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GPS Monitoring of Criminal Offenders-Florida State University-DC Public Safety Radio

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/10/gps-monitoring-of-criminal-offenders-florida-state-university-dc-public-safety-radio/

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

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. The program today, ladies and gentlemen, is on GPS global positioning systems or electronic monitoring. We have Bill Bales on from the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. They just recently completed a study of 5,000 offenders in terms of the impacts of electronic monitoring and global positioning systems, and some of those results were pretty good. We also have Carlton Butler, a program administrator for GPS for my agency, the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency. We’ve been doing GPS monitoring since 2003, so the whole idea, ladies and gentlemen, is to take a look at electronic monitoring, global positioning system monitoring, finding out whether or not it works to reduce recidivism. According to the Florida State University study, it does. And with that introduction, Bill Bales and Carlton Butler, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Carlton Butler:  Thank you, Len.

Bill Bales:  Thank you, Leonard.

Len Sipes:  Okay, Bill, the first question’s gonna go to you. Now this is an impressive study. We’re talking about 5,000 offenders were part of the study, and then you do represent one of the premier research organizations in the United States, the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. So the thing that I find amazing when I read your report, is that reduce risk of failure by 31 per cent. You’ve reduced – the program, GPS program, electronic monitoring reduces absconding, it reduces revocations, it reduces new crimes. One of the really interesting things that I found is that it’s used as an alternative to prison in about a third of all cases. And considering how states are really struggling with their correctional budgets, I think all of that is a pretty impressive set of findings. So Bill, can you give me a sense as to the larger study and what it really means?

Bill Bales:  Certainly. Yeah, the study involved—and I think this is very important—it involved medium and high-risk felony offenders in Florida. And Florida currently has almost 3,000 people on electronic monitoring. Almost all of those are Global Positioning System cases, and we did a very, what I believe is a sophisticated study of complicated matching of offenders who were placed on GPS versus similar offenders not placed on GPS, and then tracked them. So essentially, we have what we believe is a very equivalent control and experimental group, and the findings are very robust in the sense that just over 30 percent reduction in the likelihood of failure for the same type of offender on EM as non-EM. So that – it’s a finding that again, is very unequivocal from an empirical standpoint, and we believe is very sound from a research perspective. And like you said, Leonard, we also found that about a third of these offenders on electronic monitoring would have been in prison if not for electronic monitoring. And we also found somewhat surprising is that when you look at the effect of EM on outcomes, it’s fairly similar across different offender types in terms of younger versus older, male versus female. Across offense types, we found very similar results, except for among violent offenders the effect was not quite as great, but it was still a significant reduction in new crimes and absconding and violations. So it’s not as though Global Positioning Systems are only useful and effective for certain types of offenders, it’s pretty much across the board. So that was a very positive effect.

Len Sipes:  Now the findings of the research are significant, because all of us read criminological research as it pertains to reducing recidivism, reducing offending, reducing new crimes.

Bill Bales:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And ordinarily, those results, if they are positive, range in the 10 to 20 percent. The outer limits of a lot of the programs that are used around the country are about 20 percent. I mean, you’ve reduced the risk of failure by 31 percent. That makes your study one of the most significant research findings in criminology regarding managing people on community supervision, correct?

Bill Bales:  That is correct, yes. You’re exactly right. There’s a lot of the empirical research in criminology, if we find effects of various types of programs and interventions, they tend to be fairly marginal effects, if any. So yes, this is a very strong finding. And I will also mention that this project was funded by the National Institute of Justice, and the initial report went through a very rigorous peer review process. So these are findings that have been sanctioned and approved by, you know, other experts outside of certainly our college here.

Len Sipes:  Right, you’re a part of the Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice funds research on the basis of – under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice. So generally speaking, whatever research they fund is peer reviewed and methodologically correct.

Bill Bales:  Right. Exactly.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

Bill Bales:  That’s correct. Yes.

Len Sipes:  Carlton, we’ve been doing – Carlton Butler, program administrator for our program here in Washington DC under the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency–we’ve been doing GPS since 2003, correct?

Carlton Butler:  That’s correct. We have been.

Len Sipes:  Okay. Now when one of the things that I have found is that there’s just a wide array of evidence, there’s a wide array of stories in terms of the success of GPS. One that comes to mind simply in terms of apprehending an individual, we found that was a person that was involved in a series of sex crimes against young girls. And the picture was put out, and one of our community supervision officers, known elsewhere as parole and probation agents, recognized the face, looked at the GPS tracking system, was able to tie him in to exactly the locations and times that these crimes were committed, worked with the metropolitan police department, and arrested him. So GPS not only has a deterrent value, it has an apprehension value.

Carlton Butler:  Yes it does. Here in DC, Len, we have a partnership program with all our law enforcement partners. We call it the Crimes and Correlation Program, and in that program we offer limited access to our law enforcement partners, and they use crime data to help resolve crimes in the neighborhood. And under that particular case was one of those instances where the Crimes and Correlation Program worked very well.

Len Sipes:  And again, I think the point needs to be made is that law enforcement has access to our GPS tracking data. So not only do we, within the agency, keep track of individuals under supervision, law enforcement has access to that tracking data directly. They can see on any given day, if they have a suspect, where he’s been and where he is.

Carlton Butler:  That is correct, but they also use it for some extended purposes as well. In the District of Columbia, unfortunately there is some issues with gang interaction.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Carlton Butler:  And they use the program to set up what we call global zones throughout the city, to help track who’s actually entering those zones, to be able to match individuals up who might be involved in gang activity, and/or new criminal activities. So they kind of use it to the extent where they do use it for tracking new crimes. But they also use it for crime prevention as well.

Len Sipes:  Bill, I’m gonna go back to you. Now your research shows a reduction in absconding, a reduction in revocations, of reduction in new crimes. Once again, I mean these are just extraordinary findings. It is just – GPS seems to be certainly something that’s gonna be used in the future. You also estimate that five billion offenders are electronic monitoring or GPS somewhere in the United States, correct?

Bill Bales:  I believe that’s the figure. I don’t recall it right off the top of my head -

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Bill Bales:  – to be honest with you. Yes, I know that it’s – certainly it’s expanding as, you know, correctional and preventative type of tool that’s available to various states throughout the country. And my sense is that it will be a method used more and more in the future because of its effectiveness, and the fact that it’s anywhere from six to seven times cheaper than sending someone to state prison or federal prison.

Len Sipes:  And we all agree that states are suffering. I’m not going to get into a debate about the efficacy of incarceration, I’ll leave that to others to decide, but we do know that states throughout the United States, virtually all of them, they’ve got to reduce the budgets of state agencies across the board. What I’ve read in my reading of newspaper articles and media reports, the budget cuts have been the prominent point of concern in the media. The budget difficulties with state agencies and local agencies, we have laying off police officers, closing down prisons, reducing the amount of people in the state attorney’s office and public defenders offices, and the states are saying, “Hey, we have absolutely no choice but to do this, because we’ve got to operate within the confines of the budgets that are given us.” So what this seems to say to me is that GPS is a viable alternative to use as those states try to figure out how to protect public safety, and at the same time, how to manage their own budget. That seems to me that GPS is certainly going to be part of that mix.

Bill Bales:  Yes. I would certainly agree with you 100 percent. There’s no question. Every state in the country is under dire, you know, financial straits at the moment, and Corrections, at least in Florida, the current budget is about 2.5 billion a year.  And it’s almost 10 percent of the state budget, and most of that is in the area of prisons. So certainly to the extent that you can reduce the prison population by even a percent or two, you can make a huge dent in the state budget when we have big deficits.

Len Sipes:  And out of pure curiosity, Bill, one of the things, when I read this study and it came out through the Department of Justice mailing list, I guess I’m a bit surprised that mainstream media has not picked up on this, that other organizations have not picked up on this, that again, the significance of these findings are I guess somewhat short of astounding. Are you getting a lot of coverage for the research?

Bill Bales:  Well, yeah, we’ve gotten numerous enquiries from just really a host of entities. Several states have contacted us that are considering either starting or expanding their GPS programs. And so, legislative bodies have contacted us, governor’s offices. Yeah, we’ve received quite a bit of attention because of the policy implications and the possible cost savings of this technology, which in the scheme of things is relatively new as a correctional strategy. So obviously we’d want more attention, but hopefully others will build on this research to the extent that researchers continue to find positive outcomes of this technology. My sense is it will get more and more attention from policy makers.

Len Sipes:  I guess my observation is that I’m personally surprised it’s not on the front page of USA Today. To me, after all of my years in criminal justice and criminology, to me this is one of the prominent, most significant studies out there. But one of the questions I want to put to Carlton, and Bill, you can chime in if you like, but let’s give Carlton the first crack at this, is that we’re not saying that this is a panacea. I mean, offenders cut these devices off all the time. They have to be recharged. You lose the GPS signal if you go inside of a building. There are ways, and we’re not to discuss specifically what they are, but offenders do try to defeat GPS devices. So this is certainly not a panacea. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it takes a tremendous amount of administration. You suddenly have parole and probation agents—in our case, community supervision officers—with a ton of data that they have to sift through. So this is not as easy as simply slapping on a GPS anklet on that person. Carlton, you wanna take a shot at all that?

Carlton Butler:  Yeah, I agree. I agree this program is not a panacea. It doesn’t replace the supervision officer with their supervision duties on a particular offender. I would say, however, I think the technology has improved a great deal over the last at least three years, and I think that within the next year or so, we will probably see some more advancement to the equipment. What I mean by that is that obviously there are offenders who will attempt to circumvent the system, and because we know this exists, the GPS practitioners are working very hard with vendors to make sure that their devices are updated to be able to kind of help with those kinds of situations. One of the things that I know is prevalent most now in this industry is efforts to shield the device in efforts to jam the device.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Carlton Butler:  And I do know that that is on the forefront of the vendors, manufacturers, to make sure that their device has the ability to detect those type of things. And I would also like to say too, there’s a national committee that was conformed by the National Institution of Justice, and it’s made up of 35 members. Out of that group, it’s probably, I would say, about 25 or 27 practitioners on that. In fact, Mr. [PH] Sanifield, who is the administrator, and I’m sure Bill worked with in Florida, is a member of that committee. And in that committee, we’re doing something unlike what has been done in the past, and that is we’re writing national standards for GPS. And the reason why we’re doing that, because as Bill said earlier in one of his statements, we see the technology or need for the technology to be increasing. And because of that, most practitioners right now who are trying to start up programs, don’t have a whole lot of information unless they reach out to one of their – someone that already has done. So, we hope that these standards will help individuals who want to develop or enhance their GPS program, because there will be a lot of data shared in these standards.

Len Sipes:  We’re halfway through the program, and let me introduce our guests—Bill Bales from the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The web site for the Florida State University Department of Criminology is www.fsu.edu/departments/#criminology. I’m gonna give that out several times throughout the course of the program. Carlton Butler is a program administrator for my agency, Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency. We are the parole and probation agency here for Washington DC. We’re a federal agency, www.csosa.gov. www.csosa.gov. We just redid our fact sheet on GPS, which is gonna be on the main page of our web site, so if anybody’s interested in what it is that we do here.  Bill, okay; back to you. You’ve heard Carlton say that there’s a need for national standards, and the committee that he’s working with is there. There’s a need for national standards on GPS. Do you agree?

Bill Bales:  Yes, I think that makes total sense. It is like, as Leonard knows—I mean, as you know and as Carlton knows—it’s a fairly sophisticated technology. But based on our research–and part of that involved actually going out throughout the state of Florida and interviewing those probation officers and administrators, and also offenders—we found that they were well trained, and a lot of that had to do with the vendor themselves, that were very much involved with the community corrections folks that used this technology. And I think that was extremely advantageous, that they have a very close working relationship, and they have mutual goals in mind in terms of, you know, having this GPS system work properly. And the other thing that we witnessed, which was very positive, was there’s continuous efforts to improve not just the technology itself, but just the process of implementing and using this technology to keep offenders from violating. And so I think that’s a critical component of this, is the type of relationships and partnerships that the vendors and the correctional organization has. And one thing—and I’ll plug this just very quickly—the Department of Corrections did in Florida is they determined that so many of the quote “violations” that occurred while people were on GPS, were very very minor instances; like you mentioned, where the GPS device or signal was lost. So they worked with the vendor and implemented a monitoring center that the vendor maintains. And so all the alerts that occur go directly to the vendor, their monitoring center, and 99 percent of them, they can handle and clear without an incident. But the supervising officer is aware of those, but they don’t have to respond to them instantly. So, that’s been a tremendous assistance to the officers in terms of the time involved in working with their GPS case load. So, I think there are a lot of – there are numerous things, initiatives that can be used and expanded as this, you know, capability moves forward.

Len Sipes:  And Carlton, that’s one of the things that you advocated and implemented here, is to have the vendor basically take care of all that minor stuff so the community supervision officers can focus on the big part of the violation.

Carlton Butler:  Yes, we did, Len. And also, one of the things that I read in Bill’s report, and that was one of the things that one of the probationary officer’s stated; they would have liked the opportunity to work with the EM program, actually in the unit prior to be given case loads of offenders on EM. I think that’s significant, because one, it gives them the training skill that they need; and two, it helps them to understand what some of the alerts that they actually receive, because oftentimes they get so many alerts and it’s so overwhelming to them, because there’s so much data for them to filter through. This is one of the reasons why we elected to go to the monitoring center, so that we would have someone that was a little more trained and a little more skilled to farm through that data first, before that data would be generated to the probationary officer, so they would know what to do with it beyond that point.

Len Sipes:  I remember talking to a reporter from Massachusetts who basically was a little upset with the system in Massachusetts–and that’s another story for another time–but basically talking about GPS as being over-sold and over-promised. And my sense was that well, how can you possibly over-sell or over-promise GPS? The offender can just snip it off and walk away from the unit. There are no guarantees on GPS, but this is why I was so excited about Bill Bales study, because it basically says, “Yeah, there are endless problems with GPS, there are endless complications, it’s hard to administer, it throws just an unbelievable amount of information.” Remember, the average parole and probation agent in this country sees that offender on a twice a month basis for two 15-minute interviews in an office. That’s what ordinarily happens throughout the United States. Now, you’re getting a ton of data, flow of data, every single day on every single offender who’s on GPS. That becomes difficult to deal with. But let me go back to what I originally said, and Bill, we’ll start with you. I mean, again, this is not a panacea, this is not – nobody should be selling this as something that’s going to quote/unquote “solve supervision problems”.

Bill Bales:  That’s correct, and officers told us that numerous times, that GPS is a tool. But you can never replace the responsibilities and efforts and the things that officers do to keep offenders from violating. And so while pretty much ever officer we talked to thought that GPS was a very effective tool at their disposal, you still have to have that one-on-one contact between the officer and the offender and the, you know, unannounced visits to their homes and their places of employment, and so forth and so on. So, yeah, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this is just one tool that appears to be extremely effective. But we can’t lose sight of the incredible value that these officers bring to the table in terms of dealing with, you know, especially very serious offenders, many of whom, at least in Florida, 75 percent are sex offenders. And so, we can’t lose sight of the incredible work the officers do in this regard.

Len Sipes:  And Carlton, you have essentially said the same thing, that in terms of the individual officers, it’s – you’ve gotta continue working hard supervising your offenders in person. You’ve gotta work with them, you’ve gotta get them involved in treatment programs, you’ve gotta be sure that they’re working, you’ve gotta be sure that they’re following the conditions of their supervision. The GPS system is simply nothing more than a tool.

