days, which is a real pain.

Carline Claudomir: First violation.

Len Sipes: Okay. Second violation –

Carline Claudomir: – is going to be 30 days on GPS with [INDISCERNIBLE] conference.

Len Sipes: So 30 days being tracked electronically through global positioning system satellite tracking, so wherever you go, you’re tracked.

Carline Claudomir: With a curfew.

Len Sipes: With a curfew.

Carline Claudomir: And sometimes, a stayaway. You can’t go to the neighborhood where you usually get your drugs from.

Len Sipes: There you go.

Carline Claudomir: If you do, we know where you are.

Len Sipes: There you go. So he’s being watched all the time. Okay, so that’s pretty cool. Now the next sanction after that?

Carline Claudomir: Third sanction is three nights in jail.

Len Sipes: Three nights in jail. In the D.C. jail.

Carline Claudomir: D.C. jail.

Len Sipes: Well that’s a lovely place to visit! Is it on the weekend, during the week?

Carline Claudomir: It’s whenever they get their sanction.

Len Sipes: It’s whenever they get their sanction.

Carline Claudomir: It starts immediately.

Len Sipes: Okay. Fourth?

Amanda Rocha: It would be a case staffing. So Ms. Claudomir and I, or our supervisor or other team members get together and discuss this individual’s case to see what we can do at this point, because in the past, what has been going on isn’t working. So a plan, in a sense.

Len Sipes: Is that, is that where you give your riot act pronouncement to the individual, basically saying, hey, you’re this far from going into prison?

Carline Claudomir: They’ve been getting it the whole time! And we tell our clients when they come in, if we get to the case staffing stage, please understand you’re leaving the community and going to treatment. There is no if, but, can I, can I get one more chance? No, your chance was when you stood in front of the judge and said you would be clean and sober.

Len Sipes: And there’s a certain point where we will send them away to residential treatment.

Carline Claudomir: That’s the case staffing stage.

Len Sipes: That’s the case staffing stage. Okay, after that, what happens?

Amanda Rocha: Then we have the seven nights in jail sanction.

Len Sipes: Okay, and then it just basically goes from 7 nights to 14 nights to an entire month sort of thing.

Amanda Rocha: That’s right, and if somebody gets placed in residential treatment and gets discharged unsuccessfully or voluntarily chooses to leave, then that would be 15 nights in jail.

Len Sipes: The average person listening to this program, people within the criminal justice system are going to say, eh, that’s pretty much common business, drug positives and sanctions. The average person outside of the criminal justice system listening to this program would be appalled. They’re going, how many positives, how many bites at the apple are you giving this guy? You’re telling me that he’s got 15 prior contacts with the criminal justice system, and now we’re up to our fifth and sixth drug positive? For the love of good god, put that person in prison! Obviously, that person doesn’t want to comply. Obviously, that person is posing a public safety risk. Just put him back in prison.

Carline Claudomir: But see, you look at the context of the situation, the average individual on probation actually provides a number more of positive drug tests are a lot more noncompliant. We get them immediately, after the first, second, third, fourth, fifth. So in the context of probation, sometimes a client won’t be able to go before the sentencing judge until the 20th plus drug test because we can’t get a show cause until then to tell the judge he is noncompliant with probation.

Len Sipes: Okay, but that’s a technicality, and I’m glad you brought that up, but the principal issue here for the average citizen is, you know, are, the people that we have under supervision are not exactly the most popular people on the face of the earth.

Carline Claudomir: No, but they are your neighbors.

Len Sipes: Well, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. But my, the other point is that, you know, when we go out, the citizens asking them to support, whether it’s mental health programs or substance abuse programs or educational programs or vocational programs, the response oftentimes is, Leonard, we’re going to give to the church, we’re going to give to the schools, let the money go to the kids, let the money go to the elderly, I’m really not all that enthused about giving criminals. Money for programs, so the point is, is that there’s a frustration level and a tolerance level on the part of the average citizen as to how many chances we’re going to give that individual from the standpoint of public safety, and we need to explain why we do that.

Carline Claudomir: Public safety is our number one concern, so we always talk to our clients in regards from the aspect. When you become a threat to public safety –

Len Sipes: Boom, you go.

Carline Claudomir: – you need to leave the community.

Len Sipes: That’s right.

Carline Claudomir: But up until that point, we have to work with you, because once you leave probation, you’re done with this. You go back into that same community, because you don’t walk around with a sign saying, I am a criminal. You walk around into those churches, into those schools, pick up your children, those same places that the public wants to provide their money, those clients are there with them.

Len Sipes: 1 out of 45 individuals, according to national research are on probation right now or community supervision. Now, if you can, these are active. So if you count people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system, it’s at least 1 out of 20. So every time, regardless of where you go, where you shop, those, you’re going to encounter hundreds of individuals who have been caught up in the criminal justice system. So I think the rationale is, is that we want them to quit drugs, we want them to become taxpayers, not tax burdens, we want them to stop criminality, and I think that’s what we try to do with these individuals in drug court.

Amanda Rocha: That’s right. We want them to make that lifestyle change, so they’re not back in and out of the system.

Len Sipes: We want them to toss off substance abuse for good.

Amanda Rocha: That’s right.

Len Sipes: And stop messing with us.

Carline Claudomir: The problem is, sometimes it doesn’t happen in one try. I have sat in drug court and did my cases in drug court and have turned to the left, and looked into the jury box and saw a client I had a year ago who got off on early termination who is now back on pre-trial.

Len Sipes: That’s exactly right. And it is the process of recovery, and when we do live talk radio, people have a hard time listening to this, because their sense of the criminal justice system is, you’re getting a break, buddy, and maybe one, maybe two, but you hit three, and I want you to go back to prison. I think the average person in the larger community, not in the criminal justice system, feels that way. So we have to be accountable to the average citizen and explain to them that recovery, in terms of substance abuse, is a messy process that takes, in many cases, two, three times at treatment, and in many cases, involves multiple positives for drugs until we can convince that person to stay away from drugs, at least for the period of their supervision, or go to jail.

Carline Claudomir: I have a client who has been on probation since 1995, and he has been through every team at CSOSA, and when he finally made it to STAR/HIDTA, and he started messing up, and we did the warrant initiatives and went into his home and arrested him, and we brought him in front of his judge, the judge said, no, we’re going to give him one more chance, and that is it. One more chance. And it just continues on. But I will say that after this last opportunity, he has been clean and sober for 7-8 months, is working full time, and now, he is back, part of society. But see, it didn’t work the first, second, third, 10th, 15th time.

Len Sipes: You know, the interesting part of this is that the average person hearing it has a low frustration level for people caught up in the criminal justice system, but that is our reality. Our reality is that we have individuals who don’t know how to live life without a needle. They don’t know how to live life without a hallucinogen. They don’t know how to do it, and what we do is we teach them how to live life without using drugs, and that created a much safer society, a much saner society in the long run, and we turn people who are tax burdens into taxpayers, and I think that’s the heart and soul of it. It’s messy, it’s sloppy, sometimes it’s hard to explain to the general public, but we take individuals who are problems and we turn out individuals who are no longer problems, and we do that more often than we don’t, correct?

