Archives for February 2012


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DC Safe Surrender 2011 – An Interview with Assistant MPD Chief Peter Newsham

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2011/07/dc-safe-surrender-2011-an-interview-with-assistant-mpd-chief-peter-newsham/

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

[Audio Begins]

Cedric Hendricks: Hello. This is Cedric Hendricks and this is DC Public Safety.  Today we’re going to be talking about DC Safe Surrender with Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Chief, Peter Newsham. Welcome to DC Safe Surrender.

Peter Newsham:: Thank you Cedric.

Cedric Hendricks: Chief, can you tell us how many warrants there are outstanding in the District of Columbia and the types of warrants that you see?

Peter Newsham:  We have over 600 felony warrants that are outstanding.  The biggest category of cases that we have is misdemeanor bench warrants and there’s more than 12,000 of those, so that’s significant.  And then we have another category which is other warrants, is about 1,000.  So all told, we have more than 14,000 warrants outstanding.

Cedric Hendricks: And then one of the functions that the police department plays is arresting people on warrants.  And how does that typically happen?

Peter Newsham:  Absolutely.  We have warrant squads and that’s their function is to go out and find folks who are wanted on all of these warrants, you know, any warrant would come into play.  The other way, as you know, that people can be arrested when they have warrants outstanding on them is if they come into contact with a police officer.  It could be something as simple as a traffic accident.  They could be involved in a traffic accident, we run their name, their license and lo and behold if they have a warrant, we’re required to take them into custody.

Cedric Hendricks: Now can executing a warrant be a risky proposition for a police officer?

Peter Newsham:  Well, it can be, you know, because you don’t know what to expect when you’re serving a warrant.  They serve all kinds of warrants.  There’s been some very profile cases where officers have been either injured or killed serving warrants.  So there is, you know, the police have to be prepared for that potential eventuality is that it ends up becoming a violent confrontation.  Most of the folks, I would suspect that are wanted on the misdemeanor bench warrants would not pose that threat, but the officers don’t know that so they have to be prepared for those kinds of things.

Cedric Hendricks: Now DC Safe Surrender offers an opportunity for individuals with non-violent felony warrants, misdemeanor warrants, to turn themselves in.  So what do you see as the public safety benefit of an event like this that provides an opportunity.

Peter Newsham:  Well first of all, I mean it’s a benefit to the individual.  They can get this thing off of their back essentially.  They don’t have to be concerned about it hanging over their head.  You don’t, it’s very inconvenient to have a warrant served on you if you’re doing something, for example, at a family function, traveling somewhere, we’re going to take you into custody and you’re going to have to go through that process.  If you come down here one of these Saturdays in August, you can resolve the matter.  Once the matter is resolved, it’s resolved forever.  As far as a public safety piece for us, the value that we see is that, you know, we have these warrant squads that are out there and in some cases, they are trying to apprehend folks who are violent.  And they’re trying to evade capture.  Like I said, I don’t think the large majority of the folks that have these non-violent cases are in that category, but if we’re able to get some of those folks to come in, it frees up our warrant squad to get some of the more violent folks.  And that’s a benefit to everybody, to get the violent people off the streets.

Cedric Hendricks: Now one of the significant aspects of DC Safe Surrender is a collaboration of law enforcement agencies within the District of Columbia.  How important is that in the success of an endeavor like this?

Peter Newsham:  Oh, it’s very important and we’re very fortunate in the district because of the relationships that we have.  As you know, we have the local Metropolitan police, but we have a lot of federal agencies, the CSOSA, pre-trial services,  US Attorney’s Office, the Office of the Attorney General and all these folks, the courts of course.  All of these folks come into play.  And like I said, we had a relationship prior to going into the Safe Surrender Operation.  We had a Safe Surrender, as you know, about three years ago which was very successful.  But having those relationships is really critical to making the city safe.

Cedric Hendricks: Well now you mentioned the Safe Surrender back in 2007, I believe it was.  And it’s my understandingthat there were about 530 individuals that turned themselves in.  What is your hope as we approach Safe Surrender this time around, in terms of the success?  What would be a successful outcome as you said?

Peter Newsham:  Well, it’s going to be successful if we get any number of people to turn themselves in, a significant number of people you know?  If we get hundreds of people to turn themselves in, fantastic; If we get thousands of people to turn themselves in, even better.  You know, like I told you, being able to free up the warrant squads that are working in the city to go after the most violent people is really what the police department, I think it’s what most people expect the police department to do.

Cedric Hendricks: Well, we thank you for your participation here today.  This has been Cedric Hendricks talking with Metropolitan Police Department, Assistant Chief Peter Newsham about DC Safe Surrender.

[Audio Ends]

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DC Safe Surrender 2011 – An Interview with Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Paul Quander

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/2011/07/dc-safe-surrender-2011-an-interview-with-deputy-mayor-for-public-safety-paul-quander/

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

[Audio Begins]

Cedric Hendricks:  Hello, this is Cedric Hendricks and welcome to DC Public Safety.  Today we’ll be speaking with Mr. Paul Quander, the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice about DC Safe Surrender.  Welcome Mr. Quander.

Paul Quander:  Hello, how are you?

Cedric Hendricks:  Could you tell us what is DC Safe Surrender?

Paul Quander:  DC Safe Surrender is an opportunity where all of the law enforcement partners, local, federal, judicial, legislative, have come together to provide an opportunity for men and women who have misdemeanor warrants and low level warrants, to provide them with an opportunity to turn themselves in to reconnect with their community and their lives.  It’s an opportunity for people to come get correct so that they can move on with their lives.  It’s an opportunity so that they can come, so that we can get a lot of these old outstanding warrants resolved so that individuals can move on, so they can get jobs, so they can continue their career.  So it’s an opportunity to move forward.

Cedric Hendricks:  Now what is a public safety benefit for the individual and this community by allowing an opportunity for people to come in and self-surrender?

Paul Quander:  There is a significant overall public safety benefit.  The more people that come in voluntarily, the less law enforcement resources need to be expended to look for, to search for individuals.  The other thing is that it helps us to continue to connect with the community.  We want to be in the business of preventing crimes.  We want to be in the business of trying to reestablish our communities and making sure that they’re safe places to live.  A lot of the people that we’re targeting have turned their lives around.  They are no longer involved in any type of criminal conduct.  So they have gone the right path.  So now it’s time for them just to come on in, let us take care of these outstanding issues, let’s make it right and then let’s move forward.  So there’s a significant public safety implication here.

Cedric Hendricks:  Now DC Safe Surrender was first done back in 2007 and you were instrumental in making that happen here.  What were some of the achievements of that Safe Surrender and how are those inspiring you all to want to do this again?

Paul Quander:  Well, you know we often talk about working together as a government.  That was one of the most significant endeavors whereby every part of the criminal justice system, every component, was involved in fugitive safe surrender.  And it wasn’t just the criminaljustice agencies, but it was the community at large.  We had a religious partner, Bible Way Church and all the members of Bible Way that accepted this initiative.  They took it on as one of their projects for giving back to their community.  So it brought the criminal justice partners, it brought the religious community; it brought the community at large together and was located in a church and in a safe environment just as the environment of Superior Court will be for this event.  And it allowed us to reconnect with our community.  There are in excess of 500 men and women who came in and got their lives turned around.  When you think about 500, more than 500 individuals, that’s a significant number and some of them had outstanding warrants from the 60’s.  And that’s a long time to have something hanging over your head.  And a lot of these matters were resolved right then, right there.  So it was a resounding success.  It’s a great example of community partnering and community resolve to help everyone.  So that’s why we wanted to do it again.  We wanted to offer it so that anyone that is out there that has this type of low level misdemeanor, non-violent offense, can turn themselves in in a safe environment and will receive favorable consideration to get the matter resolved.

Cedric Hendricks:  Now why should people get favorable consideration?  That certainly is a hallmark of Safe Surrender.  Why is that something you can get through this door and not otherwise?

Paul Quander:  The main reason is because of their own volition, their own will, the fact that they have decided themselves that they want to come in and have these matters addressed.  It’s quid pro quo.  They get something, law enforcement and public safety receives something.  And the community wins as a whole.  So if they can come in, get these matters resolved, then it’s law resources that need to be expended from the police, from the prosecutors, from probation and parole, right on down the line.  So the earlier we can get matters resolved, the better it is for everyone that is concerned.

Cedric Hendricks:  And finally, when will DC Safe Surrender be taking place?   August 13th,

Paul Quander:  I know there are three successive

Cedric Hendricks:  20th and 27th.

Paul Quander:  Right, there are three successive Saturdays that we want to open this up at Superior Court, 500 Indiana Avenue.  And we’re asking men and women to come in.  And we’re also asking for family members to come in and to support them.  This is an event for the community so if you have a grandson, if you have a nephew, if you have a niece, if you have a daughter, and they have an outstanding warrant, come down with them.  It’s open to the public.  It’s open for family members.  And we want to get as many people to come in and to participate with us in August so that we can have a safe summer and so that beginning with the new school year, people will be free of anything that’s heading over their heads.

Cedric Hendricks:  We’ve been talking with Mr. Paul Quander, the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice.  He’s been briefing us on DC Safe Surrender.  Thank you very much Mr. Quander.

Paul Quander:  Thank you for the opportunity.

[Audio Ends]

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Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships-US Dept. of Justice-DC Public Safety Radio

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/2011/06/faith-based-and-neighborhood-partnerships-us-dept-of-justice-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. We have a very interesting guest today, ladies and gentlemen—Eugene Schneeberg. He is the director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships of the United States Department of Justice, to talk about the national faith-based initiative throughout the country, and there’s an awful lot of things going on. Before we start our program, the usual announcements–now that we’re doing announcements, I want to announce the fact that there is the National Reentry Resource Center, which is a project of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice programs. The U.S. Department of Justice, all things you ever wanted to know about the reentry concept – www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org. The American Probation and Parole Association want us to celebrate the issue of parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia. The actual week is in July, but we’re doing it early with all the radio and television programs that we’re doing, to really get people to focus on the sacrifices and what these individuals do to protect our safety every day. So again, that’s www.appa-net.org. Also, interestingly enough, in Louisiana, the Department of Corrections is also doing their own radio series on reentry, and they’re the only other ones in the country. Go to Louisiana Corrections. Their web site is way too long for me to give out, but Louisiana Division of Correction, if you go to that web site and look for the radio shows, you will see what they have to offer. And back to our guest, Eugene Schneeberg. He’s the Director for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, U.S. Department of Justice. Eugene, welcome to DC Public Safety.

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

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

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

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

Eugene Schneeberg:  Rabbi?

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

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Sure.

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Right.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Len Sipes:  Right.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

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

Eugene Schneeberg:  That’s a whole other broadcast –

Len Sipes:  Yes, it is.

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

Len Sipes:  Mm-hm.

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

Len Sipes:  Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eugene Schneeberg:  Findyouthinfo.

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

[Audio Ends]

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Victim Rights in the Pretrial Process

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/victim-rights-in-the-pretrial-process/

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 national’s Capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Back on our microphones – Will Marling, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trynova.org. NOVA has a long history, decades-long history, of protecting victims’ rights and the topic of the show today is going to be victim’s issues and pretrial release. What happens when a person is arrested and then released back out to the community and what it means to victims and victim protection? To discuss the pretrial end of it we have Tim Murray. He is the Executive Director of the Pretrial Justice Institute – www.pretrial.org. Before we begin the show a couple of announcements. I’ve been asked to promote a variety of organizations.  One is the National Reentry Resource Center. It’s a project of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice. It is a comprehensive website in terms of reentry issues. You can reach them via the website – www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org. The American Probation and Parole Association, they’ve asked me to promote the fact that there is an entire week in July promoting the work of probation agents, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. You can reach them via their website at www.appa-net.org and also it’s interesting. I spoke to our friends down at the Louisiana Department of Corrections. They’re the only other entity in the country doing radio shows on reentry. The Louisiana Department of Corrections Division of Parole and Probation and their web address is simply way too long for me to give out on the radio. It’ll be in the show notes and so we get back to Will Marling and Tim Murray. Welcome to DC Public Safety.

Will Marling:  Hey, Len. Good to be with you.

Tim Murray:  Thanks Len. Appreciate it.

Len Sipes:  Well, gentlemen, this is an interesting topic. It really is and I can’t think of anything dicier or more controversial than this issue because, Will Marling, the victims’ issues are something that the entire criminal justice system should be embracing. I’m not quite sure if we embrace them to the fullest possible extent, but we are here not only for the protection of citizens, we’re here, needless to say, for the protection of victims and you and I have had a variety of discussions where the criminal justice system just is not as good as it should be in terms of protecting victims’ rights. And now we have Pretrial Justice Institute, