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

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

[Video Begins]

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

Dr. Debra Kafami: Thank you.

Ashley McSwain: Thank you.

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

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

Len Sipes: Right.

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

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

Dr. Debra Kafami: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: In terms of the gender specific?

Dr. Debra Kafami: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Ashley McSwain: Yes.

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

Ashley McSwain: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley McSwain: Yeah, that’s correct.

Dr. Debra Kafami: Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Debra Kafami: And sharing information.

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

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

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

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

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

[Music Playing]

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

Dr. Willa Butler: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Talynthia Jones: You’re welcome.

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

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

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

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

Len Sipes: Wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Right.

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

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

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

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

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

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

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

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

Talynthia Jones: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes: Understood.  Completely understood.

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

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

Dr. Willa Butler: Yes.

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

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

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

[Video Ends]

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/02/women-offenders-our-place-dc-dc-public-safety-radio/

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

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Len Sipes:  From our nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host, Leonard Sipes.  Today’s program is going to be on women offenders, and we have two people who are true experts on the subject. We have Ashley McSwain. She is the executive director of Our Place D.C., www.ourplacedc.org, one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive women’s reentry program in the United States of America.  We also have Dr. Willa Butler.  Dr. Butler has been before our microphones before.  She’s in charge of women’s groups for my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.  We are a federal parole and probation agency here in the District of Columbia.  Before starting the show, what I want to do is to do something rather unusual, and that is to promote two events.  We generally do evergreen radio shows.  Well, we don’t really tag events or tie events to the radio shows, but these are important coming up.  February 5 on a Saturday in Washington DC, we have the Women’s Re-entry Forum, which is one of the reasons why we’re doing a radio show on women offenders, at the Temple of Praise, 700 Southern Avenue SE from 8:00 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon, February 5, this Saturday, Women’s Re-entry Forum at the Temple of Praise Church, 700 Southern Avenue SE from 8AM to 3PM, come out and join us if you like.  Also, the Citywide Re-entry Assembly, which is something my organization does every year, where we bring those people involved in faith based mentoring, the successful mentors and their mentees together for a celebration of the hundreds of offenders who have been through the mentoring program.  That is at the St. Luke’s Center, 4923 E Capitol Street SE from 6:30 in the evening to 9:00, come on out and join us for a wonderful evening, an exciting evening, it is something that you have to really experience.  Again, the Citywide Re-entry Assembly at, this Saturday – I’m sorry, Saturday, boy, I’m screwing this up!  Thursday, February 10, Thursday, February 10 from 6:30 to 9:00 in the evening, and before bringing the ladies onto the radio program, what I want to do is to go over some statistics in terms of women offenders, and these I find startling.  Number one, if you take a look at male and female offenders involved in state and federal prison systems, the percentage growth for women is stronger than it is for men, so more women are coming into the prison system in terms of a percentage basis than male offenders, and we need to talk on the radio program about that a little bit today.  But if you look at other federal research, whether it’s HIV, whether it’s mental health, whether it’s physical or sexual abuse, or whether it’s drug use, whether it’s family violence, it is startling as to the difference between men caught up in the criminal justice system and women caught up in the criminal justice system.  Women seem to have higher percentages of HIV, mental health, astoundingly higher percentages of sexual abuse.  There’s a big difference in terms of male and female offenders.  That’s one of the things that we want to talk about on the radio show today, and also, in terms of physical and sexual violence, nearly 6 in 10 women in state prisons had experienced physical or sexual abuse in the past.  6 in 10 women, and 7 out of 10 women involved in the correctional systems have minor children.  So, I’ve laid out the stats, I’ve laid out the upcoming events that are coming out, and now to get back to our true experts on this topic, Ashley McSwain and Dr. Willa Butler, and to Ashley and to Willa, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Willa Butler:  Great, thanks.

Ashley McSwain:  Hello.

Len Sipes:  Willa, I’m going to start out with you.  Now the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, our agency, we have a different focus now on women offenders.  We’ve decided to reorganize how this agency approaches women offenders.  Can you tell me a little bit about that and why we’re doing it?

Willa Butler:  Yes, I’m excited about it too.  What we’ve done, we’ve gone gender specific.  We have three teams now under the mental health branch, two mental health teams and one general supervision team that only supervise female offenders, and the purpose of going gender specific is to answer the needs that women have.  We say women are needy, but it’s not so much that they’re needy, it’s just that their needs have not been met, and over the years, the traditional counseling or any type of counseling or therapy, even treatment or supervision has been geared toward the male dominated group, which was not feasible for our female offender population, and now at this day and time, which is good that we are able to answer that, and it’s 17 critical factors of vulnerabilities that hinders women or barriers, when it comes to supervision and that type of growth, and then it’s, our groups that we have, we have our WICA, Women in Control Again, which are psychoeducational groups to address the needs that the women, and address their mental health needs and the substance abuse needs and any other type of need that they may have, because women come with a multi-facet of things that are of concern, and that’s what we’re doing today.  We’re addressing these needs, and one of them, the main thing is their pathways to crime, how did they get into this situation?  One thing we’ve learned how to have an understanding of, we have an understanding of how they got there.  Now we need to move and have an understanding of how to get them out of that situation, and that’s what we’re working on today by having a gender responsive program.

Len Sipes:  The organization is reorganizing.  CSOSA, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, we’re reorganizing.  We’re reorganizing around this issue of women offenders.  So is it to play catch-up with the services in the past that have been given more to males in the criminal justice system?  Is it a matter of catching up, or is it a matter that there seem to be more women coming into the incarcerative setting where women, on a percentage basis, there’s a huge difference between the sheer numbers of men and women going into the prison system.  I don’t want to mislead the audience, by and large numbers, it’s predominantly male offenders going into the correctional settings, but the percentage of female offenders is rising.  So is it that, is it playing catch-up, is that one of the reasons why we’re going through this big reorganization?

Willa Butler:  Actually, it’s both, Leonard.  We’re playing catch-up, not only playing catch-up, but we are designing a program to address their needs, and when we say playing catch-up, because women have always been in the criminal justice system, far back as the 17th and 18th century, but they’ve never been treated fairly.  They’ve been put in dungeons, cast away.  They’ve even been put in insane asylums.  It’s like, we don’t know what to do, we don’t know what to do with them.  It’s not like we don’t know, but it’s like, they just fail to address this.  It’s like, we, we’re always looked on as being insignificant, overlooked, not recognizable, and even today, because I’m talking about 17th, 18th century, even today, you look at how women are put in the federal institutions, and they wear men’s clothes, nothing is geared towards them.  But now we’re trying to respond to what the women need, and like I –

Ashley McSwain:  I also think there’s a social stigma component that has –

Len Sipes:  Right.  This is Ashley McSwain, the executive director of Our Place DC.

Ashley McSwain:  So there is a lot of shift towards women, but a lot of what plagued women offenders has been this stigma that comes with just being female, which suggests that women shouldn’t get into these kinds of troubles, and so we’re not providing the kind of services and supports, because they really, you know, they’re not the population that behaves this way, and so it makes it very difficult to go to ask for funding when society doesn’t think that, you know, there’s a problem.

Len Sipes:  Now I do want to reintroduce Ashley McSwain, she’s the executive director of Our Place DC, www.ourplacedc.org, and I do want to say that Our Place is one of the most, if not the most comprehensive re-entry program in the United States of America for women offenders, coming out of the prison system.  This is a one stop shop.  They go into the prisons way before the offender comes out of the prison system, they make their initial contacts in prison, they extend the invitations, they will take this individual, they will provide housing, they will provide clothing, they will provide food, you have to come in and work with them and obey the rules, needless to say, but they work with individuals piece by piece by piece, rebuild them as human beings, if you will, and then get them ready to go ahead for the re-entry program, part of it successful re-entry.  Ashley, your program is just amazingly comprehensive.

Ashley McSwain:  Yes, it is.

Len Sipes:  I understand why you do it that way, but you know, the criminal justice system is made up of a housing piece here and a drug or a substance abuse piece there, and a legal part of it to get legal assistance over there, you’ve got everything under your roof!

Ashley McSwain:  Well, when you approach it as a female issue or a gender specific issue, then all of those different components have to fit within the needs of the female offender, and so that’s what Our Place has done, and so we recognize that there are other organizations that are providing legal support, but a lot of them don’t understand the experience of being a woman and being in the criminal justice system and all of the myriad of obligations that they have to meet in the same way that Our Place does, and so that’s the reason why the services are so comprehensive, so when a woman is still in custody, we can begin to provide her with some guidance and support.

Len Sipes:  You know, now that we’ve done the introductions, and we’ve given a sense as to what both organizations are doing here in the District of Columbia, let’s get into a larger discussion of women offenders.  They come out 7 out of 10, according to national statistics, come out, they have children in the community.  The males don’t.  Now that alone is just such an incredibly big bridge to cross.  Not only do you have to deal with your own substance abuse, not only do you have to deal with your own issues, and a lot of these individuals have histories of being abused as children.  A lot of them have histories of sexual abuse, flat out sexual abuse from young ages.  Much higher than the percentages than males.  The rate of substance abuse is higher, the rate of substance abuse is higher, the rate of mental health problems is higher, then they come out, and then they have to reunite with their own children.  That, to me, is almost impossible.  Considering the problems that we have with male offenders, and we say, 50% go back to prison in three years, that’s a national statistic, 50% don’t, by the way, but 50% do, so if that 50% are going back to the prison system, male offenders and female offenders together, throw on the obligation of taking care of your kids seems to be almost insurmountable, especially in Washington DC’s economy.  Any, who wants to take a crack at that?

Willa Butler:  Well, let me get back, address the reuniting with the children situation.

Len Sipes:  And this is Dr. Willa Butler.

Willa Butler:  That is one thing of concern, because when they come out, the main thing is, their focus is trying to be reunited with their children, and the hard part is that sometimes the children have been adopted, or they’re in foster care, they’re not, they’re going through the process of trying to get their children back, and in some instances that they really can’t get them back because of what all has, they’ve gone through while they’ve been away, while they were incarcerated –

Len Sipes:  Somebody else has been mom and dad while they’re away, and in some cases, they haven’t really come into contact, direct contact with their children for years.

Willa Butler:  Years, and some of them don’t know their children –

Len Sipes:  That’s right.

Willa Butler:  And since, and it’s kind of hard, and when we talk about the different programs being integrated, which makes it even better for the women to come out and try to work together in not only getting their kids back, but also getting themselves back together again, when you talk about an integrated treatment modality, which is feasible for addressing all of their concerns.

Len Sipes:  But again, you go back to my larger question, and that is that it’s very difficult for male individuals to come out of the prison system and find work, even if their criminality is behind them, and we have people on our caseload, by the way, that have been, it’s been years since their last positive drug test.  It’s been years since their crime.  So they’re pretty much adhering to the rules, yet they still can’t find work.  Now you have a woman offender coming out with the same set of circumstances, although she’s got kids to raise.  I mean, there’s a certain point where you can [ph] pall up so many obstacles to the point where, for women offenders, it sometimes seems impossible for them to cross the bridge.  Ashley?

Ashley McSwain:  Well, when you start thinking about the fact that this is the experience of female offenders, and you start looking at taking a gender specific approach, those are the things that you factor and consider.  Some of the women have not only their own issues to deal with, but they have the issues that come with having children, and as long as we acknowledge that that’s a part of their reentry process, then we can provide the kind of supports that they need to move forward.  Prior to this dialogue, you know, people didn’t acknowledge that women coming home also had to now deal with the responsibility of taking care of their children, and so, I mean, this is a great conversation to have to begin to think about what are the interventions that are necessary to ensure that a woman does not recidivate, or that she does not fail.

Len Sipes:  And the other part of it, and I have to close in a couple seconds to reintroduce you, not close, but reintroduce the two of you before we go on with the rest of the program, is that most of the individuals, because of that history of being abused and neglected, pushed around, you come out, you have substance abuse issues, a lot of the women caught up in the criminal justice system have led very hard lives.  They don’t trust anybody.  They don’t trust me, they don’t trust either one of you, and yet both of you put women in groups and begin to break through those barriers.  That, my guess is that out of everything that we’re going to talk about that mistrust of the system, and both of you are in one way, shape, or form, part of the criminal justice system, breaking through that barrier is the hardest part.  Am I right or wrong?