Carlton Butler:  I agree, that it is simply a tool, and that is it’s data, as you said, it’s a lot of data that you have to absorb and try to dissect. But that’s all that it is, is data. That one-on-one contact with the offender tends to give the supervision officer a whole other realm of information that the GPS device will never be able to provide. What the GPS device pretty much provides is locations and maps of where the offender would actually frequent. But in terms of – and it might give them some information on new collateral contacts where they may have not known where the offender was going, of certain places he was going.

Len Sipes:  Or, if sex offenders are hanging out at playgrounds.

Carlton Butler:  Exactly.

Len Sipes:  And we also use this as a curfew. We can restrict them to their house, we can restrict them to their block, we can restrict them to a certain part of the city. And we can, as they comply with the methods of supervision, we can ease up on GPS supervision. We can give them more freedom and more flexibility to reward them for complying with the terms of their supervision.

Carlton Butler:  Yes, that’s true, and these are the types of things we’re able to do here in DC, that’s been very effective in my use of GPS.

Len Sipes:  Okay, gentlemen, we have four minutes left in the program, and I need 30 seconds to close, so that’s three-and-a-half minutes. Bill, where do we go with GPS? With your research, it seems to indicate that this has a major impact not only on state budgets, but it has a major impact or potential for reducing crime, for reducing problems under supervision. Where do we go to from here?

Bill Bales:  Well, I think certainly we need to continue to do the research. I mean, our research was but strictly in one state, and it was a population of medium and high risk felony offenders, so as you all know, GPS has been expanding to local jails and other types of correctional facilities. So I think that’s one area. I think the other area is in terms of the application of GPS to various types of offenders, and also the level of discretion that probation officers and administrators have in the use of GPS, because currently, at least in Florida, that’s all determined by the judge. And from what we observed in talking to people, was that something that the states and locals should consider is giving more discretion to the probation offices in terms of the application of GPS, in terms of when an offender needs to be on it, when they need to be off of it; and because they work with the offenders on a consistent basis, and they know when an offender may be going south, and when this tool could possibly be applied to prevent that from getting worse.

Len Sipes:  So more jurisdiction, more authority at the local level to make those decisions in the field based upon conditions and not necessarily what the judge has to say or what the parole commission has to say, to give that flexibility and freedom to the people in the field to make those decisions.

Bill Bales:  Right, yeah. There’s been laws, like the Jessica Lunsford law in Florida where it ties the judge’s hands as to who gets put on GPS. But as I know Carlton knows, every case is different, and what tool we need to bring to the table to, you know, reduce the likelihood of failure, is variable across different types of offenders, different situations. So I think the states, the policy makers, real need to look at this in a very objective way and say, “Okay, this tool seems to be incredibly effective. How can we apply it in a more reasonable, objective and effective manner to the right population at the right points in time of their supervision?”

Len Sipes:  Carlton, we only have about a minute left. That’s basically what you’ve said as well.

Carlton Butler:  Yes, it is.

Len Sipes:  That really, it really cannot be a hard and fast rule. It can’t be a hard and fast application that the community supervision officer/parole and probation agent needs to be involved in this, and really needs to make decisions in terms of when to apply it, when to take them off, how long to keep them on.

Carlton Butler:  Yeah, I agree. I agree with everything that Bill has said. I do know that however with the Jessica law, there is a loophole in it that might present a problem. One is that from the time the individual comes off of probation and have life in GPS, there’s nobody to really supervise them after they come off probation or supervision.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

Carlton Butler:  So hopefully they can fix that part of the law, because that’s been a challenge to the industry.

Len Sipes:  Alright, Carlton, I’m gonna give you the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We’ve been talking to Bill Bales, Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The web site is www.fsu.edu/departments/#criminology. Also being with us today, or also on our air is Carlton Butler, program administrator for my agency, the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency. The program administrator for the GPS program, www.csosa.gov. The research that I’ve been talking about today it’s called “A Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment of Electronic Monitoring”. Ladies and gentlemen, we do want to thank you for your letters, for your phone calls, for your e-mails, for suggestions in terms of what we can do to improve the show. Comments and criticisms are always welcome, and I do want everybody to have themselves a very very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Interview with Ex-Offender Eddie Ellis-DC Public Safety Radio

March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/10/interview-with-ex-offender-eddie-ellis-dc-public-safety-radio/

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

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.  I am your host, Leonard Sipes.  Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a real pleasure today to have Lamont Carey. Lamont’s been around for a long time.  He’s a fixture, not only in Washington DC, but throughout the country.  Lamont spent 11 years in the federal prison system for committing a crime in Washington DC, and he’s been an outspoken individual regarding the condition of people coming outside of the prison system and in the world where the overwhelming majority of people who come out of the prison system are basically ignored.  He’s gotten an awful lot of press.  Let me tell you a lit bit about what Lamont Carey has done within the course of the last 10 years, 11 years:  HBO, for the Def Poetry Jam, on Home Box Office, he’s done The Wire, again, with HBO, probably the best crime and justice program ever on television.  Black Entertainment Tonight, Lyric Cafe, he worked, he’s spoken at the National Cathedral multiple times talking about the plight of ex-offenders.  He’s done a ton of media both in the United States and Canada.  He’s been with Al Sharpton, with the National Action Network, and he has written a book called The Hill, just out, about his journey through prison, and he’s also, in progress, his film, a video called Outside the Gate.  Lamont Carey, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Lamont Carey:  Thank you for having me.

Len Sipes:  All right, man.  Again, what I said at the beginning, what I said in terms of the introduction is that the overwhelming majority of people coming out of the prison system, they don’t talk to anybody.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  I mean, they don’t even talk to their own sister.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And here it is that you’re talking on – you know, you’ve been with a couple HBO productions.  You’ve been at the National Cathedral.  You’ve been at media throughout the United States and Canada.  You’ve been with Al Sharpton.  You’ve been at the National Cathedral.  You’ve been with BET.  Why is all this going on when everybody else is ignored, you’re getting all this air time.

Lamont Carey:  Well, I think the difference between me and everybody else is that I’m not afraid of where I come from.  Most people don’t talk about the things that they think will hurt them, so I was once labeled a product of my environment.  Now I use those experiences as my product, and that is how I make my living.

Len Sipes:  But everybody goes through the same thing you went through.  What is it that – I need to know this.  What is it that distinguishes you from everybody else?  Everybody is talking about this, but they’re just talking to each other.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Everybody is going into group.  Everybody is talking to their friends.  Everybody is standing on the corner.  You’re standing on the corner at HBO with The Wire.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Okay, so, there’s got to be something unique and something different in your experience versus everybody else.

Lamont Carey:  Well, when I came home from prison, before I came home, I decided I was going to be successful.  I decided I was going to give back to my community, and with both of those goals in mind and the developing in it a grasp of entertainment, I figured that I would combine all of those and that would be how – One, I remember where I come from but also use it as a stepping stone to get where I’m going, so I’m fearless.  I turn all of that into a business, and so that, I think, what makes me a little different than most.

Len Sipes:  Okay, I’m going to try this one more time.  Okay, I’ve been interviewing people out of the prison system for 20 years.  Everybody wants to give back.  Nobody wants to go back to prison.  Everybody wants their voice heard.  Nobody’s voice is heard.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  There is something unique about you, I mean – that I’m still trying to get at.  Everybody’s said what you’ve just said.

Lamont Carey:  Yeah, but I’m driven.

Len Sipes:  All right.

Lamont Carey:  I’m driven to succeed underneath it all.  That’s what it is.  I’m driven to succeed.

Len Sipes:  All right, all right. WWW.LAMONTCAREY.COM, WWW.LAMONTCAREY.COM is Lamont’s website for all the different projects that Lamont is working on.  All right, let’s get around to the former offender coming out of the prison system.  All right, so the guy comes out.  The woman comes out.  He hits the street, and what happens?

Lamont Carey:  Well, a lot of – what I think throws a lot of people off when they hit the street is that they deviate from their plan that they created in prison.  Everybody has a plan.  I have a – I’ve been incarcerated in 11 institutions, and every individual that I came into contact with had a plan on what they was going to do when they come home.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  But when they get home, they – I guess because they try to live up to the expectations of their family members, they think they have to rescue their family, change their whole standard of living, and so they get thrown off, and they go after jobs, or get on another route that they didn’t plan for, and I think that’s another difference between me and a lot of people is that I didn’t deviate from my plan, so they come home.  They get everything isn’t like they thought it was going to be, I mean, even me, when I was coming home, I thought that all the doors was going to open for me, I was going to be celebrated as a hero or what have you, and then when you get home and you face reality – that I have to go live back at my mother’s house, and she’s doing as bad as I thought she was doing, and I felt those urges, or those desires to want to save her, but I can’t save nobody unless I get myself right, so I had to stick with my plan and follow it to the letter.

Len Sipes:  Okay, so 50 percent, according to national stats, 50 percent of people go back to the prison system within three years.

Lamont Carey:  Right, right.

Len Sipes:  That’s just within three years.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  I mean beyond three years, more go back.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  A ton of people go back to the prison system.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  There can’t be mass hysteria in prison.  Everybody’s got to know how difficult it is when they’re going to get back.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  That they’re going to be labeled an ex-con.  They’re going to go and try to find jobs, and people are going to go “Hmm.  How many years you spent in prison?”

Lamont Carey:  Right, well I think.

Len Sipes:  Well, you know, everybody’s got to come out of there with a sense of man, it’s going to be hard when I get back to the street, I mean, how could it be any other way?

Lamont Carey:  But they don’t, I mean – a lot.

Len Sipes:  Are you serious?

Lamont Carey:  Yeah, a lot of people don’t because you got to – something that – what took place with me in prison – prison – it’s like you’re living inside of three different worlds.  You’re living off your past, you’re living off of – you got to follow the rules and regulations of the institution.  You’ve got to follow the rules and regulations of the convict, and then you got this future that you’re dreaming of happening, so a lot of individuals assume that when they come home that this woman is going to help them find a job, or the man that they used to hang out with, he’s working at a company, and he said that he can get them a job there, so a lot of times, we believe in there what somebody else is telling us so we don’t see that we’re going to have to, like face applying for a job and not getting it.

Len Sipes:  Somebody’s going to hook you up.  Somebody’s going to take care of you.  Somebody’s three hearts and a card.

Lamont Carey:  Yeah, it’s the hook up.

Len Sipes:  Somebody’s going to give you a place to stay.

Lamont Carey:  Right, right.

Len Sipes:  And nobody in prison is sitting there going, Dude, we got a lot of guys keep coming back.

Lamont Carey:  Well, I did that.  I figured that – the one thing that I knew:  One, that I’m not a construction worker.  I’m not doing no labor.  Two, I knew that I never had a job before.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  And so, I knew that the chances of me getting a job that is going to pay me 20 dollars an hour like I deserve with no work experience, I knew it was impossible.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  So I decided that I wanted to work for myself.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  So I think that is what made me different.  I didn’t expect – what I did expect – I didn’t expect that they were going to give me stuff.  I looked at it as they owed me because they wasn’t there for me while I was in prison, so when I come home, that they was going to give me this, and they were going to give me that, but I also had to face the reality.  What it was, was that they weren’t doing as good as I thought they were doing, but I didn’t get to see that until I came home because most of the time, people don’t reveal that they’re doing as bad as they’re doing.  They might say they can’t send me no money.

Len Sipes:  Right, right.

Lamont Carey:  But, we live – and prisoners live in a fantasy, like I havn’t met too many prisoners that said they’re the corner boy.  Most prisoners say they were the kingpin or close to the kingpin, so a lot of times.

Len Sipes:  Everybody’s on the corner.

Lamont Carey:  Right, so yeah – but that’s not what they say in prison.

Len Sipes:  But do they really believe that?  Does everybody else really believe that?

Lamont Carey:  Well, not really, but what else do we have to go off of?

Len Sipes:  All right, so it’s the convict world.  There’s two things come to mind.  The convict world is what rules in the prison system, not the correctional personnel.  I mean that world -

Lamont Carey:  Right, right.

Len Sipes:  is what rules, and so what you’re saying is that people invent a sort of fantasy world that allows them to exist with some sort of dignity while in the prison system.

Lamont Carey:  Exactly.

Len Sipes:  And when they come back out, sometimes that status gets in the way of clear thinking.

Lamont Carey:  Right.  Because it’s distorted, because you have been incarcerated for two years or ten years, and you’ve been – you get to believe in this lie that you told yourself, and so when you’re telling people what you going to do when you come home, it’s exaggerated, you know what I’m saying?

Len Sipes:  Yeah.

Lamont Carey:  My guy, when I come home, my man, they been doing this.  They been doing that.  They going to give me -

Len Sipes:  They’re going to take care of me, yeah.

Lamont Carey:  Probably a few thousand, so we come out, and that bubble is burst.

Len Sipes:  Now, I have talked to, in a career of 20 years of interviewing people coming out of the prison system, I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who have made it.

Lamont Carey:  Okay.

Len Sipes:  And they’re all encouraging, and it really is really neat to hear about the woman who suffered through a life of sexual abuse and child abuse, and she comes out and she gets discouraged, and she gets determined, and she goes out and buys, eventually, three ice cream trucks, and now she’s her own woman.  I mean she’s made her own way.  She said, I’m not going to let anybody step in front of me and tell me no.  I’m going to make my own way.  I’ve told those stories hundreds of times, but at the same time, 50 percent go back to the prison system.  Now 730 thousand people get out of the prison in this country every year.  That’s – conservatively, 350 thousand of those people are going back to the prison system within three years, more than that afterwards, so there’s two ways.  One part of it are all the success stories like yourselves, people who have risen above their own circumstances, people who have that magic moment in their lives, either through God or their families or their own sense of self determination that they’re going to make it, and 50 percent just like, you know, you ask them, “Why did you come back?” and it’s like, they can’t give you an answer.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  It’s like, dude, I was on the corner, and somebody said, “Man, we’re going to do a hit,” and, you know, people smoking reefer, and it just got out of hand – didn’t mean to get involved in it.  I mean, we’re not talking about necessarily stalking people, you know, just crap happens -

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  is the way a lot of people get caught back up in the criminal justice system.  How do you make sense of all of this?

Lamont Carey:  Well, again, the guys – with the individuals that I think become successful and not going back to prison, they become good at problem solving.  A lot of other people let stress get the better of them.  I can’t find a job.  I need a place to stay, and so when things are not happening according to the way that we want them to happen, we resort back to what we know.

Len Sipes:  Correct.

Lamont Carey:  Because one of the other things I think that ex-offenders or prisoners face is that they believe that they have to forget their whole past, that none of those skills are transferable to a positive and productive life, so a lot of them come home thinking that now they have to erase everything, so now they’re an infant again.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  And so they need guidance on what to do – I mean, what route they should take to be successful because they have never lived, really, a productive life, and so when things don’t go according to plan, they return back to what they know, and the police are more aware.  Surveillance is greater.  More people are telling, and so that’s how I think they end up – a lot of people end up back in the prison system, or those that used to use drugs fall back under the spell of substance abuse, which leads back to prison.

Len Sipes:  People have told me giving up drugs is somewhat easy.  Giving up the corner is impossible.  Giving up their friends.  Giving up their contacts, and a lot of times, they just get involved in crap that they have no business being involved in.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And again, it’s not – you know, there’s a huge difference in terms of people who are involved in criminal activity, between that person who says, “I’m leaving this house tonight, and I’m committing a crime, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that.” versus the person leaving the house that night, and saying, “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.  I’m going to check out my boys on the corner and figure out what’s going down.”