Carline Claudomir: And sometimes we’re the only ones who hold up that mirror to that individual and make them see how sloppy and messy they are, and they have been living their life, and hold them accountable, and when they think they’re almost done, hold them accountable even more and make them be the successes that they say they want to be when they first came to probation.

Len Sipes: It’s a fascinating process. Most of the people that I’ve encountered after a certain point, especially the older guys, sick and tired of being sick and tired. They are. I mean, it is just a terrible process of being arrested and rearrested and rearrested and reincarcerated and reincarcerated. These aren’t necessarily violent criminals. Most of these people are involved in nonviolent crimes, but there’s a certain point where they just get sick and tired of being constantly put through the criminal justice system, and they finally quit. They finally make that break. So I think what you’re doing is intervening in that process earlier, if at all humanly possible to get them to that point where they understand that they’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, correct?

Amanda Rocha: Well, and also, think about the example that I gave before where this young adult has this generational, you know, substance abuse that she’s been around, and those people who have dropped out of school in the sixth grade, or who have all these different issues, and they’re using to kind of, you know, make themselves feel better about the issue, or they’re trying to fit in with their peers, or with their family. So you have all these issues that are going on, and part of probation’s job is to address those issues, get them into an employment training program, get their GED, so now that they have these positive things in their life that they didn’t have before that would help them to stop using or even wanting to go back and use.

Len Sipes: Or put them back in jail or prison, and either one protects public safety.

Carline Claudomir: Yes.

Len Sipes: That’s the bottom line. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re out of time. Carline Claudomir, and I said it for the first time correctly, community supervision officer with our drug court unit. Amanda Rocha, also a community supervision officer with our drug court unit. You can find information about CSOSA at www.csosa.gov. You can also access the radio, television shows, the blog, and transcripts through the CSOSA website, or directly through www.media – M-E-D-I-A – dot-csosa – C-S-O-S-A – dot-gov. You can follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/lensipes, and you can also email me directly, Leonard – L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-sipes – S-I-P-E-S – @csosa.gov. Ladies and gentlemen, I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Courts, Drug Treatment, Education and Vocational Assistance, Interviews with Staff, Parole and Probation, Probation, Reentry, What Works Tagged With: Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, CSOSA, D.C., drug court, Washington

What Works: Evidence-Based Practices in Community Corrections

November 22, 2010 By Len Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript available at

[Video Begins]

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

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

Debra Kafami: Thanks, great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Williams: That’s correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: It’s huge.

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

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

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

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

Nancy Lavigne: Yes.

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

Nancy Lavigne: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

[Music Playing]

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

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

Debra Kafami: Thank you very much.

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Video Ends]

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

Filed Under: Criminal Justice, Drug Treatment, Education and Vocational Assistance, Employment, Interviews with Policy Makers, Interviews with Staff, Parole and Probation, Probation, Reentry, Video Podcast, What Works

Community Based Support for Offenders and Their Families

November 18, 2010 By Len 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

[Video Begins]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Video Ends]

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

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

Filed Under: Corrections-Prisons, Courts, Criminal Justice, Drug Treatment, Education and Vocational Assistance, Employment, Faith-Based Initiatives, Interviews with Offenders, Interviews with Policy Makers, Interviews with Staff, Parole and Probation, Probation, Reentry, Video Podcast, Women Offenders

Iowa Jail-Based Substance Abuse Treatment Project-NCJA-DC Public Safety

May 18, 2010 By Len 1 Comment

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

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

This radio program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2010/03/iowa-jail-based-substance-abuse-treatment-project-ncja-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, welcome to D.C. Public Safety. I am your host, Leonard Sipes. This program is going to focus on the Iowa Jail-Based Substance Abuse Treatment project, and let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there are some extraordinary results from this. One year after program completion 78.5% say that they are clean, 91.9% have not been arrested, and 68.2% are employed full time, and I find those to be absolutely amazing statistics. Our guest today, Lonnie Cleland, a program planner with the Iowa Department of Public Health; Leesa McNeil – she is the District Court Administrator for Woodland County, Iowa; and Kim Brangoccio – she is clinical director of United Community Services. This program is brought to you by the National Criminal Justice Association. As the regular listeners are aware, we do a regular series with the National Criminal Justice Association. Their website: www.ncja.org. Before we begin the program, once again, we thank everybody for the 200,000 requests on a monthly basis for D.C. Public Safety radio, television, blog, and transcripts. You can reach us at www.media M-E-D-I-A.csosa C-S-O-S-A .gov. You can reach me for all the comments – and I get a lot of comments, and I’m appreciative of all the comments – you can reach me directly via email: Leonard L-E-O-N-A-R-D.sipes S-I-P-E-S@csosa.gov or follow us via Twitter, which is Twitter/lensipes, L-E-N-S-I-P-E-S. Back to our guests: Lonnie Cleland, Leesa McNeil, and Kim Brangoccio. Welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Kim Brangoccio: Hi.

Lonnie Cleland: Hello.

Leesa McNeil: Hi.

Len Sipes: Lonnie, Lonnie Cleland, the program planner for the Iowa Department of Public Health, give me an overview of the Iowa Jail-Based Substance Treatment project.

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, the Jail-Based Treatment project is a four-county initiative centered in the county jails, but also including outpatient substance abuse treatment for nonviolent offenders. We started the project in 2002 with one county, and it was directly a result of research that came out saying that the longer you kept offenders in treatment, and the more structure they had, the more successful you could be in helping them being integrated back into society. Our substance abuse treatment programs can bring in nonviolent offenders, and the focus of the project is to reduce substance abuse and criminal behavior simultaneously. It’s a curriculum-based treatment program, at least at the jail level, using a cognitive-behavioral therapy approach. When offenders get out of jail, then they’re involved in outpatient treatment, which focuses on a more individual kind of approach. Typically, offenders are in the treatment program anywhere from 120 to 180 days. Now that varies from individual to individual.

Len Sipes: Well, I think the impressive part of that is the outpatient component, where you have – a lot of programs throughout the country have in-jail or in-prison based programs, and their concept of follow-up treatment is referral to AA or referral to the local health department who does drug treatment, and you sit for three or four months before you finally get into drug treatment. This concept of the outpatient part of it I think is extraordinarily valuable. It may be one of the key components of your success. Leesa McNeil, did you want to give a shot at that?

Leesa McNeil: Well, I think part of the success, too, is keeping the entire network of the community around the program. One of the things we’ve done in the Woodbury site is to create a program committee, and we have players around the table who meet periodically, at least bimonthly, and we visit about what programs are operating that impact the jail and troubleshoot them. And this is also our way of trying to keep people educated on what’s going on, make sure that we’re providing a safety net to solve any problems that may develop with the program, and we see players cycle through sheriff’s departments, public defenders offices, county attorney offices, judges, even treatment providers. And this is a way we use to make sure we keep educating people and keep the system engaged with promoting the program.

Len Sipes: So, the lesson here, Leesa, is that there’s no such thing as going it alone; you’ve got to build a network in the larger community who are going to supply the services necessary for those offenders, and they’ve got to be supportive and pretty much everybody’s got to be on board.

Leesa McNeil: Right, and we’ve even been successful in getting our county to put money on the table to assist with treatment, so the collaboration amongst the group is key and keeping players educated as they come in and out of the system and having a place where treatment folks can come and say, “Hey, we’re having a problem here,” and bringing the collaborative group together to say, “What can we do to that?” Sometimes we have problems with, you know, we need to find more clients to participate in the program, so we beat the bush, if you would, for attorneys to be reminding their clients that this is available. Sometimes judges forget it’s available, if they haven’t been on the criminal docket for a period, so it’s a continuous process that seems to work well for us.

Len Sipes: Kim Brangoccio, it’s a nice segue into what Leesa said about the clinical folks. You’re the clinical director of United Community Services, so you’re the person basically in charge – tell me if I’m wrong – of making sure that they get the various treatment modalities that are offered and that they are customized for that particular individual offender, correct?

Kim Brangoccio: Yes, that’s correct. I did want to comment, Len, on your talk about how the curriculum, both in the jail and out of the jail, affects the person. We really have found that to be successful, that once they have completed the in-jail portion, they are able to get out into the community. They’re already met their counselors out of the jail; they continue with them once they’re in the community, and they continue to use what they learned in jail, but they still have 6-8 months with us out of the jail where they can utilize what they’ve learned and make sure that they are following through. And that has been very successful for us.

Len Sipes: You know, if anybody doubts that, could you imagine, if a person goes inside the jail, and most jails are nonsmoking, so for the first time in their lives, they’re not smoking, for the three months they’re inside the jail. But as soon as you get outside that jail, you want that cigarette. I don’t care what the circumstances – I mean, before, it’s easy to go through a behavioral therapy-based program, a cognitive-behavioral-based therapy program within a correctional facility. It’s hard as the dickens applying all those skills when you get on the outside.

Kim Brangoccio: Right, exactly. And we talk a lot about that. I mean, we do talk about smoking and a lot of the clients do get out of the jail and start smoking again, but they really utilize the tools that they learn when they’re in jail when they get out, so they don’t go back to using drugs and alcohol. And one of the big things that the clients say to me that they think is a difference is that the program really focuses on both criminal and addictive thinking, so it’s not just the addictive thinking that they might have in another treatment program; they’re focusing on how those two interplay and how that got them into trouble. So we really try to help them always be looking at “What are they thinking?” as well as whether there are addictive patterns.

Len Sipes: You know, when I explain this to people, because I’ve done three stints in terms of dealing with offenders directly – jail, or job corps, doing gang counseling when I was putting myself through college after leaving the law enforcement community, and running group in a prison system – and to explain to people that you have to reorient the individual’s thinking patterns through cognitive-behavioral therapy or what we used to call ‘thinking for a change’ to get people to rethink how they look at life, rethink how they deal with problems, rethink how they process the information that’s in front of them. People who are not part of this process look at me as if I have five heads. “What do you mean? I learned at age five not to beat somebody with a stick if they made me angry, and you mean to tell me that you’ve got to take adult men, or adult women, and teach them that that’s probably not the best way to resolve a problem?” And my response to that is, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” that you have to sometimes train a lot of individuals to think through what it is that they do, and once they develop a different way of thinking through a problem, they don’t revert back to their violent or nasty ways of doing things, and they don’t necessarily go back to doing drugs, because there is an alternative. Now, am I in the ballpark of being right?

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, could I jump in there for a second, Kim.

Len Sipes: Yeah, please.

Lonnie Cleland: Len, I think Polk County historically has a perfect example of that. As part of our project, we have the University of Iowa’s Consortium for Substance Abuse Research and Evaluation doing criminal thinking assessment so that each of the offenders in the project, the providers of the service give them the criminal thinking test during treatment or admission, and then it’s also followed up later on. What we found – I think it was 2003 or 2004 – was that the criminal thinking scales changed drastically a month after they got out of jail. And so, as a result, the projects were able to adjust their treatment – the frequency, the intensity, the kinds of things that they discussed with the offenders in outpatient treatment – as a way of once again readdressing those criminal thinking kinds of things. You’re absolutely correct. You have to reinforce this at all points, in my opinion.

Len Sipes: And this program is basically based on the individual offender facing a criminal charge, going before the judge, and making a plea either on a pre-trial basis or on a post-trial basis, agreeing to stay within these four jails for a certain amount of time, and then to continue that treatment in the community. That’s pretty much the agreement. They go and they’re sanctioned by a judge and the judge remands them to this treatment program and it’s something that they must complete, and in some cases, the charges are waived or done away with, and in some cases, they continue during a probationary period. Am I correct?

Kim Brangoccio: That’s correct. That’s how it works.

Len Sipes: Okay, cool. All right. And basically, you’ve done about 2000 offenders, 2000 clients throughout that time, correct?

Lonnie Cleland: It’s probably up around 2600 now. Because of some funding problems we had about a year and a half ago, we had to reinitiate the evaluation project, and so we had to start it over, and I think we have – I was talking to the evaluators just a few days ago – I think we’ve got 800 more in the project at this point.

Len Sipes: Wow, that’s amazing.

Lonnie Cleland: But those results, because we had to start it over, those results are still sort of in process.

Len Sipes: Okay. And to go with the results, this is one-year follow-up, but this is a self-assessment on the part of an offender, basically through an interview process done by an outside agency. 78.5% were clean, 91.9% had not been arrested, and 68.2% were employed on a full-time basis, correct?

Lonnie Cleland: Full or part time, yes.

Len Sipes: Full or part time. Now, those are amazing results.

Kim Brangoccio: Yes they are.

Lonnie Cleland: Yes they are.

Leesa McNeil: We think so.

Len Sipes: Congratulations. Congratulations to the three of you and congratulations to everybody involved. Those are amazing results. Before getting involved in the larger question of the take-aways – what are the things that the rest of us in the criminal justice system can learn from all of this – in essence, you have these participants, they’re basically successful. And this evaluation is focusing on the people who’ve completed the program – it is cognitive-behavioral therapy based, but you provide lots of other services, both inside the institution and out in the community. But the interesting thing about all this is that it’s done within a jail environment, and being exposed to a jail when I was with the Maryland Department of Public Safety at the Baltimore city jail, which is one of the biggest in the country, I was like blown away by the complexity of running a jail. I mean, a prison is relatively simple and straightforward and easy compared to tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of individuals coming into and out of the jail in a rapid-fire fashion. They’re coming into the booking center, if the booking center is within the jail. Any jail is chaotic. Any jail is just an immensely complicated place to run, and the fact that you were able to produce this sort of a program and have these sort of results within the jail setting, I think are enormous. But am I right? The jail is just a difficult place to do this sort of thing.

Leesa McNeil: Oh, it’s very difficult, Len. This is Leesa. Space is an issue, because you need to find space where you can kind of isolate the defendants that you want to participate in the program. As you know, jail space is at a premium. The lack of jail space is what actually prompted our county to be very anxious to get to the table to get some better outcomes, because overcrowding was an issue. And through a series of programs, you know, here we are six years later. We’re aren’t facing building a new jail, so -

Len Sipes: And every government administrator who is listening to this program, their ears just perked up. So you were able to avoid building a facility because of this program.

Leesa McNeil: Well, not just this program. We have a group of programs, and that’s one of the keys to success in terms of a walk-away, I think, is you need to have a collaborative group that supports the bigger offender population in terms of working to get better outcomes for them. We have a drug court, we have a mental health court, and now we have this Jail-Based Treatment program. And we attribute our success to not building a new jail to the combination of those programs and the collaboration, that all of the players came to the table and worked to make them all a success.

Len Sipes: We’re halfway through the program. I do want to give the website for this particular program: www.idph.state.ia.us and search for jail-based programs. I’m going to repeat that one more time, but in the show notes, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll have the web address that goes directly to the publications that address the Iowa Jail-Based Substance Treatment program project. Stumbling over that. Again, it is www.idph.state.ia.us. Search for jail-based programs. Our guests today are Lonnie Cleland. He is the program planner, Iowa Department of Public Health. Leesa McNeil, District Court Administrator for Woodbury County, Iowa. And Kim Brangoccio – she is the clinical director for United Community Services. The program is brought to you, once again, by the National Criminal Justice Association – www.ncja.org. Okay, Leesa, you were talking about taking about take-aways, and that’s exactly where I want to go with this, is that there are people throughout the country who are saying, “Eh, the jail is just not the setting to do clinical-based programs.” Or they’re saying, “No, it’s just too expensive,” or they’re going to throw a lot of reasons up as to why they can’t do what they want to do, so what would you say to them?

Leesa McNeil: I would say the take-away is that it is key to have program evaluation, because that shows it’s a success. And when people say we can’t afford to do this, we can’t afford not to. Everybody knows that to house a prisoner for a year costs $25,000 plus, depending on the jurisdiction. We can show that treatment of an individual for a fourth of that amount can keep a person out of prison, and so when the community says, “Why are we paying for treatment for these people?” it’s like, “Well, would you rather pay for them to be in an institution in the future for how many years?” And now we’re turning them out and they’re paying their child support, they’re keeping jobs, they’re staying clean. We’re not building jails. Those things are expensive. I think when we look at the human cost, the taxpayer cost, and unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of studies that pull all that together for the taxpayer to see, but that is the true savings. And so, not only saving the person from a horrible life in terms of abuse, but saving the taxpayers and saving our future workforce, saving future families, all that. You can’t compare the cost.

Kim Brangoccio: Len, this is Kim, and I would also add to that the fact that it really does affect future generations. Many of the clients that we see in the jail, they have young children. And if they turn things around because of their treatment, their kids are way less likely to end up in jail. And right now, as it stands in our jail, there are many, many people that their grandpa was there, or their father was there, their mother was there, and if we can stop that cycle, it helps into the future.

Leesa McNeil: Again, add the cost of foster care. Oh, my god.

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, and we haven’t – we’ve actually, Len, done a cost analysis of this project and compared the cost of this project versus the cost of prison, which is where many of these offenders would end up without the project.

Len Sipes: Right, correct.

Lonnie Cleland: The average daily cost for these four counties is $30.19 per offender. The average prison daily cost is $64.00. So we’re saving the state taxpayers $34.00 per offender, per day.

Len Sipes: Basically, we want tax burdens to become taxpayers. We want non-parents to become parents. We want to reduce the odds, which according to research, are very high, of the children of offenders – instead of them continuing the ways of their parents and continuing within the criminal justice system – we’re trying to reach them as well, through their parents. So this is from an economic point of view, from a crime control point of view, from a fiscal responsibility point of view, this seems to be a win-win situation.

Kim Brangoccio: Yep.

Leesa McNeil: Mm-hmm.

Lonnie Cleland: I agree.

Len Sipes: Then the other issue is that administrators who are listening to this are basically saying, “Leonard, you could tell me that an investment of $5,000,000 will give me the goose that lays the golden egg, and eventually, those golden eggs will more than make up for that $5,000,000. I don’t have the money.” And how many times have I heard from administrators throughout the country, “Leonard, what is it that you don’t understand about the fact that I don’t have the money?”

Leesa McNeil: Well, you’ve got to ask them, “Do you have the money to build a new jail?” And our community said no. And that is why we, I think, as administrators and people who are working in the system need to help people understand there is a cost to doing nothing. And people have to be educated about that cost and we have to get decision makers to say, “This isn’t just a program we should wait for the feds to come and solve; this is a program that affects every county in the nation.”

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, and Leesa and Kim, I’m wondering if you might not agree that the first step is just getting everybody to the table and getting information out, but also having a conversation about, okay, let’s talk about what some of the options are that are out there.

Kim Brangoccio: Yeah, I think if you do that, if you have a conversation with everyone involved, there may be some other ways to get it started without the jail just having to fund it, or the community, or maybe a treatment program would be able to utilize some of their dollars in the jail, doing treatment with those folks, and it’s just a change of site. Or maybe there’s some arrangements that can be made where the services that are already being provided in another way, just the dollars could be shifted a little so that they could start a jail program, and then once you see the success, it really does prove itself and the money can be easier to find.

Leesa McNeil: Len, this is Leesa. That’s just one of the walk-aways. You have to have a good evaluation, or you won’t be able to prove that you’re doing the kinds of things we’re doing.

Len Sipes: Bingo. That’s exactly where I was going, Leesa. The point is that you can prove your impact. The great majority of the programs out there that are similar to yours don’t have an evaluation, so they really can’t prove their impact. I mean, one of the ways they’re proving their impact, by the way, is in lieu of a formal evaluation, is that the jail population seems to go down, or seems to be steady, so they don’t have to build another jail, and without the evaluation, you never know if it was attributable to your program or not, but they’re happy with that. They’re just tickled pink that they do not have to invest several hundred million dollars to construct a new jail and a million – oh, I’m sorry, probably I’m going to guess $50,000,000 a year to maintain it. They’re just tickled pink that that is the result, but it’s more than that, is what you just said before. It’s less crime, it’s more kids being taken care of. It’s just a win-win situation across the board, but yet the average county administrator in the United States is not jumping up and down to do these programs.

Kim Brangoccio: Yeah, and I think that’s why we’ve got to make the case.

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, one of the benefits of evaluation is not just the long-term benefit of being able to show that these projects save money or that they have a social benefit, but it’s also being able to move more efficiently, more effectively, when you get a snapshot of how a project is working. As I pointed out earlier, finding out that criminal thinking increases a month after people are released from jail has a powerful affect on being able to adjust the treatment program quickly and to be able to keep the social impact of those folks at a minimum. And so the evaluation component can also help you be more flexible and faster and meaner when it comes to successfully treating these folks.

Len Sipes: Right, because the process of evaluation, a third of the way through, will show some success and some problems, so thereby you address the problems, because you were evaluating the program from the very beginning. Is there something in the water in Iowa that causes everybody to sit at the same table? We did another show with the National Criminal Justice Association about a jurisdiction in New York City, Red Hook, where the judge got everybody together and had fabulous results. It’s that sense of – and it’s funny, the President’s Commission on Crime and Justice back in the ’60s made this point – and in my forty years in the criminal justice system, I haven’t seen many examples of everybody coming together and sitting at the same table and cooperating for the common good, so what’s in the water out there in Iowa that calls in four counties and calls to everybody to sit at the same table and to share resources and to try to do something for the common good?

Leesa McNeil: Len, this is Leesa, and I’ll pipe in to start the conversation on that topic. And that is, in our community, it took two things. We had a jail overcrowding crisis where we were under federal court supervision to do something or build a new jail. And we had a judge who worked with me and stepped up to the table and said, “I’ll help lend credence to getting everybody to the table.” And as you know, Leonard, when a judge says, “Come to a meeting,” everybody comes. Well, once we got people there, we kind of semi-formally organized ourselves and made some agreements about future meetings, and the groups hung with it over ten years now. And they see the benefit, after we start the process going to making these productive meetings and that we’re talking about things that affect them. And one of our collaborative groups – we have twenty-two different criminal justice entities, or entities that affect the criminal justice system – that come to the table on a regular basis. And it’s just to hear about, well, “What’s going on? What are the problems? Who’s doing what? How is that going to impact me? What am I doing that’s going to impact everybody else?” And it gives a forum for sharing, and then it creates a synergy unto itself.

Len Sipes: And more and more judges, Leesa, are taking center stage, and I’m very happy to see that, because judges traditionally have found that their role, in terms of separation of powers, the tri-partied sense of you have the executive branch, you have the legislative branch, and you have the judicial branch, and the judicial branch should not intermingle with the other two. And that seems to be falling by the wayside, and when judges take the lead, they seem to have a powerful impact on the rest of us.

Leesa McNeil: Yep, it’s working in Iowa.

Len Sipes: Lonnie, you were trying to get in here.

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, I think also sheriffs are more interested than they used to be. I think they’re seeing more of the impact of high levels of drug and alcohol use in their jails – the offenders getting into jail and having that history. And the word is starting to get around that when we can intervene with those folks successfully, then they’ve got some ideas about, “Well, okay, maybe we can do this too.” But I think the important part is understanding that we have to go to folks right from the start with information, as Leesa said, with data, with “Here’s how much it’s costing you folks to not do anything.”

Len Sipes: Well, it’s my hope that jail administrators throughout the country, or county administrators, will hear this program and say, “Well, son of a gun, if they can do it, I guess we can do it. It’s worth the conversation.

Lonnie Cleland: Yeah, but you know, it’s not easy. Kim, do you remember back in the early stages of the Polk County project, folks, you know, that was a struggle.

Kim Brangoccio: It was.

Lonnie Cleland: Getting folks together.

Kim Brangoccio: It was lots and lots of meetings, initially, trying to get people at the table, just us going to lots of different places and talking with public defenders and the county attorney’s office and going to roll call and really trying to talk with everybody about the results of this outcomes-based, evidence-based practices and that it would really be helpful. But it was very tricky at first.

Len Sipes: Well, we are out of time, and I do want to thank the three of you and the National Criminal Justice Association for bringing this program to our attention, and to congratulate the three of you and everybody involved with the Iowa Jail-Based Substance Treatment project. I mean, what you guys have accomplished, especially within a jail setting, is nothing short of miraculous. And you’ve got the data to prove it, and you have the organization in four counties to support it. And the fact that it’s both jail-based and community-based is, I think, extraordinarily impressive. Ladies and gentlemen, our guests today, Lonnie Cleland, program planner with the Iowa Department of Public Health; Leesa McNeil, District Court Administrator for Woodbury County, Iowa; and Kim Brangoccio, clinical director of United Community Services. Again, the program brought to you by the National Criminal Justice Association, www.ncja.org. I will have the exact address for the report on the Iowa program in the show notes, but for the moment, if you would go to www.idph.state.ia.us and simply do a search for jail-based programs, you’re going to be able to find exactly what it is that we’ve been talking about for the last half hour. Ladies and gentlemen, again, we really appreciate the fact that you are so influential and coming to us with lots of comments about what it is we can do, shouldn’t do, suggestions and criticisms about the program. Leonard.sipes@csosa.gov is my direct email address. Or you can go to media.csosa.gov and comment on there, or you can follow us via Twitter at twitter.com/lensipes, and I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

- Audio ends -

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Corrections-Prisons, Courts, Criminal Justice, Drug Treatment, Pre-sentence Reports, Reentry, What Works

Alliance of Concerned Men-DC Public Safety-200,000 Requests a Month

May 18, 2010 By Len Leave a Comment

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

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

This radio program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2010/02/alliance-of-concerned-men-dc-public-safety-200000-requests-a-month/

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

- Audio begins -

Len Sipes: From our microphones in downtown Washington, DC, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We’re beginning to do a series, and we’ve been requested in fact by listeners, to do a series when the impact of community organizations and what community organizations bring to the game in terms of crime control, so we’re about to do that – a couple in DC, a couple throughout the United States. Today I’m really pleased to have Tyrone Curtis Parker. Tyrone is extraordinarily well known within the DC community. He’s extraordinarily well known in terms of the former offender community throughout the United States. He is the Executive Director of the Alliance of Concerned Men, which is a 501(c)3, if anybody out there has any money, non-profit organization. Tyrone Curtis Parker comes from the neighborhoods of Washington, DC. He grew up here. When he came out of the prison system, Tyrone wanted to restore the communities that he saw around him to a better shape, a better place. To do that, the Alliance of Concerned Men does a wide variety of things. I’m just going to go over them briefly – gang intervention, substance abuse, life skills, leadership, after school programs, even programs in terms of younger individuals who abscond from the care of juvenile justice facilities. Tyrone says the bottom line for all of this is public safety, and I couldn’t agree with him more on that and the input of the larger community. Before we get on to our conversation with Tyrone, our usual commercial – I want to thank everybody for all of their letters, cards, phone calls, e-mails, you name it, we get it. If you want to get in touch with us directly, you can do so via e-mail. It’s Leonard.sipes@CSOSA.gov or you can follow me via Twitter, that’s twitter.com/lensipes no break. Back to Tyrone Curtis Parker. Welcome to DC Public Safety.

Tyrone Parker: Thanks a million for having me, Leonard.

Len Sipes: You know, this is interesting, Tyrone, because we were having the usual discussion that I have with people who have been previously incarcerated, that words are extraordinarily powerful and that this whole issue of previously incarcerated people, which I don’t disagree at all that that’s the way we should frame the conversation, but the vast majority of the people out there are going to say, oh, you’re talking about ex-offenders. You’re talking about ex-cons. You’re talking about whatever it is, and those are words that you all feel have a negative concept and hold the ex-offender community down, correct?

Tyrone Parker: No question about it. I think when we begin to look at the terminology of ex-offender, jailbird, convict, terms such as that have a strong tendency of basically retaining the person’s spirit, and this is the common denominator. To be able to uplift this population, so they can feel that they are a part of the greater world, the bigger world, and make contributions to it.

Len Sipes: But you do understand that even the most politically correct people out there, especially newspaper reporters, do refer to former offenders as former offenders or as ex-offenders?

Tyrone Parker: No question about it. I understand that it’s a living and learning situation, and that we’ve got to educate individuals how to address this population.

Len Sipes: The Alliance of Concerned Men – how many people are we talking about who are part of this?

Tyrone Parker: All right. Now, we’re talking about a staff of about 45 individuals.

Len Sipes: Yeah, it’s not a small group.

Tyrone Parker: Not at this point. We’ve been able to basically bring individuals in that have a commitment to their community to make a transformation there, Leonard.

Len Sipes: But are most of these people previously incarcerated people?