Ashley McSwain:  Yeah, I would agree with that.  I mean, one of the things we try to do at our place is create a sense of community for the women.  I mean, it’s called Our Place for a reason, so that the women can get some support from each other, you know, and some hope for some differences or some changes.  I mean, that’s what the women are seeking.

Len Sipes:  All right.  Go ahead, Willa.

Willa Butler:  I sort of piggyback on your name, Our Place, and that’s kind of our perspective in what we did when we put all the women in one building, and it’s like our place now.  This is your home, and we’re here for you, and we try to present empathy and mutual respect and develop a type of rapport, and that relaxes them –

Len Sipes:  Yeah, but we can still put it back in prison.

Willa Butler:  Yeah.

Len Sipes:  I mean, it’s empathy, it’s rapport, but at what point –

Willa Butler:  – a little different.  Right now, we’re going with trying to be firm, holding them accountable, and being firm as well, but also less confrontational.  In other words, we’re trying to work within –

Len Sipes:  I understand.  I’m just pulling your chain.

Willa Butler:  You know, work with them, and let them know that they can really, they can really do this.  We’re moving more into motivating them for change and working on their recidivism and bringing it out, because it’s in them, and they just never had anybody to bring it out of them, and that’s what we’re doing today, just bringing something out of you that’s already there in a –

Len Sipes:  Want to reintroduce both of our guests.  Ashley McSwain, she is the executive director of Our Place DC, www.ourplacedc.org.  Ladies and gentlemen, somebody out there has got some money, somebody out there has got some deep pockets, and if you’re ever looking for an organization that desperately needs financial assistance, and an organization that produces incredibly good results, reuniting mothers with their kids, taking care of the kids, taking care of the moms, moms becoming taxpayers instead of tax burdens, this is the place where you need to devote a buck or two.  Our Place DC, www.ourplacedc.org.  Also in front of our microphones, Dr. Willa Butler, who’s funded by the Federal Government, as I am, so we don’t need your money.  Give it to Our Place.  She’s in charge of women’s groups for my organization, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, www.csosa.gov.  All right, ladies, back to the second half of the program.  Okay, so, okay, so you finally break through that barrier, that woman gives you, and sometimes, hard as nails barrier, and you finally break through, and the woman comes into either one of your groups and sees that the other women are being taken care of, and she opens up a little bit.  Once she opens up, she’s going to get involved in a history that would scare the bejeebies out of most human beings, and then you start getting into the psyche of the background of the individual, why they got involved in drugs, why they got involved in crime, why their behavior is so self-destructive, and once you’ve crossed that bridge, you have just wandered into an incredibly difficult arena, that all the problems that those individuals bring to the table in terms of their background.  Am I right or wrong?

Ashley McSwain:  Yeah, you’re right, I mean, but the objective is to really break it down into smaller pieces, because it can be very insurmountable when you start thinking about all of the life experiences that brought her to the moment that she’s there, so I mean, I wouldn’t recommend that we approach it from this broad, you know, place, excuse me.  Right now, we really deal with what the woman needs at the moment that she’s there with us, and then we build from there, and we often find that the women come in for one thing, but through our dialogue and conversation, she begins to identify that there are other needs and that there are other areas of support that could assist her as she moves forward.

Len Sipes:  Right.  She comes to Our Place for legal assistance, and maybe a place to stay for a while, and suddenly, she gets involved with the other groups, and the process begins.

Ashley McSwain:  That’s exactly right.  Oftentimes, they’re coming for employment, and there’s just some underlying legal stuff that has to be addressed, and she doesn’t have any clothing, so there are some very foundational things that she needs, and a lot of times, the women we see, they don’t know how to ask for what it is that they want.  They think that it’s safe to ask for a birth certificate, but there are so many other things that they really need that they don’t feel that they can ask for, but given the right setting, you know, they’ll begin to explore a little more about what it is that they really need.

Len Sipes:  And that becomes a key issue, actually, the right setting, because a lot of people, and when I respond to emails, and comments on these programs, a lot of people are saying to themselves, look, for the love of good god, Mr. Sipes, these are criminals.  What is it about the right setting?  I just want you to protect me.  That’s your job.  Protect me, protect me, protect me.  But one of the things that the research and our own experience has pointed out pretty clearly that, if you put a human being in the right setting where you hold them accountable for their actions, I mean, public safety is CSOSA’s top priority.  Protecting the public is CSOSA’s top priority, but if you’re going to break through those barriers that he or she brings to us and work on the reasons why they’ve spent the last ten years in a bottle, or why they spent the last ten years snorting, or why they spent the last ten years with a needle in their arm, they have to be in the right setting.  We’ve got to create an environment where they’re comfortable enough to talk about who they are and what they are.

Ashley McSwain:  Yeah, the research talks about women make changes through relationships, and so, I mean, as abstract as that might seem, you have to build relationships with women in order to build trust and in order for them to become accountable for the choices that they’ve made, and that’s our objective, is to help people become aware of who they are and how their choices have affected their past and how their choices will affect their future.

Len Sipes:  And the bottom line of all that, Ashley, is that it protects public safety.  If the woman is dealing with her substance abuse, dealing with her own history, she’s going out and getting a job, she’s reuniting with her kids, that makes her a thousand times less likely to go out and reengage in criminal activity, which protects you and me and everybody else.  So we talk about the right setting, the comfortable setting, but the flipside of that is what we’re talking about is public safety.

Ashley McSwain:  That’s right, and it’s everybody’s job to provide this level of support.  I mean, these women are your mothers and your sisters and your cousins, and you know, you certainly want to make sure they have the supports they need so that they can be productive, and we all can move forward.

Len Sipes:  Right, and we as taxpayers don’t have to constantly shell money out.  If they’re off of drugs, and they’ve got their kids, and the kids are taken care of, and they’re working, that’s exactly what everybody wants!  But it’s the right setting that gets us there, and the public needs to understand that.  It can’t all be hard on the offender, hard on the offender, there’s got to be a balance.  Willa, when I talk to the different people involved in your group and Marcea’s group, you know, they praise you and Marcea, and they praise the group process, because for the first time in their lives, they’re dealing with issues that have bedeviled them for their entire lives.  For the first time, they’re actually talking about who they are, what they are, and what they need to do to kick drugs, kick mental health issues, reunite with their kids, get a job, and it’s that group process that really does seem to bring all that out.

Willa Butler:  Yeah, during our group process, first of all, we start off with the question, who am I?  They have to identify who they are first.  They might, whatever they were a drug out of, an offender, an ex-offender, right now, this is what, who I am, but now I’m working on some things, and a lot of times, when women in group, a lot of things, they’ve never talked about before, and they’ve repressed their feelings, they’ve repressed everything that has happened to them, and then it comes out in group, and we start talking about it, and then we start being able to not only to talk about it, but to get them help, to get them treatment, and we talk a lot about, a lot of our women are mental health.  They have concurrent disorders, they have substance abuse disorders, they have mental health disorders, and we try to put them in a place where we can treat both of that, not only that, they suffer from, like I say, victimization.  A lot of them have never talked about the part that they’ve been raped before, I’ve been molested a few times, I’ve been raped a couple of times –

Len Sipes:  Or a lot of times –

Willa Butler:  Right, or a lot of times, and all of this comes out, but yet, we’re still able to give them the help and the resources that they need.

Len Sipes:  Now my favorite story about women offenders, and the real eye opener to me was when I was with when I was the director of public relations for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, which was law enforcement and corrections, and we’re training public affairs officers at a women’s minimum security prison, because they had a culinary arts program, and we could feed the different people who came for training.  So I’ve got people training, and I didn’t have anything to do for two hours, so I go out in the courtyard, and I light up my cigar, and those were those days where you could actually have a cigar in prison, and the women who started coming out to the courtyard to have their cigarettes, and they know me because I was in the media a lot, and they sat down and started talking with me, and there was a two hour session in that courtyard with those women offenders, and where they took me, it was like taking me to Mars and back, because they freely talked about their lives, and one person said, Mr. Sipes, you know what?  I don’t want to go home.  This is the first safe place I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m getting my GED, I’m getting my culinary arts certificate, I’ve never talked about my issues before, but now this is the first place I’m talking, here’s a human being who says I find prison to be safer than the real world.

Willa Butler:  Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.  You get three meals every day, you know where you’re going to sleep, you know, it’s unfortunate –

Len Sipes:  You know you’re not going to be abused.

Ashley McSwain:  Right, and that’s what I was going to say, because a lot of, the abuse started from the home, you know, and when, like I said, when women leave prison, you think it should be a happy time, but it’s like a road down perdition again, because there’s no change, and I’m going back to the same situation, a double up situation, I don’t have a place to stay, I don’t know where my children are, and if they’re there, somebody else is raising them, and –

Willa Butler:  And they don’t fit in.

Ashley McSwain:  Right, they don’t fit in.

Willa Butler:  And you know, we’re actually doing some research on that, and one of the things we’re finding is that the women, while they’re still in custody, they’re very hopeful, and three months after they’re there in the community, that declines.  I mean, it’s just, you know, the options are so limited, and that feeling of empowerment that they felt so excited about is reduced when the reality of not having housing and the options for employment, you know, they really set in, and so these women start out very hopeful.

Len Sipes:  And my guess is, and we’re going to wrap the program up very quickly, so any quick responses, my guess is, if Our Place DC did not exist, and Willa, if your groups here at CSOSA did not exist, I, my guess is that there are going to be thousands, and I’m not exaggerating, thousands of women would have been, went right back to crime, right back to the criminal justice system, would have cost taxpayers tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and the two of you together, and Marcea and everybody else involved in this program, I mean, you’ve saved lives, and you’ve saved literally thousands of lives.

Willa Butler:  Yes.  Yes, we do.  Right now, our place is really encouraging women to be literate, educated, be curious, knowledge, reading, I mean, that’s, we think that that’s also going to be part of their ability to be sustainable in the community.

Len Sipes:  All right.  And I just want to make the offer, I’m going to come over and wax your car, walk your dog, do whatever you need, if you get a check to Our Place DC, because the program is that worthy.  Our guest today, Ashley McSwain, executive director of Our Place DC, www.ourplacedc.org, www.ourplacedc.org.  Dr. Willa Butler, in charge of women’s groups here at CSOSA, www.csosa.gov.  I do want to remind everybody about the upcoming events that we have on Saturday, February 5.  We have the women’s re-entry forum, Temple of Praise, 700 Southern Avenue SE from 8AM to 3PM, it will be on our website, www.csosa.gov, and also on February 10, a Thursday, the Citywide Re-entry Assembly at St. Luke’s Church at 4923 E Capitol Street from 6:30 in the evening to 9:30 in the evening, to talk about successful mentors and mentees involved in our faith based program.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host, Leonard Sipes, watch for us or listen for us next time when we explore another very important topic in the criminal justice system.  I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today, we are here to talk about the violence reduction program here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. CSOSA is a federally funded parole and probation agency with responsibility for parole and probation issues in the great city of Washington, D.C. To talk to us about this program we have three extraordinarily interesting people. We have Zoë, and that’s not her real name. She is an individual under supervision of Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency to talk about her participation in the violence reduction program. We have Tanesha Clardy, and she is a community supervision officer, and we have Michelle Hare-Diggs, she is a treatment specialist, and to Zoë, and to Tanesha, and to Michelle, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Tanesha Clardy: Thank you.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Thank you.

Zoe: Thank you.

Len Sipes: All right. We’re going to start off with you, Michelle, and you’re going to explain what the violence reduction program is all about.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: The violence reduction program was put into place by CSOSA to, it’s to successfully help the offenders on probation to successfully complete parole and probation. There’s three phases to the group. Phase one kind of gets everybody comfortable with being in the group, comfortable with the group process, so we do a lot of, I guess I would say icebreaker exercises, which is treatment readiness exercises. That runs three weeks, and they come twice a week for three weeks, and then we move on to phase two, which is the meat of the program, and we do a whole slough of, we learn a whole slough of activities, and it’s not just violence. Most of the techniques can be used in everyday life: communication styles, different communication styles, relaxation techniques, so everything that we do in the group can also, it just doesn’t relate to just violence. And that phase runs 12 weeks, and they come twice a week. And then we move on to phase three, which is, the purpose of phase three is to help, we want the offenders to, in turn, want to be able to help someone else to successfully complete parole and probation, so we integrate them into community activities, and that phase runs six weeks, and they come once a week.