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  There’s a huge difference, and so many of these people who don’t set out that night to commit a crime end back up in the criminal justice system.

Lamont Carey:  Right, right.  Cause one of the things is that if me and you hung out before I went to prison, the way you remember me is the way I was before I went in.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  You’re not fully aware of the guy that I’ve turned into.  Most of the time you probably think it’s just jail talk, or jail letters, when I’m telling you that I changed, and so I’ve had this experience.  When I came home, a guy came to see me from my past, and he tried to – he said I got a gun for you.  That’s how he remembered me.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  So, the real test comes with whether I take this gun or not.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And when I refused the gun, then he knows that I’m serious -

Len Sipes:  Yeah.

Lamont Carey:  about my change, and so I think when I come out of the house to come and hang out with you, that’s because I’m bored.  I don’t have no plan.  When I have all these – I don’t have a job.  I don’t have all these things to – instead of me focusing on them, I just get tired.

Len Sipes:  Yep.

Lamont Carey:  And I just say, “I just want to breathe for a minute.  Let me go see what Sipes’s doing.” and I go hang out with you, and – but at the same time I’m hanging out with you, you I’m observing the drug game again.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  Or whatever it is that – you know what I’m saying, it’s -

Len Sipes:  Yeah it’s all caught up.  It all falls together.

Lamont Carey:  Right, because if you’re still in the criminal life-style, and when I come around to you, you’re always thinking as a criminal.  And so, it just so happened.  When I come around, this is the same time that you about to make a move.  You about to go sell some drugs, and you about to rob a store, and I’m there, and you’re telling me, “Man, it’s sweet.  We going to be in there three minutes.  We’re going to be in and out.”

Len Sipes:  Yeah, piece of cake.

Lamont Carey:  And my pocket’s are broke.  Yeah, that 50 thousand or what you say we’re going to get out of this stuff sounds really good to me right now, and I can do it in three minutes.  What’s the chances of me getting caught in three minutes?

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And then the next thing you know, the police outside.

Len Sipes:  Lamont Carey, ladies and gentlemen, WWW.LAMONTCAREY.COM.  That’s LAMONTCAREN.COM.  Again, to go through Lamont’s list of media involvement would take, for the rest of the day, The Wire, which is, again, the best TV program ever filmed in Baltimore about the criminal justice system, BET Washington, a book called The Hill, a book about his journey through prison, and currently a video project called outside the gate which is in progress.  Okay, you’ve given me some really interesting pieces of insight, Lamont, now, let me hear what you had to say to those movers and shakers, the mayor of Milwaukee, folks here in the District of Columbia, somebody in Germany which is now our second most popular outside the country in terms of people who pay attention to what it is we do here at DC Public Safety.  What do they need to know about people coming outside of the prison system, because I’ll tell you, it’s not a terribly pretty picture.  Most people needing drug treatment don’t get it.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  The stats are very clear.  Most people needing mental health treatment don’t get it.  Most people who need job training don’t get it.  So somehow, some way, there’s a disconnect.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Because we’re saying these – if we have these things, if we have these programs, we can drive down the recidivism rate, but yet society is basically going: nah, I don’t want to fund programs for people coming outside of prison.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  So talk to me about all that.

Lamont Carey:  Well, what I think is, it should start – transitioning should start inside the institution.  I guess when the individual gets within, maybe 18 months of coming home.  If you can get programs inside there that can get them thinking on survival of – a person has to – a person has to be willing to be homeless to be free, so they have to – if you can’t think – if you can’t forsee in stack how to get around obstacles, they’re going to always fall, but the one thing that I want policy makers and program providers to understand is that, each prisoner has created a plan, whether they wrote it down or it’s mental.  If you can get them to open up and try to help them stick to their plan, I think it would better their chances of success.  Like I wanted to go into the arts.  There are no arts programs right now for ex-offenders.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  So that means, my task, my journey probably was a little bit harder because I had to do it on my own, but I was willing to be homeless to be free.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  So, again, I would say, for programs that could help a individual think.  Another thing is the college system back into the prison system.  That was a kind of an eye opener to me to let me know that I had transferrable skills because when I was in the college program, I was taking up business management, and they were talking about distribution, and I was like, I know distribution.  Supply and demand, you know, from the street life.

Len Sipes:  Yeah.

Lamont Carey:  But what school allowed to happen was, it showed me that I wasn’t as inexperienced as I thought I was.  So – and I thought – it’s been said that, a person that gets a degree in prison is less likely to re-offend.

Len Sipes:  It’s probably, out of all the research, the best strategy that we have.  That people who come out of prison with an associates of arts degree or a bachelors degree have the lowest rate of recidivism, bar none.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And when I say the lowest rate of recidivism, I’m talking about saving tax payers literally millions upon millions of dollars, and saving victims of crime from being re-victimized, so when I use those words recidivism, that’s what I’m talking about.  Go ahead.

Lamont Carey:  So, those are two things, and since the parole officer is really our first interaction after the immediate family.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  It’s being taught in prison by guys and females that have been sent back to prison for parole violations, so they say, “The parole officer is out to get them, right?”

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  So even for me, when I came home, I was on edge with the parole officer, because I’ve been told, that’s all they’re trying to do is send me back to prison, and so, that misinformation has to be broken.  It has to be explained to the individual, chances are, the most you going to see your parole officer in your first 16 weeks, well at least in DC, is like three times a week.

Len Sipes:  Right.  There’s a lot of contact in DC.

Lamont Carey:  But that is only for like, I think the longest I think I’ve been inside with my parole officer, unless I was running my mouth, was 10 minutes.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  So we’re talking about 30 minutes out of a week -

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  One hour out of one day, so, you giving up one hour out of 23 hours.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  Most of the time, all the parole officer said is, have you had any re-arrests?  Have you been getting high?  Do you have a job?  You answer those questions, and move on.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And so, I think parole officers have to first understand that that’s how the individual is looking at them, as an enemy, because that’s what we’re taught.

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Lamont Carey:  So I think the best way to break through that is parole officers saying, “What is it that you really want to do?”

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  My job is to make sure the public stays safe.  That you transition, that you get a job and all that, but what kind of job do you really want?

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  Because when I first met my parole officer, I’m sure when he asked me what kind of job that I really want, I said, it doesn’t matter, and I said that so that the parole officer won’t see me as a troubled person.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  But that ain’t my truth.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  My truth is that I ain’t going to work construction, but I’m not trying to start off this relationship on bad terms.

Len Sipes:  You want to game the parole officer.

Lamont Carey:  Right, right.  When I game them, I just don’t want to be beefing with them.

Len Sipes:  Right, right.  Sure, sure.

Lamont Carey:  So I’m going to say -

Len Sipes:  And the way to do that is to say as little as humanly possible, nod your head up and down, you go yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t worry man, I’ll do it.

Lamont Carey:  But if the parole officer say, “Okay, Mr. Carey, I understand that you have to get a job.  It’s my responsibility to make sure that I’m encouraging you to get a job, but what kind of job is it that you really want so that when you go out and apply for jobs, you not only just applying for jobs at retail stores or low end stores, but you also are applying for jobs that you really want to work at.”

Len Sipes:  Right.  Now what happens – so there’s a plan – I’m writing all of this stuff down, the plan in prison, and that it would be nice if there were programs in prison for mental health, substance abuse, and a person without job training actually got job training.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  And a person who wanted a college program could go to a college program although that carries tremendous controversy.  In Maryland, whenever we talked about college programs, we’d get a hundred angry letters and phone calls, basically saying, I can’t forward to send my kid to college.

Lamont Carey:  And that’s understandable.  That’s truly understandable.

Len Sipes:  Why am I giving this guy who stuck a gun in somebody’s head and threatened to pull the trigger and took money from them?  Why am I giving him a college education out of my pocket, but I can’t – so there are controversies involved -

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  But we know that the better.  The more training, collegiate programs, therapy programs, that you have in the prison system, the better prepared you’re coming out, and to have a realistic plan is to deal realistically with the probation officer, what we call community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia.  What else do people need to know?

Lamont Carey:  Another thing is, is who they – who they come home to.  I know, for me, when it was time for me to go up for parole, I had to give a address to where I was going to be staying, and for me, that wasn’t the actual address where I was going to be staying, but, I’m going to give you what I’m going to give you so I can come home.

Len Sipes:  Right, you got to live somewhere.

Lamont Carey:  And so the problem, the problem that I see with a lot of individuals is that they meet something in prison.  They meet a girl, or dude in prison, and they be paroled to those people, and they have never lived with those people.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And so they find out they can’t live together.  They not getting along, so that creates a problem, and now I’m rushing because I need to find additional housing, so if you can set up something where the person to return to society has housing, maybe a transitional home.  A transitional home, I think, would actually be better than a lot of places that people are staying.

Len Sipes:  You need a legal place to live because if the guy comes out and the sister takes him in and suddenly he’s a beef with the sister, or the sister’s husband, and he needs to go some place legal for three weeks, there’s some plays legal for three weeks.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Okay, what else.

Lamont Carey:  Um, now, for the sub-abuse people, it’s kind of hard for me, because I’ve never dealt with that, but I do know individuals who have, was addicted to drugs before prison, but didn’t use drugs the whole time in prison.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And so when they come home, they again to use drugs again.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  So they got to find out, like what are those triggers?  What are those triggers? and the only way you going to find that out – again the parole officer, the parole officer is the person that can get the information to actually do something with it.

Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.

Lamont Carey:  But there has to be a relationship established, an open relationship where I can trust my parole officer.

Len Sipes:  Isn’t that hard?  I mean the parole officer has got this large case load, I mean not in DC.  We’ve got some of the best case loads in the country, but throughout the country, you’ve got huge case loads.  How are you going to establish that relationship with that person?  He doesn’t trust you.  You don’t trust him.  How do you get to that point where you help out each other?

Lamont Carey:  Well, another good thing about DC is the faith based community.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

Lamont Carey:  So when I came to my parole officer, the next thing I know, they were sending me over to a church.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  Meeting with a guy, Jean Groves, and Miss Keels.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  And so, they had, they took the time to say, “Lamont, what is it that you really want to do?”  And I was looking – I, I must want to work, so they said, “Okay, I’m going to call.”  They called the restaurant and got a job at the restaurant.  That last 24 hours because I didn’t really want to work for nobody, I wanted to work on my own, so after that experience, they were like “Okay Lamont, what is it that you really want to do?”  And so I told them, this is what I really want to do.  I want to work for myself and so when I convey that to my parole officer, and my parole officer said, well Mr. Carey, you have to be working to be in the street, and so you need to start a company where you going to be able to pay yourself, or you need to get a job, and so I went, and I started a LLC, LaCarey Entertainment, and I started off with something simple, selling socks on the corner, and I just kept taking that money, turning that money over, using the profit to reinvest, and then eventually I went into the studio and recorded a CD.

Len Sipes:  The faith based program we have here in the District of Columbia is also one of the largest in the country and having people who truly, who volunteer to come to your aid to be a mentor.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  That has helped a lot of guys, and a lot of people cross that bridge.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  It’s an amazing program.  All right.  What else?  We’re in the final minutes of the program.  We got about three minutes left.

Lamont Carey:  Okay.  The next thing, for parole officers, when you got a guy or female that you have you gone problems with, I think if we open up and create a situation where they can go talk to the young people because all of us want to give back.

Len Sipes:  Yep.

Lamont Carey:  Like you said, all the guys and the females you talk to want to give back, so if you give us an opportunity.  Instead of sending us back to prison, make us do some community service at a youth facility or somewhere where we’re telling them about – if you keep going down that road, this is where you’ll end up, because nobody is going to say, “Go out and get high.”  Most of the time, they’re going to try to show themselves in a good light, and it’s going to be connected back to what they said they wanted to do in prison.

Len Sipes:  All right.  What about all of the issues that I started off with this second half of the program.  I mean, most people aren’t getting drug treatment.  Most people aren’t getting mental health.  I mean you’re letting us off the hook here.  I mean, there’s got to be programs.  You know, if a guy comes out and he’s schizophrenic, and he comes out of the prison system, that medication is going to keep him, in many ways, out of prison.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Keep him out of trouble, keep him from hurting something.  I mean there’s got to be some sort of program set up where that person’s getting their medication.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  There’s got to be some sort of setup where somebody is knocking on his door, saying, “Are you taking your medication?”

Lamont Carey:  Well, I think even people that suffer from severe mental illness, that have never been in prison, they’re pushing them out on the street.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Lamont Carey:  So there’s going to have to be another look taken at that because I haven’t really experienced that.  It’s hard for me to say, but even I had issues.  I became an introvert.

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Lamont Carey:  You know what I’m saying?  In my apartment, everything that I need was in one room, and I got a whole empty house, so again, the parole officer is probably the person.

Len Sipes:  Final minute of the program.  How people – what is fair in terms of how people look at you?  They look at you as a criminal coming out of the prison system.  You look at yourself as something else.

Lamont Carey:  Right.

Len Sipes:  What’s fair?  What should the rest of us know about people coming out of the prison system?  How should we view them because if you watch television, and if you watch Hard Time and if you watch Lock-Up, I mean, you don’t want to touch anybody who is coming out of the prison system with a 10-foot pole.  How should people – what’s fair in terms of how people should see you?

Lamont Carey:  Well, I think they should look at themselves.  We’ve all made mistakes, and now I came home.  You can’t judge me by my past, but you can, but it doesn’t stop me from doing what I’m going to do regardless if you look at me like a criminal.  I’m still going to be and do what it is that Lamont Carey is going to be, and that’s successful.

Len Sipes:  Lamont Carey, it’s a blast having you.  I want to have you back in six months and find out where you’re going with all these programs.  Lamont Carey.  WWW.LAMONTCAREY.COM.  Currently, with all the other things that he’s done, he has a book, The Hill, his journey through prison and Outside the Gate, which is a work in progress, a video in progress.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host Leonard Sipes.  Thanks again for all of your cards, letters, emails, telephone calls, and suggestions.  Have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Corrections-Prisons, Education and Vocational Assistance, Interviews with Offenders, Parole and Probation, Reentry Tagged With: , ,

The Correctional Education Association Conference, 2011-The State of Correctional Education in America-DC Public Safety Radio

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/07/the-correctional-education-association-conference-2011-the-state-of-correctional-education-in-america-dc-public-safety-radio/

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

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  This is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We’re broadcasting live from The Correctional Education Conference here in Charleston, West Virginia. We have five hundred people from not only all over the country, but all over the world – over five hundred people who are here to discuss correctional education. As you’re well aware – those of us within the criminal justice system – there are entire states that are cutting out their correctional education programs, vocational programs, educational programs and there are other states cutting back because they feel they have no choice because of budgets. We’re here to discuss what’s going on throughout the country – new and innovative ways to deliver correctional education programs.

The research does seem to be pretty clear that the better prepared they are upon release from the prison systems, the better they do in society, which means that fewer people are victimized by crime and the less money the taxpayers have to put out to put them back into the prison systems. So it’s a win-win situation for everybody. We’re going to be a doing a series of five-minute interviews, short interviews. First up is Susan Lockwood. She is the Director of Juvenile Education in a Midwest state and she is also the President of the Council of State Directors for the Correctional Educational Association talking about computer-based learning, computer-learning skills.

We’re talking to William Byers. He is from the state of Arkansas. He is a School Superintendent for the correctional system there in the state of Arkansas, where they found the 25% difference in recidivism, which is pretty significant. We have Denise Justice. Denise is the CEA Past President and she is a School Superintendent for an entire correctional system in the state. She received their President’s Award for her relentless pursuit of correctional educational and she’s talking about how to promote correctional education throughout the United States to get everybody to understand that the payoffs can be significant. Steve Steurer is up for the next five-minute interview. He is the Executive Director of the Correctional Educational Association. His job is to provide an overview, provide a national perspective as to where we currently are with correctional education.

And finally, the last person up is Cindy Borden. She with a company called Northstar Correctional Systems and she under contract for the Correctional Education Association. They did a four-year piece of research in terms of school programming, post-secondary education, collegiate education and in essence the people who they followed up in a two-year time period, one-third of these individuals were enrolled in college and three-quarters were employed, which is a pretty doggone good piece of research or statistics in terms of correctional educational programs and their results. So, again, short five-minute interviews starting with Susan Lockwood and we hope you enjoy the program.

Len Sipes:  This is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We’re broadcasting live today from The Correctional Education Association Conference in Charleston, West Virginia. Quite frankly, ladies and gentleman I’ve been to correctional conferences throughout the country and Tim Barnes and I have done our fair share of conference support and this is one of the largest correctional conferences I’ve seen. It’s principally people who are involved in correctional education, correctional programs, who have an interest in the whole concept of a fund of reentry and we’re here today talking to a variety of people. First up is Susan Lockwood. She is the Director of Juvenile Education at a Midwest Department of Corrections. But here in her capacity she is President of the Council of State Directors for the Correctional Education Association and, Susan, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Susan Lockwood:  Thank you for having me.

Len Sipes:  One of the interesting things here, Susan, is this whole concept of long-distance education, the correctional education. There’s a lot of states out there they’re budgets have been decreasing. In fact, one state in particular – California – pretty much wiped out correctional education. So different people are saying are there ways of doing this differently. Are there new and unique ways using unique technologies to do a better job, to stretch the tax-paid dollar as much as possible? And one of the things that I find interesting in what you’re doing is it’s GED in computer-based curriculum and testing, where your individuals that are involved in this program, what they’re doing is they’re learning computer skills. They’re learning how to type. They’re learning how to word-process for them to be comfortable with computer learning. So this is the process of teaching them how to take the GED test but to do it by computer, correct, do it by long-distance learning?

Susan Lockwood:  Correct. That’s why we’re going to have to drive our curriculum since we’re anticipating the fact that the GED testing service is going to move to that computer application of… the application of taking the test by computer and a lot of our funders are not ready to do that because they lack those skills. So, yes, we would have to adjust our curriculum and prepare them in order to do that.

Len Sipes:  There are a lot of people out there who are still computer-illiterate. I mean…

Susan Lockwood:  Absolutely.

Len Sipes:  Whether you’re in prison or out of prison. I mean, there’s…I spoke to a gentleman the other day who just absolutely refuses to open a computer keyboard.

Susan Lockwood:  Right.

Len Sipes:  He’s well-educated. He’s smart, but he is at that age where he’s just not familiar with it. So this is a scary thing for some people.

Susan Lockwood:  Sure and a lot of our offenders, especially some of our older offenders who have been incarcerated for long periods of time, obviously, are not technology-literate and so it can be barrier for them if they wanted to take a computer-based test.

Len Sipes:  Right. So the whole idea here is to get them comfortable with a computer to the point where they can take their GED test. Now, GED curriculums are an integral part of prison education. We want them to be literate. We want them to know how to read. We want them to get their eighth grade certificate, their reading certificates, their GED certificates. The GED certificate’s sort of at the top of that ladder, correct?

Susan Lockwood:  Sure. In our state it serves as a market signal…

Len Sipes:  Right.

Susan Lockwood:  For whether or not a student is ready or a person is ready to enter post-secondary job training or even an employment situation.

Len Sipes:  It’ll make all the difference in the world in terms of that offender. I mean…

Susan Lockwood:  Sure.

Len Sipes:  If he or she has a GED, he or she suddenly becomes a marketable, far more marketable than without it.

Susan Lockwood:  Absolutely.

Len Sipes:  So the concept of doing the computer testing is you have to get them comfortable with the keyboard. You have to get them comfortable with the keystrokes.

Susan Lockwood:  Absolutely.

Len Sipes:  And there’s a lot of work that goes into that.

Susan Lockwood:  Right and then there’s also portions of the test that involve writing an essay and so the student would need to be able to word-process to be able to actually type that in and within the time limit of taking the test.

Len Sipes:  Now, is there ever the possibility of being instructed… taking your instructions for the GED through a computer or at a long-distance learning or is that in the future?

Susan Lockwood:  Sure. There are lots of companies already that offer different curricular that can be delivered via computer. So that obviously would be something that lots of states are looking at, to be able to load that software into a lab and let students have that opportunity to improve themselves and grow academically through a lot of the coursework that would be on the computer.

Len Sipes:  Right. One of the questions that was asked of me is why can’t there be somebody sitting in the state of Kansas or, you know, and teaching people in Alaska? Why isn’t that possible?

Susan Lockwood:  Well, that would be possible, although, having experienced that kind of a situation myself via distance learning, I think that being on the receiving end of that instruction it’s really more beneficial to not only have that piece, but also to have a person in the room with the students right there on site where they can actually ask the questions, discuss and it’s often a lot more…

Len Sipes:  Powerful.

Susan Lockwood:  Yeah, definitely.

Len Sipes:  Sure. Okay and before we go, before we end this particular part of the program, I do want to touch upon the benefits to society. A person gets a GED and what happens?

Susan Lockwood:  Well, the whole thought would be that as part of a process of gaining employment that, again, the GED would be a market signal and so it just allows this person to have an opportunity to be successful and outside the fence, to be able to go out, perhaps get a job, perhaps get further job training and once that a person becomes employed, our research has shown that it impacts recidivism; that employment is…

Len Sipes:  Right. There are fewer crimes.

Susan Lockwood:  Right.

Len Sipes:  There are fewer crimes as a result of it.

Susan Lockwood:  Exactly.

Len Sipes:  And it eases the tax-paid burden because….

Susan Lockwood:  Exactly.

Len Sipes:  They’re out there paying taxes instead of taking taxes.

Susan Lockwood:  Instead of being a tax liability, they’re paying taxes.

Len Sipes:  Our guest today has been Susan Lockwood. She is the Director of Juvenile Education for a state in the Midwest, but in her capacity today she is the President of the Council of State Directors, again, at the Correctional Education Association Conference here in Charleston, West Virginia. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

Len Sipes:  From the Correctional Education Association Conference in Charleston, West Virginia, I’m really pleased to have William Byers by our microphones. He’s the Superintendent of the Arkansas Correctional School System. He’s in charge of the whole shebang. He’s on the Board of the Correctional Education Association and is also Regional Director with the Correctional Education Association And one of the things that Mr. Byers was talking about – Superintendent Byers was talking about – was the fact that he has a 25% reduction in the rate of recidivism for those people who obtain GEDs. Am I right?

William Byers:  That is correct, yes.

Len Sipes:  Well that’s incredible, a 25% reduction. Most of the research on reentry programs will basically give 10-20%. Twenty percent seems to be on the outer reaches of the reduction of recidivism. You’re doing 25%. Why is that?

William Byers:  Well, we have a very successful program. Number One: We require everyone who comes into the Department of Correction who does not have a high school diploma or GED to attend school while they’re incarcerated. Also, I might add that the Board of Correction is also our school board and they are very supportive of our program. Education, they place a high priority on education. The teachers know that. The students know that. The inmates know that. So I think that’s one thing that contributes to the success. Not only that, but we find that those who get out not only recidivated at a lower level than those who don’t earn a high school diploma or GED, but they also get a better paying job and they’re more likely to have a job.

Len Sipes:  Right and they’re more likely to keep a job probably.

William Byers:  Exactly, exactly.

Len Sipes:  But the interesting thing is that, we in the United States, we’re having a struggle now with correctional education and with reentry programs and vocational educational programs. There are some states that are giving more money towards it and some states that are cutting it out because of their budget situation. The states are in a dire budget situation. What do you say to citizens – somebody sitting out there, somebody from the Governor’s Office, somebody from the PTA – to convince them that correctional education is worthwhile, that it’s in the average citizen’s best interests to do this?

William Byers:  I don’t care what studies you look at. You can look at them from the free world, from the prison situation. The bottom line is education helps. It helps society. If you look at populations, the more educated the populous is the higher the level of income and that’s true of the general population; it’s also true of the inmate population. The more educated they are, the better they’ll behave in prison, the more likely they’ll get out and stay out. So it’s beneficial to society if individuals can get an education while they’re incarcerated.

Len Sipes:  Being a correctional officer is one of the toughest, most dangerous jobs of the face of the earth.

William Byers:  It is.

Len Sipes:  These programs…this is very rarely ever discussed, the fact that these programs keep prisoners peaceful.

William Byers:  Yes. We deal with 21 wardens around the state in Arkansas and they will tell you that they want education in their unit because not only does it provide something for the inmates to do, but it provides something positive for them to do.

Len Sipes:  Sure. You want to have problems, then give them nothing to do. Let them play basketball. Let them sit in their bunks. That’s a dangerous prison. If you have programs in the prison, that’s a safe, sane prison.

William Byers:  Plus, they’re around educators. They’re around educated people who mentor them and affect them in a positive way just by being around them.

Len Sipes:  How many people do you graduate a year from the GED program? I was very impressed by that.

William Byers:  In the state of Arkansas we have over a thousand inmates a year to earn their GED and that compares to…the inmate population in Arkansas is about fifteen thousand, so we have a high participation and we have a lot of people who walk out with a GED.

Len Sipes:  Now, we use the word ‘recidivism’ rather loosely. What we’re talking about is fewer people being mugged, fewer people being victims of crime because inmates get GED programs. They go on to live… they have the chance to live a more successful life, make more money, to be in that job longer, which translates into fewer crimes, which translates into individuals paying taxes and not being a tax burden.

William Byers:  And that’s something you can’t measure. We say that they’re taxpayers instead of being a tax burden, but also you can’t measure somebody not being mugged or somebody not being raped. That’s one of the benefits that you can’t put a figure on.

Len Sipes:  Well, that will be the final word from you. William Byers, B-Y-E-R-S, William Byers – he is the Superintendent of the Arkansas Correctional School System. Thank you very much for being with us.

William Byers:  Thank you for having me.

Len Sipes:  This is DC Public Safety. We’re at The Correctional Education Conference in Charleston, West Virginia and at our microphones today is a person with a really unique last name: Denise Justice. She is CEA Past President. She is a School Superintendent – and I love all the Superintendents that we’re interviewing today – for a correctional system somewhere in the United States. She received the President’s Award today from the Correctional Education Association and I asked somebody as you why she got the award. It was for relentless pursuit or advocacy for correctional education. So I figured she’d be the right person to ask. Denise, why in the name of God do we do correctional education? A lot of people are out there. There are a lot of other priorities. There’s the elderly. There are people out of work. I mean, there are a lot of issues in the United States today. Why should anybody care about correctional education?

Denise Justice:  There are a lot of issues in the United States and we are clear about that, but when we have an incarcerated person in the United States, they are about 99.9% sure that they are going to get released at some point in time.

Len Sipes:  At some point in time.

Denise Justice:  At some point in time. Very few people go to prison and never ever come out again and when they do come out, they don’t move far away from each one of us. They’re in our neighbourhood. They’re five minutes away from us. They’re next door, wherever the case may be. They’re going to come home. Many of them were incarcerated because they did not have the skills – educational skills, employment skills – in order to be able to be a taxpaying citizen.

Len Sipes:  The research says that we interact with people caught up in the criminal justice system every single day whether we go to a restaurant, whether we go to the auto store, whether we go to the tire stores, whether we go…it doesn’t matter. We are encountering individuals who have been caught up in a criminal justice system every single day. So if they’re constantly around us, doesn’t it make sense to be sure that when they come out of the prison system they’re as best prepared as they possibly can be to live a productive life?

Denise Justice:  Absolutely because it does save us money. If they can come out and get a job and pay taxes and stay out of the criminal justice system because that costs taxpayers a lot of money, too.

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Denise Justice:  Then we are actually saving ourselves money. We also…you need to think about do you want your neighbor to have some skills to be able to get a job and pay those taxes or do you want to force them into a situation where all they can do is go out and cause another crime? And maybe the crime is robbing your house, taking your VCR, your TV.

Len Sipes:  So what we’re talking about is lessening the crime rate for individuals listening to this program. They become safer because of correctional education programs.

Denise Justice:  Absolutely. You can look at any recidivism study that you want to and if you don’t know, recidivism is basically the rate at which people come back to prison or come back into the justice field and you can look and see no matter what study is done, it tells you that people who are involved in education or getting employable skills are going to be less likely at whatever rate – there are different rates, you know – 10%, 20%, 30% differentials, but whatever it is, education makes them less likely to come back to prison.

Len Sipes:  Well, the guest before you, William Byers, Superintendent of the Arkansas Correctional School System, I mean he claimed a 25% reduction. That’s large. I mean in a world where you’re happy if you get 7% and you’re satisfied if you get 10% and you’re ecstatic is you get 20%. By heavens, 25% is a huge difference. I mean, if you have seven hundred thousand people come home every year in this country from prison, 25% of that lopped off, 25% of these people going on to be taxpayers instead of tax burdens. That saves states millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, in the long run in terms of construction costs, in terms of operating costs. It saves taxpayers a lot of money.

Denise Justice:  Absolutely. We found in the 80s, a lot of states got into prison-building booms. They tried to build themselves out of prison overcrowding and what we discovered was it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you build it, they will come. So we were building double and triple the number of prisons maybe we had in our state and instead of getting down to a 100% capacity in our facilities we still found ourselves 125%, 150%, 200% over capacity.

Len Sipes:  Regardless as to how many prisons we built, they were still overcrowded.

Denise Justice:  Regardless of how many prisons, absolutely, and so now we are looking more at the fact that what we need to do is to start the day that people come into our system and to start planning for their reentry, looking at getting them their GED if they have not completed a GED or a diploma. Looking at getting them career tech skills and employability skills so that they can go out dealing with their addictions, dealing with their anger, issues of child abuse and all of those areas and getting them ready to go back out on the street. Getting them to know what linkages is out there that can help them. Whatever areas they needed to stay out.

Len Sipes:  Okay. So quick answer on this one because we need a quick answer. We’re just about out of time. So the Correctional Education Association is designed to advocate that throughout the country, is to bring likeminded people…there are over five hundred people at this conference today and over the course of the next couple of days. That’s a large gathering, especially in these economic times. So everybody’s coming together to do what?

Denise Justice:  Everyone’s coming together – particularly at our international conferences – is to come together to share problems that you’re having, to come up with solutions, share solutions you maybe came up with at home, to find materials and resources that we can use because of budgetary cuts.

Len Sipes:  Ladies and gentlemen, my guest today has been Denise Justice. She is the Correctional Education Association Past President. She’s the Superintendent of a Correctional School System for a state and the award recipient today for the President’s Award at the Correctional Education Association Conference. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

This is DC Public Safety. I continue to be your host Leonard Sipes as we broadcast from The Correctional Education Association Conference in Charleston, West Virginia. I really have a lot of pleasure in reintroducing because he’s been to our microphones before, Steve Stuerer. He is the Executive Director of the Correctional Education Association – Steve, welcome back to DC Public Safety.

Steve Stuerer:  Thank you for having me again.

Len Sipes:  It’s a really interesting conference. Again, Tim and I have been to conferences…Tim Barnes and I have been to correctional conferences throughout the country and we’ve been to government conferences throughout the country dealing with social media and this is by far one of the largest conferences I’ve seen. You have well over five hundred people in attendance.