Tyrone Parker: No question about it. I would say, Leonard, that particular staff, about 75 percent of our working staff is previously incarcerated persons.

Len Sipes: Now what happens with this individual? He or she comes out of the prison system and the whole idea is to work within the community to take that individual’s knowledge, take that individual’s power, to take that individual’s savvy if you will, and apply it to people who are struggling themselves in terms of substance abuse or in terms of substance abuse or in terms of crime or in terms of violence, and to directly intervene in their lives and help them find another way. That’s the bottom line, correct?

Tyrone Parker: I think you’re correct. We look at it from the perspective that the solution is in the problem, that we’ve got to begin to understand exactly what the solutions are and therefore begin to deal with that from that perspective. Leonard, we have been extraordinarily successful because we work with a number of prisons around the country where we have our programs. With our Concerned Fathers program, rebuilding,

Len Sipes: Wait a minute. Let me back up. Concerned Fathers program?

Tyrone Parker: Yeah.

Len Sipes: Okay. How many persons are you working with?

Tyrone Parker: Basically at this point about five different prisons across the country.

Len Sipes: Wow, that’s quite a bit. So what’s the message there, in terms of Concerned Fathers?

Tyrone Parker: The term is that a man’s responsibility is not relinquished upon confinement. That’s the concept – to be able to rebuild that man doing the time that he’s incarcerated so he understands what his total responsibilities are, and it’s not just a matter of doing time and not making a contribution. We begin the rebuilding process upon that man coming into the facilities and becoming a part of the movement that’s in those particular facilities to make a difference.

Len Sipes: And nobody’s going to disagree with that, certainly. www.AllianceofConcernedMen.com is the website. www.AllianceofConcernedMen.com. Tyrone, look – this is what I get the sense of decades of working with people coming out of the prison system. I worked with them directly and was a spokesperson in Maryland for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, so indirectly and directly when I used to work with folks in the street – is that they come out and they are totally overwhelmed by the process. Whether or not they want to go straight or whether or not they don’t want to go straight, maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is, is that they come out and things are so overwhelming to them, that it’s really difficult to put themselves on a proper footing. And maybe what your group does, and maybe what the faith-based groups do, and the other groups out there working with former offenders, maybe what they do is give them a sense of structure that helps them come to grips with the fact that they’re back in open society, and they still have that substance abuse problem, and they still have kids to take care of, and they still need a job, and they still have anger issues to deal with in terms of their own upbringing – at least what this does is to give them a foothold and people and a structure and an organization where they can basically begin that process of trying to find who they are and what they want to contribute. Am I right or wrong?

Tyrone Parker: You know what Leonard, I think to a very large degree you are absolutely correct. I think one of the components that the Alliance tends to look at is basically due to our own experiences. I’m previously incarcerated myself – still is on parole – have been on parole for the last 38 years of my life, so I understand the contents of what’s occurring in regards to the man himself, having lost a son also during the time I was incarcerated.

Len Sipes: You lost a son?

Tyrone Parker: I lost a son to gang violence. He was killed basically by being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I also think that due to my absentee, to be able to be a part of his life, also made a contribution,

Len Sipes: Well, that’s a lot of guilt to carry.

Tyrone Parker: Oh, well, I don’t think it’s guilt. I think it’s looking at situations and beginning to rebuild from what have occurred, what some folks would consider as bad, only transforming good from it. We all look at situations that we can actually prepare ourselves. It’s almost like throwing a tab in the ball, I think Leonard, and throwing that ball down on the ground. The harder you throw that ball on the ground the higher it would bounce.

Len Sipes: Well, yeah, but that sounds like pulpit preaching. The reality is that they’re coming here and they’re scared half to death. You know people say all the time, Leonard, stop it with this crap about former offenders and how they feel. We don’t care how they felt. They went to prison, they did something bad, they deserve their time. I don’t mind you doing programs about domestic violence, Leonard, and I don’t mind you doing programs about what you do with the police department and the other things that CSOSA does, but this ex-offender stuff starts getting on my nerves after a certain amount of time. And my response is, look, either we want them as being taxpayers or tax burdens, but to get them there involves a heck of a lot of hard work.

Tyrone Parker: You know, Leonard, I think you’re absolutely correct again. One of the things that actually occurred, they’re there to be punished and not for punishment, you know, the continuation of it, and I think that’s a key component because if you treat a person as though they are an animal, you do not treat them humane, then you produce someone that’s coming back out to make hazard on their own community.

Len Sipes: How many people in your experience, Tyrone, when they come out of prison system really are committed to the fundamental process of dealing with their addiction, reuniting with their kids, finding work, doing what the rest of us do on a day to basis? What percentage would you put on that total population who really want to make the change?

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard, this may be a biased reply, but I would easily say 99.9 and my reasons for saying that is at that point, when you find a man that actually comes out, he does not want to go back again to be treated like a dog or an animal in that perspective. So at the concept of the question, the large majority don’t ever want to go back, but as you said, the conditions of the world produce certain situations that individuals do not have the capabilities to be able to transform or to deal with, but this is when it becomes our obligation to be able to have programs put in place to begin to work with these individuals for public safety purposes if nothing else.

Len Sipes: The larger issue is, do we have all the programs necessary? Do we have all the programs put in place to deal with mental health, to deal with substance abuse, to deal with reuniting fathers with their kids, to find employment – are all those programs in place?

Tyrone Parker: You know, Leonard, no, no to a very large degree. However, is it on the agenda? When we look at emergency situations, we look at the chicken flu, the pig flu, emergencies that are occurring, and you begin to direct resources to deal with the public tragedy. This is a public tragedy. When you look at the District of Columbia, young men between the ages of 18 and 35, one out of every two is under some form of judiciary restrainment. Nationally, one out of every three is under some form of judiciary restrainment. This is a sin that’s occurring in regards to this population.

Len Sipes: And people would say that it’s terribly wrong for it to be that way. On the flip side, you have lots of people that would say, you know, Leonard, that’s why we have public schools. All the person had to do was to go to school, graduate from school, get himself a trade, stay away from drugs, stay away from crime, and he wouldn’t be in that set of circumstances to begin with. So in a competing world, the world competes every day. It’s Haiti or it’s taking care of our elderly citizens or taking care of our youngest citizens or putting money into schools, or putting money into former offenders. Different people are going to say, you know, Leonard, they had a wonderful opportunity, the government gives them that opportunity, and they just chose not to take it. Why am I going to be that concerned about them?

Tyrone Parker: Leonard, you remind me of my grade school teacher who used to always say the right thing at the right time. However, Leonard, I think when we start looking at collaborative damage in regards to an individual, once you get a charge and once you actually indict them for anything, and given the sinners, for the rest of your life you pay for that one situation that had occurred. That’s the first component of this all. That’s why we begin to look at language, why language is so very important. How do we begin to reverse these situations? Sure, opportunities were given. Sure, somebody slipped and fell, but should that be a comma for the rest of their lives? In this society, this is the point that we’re at.

Len Sipes: And that’s really the component that we’re talking about. I think all of us – now, I’ve never robbed anybody nor have I ever raped anybody. I have a hard time with, “There, but for the grace of God, go I,” but I have done and virtually everybody has done things where they could find themselves serving some time in prison or jail, even drinking and driving, when you’re younger and you’re stupid. The question becomes, okay, so the person did more than that. Is it within society’s larger, best interest to have that hanging that person’s head for the rest of their lives?