Len Sipes: So in essence, what we’re doing is helping people, the theory in criminology called cognitive behavioral therapy, where it’s sort of thinking through life’s event differently than what they’ve done in the past, and I would imagine that’s sort of what we’re talking about now, correct?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Yes.

Len Sipes: So it is how to stay away from situations of violence, potential situations for violence, how to extract yourself, how to deal with all of that in such a way not to land you back in the criminal justice system.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Exactly, and there’s situations where you can’t do that, how to make a better choice, what would be a better choice.

Len Sipes: A better choice. Okay. We were talking beforehand, my wife constantly tells me about better choices. I get angry at my daughters, and she’ll tell me to go cool off. I mean, this is sort of a lifelong learning situation for a lot of us, correct?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Right. So it’s just situations where we try to, if you’re in a situation where you can’t just walk out, what would be the better thing to do, how to take a time out in your head. Some of the techniques sound corny, but they really work. Things that you would never think of, how to count to ten, and we hear it, but do we really do it? How to shout loudly, stop it, to yourself, so you’re able to not give yourself that continuous negative self-talk.

Len Sipes: And Tanesha, we’re going to go to you for the next question. You work with these women, the women offenders on a regular basis. Do you deal just with the women, or with the men, or both?

Tanesha Clardy: I deal with both.

Len Sipes: With both. Do you have any preferences over which group? Are women easier to deal with than men? Or do they, or they bring their own unique issues?

Tanesha Clardy: All of them bring unique characteristics to the program.

Len Sipes: Because the average person is going to –

Tanesha Clardy: What I’ve discovered is that women, they have different issues, totally different issues that come from, as far as growing up and being a female, you have molestation, you have rape, you have substance abuse, and you just have emotional, physical abuse. So those are different issues that women more deal with than men.

Len Sipes: And that’s pretty much clarified by the criminological literature, by all the studies basically, talking about the fact that women offenders, women caught up in the criminal justice system have much higher rates of substance abuse than men, have higher rates of mental health issues, and the rate of prior sexual abuse is astounding. It is one of the highest correlates or the things that are connected to crime, it is astounding as to how many women caught up in the criminal justice system come from that sort of a history, and the women offenders that I’ve talked to in the past, they’re, they’ve had a lot of explosive anger going on with them and throughout their lives, and a lot of it’s self destructive, which I would imagine a lot of the emotional issues and substance abuse issues come from that history.

Tanesha Clardy: True. It’s all about their defense mechanisms. It’s things that women internalize more, so when it gets to the point where you can’t take it anymore, it’s easier to just lash out, and so it’s probably easier for them to just, you know, commit an act of violence when they feel as though they have to defend themselves. They have to protect themselves, because here you are, you’re coming up against me. And so that’s what I’ve just, you know, just noticed on my women offenders.

Len Sipes: Either one of you can answer this question now. We’re talking about basically a four month program where we take individuals with a history of violence, and we sort of restructure who they are and what they are in terms of their day to day ability to cope with the stresses of life. Correct?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Right.

Tanesha Clardy: Right.

MD: But I think the group is, because it is four months long, it gives you time to really think about behaviors and how it may have impacted your decisions in the past, so that’s the real purpose of the group. We want you to see how your past behaviors now, how have they impacted your decisions, and for whatever reason, have put you on parole and probation, and how can you rethink those past behaviors, and how can we use them differently in the future to help us make better decisions.

Len Sipes: Right. We don’t want the person engaging in additional acts of violence, so this protects the public. We don’t want the person engaging in additional acts of violence because it protects the taxpayer, because the person theoretically does better, and the research indicates that individuals do better with these programs, cognitive behavioral therapy programs, or violence reduction programs. So this is a win-win situation for everybody. What we’re doing is helping people understand that the stuff that they’ve done in the past, they cannot continue to do in the future, correct?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Right. And in turn, we also, not just for themselves, but because some, like with the women offenders, some of them are mothers or sisters, the skills that you learn, even again, they sound corny, but as you’re at home, I’m sure, they joke about it later on. Like, we did this skill. But if you really practice it, and this is something that you try to practice with your siblings at home or your children, or your significant other, it’s not something that they themselves are just learning, they’re also teaching others.

Len Sipes: And that’s important. I mean, what you teach individuals, they teach their sons, they teach their daughters, they teach their peers, a lot of people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system who are now doing well, people sort of wonder, well, why are you doing so well? And one of the reasons why they’re doing so well is they’ve learned a new way of thinking about who they are and their lives. Most people don’t want to return to the criminal justice system. I get a sense that a lot of people who are caught up in the criminal justice system don’t quite understand how they got there to begin with. All they were doing were hanging out with friends, drinking a beer, doing whatever, and somebody said the wrong thing, and they lashed out. It’s not like they sat down and said, gee, I want to assault somebody violently with a beer bottle tonight. Stuff happens.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: And stuff happens quickly.

Len Sipes: Stuff happens quickly. It happens rapidly. And sometimes you’re not even quite sure why you did what you did, correct?

Tanesha Clardy: Very true, very true. But I’m, I guess, that’s the benefit of the program, because instead of just reacting the way you normally would act, you sit back and you think about, okay, what is my next move? Like, you have to make a choice, and hopefully the choice is a positive one.

Len Sipes: All right. Now we’re going to go over to Zoë. Zoë is, what we said before the program, was the truly authentic person sitting in this room. The rest of us are paid by the federal government to do what we do on a day to day basis. Zoë, you’re here, because I’m quite sure you volunteered to be on the radio show, and just absolutely adored the idea of sharing your feelings with the public.

Zoe: Absolutely!

Len Sipes: Okay, cool!

Zoe: The public needs to be informed.

Len Sipes: Cool. Why does the public need to be informed?

Zoe: Well, because everyone that commits a crime or commits an act of violence isn’t a bad person. It’s just a way, you have to rethink the way that you’re going about things, think about how you’re going to approach this situation, and think about who you’re in the situation with. You can’t react the same to everyone, so that’s what I take most out of the group, that even though we’re not talking about something that directly applies to me, I can take the message out of that and apply it to my life, and it’s helpful.

Len Sipes: Well, what we’ve said before throughout the entire program is the sense that too many people are being caught up in too many acts of violence. They need, what we call in the field, cognitive behavioral therapy, what the other person, the average person listening to this program would be, come to you-know-what meeting, or come to reality meeting, or whatever, you know, our parents read us the riot act in the past, we got punished, we were instructed by uncles, aunts, others, people in the community that what we were doing was inappropriate. We had no business doing it. Are we suggesting that people didn’t grow up with those guidelines?

Zoe: Well, some people didn’t. Everyone didn’t have that uncle or aunt or cousins or family members around to give that positive reinforcement, or even still, just the things that you were doing wrong, no one told you they were wrong. No one really reprimanded you for it. So that catches up with you in the end, and pretty much here, we’re just reversing, kind of, the bad learned behavior.

Len Sipes: Well, there are two questions. Is it too easy to get involved in acts of violence?

Zoe: Yeah –

Len Sipes: And, you know, again, most of the people that I’ve talked to have been caught up in the criminal justice system, didn’t say, you know, I set out that evening to beat my brother over the head with a beer bottle because he insulted my wife. I mean, that’s not how it went down.

Zoe: No, it went down, in the flash of an eye, before you knew it, someone was hemmed up because of whatever internal anger that, well, that I had, this is my personal experience. Yeah, so before I knew it, I was already at a 9, and just that one little small incident just took me to 27 somewhere, and I ended up in the system.

Len Sipes: It was an explosion.

Zoe: It was an explosion.

Len Sipes: Okay. So you’ve been through the criminal justice system, and you have been through the violence reduction program –

Zoe: Currently in the program.

Len Sipes: You’re currently in the program, and what does that mean to you now?

Zoe: Well, for one, when we first started the program, I was kind of sketchy about, I just really didn’t understand why I was in the group, but now, I look forward to coming to the group. These are just people, these are my friends, now, actually, and we talk about different experiences that we have throughout the week, and it’s helpful. It’s really helpful. Whether I’m actually joking around, or we come in there and play around, but at the end of the day, all right, we actually got something out of this, and it’s valuable to put forth in your everyday life.

Len Sipes: That’s amazing to me, because that is something the average person doesn’t hear. The average person listening to this program is saying, wait a minute, people who are violent belong in prison. They don’t understand that the overwhelming majority of people caught up in the correctional system or in the street, they’re under parole and probation supervision. Parole meaning, they’ve come out of the prison system, probation means the judge decided to sentence them to a period of community supervision, and not necessarily prison, but prison’s always hanging over their heads. So the overwhelming majority of people caught up in acts of violence aren’t in prison, they’re in the community.

Zoe: Yeah. Your next door neighbor.

Len Sipes: Their next door neighbor, the person you interact with at the gas station, the person who serves you at your local restaurant, the person who hands you your dry cleaning, it’s one out of every 45 people in the community are under active community supervision. Now most criminologists have said, well, if it’s one out of every 45 under active, current community supervision with correctional systems, it’s at minimum one out of every 20. So you’re encountering people every day by the scores who were either once caught up in the criminal justice system or currently caught up in the criminal justice system. So these programs, this particular program, what does it mean to you, and what does it mean to public safety?

Zoe: Well, as far as public safety and, the program really just has people to, I don’t really –

Len Sipes: It’s a hard question. I’m sorry, it is a ridiculously hard question to answer. But I mean, the bottom line is, if more people were involved in programs like this, would there be less violence?

Zoe: Yes, there definitely would be less violence.

Len Sipes: Okay, and why is that?

Zoe: Because it changes your way of thinking about it. Change the way of thinking about the situations that you’re in, and things that may seem like a threat to take you from 10 to 27, they’re not, they don’t bother you as much anymore.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: I also think the peer interaction they’re getting from the group, the peer feedback that they’re getting, things that they would, there are situations where we’ll come out, somebody in the group will come up with a scenario that may have happened over the weekend where they didn’t think that there was any other way to handle it, and the peer interaction or peer feedback that they’re getting inside the group like, okay, maybe you could have tried this, you could have tried that, and then it seems more realistic. Like, okay, maybe I could have done that, where some people, sometimes you think, the only thing I could have done was hit this person or lashed out or cussed the person out, or have, however you may have acted before, the interaction that the peers give, the interaction in the group from the peers is just, it’s amazing. The feedback, well, next time, maybe you could try this, walk out, come back in, things that you would never think that you yourself could do, you know, they test themselves, and I really like that.

Len Sipes: We’re halfway through the program, and I’m going to reintroduce everybody here at the microphones today. Zoë, not her real name, but an individual kind enough to participate. She is currently in the violence reduction program here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Community Supervision Officer Tanesha Clardy, and what most people call parole and probation agents, we call community supervision officer, and a treatment specialist, Michelle Hare-Diggs, all three are before our microphones talking about the violence reduction program here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Now ladies, I’m going to go back to my experience when I ran groups in the Maryland prison system, and one of the things that I discovered is how folks react in a treatment setting, and how they act in the community can be two different things.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Well, I think what makes this group unique, because I’m a treatment specialist and I’m not a CSO, they kind of see it as separate, so I think the group tends to be a lot more real. It’s not as, I think what most people would consider as fake, and Zoë, you can correct me if I’m wrong.

Zoe: No, I agree with you. I like, okay, at first, I wasn’t sure about it, but I like the fact that it’s, the time period, the length of it, because if we were meeting once a week for a month, I wouldn’t know these people, and I wouldn’t tell them anything. It wouldn’t be a conversation, it’d just be Ms. Hare-Diggs talking to us. She’d just be talking at us pretty much, vs. us interacting.