Steve Stuerer:  Well, we’ve been very lucky. West Virginia is terrifically supportive of correctional education and people, I think, the people are bringing themselves together and it’s a tough time. I think it’s actually drawing us together rather than pulling us apart and pulling us down.

Len Sipes:  Well, it is a tough time and I do want to emphasize that this is a national conference not necessarily a West Virginia conference. You have people from all over the country. We have a couple of people from around the world and education programs in correctional facilities, correctional systems, throughout the country they’re hurting. California sliced out the entire education program. You have different states that are cutting back significantly.

So what you’re going to do for me today is to put it in perspective. Where are we in terms of correctional education in the United States – whether it’s GED programs, whether it’s vocational programs? Where are we? Are we gaining? A lot of states are saying, “Hey, the way to reduce recidivism and control our costs is to put more programs on the table.” Some states are saying, “I’m sorry. We can’t afford it. We’re in a budget jam.” Where are we? Put it in perspective for me.

Steve Stuerer:  On a national level, we’re losing. We just lost all our post-secondary money that we had from the federal government – $17.2m was going out to the states on a formula basis. That’s gone. Not likely to be getting that back any time soon. Some of the states still support post-secondary education – vocational primarily, but with credits – through state funding of various sorts or some inmates actually pay their own way if their families can afford it. So we lost that. GED, we’re hanging in there, but we have a whole new challenge because GED is going on computer and within two years it will be computer-based.

So that’s going to present a real problem financially for a lot of systems trying to retool. So the whole basic education, GED, it’s holding in there, but we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to meet this GED challenge; vocational education, probably losing there, too. The Perkins Act, which has been around for decades, is being severely cut. So a lot of that money would go into corrections as well as into the community. Vocational programs, we’re cut with that. So I think generally speaking in just about every state we’re having some real stress.

Len Sipes:  Is that why you have such a good turnout at the conference, though? I mean, I see a lot of enthusiasm and the people that I’m talking to today certainly aren’t down in the mouth. They are enthusiastic about what it is that they do. They’re hopeful about what it is they do. They see the value in terms of what it is they do. So there’s a dichotomy here. On one side, I agree with you that we are struggling in terms of maintaining the number of programs and the quality of programs, but on the flipside is the enthusiasm I see from the membership of the Correctional Education Association. They know the value and they want to move forward.

Steve Stuerer:  Yeah, I think it’s kind of descriptive of our membership to see that kind of enthusiasm. They’re used to working in tough circumstances. They’re used to working with people who no one else wants to work with; who have given up on them. So when problems come along, they can gripe and groan just like everybody else and some of them just give up and shake their heads and wring their hands, but I think most of the people respond accordingly: Well, we don’t have much to begin with. Let’s figure out how we can do it a different way. Let’s see if we can find some more resources. Let’s see if…

Len Sipes:  Is there a different way of doing it?

Steve Stuerer:  Well, we’re trying to see what different ways can be done. I mean, with the GED, for example, we’re going to work very closely with the GED Testing Service, which is owned jointly by GED Testing and American Council of Education and Pearson VUE, which is a company that does a lot of vocational assessment. So we’re going to see. There might be ways to deliver things a little bit differently. At CEA one of the things we do is we train teachers to train inmates to be tutors and what started out was a kind of collaboration between Maryland and Ohio ideas, the concept of tutor training, we put it into a national program.

There’s like six states now that we’ve gone in, we’ve trained thirty… anywhere from thirty to eighty teachers at a time in three-day seminars, how to train inmates to be their aids and most states will allow inmates to act as aids. In Ohio we’re…in the last five years or so, I think it is, they’ve trained over thirty-five hundred inmates who in turn work with the teacher and tutor others in the classroom, so they’re not running around in some disorganized fashion. It’s a little army, so to speak. In Louisiana, they’re about three years into this. They’ve trained over five hundred inmates. In fact, the job is one of the best in the system. Inmates have to be highly qualified to do it and then they get some special privileges. They might get sent to another institution.

Len Sipes:  So we really are squeezing that rock for…

Steve Stuerer:  We’re squeezing it…

Len Sipes:  We’re being as innovative as possible, but one of the other…a question I asked to another person at our microphones this afternoon was why can’t you have a person centrally located somewhere in the United States teaching inmates any place else in the United States through a long-distance learning?

Steve Stuerer:  Well, you could possibly do that with some of the folks. I mean, a lot of folks do things online, for example, but I daresay, because I teach online for the University of Maryland University College; it’s an open university and some students have a great deal of difficulty because a lack of sufficient writing skills, reading skills, etc. They are much better served with some face-to-face assistance, whether it’s a mentor or hopefully a teacher, but people need assistance who have a lot of severe deficits and the correctional population, typically, come in…

Len Sipes:  Is filled with people who have severe deficits when they come to the education…

Steve Stuerer:  All kinds of deficits and complications.

Len Sipes:  But before we end the program and we’re in our final minute of the program, I do want to get around to the results because people listen to this program and they’re going to say to themselves, “Okay, you’re the Executive Director of the Correctional Education Association. Sorry, Mr. Executive Director, we’ve got elderly people. We’ve got school kids to take care of. We have so many people unemployed and now you want me to give money and support to this whole concept of correctional education,” and to these people you’re going to respond how?

Steve Stuerer:  Well, if I were to talk to a group of elderly people, I think I could get some of them to understand the situation. Things are tough and what are you going to do? Why can’t you reach out to other folks who are in bad situations? What is it about us that we in the United States that we tend to just incarcerate somebody and want to throw away the key? Why isn’t the concept of community, of helping each other, people who are down, who are quite capable if they get the right kind of assistance…why do we want to do that?

Len Sipes:  But there are tangible benefits to taxpayers as well.

Steve Stuerer:  Sure.

Len Sipes:  Look, they’re not going to…their chances of being mugged, their chances of their house being burglarized are significantly reduced if these individuals are trained in prison.

Steve Stuerer:  Right, but the reason I bring out this other issue is that we’ve made that argument for years – the reduction of recidivism. We did one of the significant studies in the field and so that really brought the attention of politicians, but right now, all bets are off. You see, what’s happening in states and at the national level. They’re not looking at research in any area. They’re cutting programs. They’re cutting this, cutting that. So I’m trying to see if we can appeal a little more to people’s consciences because there is a big conscience in the United States. Some of the biggest givers in the world in terms of charity and in terms of helping folks and so we’ve gotta take a little bit different tack because right now nobody cares about the recidivism study, you know? So we need to create some sympathy on a humanistic level. So that’s one of the reason why I think the social media, we need to take a good look at it and see how we can reach people. Not just in the dollar in their pocket, but their own feelings about helping others.

Len Sipes:  Steve, you get the final word. You had the final word. Steve Stuerer, the Executive Director of the Correctional Education Association, at their Annual Conference in Charleston, West Virginia. Ladies and gentlemen, please have yourselves a very pleasant day.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We continue to broadcast from the Correctional Education Conference here in Charleston, West Virginia. Again, well over five hundred individuals from all over the country – some people from all over the world – looking at this whole concept of correctional education, looking at correctional programs, looking at reentry programs, looking at what makes a difference in terms of the impact of how people come out of prison. Are they successful? What programs are they engaged in? What programs did they participate in? What programs are successful? What programs aren’t successful? That’s the point of the Correctional Education Conference and before our microphones, we’re going to continue this discussion on research. Cindy Borden, she is with a private company and the private company was under contract to the Correctional Education Association to do some research. Now, needless to say, we can’t endorse a private company, but these are the people who were in charge of the research. Cindy Borden. She is with the Northstar Correctional Educational Services. They are Correctional Education Consultants and the interesting thing here is that what we’re talking about is post-secondary education, i.e. college. A four-year piece of research that shows that one-third, after they’re done a two-year period, one-third are enrolled in college and three-quarter are employed. So those are pretty, pretty, pretty significant findings. Cindy, let’s talk about this. Now, how did you end up with the contract with the Correctional Education Association?

Cindy Borden:  CEA asked us to find a funding source and then to recruit states. Started out with six states to participate in this research who were willing to randomly assign students into either the intervention, which was a distance learning program or a control situation, which was basically business as usual. There are local community colleges or correspondence work. So we found the funding source in the Institute of Education Sciences with the US Department of Ed and then they asked us to conduct the field research.

Len Sipes:  Now, both of you…and you’re the other person from your company. You’re former principals or superintendents? What were you?

Cindy Borden:  We were former teachers and then principals in the prison system.

Len Sipes:  So you have a lot of experience in terms of this.

Cindy Borden:  I do.

Len Sipes:  You have hands-on experience. Now, I do want to explain for our audience that random assignment is the gold standard for research. It’s when a prison…we’re talking about forty-four prisons, right, in seven states?

Cindy Borden:  Forty-four prisons in seven states, that’s right.

Len Sipes:  Okay and so half were given this program and half were not and it happened by chance. So in other words there’s no research bias.

Cindy Borden:  That’s right. They were randomly assigned by computer, generated and half were given the distance learning intervention. The other half continued business as usual.

Len Sipes:  Okay. So that is the gold standard. So tell me about this. So you had…this existed for how long in the post-secondary education is a collegiate program and the college program?

Cindy Borden:  Yes, it was the first two years of academic college, so basically freshman and sophomore year core course – Gen Ed courses. We went out to the prisons for three years, twice a year. We did pre-testing of the students in the fall and post-testing in the spring. For three years running, we conducted focus groups and we interviewed site coordinators and students. We gave the CAP Critical Thinking exams to all the students in the fall and then post-tested them in the spring.

Len Sipes:  Now, believe me. I understand how controversial this is from a public relations point of view. When I was with the state of Maryland I used to do press releases about collegiate stuff, people graduating from collegiate programs and I got quite a bit of pushback from citizens. So there is a concern. People asked me quite blankly…bluntly rather, “I can’t afford to send my child to college, so this guy goes out and commits a violent crime and he gets a free college education. Where’s the fairness in that?” One of the things that I would say in return was that the individuals involved in collegiate programs had the lowest rates of recidivism. That means out of all the things that you could do within a correctional setting these individuals committed fewer crimes, fewer crimes than any other group of individuals and cost taxpayers less money than any other group of individuals. Is that right?

Cindy Borden:  That’s absolutely right. An investment in college education for these students brings a cost benefit to the taxpayer that is tremendous. We invest in their college education while they’re incarcerated and the recidivism rate drops significantly for these people. We have discovered in the course of this study that even exposure to a single college course or a single semester of college courses makes a tremendous difference in their decisions once they get out.

Len Sipes:  Right, but I mean in this case, what I’m asking is is that this program, these post-secondary collegiate programs in the prison settings are more effective than any other program I’m aware of. That’s the question.

Cindy Borden:  They are very effective. Vocational training is also very effective for a separate type of person, but for those who are interested in academic education, yes, college – straight up college – is tremendously effective.

Len Sipes:  And I do want to point out the effects. Now, we’re talking about two years out, but that two-year cohort could be people out for two years or people just entering the cohort and being out for a couple of months.

Cindy Borden:  That’s right.

Len Sipes:  So when you measured this at a two-year period for people out for an entire period of two years and just entering the cohort for a couple of months you found that one-third were enrolled in college and three-quarters were employed.

Cindy Borden:  That’s right.

Len Sipes:  Now that’s amazing. I mean…

Cindy Borden:  It’s a pretty good result.

Len Sipes:  Those sorts of statistics are beyond comprehension. I mean, that’s pretty much the best piece of research or the best research findings I’ve ever heard of.

Cindy Borden:  It’s much higher than we anticipated. We didn’t expect it to be that high. We were surprised at what that exposure to college produced in their post-release statistics.

Len Sipes:  And you would say to the average individual out there who has mixed feelings about this that, what? That these finding trumps just about every other finding that we’ve encountered or what do you say to that person?

Cindy Borden:  To the one who says, “I’m paying for my kid’s college. Why should the convicts get it for free?”

Len Sipes:  Right.

Cindy Borden:  The investment in these people pays off to our communities. What I say to people who say that directly to me is that these people are getting out of prison and they’re going to move next to you and they’re going to move next to your children…

Len Sipes:  Or they’re going to be a five-minute drive.

Cindy Borden:  Or they’re going to be a five-minute drive and who do you want there? Do you want someone who has had some exposure to college, who’s actually earned a college degree or someone who did nothing with his time while he was incarcerated and then was released and moved in next to your children?

Len Sipes:  Cindy Borden, you had the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re broadcasting from the Correctional Education Conference here in Charleston, West Virginia. Cindy is with a private company. Again, we can’t endorse private companies, but she was a contractor to the Correctional Education Association to conduct this research. Northstar Correctional Educational Services at northstarcorrectional.com. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your time and effort and listening and look forward next time to another program on the state of the criminal justice system in America. Have yourselves a very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends}

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Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Budget Issues, Corrections-Prisons, Education and Vocational Assistance, Interviews with Policy Makers, Parole and Probation, Reentry, What Works Tagged With: , , ,

Iowa Reduces Recidivism-DC Public Safety Radio

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/05/iowa-reduces-recidivism-dc-public-safety-radio/

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

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety, I’m your host Leonard Sipes.  Today’s program is on recidivism reduction in the State of Iowa.  We have a continuing series of programs where we interview states about the fact that they have been able to reduce recidivism.  Everybody’s involved in re-entry nowadays, but the trick is, can you reduce recidivism?  Can you reduce the rate of return of people coming back into the prison system thereby saving the states, literally tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, or saving tax payers from further victimization? And we have two guests with us from the State of Iowa, Lettie Prell, she’s the director of research, which is at the Iowa Department of Corrections, WWW.DOC.STATE.IA.US, for the website, and Jerry Bartruff.  He’s the deputy director of offender services for the Iowa Department of Corrections, again the same web address, WWW.DOC.STATE.IA.US, and to Lettie, and Jerry, welcome to DC Public Safety.


Jerry Bartruff:  Thank you, Len.


Lettie Prell:  Hi Len.


Len Sipes:  Before getting into the program, ladies and gentlemen, we’re doing, believe it or not, some commercials.  One, actually not commercials, but just announcements, the American Probation and Parole Association which I’m a proud member of, what they want us to do is to remind everybody throughout the country of the leadership of the sacrifice of literally thousands of individuals, not just in the United States but around the world who are out there in our streets protecting our safety, and to acknowledge them doing an upcoming probation and parole officers’ week in July, but we’re starting early.  We ask everybody, to again, remember parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers here in the city of Washington DC.  The website for the American Probation and Parole Association is WWW.APPA-NET.ORG.  Also what my people here have asked me to focus on the work of the National Re-entry Resource Center.  The fact that they’re putting out some really wonderful materials lately in terms of cutting edge state of the art material research on this whole issue of re-entry, they are funded by the office of justice programs of the United States Department of Justice, and their website is WWW.NATIONALREENTRYRESOURCECENTER.ORG, WWW.NATIONALREENTRYRESOURCECENTER.ORG.  Back to our program, to Lettie Prell and to Jerry, welcome again to DC Public Safety.  Lettie, let’s start off a little bit about the reduction of recidivism in the state of Iowa.  We’ve had a pretty good reduction in overall recidivism for the last couple of years, but it’s larger for some groups.  We were talking in the preshow about say for mentally ill offenders and for women, there have been some significant reductions, so why don’t you just start off with the larger reductions in recidivism, and then we’re going to go over to Jerry and get a sense as to why these things are happening.  So Lettie, why don’t you start us off?


Lettie Prell:  Um, yes.  The people return to prison who were released in fiscal year 2004, that’s our prior year that we are on comparing our newer data with.  For those people who were checked for three years following release, their return rate to prison was 34 percent.  Our more recent group, fiscal year 2007 releasees, who were followed through 2010, their return rate to prison overall was 32 percent.  Now that’s a two-percentage point drop which sometimes just indicates statistical noise, but when we drill into the subgroups and by the way, these are subgroups that we have been specifically targeting some special efforts with, we find that their recidivism rates have dropped down more, and that has pulled down the overall recidivism rate.


Len Sipes:  And you know, that’s interesting, because there are large drops for the mentally ill category and for women and for some other groups, correct?  A much larger than the two percent in the overall reductions.


Lettie Prell:  Yes, yes, and you’ve mentioned the mentally ill, and so let’s just start with them.  We were looking at the return rate to prison for chronically mentally ill offenders, for men and women separately because their groups are very different.  For female offenders who are chronically mentally ill, their return rate to prison was reduced from 45 percent to 29 percent.


Len Sipes:  Now that’s huge.


Lettie Prell:  That is huge.


Len Sipes:  That is a very big reduction.


Lettie Prell:  Yes, and that’s not explained by statistical noise like a two percent drop can be.


Len Sipes:  Right.


Lettie Prell:  For male offenders, the same thing.  For chronically mentally ill male offenders, they’re recidivism rates were reduced from 52 percent to 41 percent.


Len Sipes:  Again, a large drop.


Lettie Prell:  Yes, and now we’ve also reduced the disparity in return rates between the chronically mentally ill and the not chronically mentally ill.


Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.


Lettie Prell:  There’s still a difference, but the difference isn’t as huge as it was in FY ‘04.


Len Sipes:  And Jerry Bartruff, this is a result of programs specifically aimed at these particular groups, correct?


Jerry Bartruff:  Well, I think so, and I think whenever you look at re-entry and its impact on reducing recidivism.  I think there needs to be a recognition that those things don’t just happen because you focus some effort.  I think that there’s some historical things that have happened in the Department of Corrections that have lead us to this point where we’re able to impact those numbers successfully.  So I would suggest that one of our strengths in Iowa is that we have a very strong and vibrant community based corrections system, which works very collaboratively, and I may say, even intimately with the Department of Corrections.  We also share one database, so as offenders move through the corrections continuum, when they’re first placed on correctional supervision, we record all offender movement, case management, interventions, risk assessments, all on one database, so folks in CBC and the institutions have an opportunity to share information instead of creating a new case file when an offender moves from one jurisdiction to another.  So I think that that historical piece has benefited us today.  I also think one of the historical decisions that we made was in 2000 when we implemented evidence based practices in community based corrections programs and focusing on those elements we know, with interventions that work, with the outcome being reducing risk which then reduces recidivism, which then makes our community safer.  So I think if you look at our community based corrections system, our ability to share data together and for Lettie to be able to report out on that data to help guide our decision-making, and our commitment to evidence based practices.  All those things have coalesced into affecting that bottom line which we know is most important to us.  How many people enter our system, leave and don’t come back again?  Because we think that equates to fewer victims and safer communities.


Len Sipes:  Well, it’s extremely – it’s very well put, Jerry.  I couldn’t have done it better myself.  The whole concept is to save the state of Iowa money, and to save the citizens of Iowa, victimization, and so it’s a win-win situation for everybody, but if you take a look around the country, you’re going to find states that are cutting back on these programs, so they, the states may say to themselves, fine.  I buy into evidence based practices, I buy into the fact that when we did the interview with Kentucky, Kentucky is at their lowest rate of recidivism in ten years.  I’ll buy I – I’ve listened to the program on Iowa, and find the good people of Iowa have convinced me once again that evidence based practices work.  We simply don’t have the money.  This is other states speaking.  We’re in a dire jam in terms of our own budget.  We have to cut from some place, and so it’s pretty easy to cut programs for prison inmates, so I think that’s the dichotomy, what are the dynamics in Iowa that have allowed you to put programs into place?


Jerry Bartruff:  Well, I think we’re struggling with those issues that you just very well described, Len, but I think one of the things that doing is recognizing that evidence based practices, and being able to get the out comes from our data systems tells us what’s working and what’s not working.  So one of the things we’ve done after we committed to ensuring that evidence based practices were guiding our work was that we looked at every intervention that we offered in the state of Iowa both in the prisons and the institutions.  We developed an EBP steering committee, and we had a group of folks who were experts in evidence based practices and principles who went out to every district and every institution and assessed and evaluated all of our interventions.  As a result of that, we identified those interventions as needing improvement, promising, or Lettie, what was the other one.


Lettie Prell:  Excellent.


Jerry Bartruff:  Excellent.


Lettie Prell:  Excellent, correct.


Jerry Bartruff:  And so it’s needs improvement – I’m sorry I lost my train of thought.


Lettie Prell:  Well, let’s put it this way.  When we started this process, we found after that process, 31 percent of our programs were rated promising or excellent, meaning, well, two-thirds, over two-thirds needed improvement.  Well now, that became a performance measure by the way, and people have been improving programs – actually, we’ve also discontinued some programs so that more recently, we find that 41 percent of our programs now are scoring promising or excellent according to these evidence based practices.


Len Sipes:  And this is amazing because that’s exactly what the criminological literature, that’s exactly what the re-entry experts, ask states to do, is to take a hard look at what it is they’re doing, to figure out what’s working and what’s not working based upon the best available evidence, and then to go back and to intervene and to tweak the programs, to improve these programs based upon best practices.  I mean we throw out this word best practice over and over again, and I’m not quite sure it’s – it means all that much to everybody.  All you’re trying to do is take what you’re doing and to make it better and discard what doesn’t work, right?


Jerry Bartruff:  Right, and engaging stuff in the process.


Lettie Prell:  Right.


Jerry Bartruff:  And that’s also, it’s also a valuable component of utilizing our resources effectively.  So when we went through that process, there are several programs that we’re investing staff and resources in that we said, these aren’t working the way that we want them to, so let’s focus our resources on those that do.


Len Sipes:  Excellent, excellent.  Now Lettie.


Jerry Bartruff:  Just making those tough discussions along the way as well.


Len Sipes:  Lettie, let me ask, I mean the stuff that you sent me before the program was very nice and, to me pretty crystal clear in terms of the stats that you all have produced.  Once again, most states won’t do that self-examination.  Most states won’t do – I mean, there’s a growing, growing, growing number of states that are, but it’s still very interesting when a state like Iowa comes up with graphics that you produced that are so easy to understand, and so easy to comprehend.  I mean, that’s a compliment to the state of Iowa.


Lettie Prell:  Well, it’s also been a challenge to me.  They – the do you want has challenged me to not only make information available, but to make information available and speak English in the process, and communicate clearly, as clearly as we can.  We put out these one and two page data download issues, and I do that in conjunction with the executive assistant to the director, Kurt Smith, to makes sure when everything is said and done, it’s in English.


Len Sipes:  But, do you understand how rare that is?  I mean I’ve worked with empiricists my entire career and getting people from the empirical community to make a – give a straightforward answer to a straightforward question sometimes is like pulling teeth, so you certainly have crossed that bridge.  I mean I just wanted to compliment you on the materials that you sent me because they were pretty easy to understand, and there were also different newspaper articles in the state of Iowa, and we’ll put those on the show notes, and we’ll put some of Lettie’s materials in the show notes to give you an idea as to what I’m talking about so it will talk about the reductions in recidivism in the state of Iowa and some of the reports that Lettie puts out.


Jerry Bartruff:  And Len, if I could just comment a little bit?


Len Sipes:  Please.


Jerry Bartruff:  And I think that those – that data that Lettie shares with us, we push down to the practitioner level.


Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.


Jerry Bartruff:  Because I think it’s an important component of this is if you have data, and data tells you certain things, that you make decisions based on what that data is telling you, so I think that the way that Lettie is able to take some kind of complex issues and make them understandable for folks then translates into practitioners following through with what the data tells us is most effective.


Len Sipes:  Yep.  I could go on for five years about my issue with the research community, but I won’t.  We’re going to stop there.  Lettie, what is the bottom line behind all of your numbers?  So you’ve had – it’s a two percent drop in terms of the recent years, but larger for some groups, mentally ill, for women, for some men who are mentally ill.  That’s a result of specifically programming to that particular group.  Are there any other groups involved in reductions?


Lettie Prell:  Um, yes. African-American offenders.


Len Sipes:  Yeah, right.


Lettie Prell:  They, in fiscal year 2004, the prior year, they had the highest return rate to prison of any other race of ethnic group.  It was 43 percent compared to 32 percent for white non-Hispanic.


Len Sipes:  Again, big drop.


Lettie Prell:  Well, yes, there was a big drop.  Overall recidivism for African-Americans went from 43 percent to 40 percent with the largest drop was in the return rate due to new conviction.


Len Sipes:  Ah.


Lettie Prell:  Where we saw a drop from 29 percent to 22 percent.


Jerry Bartruff:  Again, good drop.


Lettie Prell:  Greatly narrowed the gap in return rates between blacks and whites, and created a less disparate – that’s one of our goals to create a less disparate corrections system.


Len Sipes:  When you talk about the issue of new convictions, set it up, either one of you in terms of the reasons people come back to the prison system.  We call technical violations which I have a hard time with in some ways because if you refuse to make restitution to your victim, that could be a technical violation, or if you refuse to go to drug treatment, but in any effect I know the controversy with technical violations.  People either come back to prison for technical violations, or new convictions, correct?


Lettie Prell:  Yes, those are the two reasons.


Len Sipes:  And so the new convictions are down, which means that crime is down.


Lettie Prell:  That’s exactly right, and not only that, but these are the kinds of crimes that lead to imprisonment.


Len Sipes:  Right.


Lettie Prell:  So they’re the more serious crimes, so when we can say that serious crime is down, that’s really significant and translates into real public safety.


Len Sipes:  I’m going to reintroduce both of you right now because we’re quickly half way through the program.  These programs go by so quickly.  Lettie Prell, director of research, Iowa Department of Corrections.  WWW.DOC.STATE.IA.US.  Jerry Bartruff, he is the deputy director of offender services, Iowa Department of Corrections at the same website, WWW.DOC.STATE.IA.US.  Okay, for the second half of the program, the fact that – Does anybody understand, except for those of us in the re-entry field as to the significance of what you all have been able to do, or are you laboring in obscurity?  You’ve got a couple newspaper articles about the reductions in Iowa.  I’ve seen some coverage from the re-entry community about the reductions in Iowa.  Does anybody else understand what’s happening in the state of Iowa?


Jerry Bartruff:  I think so.  One of the things we benefited from is since the federal government started to issue grants to promote re-entry activities; we first participated in the Edward R. Byrne grant in 2005.  We participated in two PRI grants, one an urban focus, and because Iowa is a mostly rule state, another PRI grant that focused on re-entry in rural areas, and we’re also involved in a technical assistance program through the National Institute of Corrections which brings folks from the Urban Institute and the Center for Effective Public Policy to Iowa on a fairly routine basis to help us move forward in adopting the transition from prison to the community initiative as our re-entry model in Iowa.  So I think our work through the grant process, through our involvement with NIC and then with the center and the Urban Institute, we’ve received feedback from them that what Iowa’s doing are the things that jurisdictions needs to be doing, and there’s always some work to do.  There’s always a lot of improvement we need to make, but we rely on the expertise of those folks to help us move forward.


Len Sipes:  Right, but I mean, this is in the re-entry community.  Somebody said, Len, you need to do a program about Iowa.  They’re doing significant things out there.  They’re doing a lot of evidence-based ideas.  They really are going through an analysis of how – of what they do it, and how they do it.  They’re really being bold in terms of that self analysis, of – It’s very hard for government agencies to turn that evil eye on themselves and ask critical questions -


Jerry Bartruff:  Uh-huh.


Len Sipes:  as to whether or not we’re really serving the citizens by reducing recidivism, and so the re-entry community understands this.  Does the larger citizens, do the larger group of citizens in the state of Iowa understand the significance as to what you’re doing?


Jerry Bartruff:  I think that there is this – there’s always room to tell the good stories, because as you know, often in our business, it’s the high profile crime that creates people’s perspective of what the criminal justice system or the corrections systems does.


Len Sipes:  That’s exactly right.


Jerry Bartruff:  We have several success stories that I think that we need to continue to tell people because I do thing it has impacted community safety.  One of the things that I can say that we’re fortunate in the state of Iowa is that we’ve gotten a whole lot of support from the executive branch of state government.  In July of 2009, the Governor issued an executive order, which established the Ex-offender Re-entry Coordinating Council.


Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.


Jerry Bartruff:  The primary goal of that counsel is to integrate successful re-entry principles and practices in state agencies and communities resulting in partnerships that enhance offender safety and successful reintegration.


Len Sipes:  That’s right.


Jerry Bartruff:  The group was chaired by our director, and also the director of IWD, and we think employment and opportunities for offenders to receive an education, to find a job and maintain a job.  That’s a huge re-entry success indicator.


Len Sipes:  We just did a radio show on correctional education, so that was the show that preceded yours.  So what is the lesson in all of this, either Jerry or Lettie?  In terms of, you know, what do we tell people around the country?  What do we tell people here in Washington DC?  In terms of what works because we have – I mean what we’ve done here is focus specifically on the mentally ill, and broken it down by male and female.  We’ve talked about African-American offenders.  We’ve talked about good reductions there.  What are we talking about?  And so I’m assuming that you have implemented programs specifically for mentally ill offenders.  What does that consist of?


Jerry Bartruff:  Yes.


Lettie Prell:  Well, it started with, go ahead.


Jerry Bartruff:  Go ahead Lettie.


Lettie Prell:  It started with John Baldwin’s.  Director John Baldwin established focus groups in 2007, and focus groups got together on exactly around the issue of mental health, mentally ill offenders and mental health re-entry, and I’ll let Jerry take over because he’s really been spear heading a lot of that.


Jerry Bartruff:  Yes, and we had previously received a federal grant that provided a mental health re-entry pilot project that involved folks that are going to be supervising offenders in the community, and case managers and offenders and mental health professionals in the institution doing this case management process together because I think what often happens with mentally ill offenders is they go through the system, return to the community – you’ve got several people with their hands in the offenders pot, and we were thinking that if we have a consolidated case management process, that we will be able to impact that recidivism rate, and that is -


Len Sipes:  To the congressional staffer, consolidated case management means what?


Jerry Bartruff:  Uh-huh, uh-huh.  That means that historically, and one of the reasons I think the Ex-offender Re-entry Coordinating Council is important is that IWD has a case file for an offender who has left the institution, goes back.  The Department of Human Services does, education may have a focus.  There are several different agencies that are kind of helping to – helping the offender navigate what they need to be doing in the community to be successful, and we’re saying that instead of having a separate case plan from every agency that is working with the offender, if we can consolidate that case management process so that the offender is only accountable to one case plan, that people that are working with the offender wrap themselves around the offender.  The expectation for the offender and the services that can be provided are clear, and we just think it’s a better process for both the offender and the agencies that are working with the offender to provide effective service.


Len Sipes:  Now that’s understood.  For the programs in the state of Iowa in terms of the Division of Correction, the Department of Correction, are they getting good solid programming, individualized programming focusing on their own mental illness in the – while their locked up?