Tyrone Parker: Leonard, there are very few things that individuals did that should be held over their heads for the rest of their lives. You’re basically taking away all of the rights of a human being in the contents of labeling him or of the collaborative concept. This person can no longer vote. He can no longer get employment. I mean, how’s it the whole nine?

Len Sipes: I have a friend of mine – I wouldn’t call him a friend – an associate that I’ve known for years, did a series of armed robberies, served time in the Maryland prison system, and he now sells insurance. He now makes more money than you and I put together. I’ve been to his house – beautiful home, beautiful kids, beautiful wife, beautiful cars – ex-offender, scared half to death that people will know that background. And the thing is, what he’s told me is that look, I can be one of the down and outers. I can be one of the people that constantly goes back to prison, and if the taxpayer wants to spend all that money on me then that’s fine, but I’m putting so much money back into the tax base by being employed and buying all these things and being as successful as I am. That’s an extreme example, but that is the heart and soul of it. What do we want from people?

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard, and I don’t know if we have the time,a very brief story. We did a rally for ex-offenders, previously incarcerated persons, across the street from the White House maybe about four years ago, and this guy had a beautiful picture. Actual fact. It was himself and his son, dressed up in old, traditional jail clothes, and they had a ball and chain that they had actually made with a cross. Maybe the cross had to be about an eight-foot cross, and on that cross they had a sign, and it had Christians have some redemption for me, have some mercy for me. Christians have some mercy for me. I think that’s so symbolic in the context of showing redemption and showing compassion and showing concern for individuals. When do we get to the point that we have that in place and begin to reach out?

Len Sipes: And what would be the impact, indeed, if we did have the capacity to deal with everybody? What would be the impact on public safety? What would be the crime rate? If you had the 800,000 or so people who come out of the prison system in this country every year, back into their communities, if they all had the wherewithal applied to them, in terms of mentors like your organization does in terms of the services that your organization provides, in terms of job training, job assistance, mental health issues, substance abuse issues, a place to live, and a faith-based person there to guide them and to ride them hard if necessary. If they had all of that, what would it mean for the safety of the average citizen? That’s what it comes down to, correct?

Tyrone Parker: That’s exactly what it comes down to.

Len Sipes: And that’s the larger question. I want to reintroduce our guest today. It is Tyrone Parker, the Alliance of Concerned Men, an extraordinarily well known group in Washington, DC, and certainly a group with a national reputation within the reentry community. www.AllianceofConcernedMen.com, a 501(c)3, which means your contributions are tax deductible. So let’s get back to Tyrone, and so that is, I guess Tyrone, that is the larger issue. If you’re saying that 90 percent of all offenders and more, when they come out of the prison system don’t want to come back, and that’s been my experience at the same time, but they’re back on the street, they’re not,it’s not that they don’t want to work. They’re not quite sure how to go about it and they start hanging with folks on the corner, and they start passing a reefer, and they start being loud, and the neighbors get ticked off, and they call the police, and boom – this person is back in the system almost overnight. Now what I’m describing is that unusual?

Tyrone Parker: No, not at all. I think it reminds me of this great holiday that just got through celebrating, Martin Luther King, and Martin makes mention of it’s one thing to give a beggar a quarter, but it is another thing to deal with the system that has created this beggar. So I think as we begin to look at how do we come out of this maze, we’ve got to also look at means to be able to create a safer community, a healthier family, and a better person. This becomes the common denominator. I find it difficult for individuals to be able to tell me anytime this country can go to the moon or be able to tell me where there is war in Africa or any other country underneath the ground, cannot tell me how to deal with this impact of incarceration at the numbers that are occurring.

Len Sipes: Every night they go home. Every night the average citizen who,they are making the decision as to whether or not to fund this or not fund it. Every night that person goes home and they watch the 6:00 news and they watch the 11:00 news and they watch the litany of man’s inhumanity against man, and you and I both know that the term ‘former offender’ or whatever, previously incarcerated person, was responsible for that crime and people say, ah, if I’ve got money to give, it’s going to go to the Red Cross for the Haitian Relief Fund. I’m sorry – I just don’t have all that compassion for a group that is so responsible for harming the larger society. Is that not what they say? Is that not the reality as to why we don’t have more resources for former offenders?

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard, I think it’s also in the concept of it’s easier for individuals to get resources to be able to retain or to jail this population in the contents of priorities. I think that, Leonard, when you start looking at priorities in this country, you start looking at is it more beneficial for us to channel our money into bombs and planes and defense than it is into human services?

Len Sipes: Okay, but they’re going to say daycare, they’re going to say programs for the elderly, they’re going to say all sorts of other things beyond money for former offenders.

Tyrone Parker: And you’re absolutely correct, but the question that I ask next is what type of society do they really want?

Len Sipes: Okay, but that’s a really interesting question. Do they want safety or don’t they want safety, because there seems to be enough research out there now that indicates, and it’s not all uniform and it doesn’t march in cookie cutter lockstep fashion, and it’s not like the reductions are in the 70 to 80 percent range. They’re closer to the 10 to 20 percent range, but if you can have a 20 percent impact on individuals coming out of the prison system in any city in this country, that 20 percent of them are no longer involved in crime, in fact they’re now working and taking care of their kids and taxes, that’s a huge impact on public safety. That’s a huge impact on money we don’t have to spend in terms of taking care of kids who have no father.

Tyrone Parker: And again, Leonard, you are absolutely correct. I think when you start looking at the impact of programs that have really made an impact in regards to public safety you’ve got to look at the District of Columbia. We’re celebrating here a 45-year low in regards to homicides in this particular city. I know when the Alliance first started homicides were almost at 100 a year.

Len Sipes: And you are all out there on the streets night after night after night working with these communities, working with people who are ready to go to war with each other, and sitting down and basically saying no. Look my man, there’s a better way of doing it and this is how, and somehow, someway, you’re having an impact.

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard, that’s because we put everything on the table. Every means of resource was actually put into that equation. We utilize even the guys that are locked up to be able to help us in regards to facilitating truce, because we understand their impact in regards to their reputations and their relationships and their love for their community, so why not take that energy level and direct it into the best interest of public safety for that man’s family and the community on the greater good?

Len Sipes: And this is something that the ex-offender community, the previously incarcerated person community, this is the community that’s leading this.

Tyrone Parker: Absolutely, because it’s there. One of the things that has occurred, Leonard, is that we’ve come to realize who is really feeling the brunt of this particular impact in regards to violence in our communities, and by process of elimination, it’s us. I’ve seen times at federal prisons, Otisville, New York, federal prison was willing to do a conference with the Metropolitan Police to deal with gang violence. I’ve seen times where this population has negotiated to help us with truce. I’ve seen the demonstration of public safety in healthy building of communities in the prison itself. They’re in these facilities waiting to be utilized. Our greatest challenge is how do we include them in the conversation to utilize the resources that are already there.

Len Sipes: So the bottom line is that it’s don’t give me a dime, let me make your life safer?

Tyrone Parker: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: What you’re saying is that we’re not here for a handout. We’re here for to take leadership.

Tyrone Parker: And for redemption as well.

Len Sipes: Oh, I understand that, but there’s such a huge difference between give me money for programs versus let me take leadership of my own life – by the way, help me out in the process of doing that, but we’re actively involved and we’re effective.

Tyrone Parker: Absolutely. It’s a win-win situation.

Len Sipes: Yes it is.

Tyrone Parker: Nobody loses. I’ve basically working with up in Otisville, and these guys have produced a document basically stating, select the best prison program that there is in regards to public safety, and they had a list of criterias that would actually produce who would be the best. Leonard, when you start looking at our population of men that are locked up, willing to come forth to create programs that would be in the best interest of the community as well as themselves? Man, how can anybody lose with that type of a concept on the table?

Len Sipes: But it’s interesting. It’s why we do these shows, Tyrone, is because the average person is simply not exposed to this. What the average person is exposed to is channel four. I’m not picking on channel four – it could be channel five, could be,doesn’t matter. Every night after night after night and people are saying, I’m getting sick to God of crime and what it’s doing to my community, and by the way, the people responsible for it I’m not favorably predisposed towards them. Isn’t that the bottom line? The former offender community, the previously incarcerated person gets far more negative publicity than positive publicity.

Tyrone Parker: And that’s simply because we had not did well in regards to PR. We have not did well to be to allowed for the successes that we have had in our community. We have not did well in regards to communication and public relationships to individuals. We have not did well at all in that particular area, but one thing that I know – the case is there that can be presented to be able to show another side of this particular population.

Len Sipes: There are organizations throughout the country that are former offender, previously incarcerated person operated. Delancey Street comes to mind, and I studied Delancey Street when I left the police and was in college and studying criminology, and that concept goes back 25 years of former offenders basically saying, we are taking charge of ourselves and we’re going to accept other former offenders, previously incarcerated people into our community and they’re going to have to follow our roles, but if you basically can toe the line and you basically can prove your worth, we will help you transform from tax burden to taxpayer. So this concept is not a new concept and people need to understand that, that it’s happening throughout the country in one way, shape, or form; it’s just not publicized.

Tyrone Parker: That’s what it is. You’re absolutely correct. No question about that. I think that when we begin to do a better job in regards to PR pertaining to this population here, then we’ll be able to basically see a transformation. The same thing has occurred in other great movements, when you start looking at the handicapped disabilities or different movements where they basically came together and began a whole campaign that transformed things.

Len Sipes: Well, we just have a couple of minutes left. I just want to reemphasize one thing – again, you’re free to criticize. I represent a parole and probation organization – federally funded thank God, parole and probation organization. We freely admit that we don’t have everything that we would like to have in terms of drug treatment and in terms of mental health treatment. The programs that we have are substantial and we are grateful to the taxpayers for doing them, but it is an issue of, not just with us but every organization in the country, whether it’s faith-based, whether it’s parole and probation, whether it’s community-based, it is a matter of resources. It is, is it not?

Tyrone Parker: Leonard, I heard you appropriately say, thank God.

Len Sipes: No, we’re federally funded. We have far more than most parole and probation agencies in this country. We have an entire wing of a hospital devoted to drug treatment that we have financed ourselves through the taxpayers.

Tyrone Parker: And it’s making a significant difference.

Len Sipes: Yes, it is. But the average parole and probation agency in this country doesn’t possess a dime for drug treatment, so we are lucky in the District of Columbia that we do have these resources that we can bring to the table, but the question is, is treating 25 percent of the high-risk population enough?

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard? As we begin to turn this ocean liner around, we’re getting a grip on it, even though all the ships may not come in or dock at the same time they’re still coming in. The key is that there is a model in place, which other jurisdictions can begin to look at and begin to build from in the contents of success, and I think the District of Columbia is that particular model at this particular point, because as you said, thank God the resources are there.

Len Sipes: At least in terms of federal resources, but again, we within the criminal justice system, we sit back and we recognize two things – (a) regardless to what we say and regardless of bluster and regardless of whatever confidence that we put on the table, it is the larger community that is going to make us or break us in terms of crime control, not the criminal justice system. And number two, it is groups like yours that are going to have an impact on people coming out of the prison system, not folks like us. It’s going to be the larger organizations that take responsibility, that step up to the plate, and who advocate and who convince people that this is something worth supporting.

Tyrone Parker: No question about it. I often say, Leonard, a healthy father makes a good family, a good family makes a strong community, and a strong community makes a great country, and this is the return fact on what’s occurring. Here in the District you have so many great organizations – Cease Fire, you have Clergy Police Community, you have [INDISCERNIBLE]. You just have a collaboration of excellent programs that have basically,maybe not been on the same page at the same time, but had the same goal, and the goal was public safety.

Len Sipes: And the bottom line and this is worth repeating one more time before we close out the program, in your opinion, is that the great majority of individuals coming out of the prison system don’t want to go back. Who would?

Tyrone Parker: No, there’s no question about it. The large majority of individuals that have come out these particular facilities don’t ever want to go back because they understand their family, they understand themselves, they understand their community, and they understand that they do not want to be treated like an animal.

Len Sipes: But the larger analysis is that somebody – it can’t just be the family. That person may need mental health issues, that person may have substance abuse issues, that person may have dropped out after the 8th grade and needs hard skills in terms of finding work or being trained for work – that’s the problem. Do we have that structure of not just programs, but of fellowship either from the faith community,when I say faith community, I don’t necessarily mean the Christian community. It can be the Islamic community, it could be the Jewish community, it could be anybody. The faith community. Sometimes they need big brothers and big sisters to guide them.

Tyrone Parker: You know what, Leonard, it’s no question about that, but I’m a thorough believer that this whole process begins with the community, but inside these correctional facilities where they can build capacity around themselves by support systems that’s already in place. The Alliance of Concerned Men is doing an extraordinary job with that. We have produced a manual that we feel can make a major difference, and that’s our common denominator. Let’s take a look at doing something out of the box.

Len Sipes: Our guest today has been Tyrone Parker, the Executive Director of the Alliance of Concerned Men. I’m going to repeat the Web address one more time, www.AllianceofConcernedMen.com. That’s all one word by the way. It’s a 501(c)3, which means whatever money that you have Mr. Rich Person sitting back and you’ve got $25,000 to spare, it is a tax deduction. I really want to express my appreciation to Tyrone, and hopefully he’ll come back in about four months or so to talk about other aspects of working with communities in Washington, DC, and in the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. Once again, thank you very much for your contacts and your suggestions and your criticisms. We don’t care – we’ll take them all. Reach me either through the comments box at media.csosa.gov, that’s how a lot of people do it, or they e-mail me directly at leonard.sipes@CSOSA.gov or follow me via Twitter at twitter.com/lensipes. I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

- Audio ends -

Terms: previously incarcerated people, ex-offenders, offenders, public safety

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Corrections-Prisons, Criminal Justice, Drug Treatment, Education and Vocational Assistance, Employment, Faith-Based Initiatives, Interviews with Policy Makers, Reentry

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Iowa Jail-Based Substance Abuse Treatment Project-NCJA-DC Public Safety

Alliance of Concerned Men-DC Public Safety-200,000 Requests a Month

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