Len Sipes: A lot of people go through these programs because they’re stuck with going through these programs. How authentic is this? Any one of you can answer. How real is this? How deeply do we get into the lives of the individuals, and is there real change? That’s what the public wants to know?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Well, it is a real change, because one, you don’t have to be there. You can just be at home, and next thing you know, you’ll get someone at your door taking you back to jail. You don’t have to be there. But you come, and then you choose to participate. So you can come and not say anything, and you can come and share your experiences, so just by that, and just us learning to trust each other, we can talk about these things and throw ideas off the wall and give each other constructive criticism or just say pretty much whatever we’re thinking without it becoming an issue. So the fact that we have that freedom, that ability to just let it all hang out and put it out there. We get a lot of things accomplished. We talk about a lot of different issues, and we hear each other out. We’re more receptive to our peers, because they’re not someone talking down at us, they’re someone that’s going through the same thing I am.

Len Sipes: How scary of a place is that? I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been through drug treatment describing it as one of the scariest events of their lives, because they had to confront all the garbage that has gone on in their lives that calls them to be caught up in the criminal justice system. Sometimes treatment is not pretty. Sometimes it’s dragging a person through everything that happened beforehand and coming to an understanding that it doesn’t matter what happened to you beforehand, what happens is now and how to control yourself now.

Zoe: It definitely gets ugly at times where, you know, the group forces an individual to look at their own behaviors and stop putting the blame on everybody else, from the PO to their mother to, sometimes, it’s really difficult to look at your own behavior sometimes, so it gets ugly when the group forces that person to address and take some ownership in their behaviors.

Len Sipes: When I did group, it was like going to Mars in many instances because, no, you went to a different planet. You got involved in an extraordinarily intensive examination of people’s lives. In my life, the lives of the participants in the program, it was scary at times, because, not because of what they said, not because of threats or anything along those lines, but you dig deep into the individual’s life, and suddenly, they are dealing with issues of their past for the first time. They’ve never really dealt with them before. Am I right or wrong?

Tanesha Clardy: You’re definitely right, because I’ve definitely seen a change in, especially the females who weren’t very interested in being in the program at all. Like for Zoë, she definitely came a long way. She didn’t want to do the program, she didn’t understand why she had to do the program, she understood the charge, but to her, I’m not an angry person, I’m not a violent person, the situation happened, it is what it is, I just want to do this and get on with my life. But she comes to group, she actively participates, she’s very open, she accepts responsibility for her actions, and I’ve just definitely seen a positive change in her.

Len Sipes: And I think that’s the most meaningful part of all of this. When you go through interacting with a whole bunch of people, and they come to understand what’s happened to them in the past, and they come to understand that they can control it, there are a lot of people caught up in the criminal justice system who have been, I don’t know, I mean, ships on the ocean without sails. I mean, the wind’s just pushing them all over the place, and suddenly, they learn how to put up sails and move in the direction that they want to move in. Boy, that’s a great analogy, isn’t it? I just thought of that! And then there are people who are listening to this who are going, you know, Mr. Sipes, you’re so full of hooey, don’t you understand that they’re just jiving you, they’re just doing what they have to do to get through the program, and –

Zoe: Well, they show. When you show back up, and you’re locked up, it’ll show whether you got something out of the program or not, and it’s all about what you put into it. You can’t expect to, okay, well my life has changed, when you don’t even talk in group. You don’t even participate. It’s not going to happen. And they’ll see you again. So if you’re trying to put your best foot forward, just go ahead and actively participate, pay attention, try to get something out of it, and you won’t, hopefully you won’t have to be in the system again.

Len Sipes: My guess is that an awful lot of people involved in the criminal justice system could use this type of, who could use this kind of program, that this kind of program would be valuable to them. It’s just not people who are ostensibly “violent offenders.” There’s a lot of people with nonviolent charges who have a history of violence. And you, we can judge that through our own instruments. We’ve pretty much come to a good understanding here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency through our instruments as to who that person really is, correct?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Correct. I think anyone can benefit from the program. You could probably benefit from the program yourself because it’s all about conflict resolution, different communication styles, and coping skills, because it’s nothing but a table that separates me from Zoë. I could have been in that same restaurant, and someone pushed me, and I turned around and slapped them, and here I am, I’m on supervision.

Zoe: That’s what happened. No, that’s what happened.

Len Sipes: Yeah, but that could happen to any of us. But I mean –

Michelle Hare-Diggs: It’s all about how you react and the choice that you make.

Len Sipes: And according to the research, most individuals who are caught up in the criminal justice system at the time of the arrest were under the influence of something. And most were young. So if you have a younger individual full of pee and vinegar who doesn’t feel that good about themselves, who –

Tanesha Clardy: Pee and vinegar?

Len Sipes: As Tanesha tries to recover from that statement, and, no, no, no, I mean, this is the reality of what we’re dealing with, is it not? I mean, tell me if I’m wrong. It’s, they’re young, they’re very emotional, they’re caught up in the moment, somebody has insulted them, or there’s a perceived insult, may be real, may not be real, and that person just explodes, and that person, they don’t have to be young?

Tanesha Clardy: No, they don’t have to be young. I mean, we don’t have many old people in our group, but there’s a few. Yeah. And they, they get just as much out of the group as I would, or as the next person. So you don’t have to be young, you don’t have to be a male or a female to get caught up in the moment, and next thing you know…

Len Sipes: But you do have to be willing to understand how you became involved in the criminal justice system, how you came to be arrested that evening, and that arrest is oftentimes just the tip of an iceberg. I mean, people caught up in the criminal justice system, they’re here for a burglary, but you know, they’ve been down the road before. They’ve been involved in the criminal justice system. We just don’t know about it. Most crimes aren’t reported, most reported crimes do not end up in arrest. I’m talking about national statistics, and most reported, even when they’re prosecuted, most felonies in this country don’t get prison time. So I mean, to be involved in the criminal justice system, you’ve really had to do something, or you did a series of things before they send you to prison. So, I mean, the point is, is that people are actively engaged in lots of different things that could get them involved with our agency or put them behind prison bars. I mean, it’s just not one instance in many cases, and in many cases, there’s a history of violence, there’s a history of crime, there’s a history of acting out.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Right, the group also focuses on trying to get the individuals to understand what they did and how it has led, again –

Tanesha Clardy: Ownership.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Ownership, taking ownership to their behaviors, because a lot of things are learned behaviors, and they don’t see anything wrong with it, so we have to really focus on what you did and how it’s affected your life.

Len Sipes: And it’s not just, I guess the point that I’m trying to make, Zoë, is that it’s, in many cases, it’s not just one altercation. We’re talking about a history of inappropriate behaviors.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: So we try to focus on learned behaviors and unlearning behaviors, and it can be done.

Len Sipes: That’s the interesting thing where the audience does need to hear that. I mean, you can be 27-years-old, according to Zoë, you can be 47 years old, and you can have this whole life of not making the best of decisions, and you can come out of these sort of encounters making much better decisions. It does work, is the question the average person listening to this program is saying, ladies, does it work?

Michelle Hare-Diggs: It does. I mean, it’s hard for an individual, if you’re 47, 27, whatever, if you’ve been reacting the same way your whole life to whatever situation, if you’re used to lashing out, holding off hitting somebody, smacking somebody, spitting, whatever, and then you’re in a group with other people who have the same issues, some of the similar, some of the same, similar incidents have happened, and you can hear how somebody else is able to react to a situation, it makes you think at some point, okay, maybe I can try that, you might, you might not want to try it the first time, maybe not even the second time, but the third time, be like, okay, I can try that, and then if it works, it works, if not, we use so many different skills, you can try a different one, a different type of coping skill –

Len Sipes: Like retreating.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Retreating, right. Or counting to 10, removing yourself, some people are like, I’m never going to walk out. I would never do this, and you just try something different. So every skill doesn’t work for everybody, but we, thinking errors, you think about, what have I been doing all these years, I’m sorry, what have I been doing all these years, and you have to think, how has it gotten me to this place? And I think that’s the biggest thing that we learn in group, so many, we do the same things over and over and over again, and if it doesn’t work, what can we do differently?

Len Sipes: I talked to a guy who went through this program who was telling me about being involved in a confrontation on the street, and for the first time in his life, he retreated. He removed himself from that situation. It was a tool that he learned in group, and he was able to use that tool and extract himself, and he simply said, my going back to prison is not worth an altercation with this idiot. And that was a huge revelation for this individual. It prevented a violent crime from going down. It prevented him from being further caught up in the criminal justice system. It saved the taxpayer tens of thousands of incarcerative dollars. That was effective. I mean, just simply saying to himself, I’m going to extract myself from this situation. I’m getting out. I’m not going back to prison.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: And I guess another thing, when you have that peer interaction in the group, the peers tell you, it’s okay to walk away. It’s not such a bad thing. Whereas before, you might have said, I’m not walking away. If this is a way of living, you’re not used to walking away, you’re used to handling things in a violent manner, or in a physical manner, and you’re hearing everyone say it’s okay to walk away, you keep telling yourself that, and if my freedom is on the line, sometimes you need that, the cost, the interaction from your peers telling you, what’s the better thing to do in this situation?

Len Sipes: We just have a couple minutes left. Ladies, I mean, to me, this has been an extraordinary half hour. To me, it really has been. The two of you who are paid to be doing this, and Zoë who got sucked into it, but I mean, the explanation, the explanation is, I think, powerful, that people can change through the right kind of programs, and if we had more of these programs, more people could change. Is that overly simplistic? If you had programs in place for more people, we could, we could have a greater impact on public safety.

Michelle Hare-Diggs: Yeah, sure.

Zoe: Definitely. Definitely.

Tanesha Clardy: This is something that could be put into the community. It doesn’t have to be called a violence reduction program. It could just be at a community center, just have people come in from the community, sit down, just learn these different skills, like, be the bigger person. You don’t always have to, of course, defend yourself, but you don’t have to do anything drastic to where you’re going to actually hurt the other person, but just turn away, walk away, I have something to live for, I have a life, I love my freedom, so okay, I’m going to let you get away with this one, and I’m going to just keep moving, because I don’t want to go to my PO and be like, yeah, I got arrested.

Len Sipes: I’m going to let you get away with this one because you are of no consequence to me. I am of consequence to me, and I’m going to protect my kids. I’m going to protect myself, and I’m going to protect my family by getting out of it –

Tanesha Clardy: Exactly.

Len Sipes: Because, my man –

Tanesha Clardy: It’s not worth it.

Len Sipes: – you’re nothing to me.

Tanesha Clardy: I have way too much to live for.

Len Sipes: I have way too much to live for. So he’s not getting away, his opponent is not getting away with anything. He’s getting away with a much better life.

Tanesha Clardy: Right.

Zoe: Right.

Len Sipes: And that’s the whole idea behind this program, right?

Tanesha Clardy: Yes.

Zoe: Yes.

Len Sipes: All right. Any final words? Before we close?

Zoe: Well…

Len Sipes: Okay, Zoë. You’ve got the final word. What is it? Is it meaningful?

Zoe: Well, the program is meaningful. I do appreciate now, I can say this now, once again. I do appreciate being chosen to be a part of it, just, just so I can see, okay, this behavior is not right. Something has to change. And now that I have some of the tools in place and some of the methods in place, I’m able to do that and not just take it to the extreme every single time.

Len Sipes: Well, for me, it’s been a wonderful half hour, ladies. I’ve really enjoyed this, and I think it’s been very meaningful, and I think a lot of people and the public are going to learn from it. Our guest today, ladies and gentlemen, Zoë, who, it’s not a real name, but she’s a person under supervision with our agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in the violence reduction program. We have community supervision officer Tanesha Clardy, and we have treatment specialist Michelle Hare-Diggs. Ladies, again, thank you for being on the program. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety, radio programs from the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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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]

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[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety.  I’m your host, Leonard Sipes.  We have, what I believe, is another very interesting show.  We’re going to be talking about crime victims, and I know we’ve been talking a lot about crime victims lately, but this time, we’re going to do it from the faith based perspective, the fact that my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency really has what I consider to be one of the best faith based programs in the United States in terms of reaching out to criminal offenders, volunteers and churches, mosques, synagogues to help them readjust from prison, or even on probation, but in this context, we’re going to be talking about it in terms of the faith based initiative.  Anne Seymour is one of our guests today.  She is with Justice Solutions.  She’s a national expert on the issue of victims and victimology.  Anne’s website is www.justicesolutions.org.  I’ll be giving that out again all throughout the program.  Reverend Bernard Keels, the director of the University Memorial Chapel at Morgan State University in the great city of Baltimore, Maryland, where I am from, www.morgan.edu, he’s also joining with us today.  He’s a mentor and facilitator in terms of faith based groups.  Before we begin the show, our usual commercials, we’re up to 200,000 requests a month for D.C. Public Safety, television, radio, blog, and transcripts.  That’s media, M-E-D-I-A – dot-CSOSA – C-S-O-S-A – dot-gov.  Your input into these shows is what makes the show enjoyable, and what makes the show come alive, and we really appreciate every email, every comment on our comments box, your responses via twitter, and your responses, once again, via email.  If you want to get in touch with me directly, it is Leonard – L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-Sipes – S-I-P as in Peculiar-P-E-S – @csosa.gov, or you can follow us via twitter at twitter.com/lensipes.  Back to our guests, Anne Seymour and Reverend Bernard Keels.  Welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Anne Seymour:  Thank you.

Bernard Keels:  Thank you.

Len Sipes:  Anne Seymour, now I’ve read your resume and been on your website, Justice Solutions, www.justicesolutions.org.  You’ve done a ton of work with the U.S. Department of Justice in terms of victims’ issues.  You are, what I was told by Christine Keels, the person who heads up our faith based program, truly one of the national experts when it comes to victims’ related issues.  We’re approaching National Victims’ Week in April.  Give me a sense as to what’s happening with the victims’ movement throughout the country.  Is there a way of summarizing that in a couple minutes?

Anne Seymour:  Yeah, I think, boy, summarizing the victims’ movement, we’re a very, very diverse movement.  So it’s hard to summarize, but I will say that, you know, we’ve got 32,000 laws across the states and the Indian country at the federal level that protect crime victims.  A big issue now for victims is making sure that these laws are more than just rhetoric, and so we’re looking a lot at compliance issues.  For me personally, one of my big issues is also making sure that we’re identifying victims who choose not to go through the justice process, which is the majority of victims who don’t report crimes, and they never know that services are available to assist them, and so I’m working a lot now with victims who choose not to report, as well as with agencies like CSOSA, which has been really a national model in terms of the work they do with crime victims.

Len Sipes:  And I think, and I thank you for that, and I think Christine Keels, the person who heads the faith-based program, really deserves a lot of credit for that and really has re-invigorated the whole faith based initiative. It’s interesting you talk about people not reporting crimes.  Most crimes are not reported to law enforcement.  40% of property crimes and about 50% of violent crimes are reported.  So I’ve oftentimes wondered what happens to those people who float through their victimization without going through the formal criminal justice system; that you’ve just brought up a very interesting issue.

Anne Seymour:  It’s interesting, and I think it’s also very sad.  I mean, one of the things we need to do is to make sure that everyone in a community knows about victims’ services, because I may not report to the police, but I may talk to my hairdresser, to my child’s student, or if I’m at school, I may talk to the school nurse and still not want to report.  That’s my choice, and I support victims who choose that, but we still want them to know that they can access services for mental health counseling, for medical services that they may need.  There’s a lot of services that do not require reporting and going through the system.

Len Sipes:  Okay.  Reverend Bernard Keels, director, University Memorial Chapel, Morgan State University in the great city of Baltimore, again, where I’m from.  Morgan, www.morgan.edu, one of the well known institutions of higher learning in the Baltimore Metropolitan Area.  You’re a mentor and a facilitator in terms of faith based organizations where, here in D.C., in Baltimore?

Bernard Keels:  Yeah, with the Family Reunification Program in D.C.  One of the things that I think Anne has touched on that is so powerful is that the whole issue of the rhetoric that is present in our society, churches and faith based organizations oftentimes had to separate the historical imperative from what’s happened in contemporary times.  Going back to the Cain and Abel saga, where the first, probably the first victim was Abel, I think churches have to really begin to understand that there is a duality, if you will, with how people who are victims of crimes need to have restitution, need to have restorative justice that happens to them, and many, many times, churches tend to be so caught up into the dogma of worship that they forget the everyday issues that affect the people who are worshipping, i.e. crime victims, and yes, people do report crime victims to hairdressers and to strangers, and sometimes, the last place they come is a faith based institution because of the built in negative images of what it means to accuse, for instance, a cleric of abuse.  Some of the institutional abuse you hear about, pedophilia in some of the mainline denominational churches, so faith based churches and institutions need to really broaden their understanding that it’s okay to leap out with your faith, but to understand the very basic issues that affect people, because people, after all, bring the whole idea of parishioners, and I think that’s where we have to become more relevant.

Len Sipes:  The, especially when it applies to women victims, most, in most cases, women know who attacked them.  In most cases, there is prior knowledge or a prior relationship.  That is extraordinarily difficult when your best friend/brother/husband/friend of five years/somebody that you’ve known for the last 30 days victimizes you, and thereby the struggle, and we understand that, in terms of people not reporting crimes, they see this in many cases as a personal event, not necessarily an event that you would report to the criminal justice system, but she’s a victim nevertheless.  So I would imagine, I can see that person going to their Imam.  I can see that person going to their priest, going to their minister, going to their rabbi, and saying, although I don’t want to report this to the criminal justice system, I am reporting it to you, I need spiritual counseling in terms of best, next steps.  What should I do, correct?

Bernard Keels:  Yeah.  Not only are you correct, but it’s so incumbent upon that spiritual director to recognize the boundaries of their ability, his or her ability, to become a meaningful mentor, a meaningful person that could intervene in it.  So many times, people will go to their cleric, the imam, the rabbi as a way of sort of ameliorating the situation and saying that prayer will change that, or the fact that I’ll come to church will make it easier, and it takes a very strong and well-trained cleric to realize that it’s okay to be able to access those governmental, or organizations like a CSOSA, to be able to partner with those governmental organizations and partner with Anne’s group, and to be able to say, help me learn how to translate what I do so that a victim actually has a face and a person they can believe in in the process of healing.

Len Sipes:  Now before going on in the program, to cretae clarity, some clarity out of all the issues we’re dealing with over the course of the next 25 minutes, we have to deal with the faith based component, and the faith based component, ordinarily, is one of mentoring people under supervision. So we’ve got to be dealing with the fact that there are people under supervision, and we use the faith community to mentor to them, to help them regain their footing, not do drugs, get together and take care of their families and not continue a criminal lifestyle.  We’ve got to deal with that.  We’ve got to deal with that in the context of the victims’ movement, and we’ve got to deal with the victims’ movement across the board.  So that’s three gigantic topics that we now have, oh, 20 minutes to deal with.  Do we want to start off with the mentoring to people under supervision/criminal offenders?  Do we want to start off with that component and how that interacts with the victims’ movement?

Bernard Keels:  Yeah, one of the ways that we started was to be able to help offenders understand that there’s not that much difference between a mentor and a mentee.  So many times, we draw an invisible yet concrete barrier between those who have transgressed society and those who are nice, normal people.  I’ve found that it’s important to tell your story and be a very good listener so that a person realizes that no matter how far you’ve gone, you can come home.  The Hebrew biblical story of the prodigal son comes to mind.  It’s important to realize that if we live against society, rehabilitation and restorative justice is possible, then that offender has to have the very realistic goal that if he or she can begin to first seek some forgiveness within themselves, their higher being, whatever it might be, then and only then can they begin to go to that person that they’ve transgressed and try to be able to create a more helpful and hopeful dialogue.  So mentors have to be very careful not to prejudge a situation based on their own concept of morality, their own concept of religion.  Religion becomes so narrowly defined sometimes that it can become dangerous when we begin to judge people from a unidimensional yardstick that says, if you’ve done this, then this is the result.  I don’t know a person’s story, but I can hear who they are and interact with who they’ve been, and then share a bit of my own story.  So I think that that mentoring thing, in the faith based community, has to be able to step outside of its own power, if you will, its own sense of history, and look in the universal sense of, what does it mean if I have offended Anne, to know that Anne has the right to come to her own terms of forgiving my offense.

Len Sipes:  All right, so basically what I’m hearing is, first, the individual has to heal themselves.  The faith based mentor, whatever religion that persons happens to represent, can’t be too judgmental.  He’s there to help that person cross a bridge, but there is a certain point where he or she needs to acknowledge that they’ve done a tremendous amount of harm to another human being, they need to acknowledge they’ve done harm, a tremendous amount of harm to the community, so it’s just not that particular act in isolation.  There’s no such thing as a burglary.  There’s no such thing as a rape.  It is multiple, multiple victims.  It may be one person that the state uses to prosecute, but there’s an entire family, there’s an entire community that’s been harmed, and that offender needs to come to grips with that community –

Anne Seymour:  And their own family as well.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

Bernard Keels:  Good.

Len Sipes:  Go ahead –

Anne Seymour:  Oh, I was just going to say, that’s the whole concept of restorative justice, is that you really need to look at the harm you’ve done to yourself.  I really agree.  You’ve got to go to yourself first.  It’s not about me first as a victim advocate, or as someone who’s a probation officer, it is really looking at you and the harm that you did, but how I hurt you and your family first, and then your victim, and then your neighborhood, and then your community, so it’s very, very important that we understand, it’s almost like a tidal wave that occurs.  It may start out as a little wave, but when you think about the impact of crime, it goes so far in our society, and I think traditionally, a lot of folks that are under community supervision, we’ve never made them think about it, and a big part of what we’re talking about today is that we want them to think about it, and we’re going to give them help to acknowledge that they have caused harm to people, and that we’re giving them an opportunity to make up for the harm that they’ve caused.

Bernard Keels:  From a spiritual point of view, acknowledgment is only part of it, Leonard.  Understanding becomes an even deeper part, because when you understand something, there’s a possibility for transformation to take place.  So many times, people carry on the label of being an alcoholic or a drug addict or a recovering drug addict.  I try to get a person to the point where they both acknowledge and understand they can become a delivered person so they don’t go that pathway again.  They discover new pathways to conflict resolution, new pathways to understand that their personal issues don’t have dominance over someone else’s issue because of their role or their gender or their relationship or their wealth, and so many times, society begins to casually assign value on crimes based on who’s committing the crime.

Len Sipes:  Well, the society puts labels on each and every one of us for a thousand different reasons, whether you’re African American, whether you’re white, whether you’re short, whether you’re tall, whether you’re Hispanic, whether you’re a male, whether you’re female, whether you’re from the United States, or whether you’re from Germany, we all tend to provide stereotypes.  So the stereotype of the criminal offender, or the stereotype of the person under supervision, however you want to describe that person, doesn’t that come with the territory?  Anne?

Anne Seymour:  You know, I think it does.  I think we are judgmental, even though we’re all mamby pamby and say we’re not supposed to be, but we do judge.  We very often do judge a book by its cover.  But it’s the same thing when, you know, when we talk about victims, people see victims as weak, as someone who might have been partially responsible for what happened to them.  We make judgments about victims, and when we talk about why crime victims don’t report crimes, it’s because they are afraid that no one’s going to believe them, and they’re afraid of being blamed, and the thing that you mentioned, Leonard, I think is so important.  Very often, they know the person, and so they don’t want to get that person in trouble, or they’re fearful of that person.  So we need to recognize that we do judge people who have committed offenses, and very often, I think our judgments are way off, just as they are with crime victims, that we should not make assumptions that anyone is a certain way because they committed an offense, or because someone committed one against them.  With victims, for me, it’s always so important to, despite all the research that tells us about domestic violence victims, and kids who are child abuse victims, everyone is unique.  Every single person has their own story.  Every person came to the path of victimization with a lot of stuff that came before that we need to recognize, which is going to affect how they cope with the victimization.

Len Sipes:  I want to reintroduce my guests halfway through the program, and it’s going by like wildfire.  Anne Seymour, Justice Solutions, www.justicesolutions.org, national expert in terms of victim assistance.  Reverend Bernard Keel is director of University Memorial Chapel at Morgan State University in grand and glorious Baltimore, Maryland, www.morgan.edu.  We go with the research, and you go with a certain sense of pragmatism, and I just want to touch upon this whole sense of labeling very quickly and then move on.  If I don’t introduce that, if I don’t introduce the anger on the part of the crime victims, if I don’t introduce the anger on the part of the average citizen who happens to listen to this program, they don’t see the program is relevant.  They say, Leonard, for the love of good god, at least acknowledge the fact that we are suffering and the community is suffering.  Yeah, I do understand that programs need to be there for offenders/people under supervision.  I need, I understand all of that, but somewhere along the line, you’ve got to acknowledge the harm.  Okay, so if we acknowledge the harm, then we can move on and say that the research is pretty clear that these programs, and programs run the gamut from drug treatment to mental health treatment to finding jobs to dealing with a wide array of other social issues, do have a way of lessening recidivism, which means fewer offenders go back to the criminal justice system, which saves a) victims from being victims, and b) taxpayers from having to pay additional taxes.  The research indicates that there’s approximately a 10-20% reduction in recidivism, so Reverend Keels, by mentoring to individuals, helping them cross that bridge, that’s accelerating that process, is it not?

Bernard Keels:  Not only is it accelerating the process, but it really assures that recidivism does not become the revolving door that so many times is in the criminal justice system.  Apart from the understanding of the offender, I want to really talk a bit about the victim.  So many times, the victim, in his or her silence, has been shunned by all of the institutional support.  Most of the institutional support in America is for offenders, and so the support, there’s parole, probation, there’s –

Len Sipes:  98% of it is focused on the person, the participant within the criminal system.

Bernard Keels:  This is where the community becomes important.  The community becomes the holistic vehicle by which we can rally around the whole adage about, it takes a village to heal something, can rally around and begin to say that it’s not your fault, that there is a way of you being able to come to grips with your own hurt, and maybe someday, at your pace, forgive, but not to put the victim in a sense of being revictimized.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

Bernard Keels:  So many times, faith communities make that mistake, Leonard, to revictimize the person.

Len Sipes:  And that’s part of the problem here, in terms of the calls and letters that I get, or the emails, is that, don’t revictimize people who are victimized by crime.  We do understand that you’re advocating for more programs for criminal offenders, and we understand that, but somewhere along the line, you have to advocate for us, which is the reasons why we’re doing these radio shows in.

Anne Seymour:  I just remember, as a young victim advocate, and this was 25 years ago, I was training probation officers, and a woman lingered afterwards, and told me about being a battered woman.  She was a probation officer who was in a chronic battering, and she told me about going to her minister, and he said to her, if you would just be a better wife and think about your children, it’s important that you stay with him for the sake of the family.  And I remember her crying, and I remember crying myself thinking, oh my gosh, we have to do something if that’s the advice that faith communities are giving to victims, and that’s why I’m so happy to be addressing this subject today, because people do not, they’re not mean to victims intentionally, but they say the wrong things, and the faith community, in trying to keep the family together and trying to stick with, especially the Christian requirement forgiveness can be extremely hurtful to victims.  So we have partnered, over the years, and developed wonderful training programs, and a lot of work like the mentoring that the reverend is doing, that helps them understand that they have two options: they can help victims, or they can hurt victims, and we’re kind of hoping that everyone sides on the help part, because there’s a lot of help needed by victims.

Len Sipes:  There is middle ground.  From what I’m hearing from both of you, there is a way of mentoring to victims, and to be sure that their rights and responsibilities are constitutional rights in most of the states, so there is a constitutional right in terms of the federal crimes, they are, they have constitutional protections.  There is a way of taking care of the victim, and at the same time, being sure that the people under supervision, by my agency or any other agency out there, we’re talking about five million human beings, seven million people caught up in the criminal justice system and the correctional system, but the vast majority of them belong to us, the people who provide community supervision.  There is a way to take care of the victims’ issues, and there is a way to take care of the people under supervision to provide them with that bridge, and in many ways, and I’ve seen it first hand in the 20 years that I’ve been dealing directly with the offender community, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have crossed that bridge, who do come to an understanding that they’ve done a tremendous amount of harm, who have gotten the programs and the services necessary to help them go from tax burden to taxpayer.  So we can do it all, is the point.

Bernard Keels:  Traditionally, institutions like faith based institutions have done, by every means necessary, to protect the pristine image of being perfect.  Nothing bad happens here.  Everything that walks through this door gets returned to a perfect relationship with the creator and all those kinds of things.  One of the things that I try to do personally and professionally is to realize the need to be able to acknowledge brokenness with the victim, and to talk about those issues both biblically, historically, interpersonally, where broken does, when it becomes uncared for, brokenness becomes a characteristic, if you will, or a habitual cyclical thing where people feel to be broken.  Case in point, and Anne reminded me so much, you’re talking about that crime victim went to her pastor, I had a young lady come to me some years ago, battered and bruised, and told me that she needed to be a better wife because she knew her husband loved her, and I said why, because he beat me.  And you know, for her, that was her Judeo-Christian training in terms of wives, submit to your husbands.  Property issues.  And I said to her that, let’s rethink that again.  If you remain in a state of brokenness, normally, you do not become well, you might pass that brokenness on to your offspring.  So your children may begin to understand that that’s the role of a woman, to be battered, not to be made, self-actualized through her own abilities, her own talents, and when pastors and imams and rabbis are not properly trained, they will almost always go to maintain the integrity of the institution, and not the integrity of the individual who’s hurting within an institution, so it’s critical to do that.

Len Sipes:  These are all extraordinarily sensitive issues, and I think we’re tackling them rather well.  We’re not avoiding them.  We’re not being a bunch of bureaucrats.  Let me throw in one more.  The great majority of, according to research, especially women caught up in the criminal justice system, they’ve been crime victims themselves.  Males, I mean, there’s a strong piece of research, series of research articles out there talking about the fact that everybody caught up in the criminal, not everybody, the majority caught up in the criminal justice system are subject, have been the recipients of child abuse and neglect.  The instance of women offenders being sexually assaulted, especially as children, especially by people they know is astounding.  I understand why, after 40 years in the criminal justice system, why so many people do take to drugs, why so many people, in fact, it’s 50%+ claim mental health issues, not diagnosable mental health, but they claim their own mental health issues.  I understand a lot of that, not trying to rationalize the criminal behavior or excuse the criminal behavior, but when you come from that sort of a background, I understand why they get into drugs, and I understand why drugs, in many cases, leads to criminal behavior.  Who wants to tackle that?

Anne Seymour:  Well, I’m happy to tackle that, and thank you for bringing up female offenders.  I think a real theme of what we’re talking about is that, in the old days, we would have the people who worked with offenders, or people in prison on one side, and the victim people way on the other side, and we have come to a rightful conclusion that it is not black and white.  We are all gray in this, and you raise a great example of women offenders, at least 90% of them have victimization and trauma in their background, which causes them very often to use and abuse, to cope with the trauma, which puts them in dangerous situations, which sometimes lead to criminal situations.  Now tell me that’s not a victim assistance issue!  And I actually am starting  to work on women offender issues, but similarly, I think of CSOSA as a great example.  Why does CSOSA have a victim assistance program? People go, they’re supposed to be working with people on probation.  It is great!  Every probationer, and people talk about victimless crimes.  I’ll make the case that there is no such thing as a victimless crime!  For every probationer, someone is hurt by that.  So they need to be having victim services to be able to recognize that fact, and I will give you another example.  Prison rape is an issue.  That’s a huge concern now in this country.  Who is stepping up to the plate to work with people who are incarcerated, men and women and youthful offenders?  It is victim advocates.  We have a moral obligation to not say, this person’s a criminal or a murderer, or they raped themselves.  That doesn’t matter to us.  They’re a victim in need of help, and so I just say that, because we not only judge people, as we said earlier, but we tend to pigeonhole people, and the beauty of what CSOSA is doing, and I hope a lot of other programs out in this country and internationally is recognizing that we’ve, we can’t box ourselves in anymore.  We just can’t.  Everyone is or knows a victim of crime.  Everyone knows someone who has been through some sort of criminal or juvenile justice supervision, so let’s look at it from that perspective.  This affects every single one of us.

Len Sipes:  It’s a massive amount of suffering, whether you’re the victim, whether you’re the person caught up in the criminal justice system, whether the person caught up in the criminal justice system who was victimized when they were young, there’s just a massive amount of pain going on out there, and I guess it’s our job, in terms of the victims’ community and the faith based community and government, I sort of have to laugh when you say government.

Anne Seymour:  No, it’s a big role.

Len Sipes:  Well, we would like to, but I think the leadership is going to come from the victims’ community, and I think the leadership is going to come from the faith based community, quite frankly, because you all can say and do things that we can’t in government.

Anne Seymour:  The giant sucking sound we want.

Len Sipes:  The giant –

Anne Seymour:  – to get wrapped into what we’re doing.

Len Sipes:  The giant, the giant sucking sound.  Well, but we also want, at the same time, we want to convince people that it’s all shades of gray, that there’s very little black and white here, that it’s very little E=MC2, that there is a massive amount of suffering.  If the faith community steps up to the plate and provides the leadership which they’re so capable of doing, and can mentor to individuals in a way that government, quite frankly, cannot.  I’m paid to do what I do.  So that person, regardless of where I spent my career, part of my career in terms of helping people caught up in the criminal justice system, I’m still paid to do it.  The mentors are there because they see it as God’s work.

Anne Seymour:  And the keyword in all that is servant leadership.  Leadership by itself does not hold, I think, the true sense of what can be accomplished by serving others, a servant leader takes, at the very center of his or her setting to meet a person at the point of their need, and the need of victims, the need of offenders, the needs of the secondary and tertiary victims who sometimes feel helpless because someone they love has been victimized are really, really important, and one of the things that I try to consistently understand is this marvelous study in the Hebrew scripture about Nathan, the friend of David.  David had victimized people without realizing, because his authority said you can do it.  You’re the king, take Uriah and kill him.  You know, you’re the king, do whatever you want to do, and Nathan appeals to the core of who he is, and here through the friend, the king, who has an influence over his subjects, comes and writes one of the most powerful restorative psalms that you can read in Hebrew scripture.  So I think that it’s important that that victim realizes, never be forgotten, that Anne and I are crucial to what you do, but you are crucial too, because a part of the government, the rules and the issues become subtle and arrived at, and we’ve got to be able to go into institutions and say, for instance, the homosexual rape, indeed, is victimizing people.

Len Sipes:  Okay.  Anne, I’m going to give you the final 30 seconds of the program.

Anne Seymour:  I just want to reiterate that I think we’re all in this together where we are victims or people who choose to victimize others, everyone’s going to have needs, and we as a community, I think, have an obligation to identify the needs of victims and try to meet them, but also recognize, I really appreciate what we’ve said, this whole thing is that, I think a lot of offenders, not all of them, a lot of them deserve a second chance, and the only way they can get that chance is if a community is willing to accept them and accept the fact that they have done something terribly wrong and give them opportunities to be held accountable to their victim and to their own community.

Len Sipes:  Our guests today have been Anne Seymour of Justice Solutions, www.justicesolutions.org, a national expert on the issue of victimology.  Reverend Bernard Keel is director of the University Memorial Chapel of Morgan State University, www.morgan – M-O-R-G-A-N – dot-edu, a mentor and faith based group facilitator.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is D.C. Public Safety.  Once again, we are extraordinarily appreciative of all the contact that you provide us, either through the show notes, the comments, and our four websites at media – M-E-D-I-A – dot-csosa.gov, or reach me directly via email, Leonard – L-E-O-N-A-R-D – dot-sipes – S-I-P-E-S – @csosa.gov, or follow us by twitter – twitter.com/lensipes.  I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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[Audio Begins]

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

Diane Kincaid:  Good, how are you, Len?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Kincaid:  Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Kincaid:  I’m not quite that old!

Len Sipes:  No!

Diane Kincaid:  But about 10 years or so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Kincaid:  Right, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Audio Ends]

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

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.

This Television Program is available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/?p=8

[Video Begins]

Leonard Sipes: Hi and welcome to D.C. Public Safety, I’m Len Sipes. Today we’re going to talk about the supervision of sex offenders, and there are literally thousands of articles and reports in the national media every year. Few criminal justice topics generate more interest. We’ll talk to two professionals from my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency who directly supervise sex offenders. In the second segment we’ll talk to community supervision officers who supervise female and male sex offenders. Throughout the program we will post agencies who could possibly answer your questions about sex offenders. And with that I’d like to introduce our first guest, Akil Walker, a supervisory community supervision officer, and Clarence Anderson, a community supervision officer. And gentlemen, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Clarence Anderson: Thank you.

Akil Walker: Thank you, real pleasure to be here.

Leonard Sipes: Akil, the first question goes to you. Before we get into the components of the Sex Offender Unit, the thing that’s always amazed me throughout my criminal justice career and sex offenders is that they’re compliant. You go to regular offenders, robbers, or drug offenders, and sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t – sometimes they’re properly drug tested, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they get the job, sometimes they don’t‚ but with sex offenders, they’re generally speaking very complaint. They dot every i and cross every t. Am I right or wrong?

Akil Walker: Yeah, for the most part. One of the issues that we have to address is that most offenders present very well. They’re working, they’re reporting – drug testing is very negative, so when they come in, they present themselves like they’re everyday citizens, hey, I’m just like you.’

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Akil Walker: That’s one of the difficulties so we’re trying to work with them on their behavior, as that of the every day citizen. We try to work with them just adapting their behavior.

Leonard Sipes: Right. But Clarence, that’s a challenge isn’t it, when you’re supervising sex offenders because you’ve got all of these guys and some women who, again, their showing up, sometimes they’re not, sometimes they’re compliant, sometimes they’re not. But those sex offenders, they’re doing everything right. And that’s a screen, is it not?

Clarence Anderson: That’s true, Len. That’s one of the difficulties in supervising sex offenders nowadays. They are compliant, and as a community supervision officer, you have delved deeper into their behaviors because they will present as Mr. Walker said, appropriately for supervision. You have to go into their background, you have to go into their family history, their criminal record. There’s certain behaviors that will investigate to in an sense sniff out -

Leonard Sipes: Sure.

Clarence Anderson: – inappropriate behaviors and so forth.

Leonard Sipes: And Akil, one of the things in terms of the sex offender unit, we are the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, we are in essence the parole and probation agency for Washington D.C., we are a federal agency. How many people are in the Sex Offender Unit and how many offenders are in the Sex Offender Unit?

Akil Walker: We have three supervisors, 23 CSOs. We have 414 active sex offenders, and a total of 620 offenders. Those are monitored offenders currently in jail or in drug treatment programs.

Leonard Sipes: OK so people on the street are what, 600?

Akil Walker: People on the street are 414.

Leonard Sipes: 414, okay. And we have others that we keep an eye on who are in jail or treatment in another state or that sort of thing, right?

Akil Walker: Pending release as well.

Leonard Sipes: All right. So we have a very low caseload. I think the audience needs to understand that in parole and probation agencies throughout this country, it’s not unusual to have caseloads of 150 offenders to every parole and probation agent. Now throughout the country they’re called parole and probation agents, in D.C. they’re called community supervision officers. But in the Sex Offender Unit it’s what, one community supervision officer to every 35 offenders, something along those lines?

Akil Walker: One CSO to every 23 offenders.

Leonard Sipes: 23 offenders.

Akil Walker: Active offenders.

Leonard Sipes: That’s amazing‚ active offenders. Okay, so you have a way of keeping an tight reign on sex offenders, correct?

Akil Walker: Absolutely.

Leonard Sipes: Okay, and some of the things that the audience is going to see throughout this show is footage of the community supervision officers using GPS – Global Positioning System, or satellite monitoring where we can actually watch their behavior on a day-to-day basis, on a minute-to-minute bases for that matter. We go to a computer and we can see in real-time where they are, so if they’re hanging out at a playground, we know. We know where they are and we ask what it is they’re doing, correct?

Akil Walker: Correct.

Leonard Sipes: And that’s why we have such low numbers, because for each offender, the CSO spends many hours‚ well just one offender, for example, when you’re in general supervision, you don’t have to spend as much time, but for example, Clarence will have to review GPS which takes hours at a time on an offender, tracking him. Depending upon their movements, they can be in D.C. right now, and then later on this afternoon they’re in Virginia, so it takes a lot of time.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Akil Walker: Plus our officers also monitor computerware and stuff like that, and the contact requirements are much higher in our office.

Leonard Sipes: Right. Now Clarence, let me go back to you. Now I’ve seen the community supervision officers hovering over the top the computer terminals watching where a person is going. Now the person is supposed to leave the house and go to work. He has a job, we ensure that he has a job to the best of our ability.

Clarence Anderson: Correct.

Leonard Sipes: And we know that he’s scheduled to leave the house at eight o’clock in the morning and arrive at his job at 8:30. But if that person’s veering off to the side and‚ we can see graphically on the map every playground, every church, every subway stop in the District of Columbia, we see that. So if he veers off for 15 minutes and gets to work 15 minutes, or instead of coming back home veers off the playgrounds, we stop him, we call him into the office, we go to his home, and we say, why were you hanging out at the playground? What were you doing at four o’clock this afternoon?’

Clarence Anderson: Right, that’s correct. That kind of deviant behavior at the time may not be considered deviant, but it goes against what their schedule, normal schedule, would be. So in that case we would have to investigate to find out, what was the reason why you went this particular place instead of going straight to work?’ You ask probing questions to gather more information so you can adequately and properly supervise the individual.

Leonard Sipes: Right. Okay. You also go into their computers. You have software that you can access the inside of their computer‚ what it is that they’re looking at from the office, correct?

Clarence Anderson: Yes, we’re expanding our computer search capabilities. Right now we have the ability to extract what they previously viewed and also implement monitoring software on their computer to see what they’ll be viewing in the future. And then the CSOs responsibility would be to come back, look at the computer again, pull that information, and we’ll review it amongst staff and then also bring it to the offender’s attention.

Leonard Sipes: Right, because he or she, but the overwhelming majority of them are males, they’re not supposed to be downloading pornography, they’re not supposed to be downloading child pornography or anything along those lines, correct?

Clarence Anderson: Pornography‚ they shouldn’t be downloading any of that information, but also we’re looking at chats, even computer sites that are not considered necessarily pornography. There may be some adult context which would be questionable that we would like to address with them.

Leonard Sipes: Okay. But even if they’re engaged in email conversations‚ inappropriate email conversations, we monitor that as well?

Clarence Anderson: Yes, correct.

Leonard Sipes: That’s amazing. All right, so we also use polygraphy ‚¬” lie detector tests.

Clarence Anderson: Correct.

Leonard Sipes: Okay, and why do we do that?

Akil Walker: We need to address certain issues, for example, we may talk to them, have you had contact with minors? Have you been involved in criminal activity?’

Leonard Sipes: Okay.

Akil Walker: And so forth because a lot of times the offenders will come into the office and say, everything’s fine.’

Leonard Sipes: Oh yeah

Akil Walker: Everything’s fine, nothing’s going on.’ But when you get a chance to polygraph them on specific questions, this one really comes in‚ okay, well there’s deception indicated on certain areas. Once we get that information, we can bring it to them and like Clarence said, probe deeper into what those questions were that they failed.

Leonard Sipes: Okay. And we also have from time to time investigators who actually shadow this person, correct?

Akil Walker: If we have the capability to‚ we have surveillance officers available to our CSOs and our teams.

Leonard Sipes: Okay. What’s the bottom line with you gentlemen in terms of supervising sex offenders? I think that these are some of the most challenging offenders to deal with. And again, throughout my career, people who have committed murder, armed robbery, garden variety types of crimes, drug dealing‚ they’re fairly predictable. But the sex offender‚ again, he presents himself very well. He’s in every meeting, he’s always working, he’s always compliant. You really have to dig to get at whether or not this person is violating, and that’s the challenge. Is it not of your unit?

Akil Walker: Oh yeah, definitely because we’re not only dealing with the offender, but also his family members, his friends and so forth. A lot of times you’ll say, just for an example, Bill didn’t do it, he’s a good guy.’

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Akil Walker: So it’s difficult sometimes working with the community to make them understand that these guys present as normal human beings, but sometimes they issue is a lot deeper.

Leonard Sipes: Clarence, you go out to their homes?

Clarence Anderson: Yes I do.

Leonard Sipes: You visit them in their homes, you visit them where they work. Sometimes they’re prearranged visits and sometimes they’re surprise visits, correct?

Clarence Anderson: Correct.

Leonard Sipes: All right, so tell me about those. And sometimes you go to the house with members of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Clarence Anderson: Correct. The times we go out with the Metropolitan Police Department are called accountability tours.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Clarence Anderson: It holds the offender accountable to let them know that we’re out in the community‚ I can not supervise a sex offender 24 hours a day. With bringing MPD out, it gives the offender opportunity one, to meet the officer and also let them know that somebody else will be watching out for them.

Leonard Sipes: Sure. And those officers spread the word to the other police officers that that John Doe, that Johnny Thomas, who’s living at 1113 Montpelier Street is a sex offender and here’s his criminal background. And he alerts others so the other police officers keep an eye on him as well.

Clarence Anderson: Correct.

Leonard Sipes: So that’s part of the interesting partnership that I think that a lot of parole and probation agencies throughout the country do not have. We work on a day-to-day basis with the Metropolitan Police Department as well as I mean, we are Washington D.C., as well as the FBI, as well as other federal agencies. Again, we are a federal law enforcement criminal justice agency. And that partnership is a big strength of our supervision strategy, correct Clarence?

Clarence Anderson: Right, it’s important. Like I said, I can’t be with them 24/7.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Clarence Anderson: It allows the officers in the community to get to know the offender‚ his behaviors, his hangouts. And if they see him in an inappropriate situation, of course they’ll take action. However, they’ll also notify me to let me know what kind of situations he may be getting himself into so I can address it when he comes in for his office visit.

Leonard Sipes: Now Akil, that’s the heart and soul. It’s all the equipment we have, the satellite monitoring GPS tracking, the lie detector tests, looking at their actions in real-time on the computer, having investigators follow them. But it’s your personal sense as an investigator, it’s your personal sense as a person. We’re trying to help them as well. I do want to get into that part, we provide a ton of treatment. So it’s that combination of working partnership with law enforcement, all the equipment you have at your disposal, your own skills as an investigator, but what about the treatment aspect?

Akil Walker: Well like you said Len, I think all this is done in terms of we use what we call a containment theory, like you mentioned MPD, CSOs, and so forth, bring the attention to communities so that the offender won’t recidivate again.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Akil Walker: So we’re trying to make sure that they get the tools necessary, and that’s where treatment comes into play. Treatment can span from 12 months to 18 months or even longer. We’re starting to extend our treatment program to allow more tests, what we call PPGs, or penile plethysmograph.

Leonard Sipes: We actually measure his arousal capacity, correct?

Akil Walker: Right, to minors, to adults.

Leonard Sipes: Yes.

Akil Walker: They’re likings‚ heterosexual, homosexual likings. And it’s important, we need a complete picture of the offender and we can’t get that just based on the information provided through the offender, so we need the community, MPD, treatment providers, all adding their input on this offender to give us the maximum picture on this offender.

Leonard Sipes: Right, but the point that I do want to make is that we provide treatment – I mean, we fund our sex offender treatment. We not just enforcing the rules, as important as that is.

Akil Walker: Right.

Leonard Sipes: At the same time, we will give that person counseling, at the same time we will give that person the measurement tools to help him because the research is fairly clear that if you ride the individual hard, hold him accountable, if you integrate that treatment package‚ Clarence, this question goes to you, that there’s a good possibility that this person can reside in the community safely without harming anybody else, correct?

Clarence Anderson: That’s correct. With all the necessary tools in place to include treatment, it lowers the offender‚ it can lower the offender’s recidivism rate which is important.

Leonard Sipes: Right. But that’s the final challenge. The final challenge is putting that whole package together. I mean, most parole and probation agencies in this country see their offenders twice a month, maybe‚ for maybe 15 minutes a piece. You guys are out in the field using all this equipment.