Jerry Bartruff:  Yeah, and we’re also, again going back to some comments I made about community based corrections.  We’ve also developed a pilot re-entry mental health courts where we’re looking at people before they come to the prison system and making some determination whether or not their mental illness could be better managed in the community because we think one of the evidence based principles is keeping people as close to their natural community as possible so not only are we trying to provide those services to people who are incarcerated, but we also want to try to provide those services as those people are at the very entrance point into the criminal justice system, and some of those people should be diverted back to the mental health system because the further you enter the criminal justice system, the more difficult it becomes for people to receive the services they need and then hook up with those resources when they leave the system.


Len Sipes:  Right, and there we’re talking about lower level offenders, diverting them off into treatment so they don’t go into the prison system to begin with.


Jerry Bartruff:  Right, right.


Len Sipes:  And then you’re talking about treatment in the prison system.


Jerry Bartruff:  Correct.


Len Sipes:  And that treatment being carried out seamlessly into the community, so in everybody’s operating off of one plan and in terms of their own plans.


Jerry Bartruff:  Exactly.


Lettie Prell:  Uh-huh.


Jerry Bartruff:  You’ve got it.


Len Sipes:  Okay.  What about drug treatment?  You mentioned before employment and vocational programs, education programs and drug treatment.  What about all that?


Jerry Bartruff:  We think that there’s a myriad of interventions that we need to have available for us to use with offenders, and so we spent a whole lot of time with front end risk assessments to both identify risk levels but also to identify needs, and then making you’re that our interventions – that reduce risk and address those criminogenic needs, are the programs we offer both in the institutions and in community based corrections so -


Len Sipes:  Now most states don’t have sufficient slots, numbers, treatment slots, people, to do this.


Jerry Bartruff:  That’s where I’m coming next.


Len Sipes:  Okay.


Jerry Bartruff:  Our need for treatment slots in those various areas of criminogenic needs does not nearly – the capacity does not meet the need.


Len Sipes:  Right.


Jerry Bartruff:  So one of the things that we’re forced to do is to focus our resources on that risk population that we have the most likelihood of impacting, so we focus a lot of our resources, our core programs, our cognitive programs, on those offenders that moderate to high risk offenders.


Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.


Jerry Bartruff:  And so, there’s a targeting piece that comes in there that is important too, and consistent with what the evidence tells us – so we wish we could provide the programming that we need for all offenders, but sometimes, and especially with low risk offenders, you can actually make them worse by forcing them to go through some of those programs.


Len Sipes:  Well, number one, there’s no state in the United States that has all the resources that it needs.  If you take a look at drug treatment, if you take a look at other sorts of interventions, it’s not unusual to see 10 percent of the population being treated, 15 percent of the population.  I’m talking about the population who needs it, not the overall population.


Jerry Bartruff:  Right, right.


Len Sipes:  So if we’re saying – I think it’s safe to say that somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of every offender and every correctional system in this country, whether it’s yours or ours has a serious history of substance abuse.


Jerry Bartruff:  Uh-huh.


Len Sipes:  So even we, we’re federally funded.  We can do 25 percent out of our own funds of that particular population, which means we, like you have to target, so I’m not trying to put the State of Iowa on the spot.  I’ll put ourselves on the spot.  You can’t do everything for everybody.  That’s why they’re saying target the more difficult and serious offenders.


Jerry Bartruff:  Uh-huh, uh-huh.


Lettie Prell:  Right.


Jerry Bartruff:  And we started out at the front end with doing a whole lot of assessment work, and parsing that population of substance abusers into the people who need intensive inpatient.  People who would better be served by outpatient, people who have received treatment before and need relapse, and so looking at a continuum of care and using assessments to say, where should we put this offender based on his needs and his assessment in those critical beds that we know we don’t have enough of, so doing that front end assessment work is huge with our then trying to match the offender to the intervention that meets that offenders needs and reduces the risk.


Len Sipes:  And Lettie, you’re on the opposite end of the continuum taking a look, a hard look at all these different programs and figuring out, you know what, we don’t have all the money we wish we had, so let’s do away with the programs that aren’t performing as well, and let’s put adds intersection al funds and resources into the programs that are doing well.  So the research part of it is an extraordinarily big piece of re-entry programming in terms of state of the art practices, right Lettie?


Lettie Prell:  Yes, and our executive from the very top on down is committed to basing these tough decisions on the data, and speaking of risk, listeners in other states and jurisdictions, you know, the Iowa data really show.  Don’t be afraid to treat that high risk offender because we’ve shown the largest drops in recidivism rates, getting the bang for your buck out of treating those high risk offenders.  We have a dynamic risk assessment.  We use the LSIR, the Level of Service Inventory, revised that with developed in Canada, and when we recess for risk, we find that there’s some score drop that is happening, and we had a research partner, she got her PhD doing this study, and we said, well, we’re seeing these score drops.  Does that translate to lower recidivism?  And her research says that, yes.  That for that highest risk group, a 10 percent drop in their assessment score means a 6 percent reduction in recidivism.


Len Sipes:  Uh-huh.


Lettie Prell:  And that’s the largest recidivism reduction of any of the risk groups, is at the highest level, and that’s really important because at that highest level of risk, you see a disproportionate number mentally ill, a disproportionate number of African-Americans, so this exactly translates to the targeted treatment we’ve been doing for these subgroups.


Len Sipes:  All right, final minute of the program.  So you guys going to have to be concise.  What are the lessons for everybody else?  Again, for the congressional staffers and the other people in other states listening to this program, it’s to do what?


Jerry Bartruff:  I’ll go first.  I think the first thing to recognize is that incarceration and re-entry is not just a criminal justice issue.  It’s a community safety issue, and that other agencies and the community needs to be involved with this if we are going to be able to make your community safer.


Len Sipes:  Lettie.


Lettie Prell:  Improve programs that you have.  Get rid of programs that aren’t working, and treat the high risk offender.


Len Sipes:  I really appreciate the summation.  Both of you, I think, did an extraordinary good job of explaining something that is very complex, and hopefully other states and jurisdictions will benefit from what you’ve said today.  Lettie Prell, director of research for the Iowa Department of Corrections, again, WWW.DOC.STATE.IA.US.  I wouldn’t that repeat that again for Jerry Bartruff.  He is the deputy director of offender services, again for Iowa Department of Corrections.  Big drops in recidivism, and again, congratulations to you both.  Again a reminder as we said at the beginning of the program, the American Probation and Parole association.  WWW.APPA-NAT.ORG is talking about honoring parole and probation agents, community supervision officers throughout the country, and for that matter, throughout the world.  Check out their website in terms of activities coming up, and also, once again the National Re-entry Resource Center funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance for the US Department of Justice, WWW.NATIONALREENTRYRESOURCECENTER.ORG, ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety, I am your host Leonard Sipes.  Listen for us next time as we explore another very important topic in our criminal justice system.  Please have yourselves a very, very, pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Corrections-Prisons, Interviews with Policy Makers, Reentry, What Works

Correctional and Vocational Education: Does it Work?-DC Public Safety Radio

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/04/correctional-and-vocational-education-does-it-work-dc-public-safety-radio-2/

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

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the Nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host Leonard Sipes.  Today’s program is about correctional education, vocational education.  It’s been talked about for decades, the whole concept of preparing people coming out of the prison system.  And the research certainly seems to indicate that the better prepared they are when they come out of the prison system, the less they recidivate, the fewer crimes are committed.  And in fact, states find themselves saving literally hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of reduced prison costs, in terms of reduced operating costs.  It’s a win/win situation for everybody involved.  But we have two issues going on today, ladies and gentlemen.  We have massive budget cuts at the state level and states are basically saying hey, we can no longer afford to do the sort of programs that are necessary.  We understand that they cut recidivism, but then again at the same time, there are budget cuts that need to be made.  And with the whole reentry movement, where in essence what the Department of Justice and everybody else is saying is that the better prepared individuals are upon release from the prison system, the better they do.  Again, the less they recidivate and the less they cost states.  We have two principals with us today to discuss this entire issue, Steve Steurer; he is the Executive Director for the Correctional Education Association of America and Bill Sondervan.  He is a professor and Executive Director of Public Safety Outreach for University of Maryland University College.  First of all, give me a sort of an overview of the Correctional Education Association and you guys have been around for decades, and in terms of the preshow, we were talking about the whole issue that you all had been pushing this whole issue of reentry for decades.  So this concept that we think is new, preparing offenders coming out of the prison system and have that seamless transfer to resources and the community, that is something that you guys had been advocating for decades, correct?

Steve Steurer:  That’s correct.  CEA has been around, it’s heading towards its 70th birthday in a few years.  And we’ve always advocated to educate inmates for preparation for, you know, getting back into society and being productive people, workers, parents, etc.  But that’s nothing new.  The reentry efforts, I’m very happy that we’ve seen this emphasis on reentry.  I think the only thing that I feel badly about is that it doesn’t really focus as much on education as I would like to see.  We do have an opportunity to get some educational efforts going through this Second Chance Act and we have taken advantage of some of that.  But education seems to get lost.  A lot of programs want to go forward for reentry, but if you have a highly illiterate population unprepared, you need to catch them up a little bit with skills and the ability to communicate in order to be successful in other programs.

Len Sipes:  But Steve, the bottom line in all of this is that the research does indicate that the better prepared offenders are upon release, especially if they transfer seamlessly in terms of similar programs in the community, the less they recidivate, the less crime there is and the fact that states do save hundreds of millions of dollars in delayed or completely postponed prison construction costs, correct?

Steve Steurer:  That’s correct and most people in criminology believe that and understand it because of the research.  I mean you can get into the particulars about which programs might be more effective than others, but that nobody really knows precisely.  But they do know overall, education programs with basic literacy or post-secondary education, an investment in that pays off tremendously in fewer crimes and fewer re-incarcerations and then costs to the public, you know, in general.  But that’s a given for almost all of us.  But the problem with budget now is there are all kinds of priorities.  And so corrections kind of falls to the bottom underneath public schools, university and education, etc.  So we’re fighting for a small number of dollars’ worth, you know, with other priorities.  So we’re in a real pickle right now.

Len Sipes:  Bill Sondervan, you are a professor and Executive Director for Public Safety Outreach for University of Maryland University College.  University of Maryland University College, it just teaches an immense number of individuals.  What is it, like 90,000?

Steve Steurer:  I think last I looked; we’re up to about 95,000 students or more.

Len Sipes:  95,000, that’s amazing.  And one of the things I do want to be sure that people understand before we get into the crux of the conversation today is that you have had a lifetime in the criminal justice system, but you ran Corrections in the state of Maryland for how many years?

Steve Steurer:  Len, I was a deputy commissioner for five years and I was the commissioner for five years before a short stay at the American Correctional Association and then coming to University of Maryland University College to run the criminal justice program.

Len Sipes:  So both of you have seen everything.  Both of you have been around in this system for a long time.  Bill, again, I’m assuming that you agree with the proposition that I’ve placed to Steve and that is is that the better prepared they are in prison, the less they’re going to recidivate when they come out and there’s research that shows this, correct?

Bill Sondervan:  Yeah, absolutely Len.  I think one the realizations that the corrections community came to is that we have to do better than we were doing in the past.  In the old days, we did very little research.  We did very little to prepare inmates to go home.  But there’s been a realization that we need to do research.  We need to see what works and what doesn’t work.  We need to focus our limited dollars on the programs that work effectively.  And when inmates come into the system, like I ran a state system with 27 prisons, and what we all decided that we needed to do is as inmates came into the system, we need to assess them, see what their needs were, get them to a prison that had programs to deal with their needs, do effective things and start preparing them to go home from the time they get in, cause 95 percent of them are going to go home.  And in the old days, like in Maryland, we would give them 20 bucks and put them on the bus and that was the end of it.  But we’ve got to do a whole lot more on that end.  In Maryland I’m proud of the fact that we did some of the initial research, the Department of Justice and others, to determine what those needs were and start putting those programs into place and doing pilot studies to show that we can make a big difference in recidivism rate if we did the proper things.  And one of the things that really stood out of that was correctional education.  I think correctional education is one of the things that really works.  It’s been empirically shown to be effective through studies.  And I think it would really be a crime if we didn’t continue to support and expand correctional education the best we can.

Len Sipes:  Steve Steurer, I do want to give out the website for the Correctional Education Association, www.ceanational.org, www.ceanational.org, and for Bill Sondervan it’s www.umuc.edu, www.umuc.edu.  Okay, well gentlemen, look, we set up the program.  We talked about the fact that these programs are necessary.  We talked about the fact that these programs are effective.  We’re talking about, you know, we’ve pretty much substantiated the fact that the programs reduce crime, reduce recidivism, calls fewer people to be brought up in the criminal justice system, saves the state tens of millions of dollars.  Okay, if it’s that clear-cut, why are states cutting back on correctional education programs.  And Steve, you told me something I didn’t know before the program began is that the cut-backs also apply from federal funds, that the federal government is cutting back on correctional education programs.  So if it’s so clear-cut, why are we facing such a hard time convincing states to not only expand, but keep the capacity they currently have?

Steve Steurer:  Well, I like to think it’s not because people are mean-spirited, I think we find a few people in politics who are, but I think politicians operate with a meager amount of evidence when they start trying to do things, so they operate more on what seems to be popular or what the voters are like.  The latest example you gave of having cut all the post-secondary funds available in the United States for college education, mostly which went for career and vocational programs after somebody, you know, graduates from high school, their GED.  All that’s gone and it was done with a committee that got together with the White House and Congress secretly and decided to cut out 38 billion dollars.  Well, they went for all the low hanging fruit.  You know the things that could be easy, not just for excellent education but an icon of a program like Reading is Fundamental with zero out.  And that’s been a successful book program for years.  It’s had terrific effect on helping children read.  I mean and so who would argue against Reading is Fundamental?  And if they looked at the research, who would argue against prison education?  You could argue about whether they should get a Bachelor’s or a Master’s and how much you’re going to contribute to their education.  But people get together, politicians get together, they’ll lay everything out, they have meager evidence in front of them on all these things unless they really have a terrific staff helping them sort this out and they go to town.  And the result is a lot of stuff like correctional ed. and drug programs, you know, often get cut or other things that are good for, you know, for public welfare.  And they’ve got the voters out for these issues, so that’s part of the reason they cut them.  They’re low hanging fruit.  They’re not anything that people are going to argue about too much.

Len Sipes:  Bill, you want to take a shot at the same question?

Bill Sondervan:  Well, I think Steve hit the nail on the head, you know, and I’ve been through the budget battles.  I had to ask Corrections Commissioner, I had a $620 million budget and that seems like a lot of money.  It is a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough money to do all the things you needed to do.  It wasn’t enough money to even do the basics.  And right now, looking at what’s going on around the country and looking at the states, the budgets are really, really tight and people are cutting, you know, wherever they can and the decisions are being made physically and they’re being made politically.  And the money’s really, really tight and folks in the legislature are going to vote for budget expenditures on areas that’s politically helpful to them to get reelected.  And unfortunately in corrections, you know, there’s not a big voting block.  You know inmates don’t have a big constituency.  And I’ve had private conversations with senators and delegates and pleaded my case and asked for money for these sort of things and got a variety of answers.  And some of them were, you know what, we like you, we think you’re on track, but if I vote for this, if I approve this, I’ll get voted out of office and I’m not going to do it.  So again, I think that the issues are physical and they’re political.  I don’t think anybody’s mean spirited.  I think everybody or most people who understand the process after it’s explained to them, would want to help you if they could.  But times are just really, really tight.

Len Sipes:  Now, the PEW Center on the States just came out with a report gentlemen, where they contrasted recidivism rates state by state by state.  And they talked about the states that were doing it well and the states that really weren’t doing it well.  And we here at DC Public Safety, what we’re now doing is interviewing the commissioners or the public safety secretaries from a variety of states that have claimed reductions in recidivism due to the programs that they’ve put in.  I just did an interview with the Public Safety Secretary of the State of Kentucky and he has now cut recidivism rates to a ten year low.  So there are states out there, Michigan, Iowa, Kentucky, Oregon, and I’m probably forgetting one, that are claiming reductions in recidivism and we hope to bring them all on this air at DC Public Safety and talk to them about what they think was effective in terms of cutting rates and recidivism.  But that’s five states.  That’s five states out there that have claimed reductions in cutting recidivism.  A couple of other states have also claimed reductions, but they’ve since backed off those claims.  So some states are out there and they’re saying okay, we understand the GED programs are necessary.  We do understand that drug treatment programs are necessary.  We do understand that vocational programs are necessary.  And we do understand that when that offender comes out of prison and goes into the community that those services should be there.  So again, some states are embracing this and some states aren’t.  And everybody’s operating from the same base of knowledge, I think.   I mean the research is the same regardless of whether it applies to Michigan or Oregon.  Some states are doing it, some states aren’t.

Bill Sondervan:  Well politics drives things more than a research Len, and, you know, sometimes that’s a shame.  But you know it’s an enormously complex problem.  And we did a lot of research on what works and we came up with some good answers and more research is going on.  But it involves a lot of things.  Not only does it involve assessing inmates when they come into the program to determine their needs.  Like Steve said, you know, the average inmate has like a sixth or seventh grade reading level, but it’s more than that.  We have to, while they’re in prison, we have to do things like teach them employment readiness skills.  We need to teach them how to do, you know, cognitive thinking skills.  We need to prepare them to go find jobs, how to interview.  We had to do simple things like get them ID cards, so that they can prove, you know, who they are when they go for a job.  But it’s more than that, you know?  And it’s more than just, Corrections said it’s more than just the prison systems.  When inmates get out, there needs to be some kind of a hand off back to the community.  And the things that we found that inmates need are temporary housing.  They need to have healthcare.  They need to have medical care.  They need to have people on the outside to help them find jobs.  They need to have people on the outside to help them reconnect with their families and other people in their communities.  So it’s a very broad spectrum of things and it crosses, you know, several boundaries.  And one of the issues that I found at being a corrections commissioner, is that my money, my authority, my funding, everything I had, was all in a stovepipe.  And once I wanted to do things that crossed that boundary to reach out to the community, you really had to go out and spend the time to convince people to ask, you know, for help from people to get other organizations to chip in.  And what really made that difficult is that the inmates going home, we had 13,000 inmates go home every year, they weren’t all going home to, you know, one community.  The bulk of them were going to Baltimore, but they were going to communities all around the states.  So all those support things that you need for inmates to help them to be successful when they get out, have got to be replicated in several communities and not just one.  And that’s an enormously complex task.

Len Sipes:  We’re halfway through the program.  Steve, let me go ahead and reintroduce both of you.  We’re halfway through the program ladies and gentlemen.  Steve Steurer, the Executive Director of the Correctional Education Association, www.ceanational.org, Bill Sondervan, Professor and Executive Director of the Public Safety Outreach Program and the University of Maryland University College, www.umuc.edu.  They’re our guests today, talking about this whole concept of correctional education, correctional vocational educations, correctional programs and how that these programs certainly are proven to have an impact in terms of recidivism rates.  But the fact is is that the states are struggling financially.  And as you said a little while ago Bill, they’re cutting low hanging fruit.  So is there a way, are there new techniques or are there new ways of approaching this issue that are cheaper and at the same time more effective.  Steve, you and I talked before the program that my folks wanted to ask you is that why aren’t we doing more long distance learning?  Why aren’t we having a person sitting in a classroom in Iowa teaching inmates how to read or teaching inmates vocational education in four or five adjacent states?  Why, aren’t there more interesting and more powerful ways of conducting business that are cheaper and at the same time more effective?

Steve Steurer:  Yes, and we’re involved with trying to get some of these efforts going.  Part of the, I’ll give you a good example of what the problem is.  The GED, everybody knows about the GED.  Well, the normal way that that takes place now is a face-to-face instruction or maybe some computers that people sit at and receive some instruction that way.  And well that’s all going to change.  The testing for the GED is normally done with a guy or a gal walking in to test, passes out the papers, times each one of the tests, takes the papers back and then they’re corrected.  Well, that’s all going computerized.  That’s all going to go online.  And at a local jail here in the Washington, DC area, where we’re going to be part of the pilot of this, they thought there already, because they had invested in a lab of 20 workstations a number of years ago, etc.  Well the GED testing software is going to require them to have a better fileserver and better workstations than they have.  That’s going to be the case all over the country.  There are very few states that have the technology inside that is good enough to do just basic stuff like the GED.  There’s going to be a best cost on that.  So where’s the money going to come from?  And GED testing is going forward with it and it’s going to happen at the community colleges, wherever else people go for GED testing.  So what is going to happen when somebody like Bill Sondervan, you know, when he was commissioner, goes to Annapolis and says you know, we need to upgrade our computers?  We need to do this, you know, and dollars are so tight.  So where’s that money going to come from?  But it either has to be done or all of a sudden GED passing rates are going to plummet in the nation’s prisons.  It’s one of the core programs.  It’s one of the things that people in the public would certainly support, the idea of people getting high school diplomas.  Where’s the money going to come from?  So taking that example and pushing it out there with other kinds of courses, whether it’s adult basic ed., literacy and English as a second language, parenting skills, preparing for work, etc., using computers, it costs money.  And people, they have to have staff to run it.  You have to pay, you know, fees to bring the Internet in.  And the real big sticking point for corrections is it has to be absolutely secure.  The inmates cannot get on the internet somewhere else other than what it’s designated in how do you do that?  All that can be done.  It costs money and you’re going to have to have the right kind of technical support to make it happen.  So yes, where do you go from here

Len Sipes:  But can it, I guess what people are asking Steve or Bill, can it be done?  I mean Bill Sondervan you’re a specialist in long distance education, but you’re dealing with college students.  Steve is dealing with prison inmates.  Can you really truly effectively do long distance learning remotely?  Number one, is it defective?

Bill Sondervan:  Well Len, there’s several issues there.  You know first of all, correctional systems are really technology deprived.  I became the State Corrections Commissioner in 1999.  I did not have a computer on my desk.  None of the wardens had computers on their desk.  Everything was done by stubby pencil, you know?  And there’s been big efforts made and strides made to try to computerize operations just for the basic running of the organization.  It’s been very, very difficult.  And not only are you competing for money for technology for corrections ed., you’re competing for dollars to do technology for security purposes and security reasons.  So that being one.  I’m a big proponent of online education.  I teach at UMUC and you know, probably 75 percent of our students are online worldwide.  And I’ve spent the last five years learning a tremendous amount of about it.  And it works, it works very well and it produces some really good results.  But the issue is again, like Steve said, as a correctional administrator despite the fact that I think that online education works very well; it’s very difficult to do it in a prison system because you can’t allow the inmates to go online.  If inmates go online, get onto the Internet and get into other things, things other than what they’re supposed to be doing, it can cause all kinds of problems, all kinds of difficulties and it just won’t work.  So to use that kind of technology in prisons, we have to come up with the money.  We have to find ways to do it where they can only log onto the sites that you want them to

Len Sipes:  Right.

Bill Sondervan:  log on, and you know, I think the technology’s coming along but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Steve Steurer:  I’d have to say I’d have to differ with Bill on that just because of some things I’ve learned recently.  And that it is there, but I don’t think the attitudes are there.  I don’t think that the correctional community is ready to buy into when an IT person says we can lock it down.  We can make it go just to that one site and that’s it.  And we can set it up so somebody sitting at workstation tries to break out, that computer freezes up and a signal goes out and, you know, that somebody’s violated the protocol at that workstation.  All that can happen, that can be done.  And we’re going to actually pilot that in the next couple of months at one of the local jails.  And we’re going to be trying to put GED and all kinds of other programs on that system.  But I don’t think that the average secretary of public safety or commissioner is convinced that that’s going to happen yet.  There are going to have to be some examples, successful examples that take place for a while that people don’t get out on the internet but are successful in getting a lot of educational learning done with technology that’s on the internet, and then people will start feeling more comfortable with it.  I remember years ago we couldn’t even bring a computer in a prison, although there was no Internet.  People were afraid that it would cause a security problem.  And now that nobody’s really afraid of bringing in a computer into a classroom that’s freestanding, you know, they’re more afraid of the Internet though.  So we have to go through some progressive learning here, some attitude changing as well.

Len Sipes: Well the reason I’m asking is because we’re at a dilemma.  We’re at a crossroads if the states are struggling as mightily as they are in terms of their own budgets.  You know, but some states are obviously, state of California comes to mind; some states are basically gutting educational programs.  And, you know, there’s a certain point where, you know, these other states have proven that they can reduce recidivism and other states are basically saying well, that may be but we just don’t have the money.  So somehow, someway there’s got to be some sort of solution to this issue of educating inmates within the prison system whether it’s reading, whether it’s getting the GED, whether it’s bricklaying.  I know it’s almost impossible to teach bricklaying remotely.  But there’s certainly a good part of that component that can be done remotely.  What people are struggling with is some sort of intermediate measure, some sort of idea as to where we continue to, can continue to educate inmates and at the same time live within existing budgets.  But what I hear from the two of you is that that’s still very problematic.

Steve Steurer:  Well, it’s problematic because of the cost, because of the attitudes.  And also, one of the other issues I’ll introduce here, Bill and I, you know, we’ve worked together for years in corrections and he’s got me teaching a course in criminology at the University of Maryland University College and I’ve been doing that for about four or five years now, probably driving Bill Sondervan nuts with some of my goofy activities.  But, you know, one thing that I have learned since the university is an open one, that there are a lot of students who are just marginal or maybe below margin in terms of their skills to be successful in college courses.  As a professor, I can only do so much online.  There are services at the university that I can refer them to.  You get into the same problem in prison, even in a bigger way, because so many people have marginal skills and there are software programs that help, you know, with lower level literacy skills and all that.  But you really need to do a lot more work with these students and probably have a lot of face-to-face assistance as well.  So just putting people online, even if you forget about and solve the security problem, you’re dealing with a population that often doesn’t want to, doesn’t know that education’s a good thing because they’ve been so unsuccessful in it.  A population that doesn’t know how to use technology very well, and so you’ve got to get them comfortable with it and just all these skills that have to be filled in that they missed somewhere along the line.  So technology’s not going to solve it completely, you’re still going to have to have adequate staffing.  I mean it’s a huge problem.

Len Sipes:  Okay, and the final minutes of the program gentlemen, I can’t imagine anybody better qualified to discuss this issue than the two of you.  But what, are we at a stalemate?  Is it the fact that states are just going to cut and that’s all there is to it because they feel they have no choice to cut? Is it a matter of education?  Is it a matter of getting the word out as we’re trying to do with this program?  I mean the Congressional staffers listen to this program.  We have people who run correctional systems around the country listen to this program.  What do we say to these individuals?  Are we missing a golden opportunity here in terms of the reentry world?

Bill Sondervan:  Len, I think it’s all the above.  I think that first of all, correctional educators and correctional administrators have got to work together, there’s got to be a partnership.  We’ve got to be creative in what we can do.  I think you’ll never get away from face to face teaching in the classroom.  There’s some instruction you can do on self-contained computers.  There’s some things that you can do on tape and there’s some things that you can do online.  I think we need to pursue all the avenues to make it work the best we can.  We’ve got to be part of the budget solution.  But I think there’s also an educational component.  And what I find is that so many people know so little about corrections, it’s really amazing.  I think all us, we’ve got the responsibility to work with our governors and with our legislators to educate them on the importance of this program.  And I think what we can show them is that for the few dollars you spend on correctional education, you can get an exponential return in terms of reduced recidivism down the road.  And I think we all need to get out there and discuss that and sell the message.

Steve Steurer:  I think Bill’s absolutely right.  In addition to those things, I just came back from Indiana.  They went through a whole revamping of their system, not to eliminate education but to find more economical ways.  And in some cases, I don’t necessarily agree with it because they’ve hired teachers with no benefits and everything, and so they’re going to have a tremendous turnover with those people and not a lot of effective teaching going on.   But they’re also getting bits from community colleges where teachers, you know, do work with benefits and such.  But it’ll save the state some money from, you know, having to pay people, the state employees, with higher benefits.  Now that’s what I was and I retired from that, so I like to defend that system.  But there are economies that can be made.  A number of states have really negotiated with the teachers to create, you know, some economies.  There’s going to be a lot more privatization efforts.  Ohio is selling five prisons, not privatizing them, selling five prisons.

Len Sipes:  Yes, yes.

Steve Steurer:  And the Corrections Corporation of America will probably bid and maybe Management Training Corporation.  And Management Training Corporation is very big on education.  In fact, they’re accredited by CEA.  We always fight with them because their salaries are a little lower, but you know, they really put on terrific programs.  And I’ve seen CCA education programs that are pretty good too and I’m going to be there next week at CCA to talk to them.  They’re talking about working more closely with us.  These efforts will probably save money.  We’re going to reconfigure, try to figure out more ways to do things more economically.  You know, maybe try to convince some technology companies to come in and try some things out.  We’re working with the GED tech office to find out ways to make this work in prisons and jails and juvenile facilities.  You know, this will all happen.  I’m optimistic.  It’s going to take a lot of work.  If correctional education isn’t at the table, something else is going to be put upon this as educators that might not work quite as well.  We need to be there working out all the details.  You need to have people like Bill Sondervan who when he was commissioner, Bill and I would work hand-in-hand.  I mean I was actually accused by some people in my own department of working for the Department of Corrections instead of the Department of Education.  I thought that was a compliment.

Len Sipes:  Bill, you’ve got

Steve Steurer:  I really did.  I thought it was a terrific compliment because I said, you know, you’re working for the state government for the same cause, so who cares if you’re corrections or education?  Bill stood for staff training, inmate training, you know, everybody needed to be professional and inmates needed to be retooled and put back out in the community so they could survive and be productive citizens.

Len Sipes:  Bill, you’ve got about 15 seconds before I have to close the program.  Any final words from you?

Bill Sondervan:  Yeah, no, no, I’d just like to say that, you know, we know that corrections ed. works.  It’s been empirically proven.  I think we all have a responsibility to support it and get behind it and I think if we all do that, I think we have a great chance for success.

Len Sipes:  Ladies and gentlemen, our guests today have been Steve Steurer, the Executive Director of the Correctional Educational Association, Bill Sondervan, Professor and Executive Director of Public Safety Outreach.  For Steve’s organization for the Correctional Educational Association, it is www.ceanational.org, ceanational.org.  And for Bill Sondervan for University of Maryland, it’s www.umuc.edu, www.umuc.edu.  Before we close, the American Probation and Parole Association encourages everybody to really try to respect the community supervision officers, the parole and probation agents.  There are hundreds of thousands of them throughout the United States, throughout the world, who are out there protecting your safety on a day-to-day basis.  They ask you to spend some time and spend some thoughts thinking about people who are out there every day who are protecting your safety and mine.  Again, that’s from the American Probation and Parole Association.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  I’ve been your host, Leonard Sipes.  Listen for us next time as we look at another very important issue in the national and DC criminal justice system.  Have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Corrections-Prisons, Criminal Justice, Education and Vocational Assistance, Interviews with Policy Makers, Reentry, What Works
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