Akil Walker: Right. And like Clarence talked on with that treatment piece, they’ve gotta internalize those tools to really make it effective for them.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Akil Walker: They can’t just sit there and sit in treatment, they need to actually practice what they learn. And if they do so, like Clarence said, it’ll seriously reduce the likelihood that they’ll get rearrested in any type. Sex offense or just minor criminal infractions.

Leonard Sipes: All right, that closes our first segment. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us. Watch for us in the second segment as we continue our discussion on the supervision of sex offenders. We’ll be right back.

Leonard Sipes: Hi, welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Len Sipes. Our guests for the second segment are two community supervision officers, again, from my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. They are Ivy Gilliam and Anthony Desharten, and welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Ivy Gilliam: Thank you, Len.

Anthony Desharten: Thanks for having us.

Leonard Sipes: Ladies and gentlemen, before we interview Anthony and Ivy, we’re going to throw to a package of the supervision of sex offenders provided to us by NBC4 here in Washington about the supervision of sex offenders, we’ll be right back.

Video Footage: In the Washington area and across the country an increasing number of sex offenders in the headlines are women, some of them teachers. Tonight in part 2 of her special report, Julie Carey looks at whether parents and educators are teaching children that sex offenders are not always men.

Offender: I felt like this was my only friend…

Reporter: This woman we will call Cala is a convicted sex offender, accused of inappropriate touching for incidents involving a 14 year old nephew. She takes full responsibility for her crime, and after years of probation and therapy, she warns that we don’t properly prepare children for the fact that a sex offender could be a woman.

Offender: There’s always the image of the creapy figure lurking around your children and snatching them off of the swing set and such, but no, not a woman. That’s the Moms.

Reporter: Ed Jagon agrees that society doesn’t like to face the idea of female sex offenders, leaving children vulnerable. He was sexually abused by a middle age baby sitter when he was just 7.

Ed Jagon: When it happened to me I did tell my Mother and it was a baby sitter and my Mother didn’t believe me.

Reporter: Now along with dozens of volunteers he runs a sex abuse awareness program for children called the Good Night Program. Based in Beltsville Maryland, the fairy tale motif has a serious message.

Man: Excuse me, I’m looking for Park Street.

Reporter: Children are taught to recognize 10 deceptions used by would-be sex offenders.

Woman: I would like to get someone to mow my lawn.

Reporter: And in half of the role playing scenarious, the offender is a woman.

Sophia West: What we try to teach the children, education wise, is you look for the behavior of the individual. Whether it be a male, a female, whether it be a family member, whether it be a teacher, a priest, a neighbor or the stranger on the street.

Reporter: At the District of Columbia Superior Court Supervision Office, just 4 female sex offenders are among the hundreds of men being monitored and treated. Still Director, Paul Brennan, warns most female offenders go undetected in part because women are seen as caretakers and naturally have more intimate contact with children.

Paul Brennan: The community in general determines that females don’t commit sex offenses. If they are inclined to molest children, some of the warning signs aren’t going to be picked up on as readily because they are women.

Reporter: Brennan says most female offenders with intensive treatment will not offend again. Still he says one woman supervised by his office is classified as predatory. She’ll be placed under electronic surveilance. And Brennan says as society slowly begins to acknowledge the danger in female sex offenders, the criminal justice system must do it’s part.

Paul Brennan: What we can do in the criminal justice system is hold the female sex offenders just as accountable as the male offenders. The message will be clear if we are doing that.

Reporter: Julie Carey, News 4.

Leonard Sipes: Ladies and gentlemen again, welcome to back to D.C. Public Safety. Ivy Gilliam and Anthony Desharten. Ivy, the first question goes to you. We saw in the package about one of our comprades, Paul Brennan, supervising female and male sex offenders. Now I want to make it clear that we don’t have that many female sex offenders compared to the male sex offenders, there’s only ten compared to like 400. But there are differences in terms of supervising men and women, especially female sex offenders, correct?

Ivy Gilliam: That’s correct Len. In general we like to take a proactive approach for both our male and female sex offenders. But the differences are instances where we have to consider children, consider that our female offenders may have other issues‚ childcare, finding parenting and maybe even issues around employment in order to be able to take care of those children that they have.

Leonard Sipes: I think one of the things we want to talk about in general, but we’re getting back to female offenders, is recent research basically stating that 50% of all offenders are claiming histories of mental health issues. For women offenders, it’s higher than that. If you take a look at substance abuse histories, again, for female offenders, they have higher rates and more intense rates of substance abuse. So it seems to me that female offenders bring more challenges than the male offenders simply because of their backgrounds.

Ivy Gilliam: And they do. And we meet those needs by placing all of our offenders, by placing the female offenders into treatment programs if they’re necessary so they can get those needs met.

Leonard Sipes: And the bottom line for the public, and Anthony, I’m going to go to you, the bottom line in terms of the public is, are those needs met? I mean, a person – because a lot of female offenders come from histories of sexual violence. They have their own histories of being a victim of sexual violence and being abused as children and as young women. That seems to me to be an extraordinarily difficult person to deal with. Can we tell the public that these intense needs that they bring to the table are adequately met?

Anthony Desharten: Well they’re most definitely adequately met. And one thing that’s special about CSOSA is that we offer so many services to the offenders. We give them every opportunity to become a stable individual. And that deals with often substance abuse treatment, mental health services, sex offender treatment‚ so really what our goal is is to do our best to help them reintegrate into the community.

Leonard Sipes: Right, and we know from research, and I want to make this very clear to the public‚ very, very clear – is that we just can’t watch them, we have to provide them with treatment services. Department of Justice research made this very clear in the mid 1990s, that the more you supervise them, all you do is violate them and put them back them back in prison to the point where the prisons can’t deal with the volume coming in. But if you provide services, stabilize them in the community‚ especially with a person with mental health issues. I mean, who would argue that a person coming out of the prison system with a severe mental health problem needs mental health treatment, or it’s guaranteed that he’s going to go back to prison? So we intervene, we try to provide these services that stabilize that person, but at the same time we still hold them accountable.

Anthony Desharten: Exactly.

Leonard Sipes: Okay. And Ivy, the difficulties of dealing with sex offenders, I threw this out to our guests in terms of the first segment, you’ve got a very conniving, cunning, individual‚ I mean, because they have a predisposition in some cases towards violence against women. They have a predisposition in some cases of sexual urges towards children. I mean, that’s something that is extraordinarily difficult to deal with because it can be the core of that person’s psyche.

Ivy Gilliam: Right. And which again is the reason why they work so hard to make sure that they fly under the radar, why they make it a point to be as compliant as possible so that we won’t look, we won’t probe, we won’t ask those important questions that will gain us access to information that will be helpful in protecting the public. And also protecting themselves from possible situations where they leave themselves susceptible to reoffending.

Leonard Sipes: Now when they go through the treatment process, the people who deal with them, they’re experts. I mean, you guys are experts, but the psychologists and psychiatrists who deal with them, they know when they’re not telling the truth. And I can be a bit more explicit, but this is family television. They know when they’re not being honest and they confront them about that. And then you’ve got the lie detector tests, and you’ve got the satellite monitoring, and you’re viewing their computer – there’s a certain point where you can get a fairly decent picture as to who this person is.

Ivy Gilliam: That’s correct. They also give us the opportunity to work with them, the treatment specialists, so that once information is obtained through treatment, that information is given to us by way of staffings with the treatment providers and the offender, so that we could all sit down and discuss what’s going on in this person’s situation in order to better assist them.

Leonard Sipes: Right. Now Anthony, we have‚ I mean, no offender on community supervision is perfect, it’s impossible. I mean, we expect issues, we always expect issues. If a person comes out with a serious substance abuse history, that person when he gets to the street is‚ we expect that this person is going to try to sneak in drug use, which is why we drug test as massively as we do so we can ferret that out and deal with it immediately.

But we expect these sort of things. Our sex offenders, when they violate what we have as a serious of intermediate sanctions that we take immediate action to deal with that person so that person knows that there are consequences for his actions.

Anthony Desharten: Yes, it’s interesting you brought up drug testing because even with sex offenders, it seems as though substance abuse issues are at the forefront. But we do have sanctions in place to help deal with those. Some of the more basic sanctions are daily reporting to the supervision office. When an individual is having problems, we want to see them more often.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Anthony Desharten: If they’re on maximum or medium supervision, we can increase the supervision to intensive, that would also give us the benefit of seeing them more.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Anthony Desharten: Additional sanction would be GPS monitoring.

Leonard Sipes: Right. Is there more treatment? There’s just a lot of contact with us, that’s the bottom line.

Anthony Desharten: Bottom line, yes.

Leonard Sipes: Okay.

Anthony Desharten: And when there are issues, we notify their treatment vendors immediately, especially they’re sex offender treatment providers immediately so then we can also address the issue in the supervision office, but they’re also addressing the issue in the treatment center as well.

Leonard Sipes: Okay. And the question goes out to both of you, we can assure the public, because the public is scared of sex offenders, again, everyday I get news clips from all over the country, and every day those news clips are filled with stories about sex offenders and what different states are doing to deal with them and just basically sex offenders – that’s all you read about, it’s guaranteed everyday in terms of the news summary. We can tell the public through your low caseload ratios‚ again, it’s what, 23 offenders to every community supervision officer. I know of other states immediately surrounding the District of Columbia where it’s 150 to one. So you have 23 to one, you have all this equipment, you have all this treatment‚ we can safely maintain, this is what the public wants to know, that we can safely maintain these individuals in the community?

Ivy Gilliam: We can. Through the technology that’s now made available, we are able to watch them closely and to be more effective in our positions.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Anthony Desharten: As Ms. Gilliam indicated earlier, we take a very proactive approach towards supervision, that’s with regular contact with the offenders, regular contact with the treatment vendors, and we also like to establish collateral contacts with their family, friends, girlfriends -

Leonard Sipes: Do their families cover for them? I mean, are the families enablers or are the families helpful in terms of the supervision?

Anthony Desharten: At times they do attempt to cover up for their family member, but I’ve situations where family members are concerned about the well-being of their relative in the community, they want them to succeed as much as we do.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

Anthony Desharten: So when they do see an issue, they do bring it to our attention at times.

Leonard Sipes: And that’s one of the things that a lot of people are going to understand, but it’s true. Again, I’ve been in the business for quite a few years, and sometimes family members are your best ally. They want to see the person succeed, so when they see the person veering off to the side, often times they will bring you that information.

Ivy Gilliam: But that comes with early establishment of a rapport with the family members. We make sure that we gain collateral contact so that we can contact those family members and build a relationship with them as well as the offender. And it helps the offender and it also helps us.

Leonard Sipes: Right. And I’ve seen the community supervision officers go into the homes of offenders and they do exactly that – they establish that relationship with the family, that’s why you don’t want all the visits to be surprise visits, you want the family there. You maintain that contact with the family. I saw a mom one time chastise the dickens out of her son for not getting work and saying that, he and I will be at your office the next day in terms of looking for jobs and I want the job services,’ and the offender just sitting there going, okay.’ I mean, sometimes family members are our best allies.

Anthony Desharten: We love that though.

Ivy Gilliam: We do.

Anthony Desharten: That’s exactly what we need because they have the most insight to how an individual’s doing in the community because we can’t be with them 24 hours a day.

Leonard Sipes: Right. And they are you barometer as to how that person is doing. So suddenly if this person is not under GPS but leaves the house at three o’clock in the morning, that’s of concern to her, that’s a concern to mom or dad and they will bring that to your attention, in many cases so the offender can be immediately confronted.

Ivy Gilliam: Oh yeah.

Leonard Sipes: And the quick answer is, because we’re running out of time, you’re some of the best investigators out there. I mean, you deal with some of the toughest clientele out there. What’s it like being a sex offender CSO?

Ivy Gilliam: It’s challenging, but it’s completely doable.

Leonard Sipes: Clarence, a quick answer?

Anthony Desharten: And because it’s challenging, it’s also extremely rewarding as well.

Leonard Sipes: Great. Ladies and gentlemen – well first of all, thank the two of you.

Anthony Desharten: Thank you.

Leonard Sipes: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. This is D.C. Public Safety. I am your host, Len Sipes. Watch for us next month as we produce another program on the criminal justice system. Have yourselves a pleasant day.

[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.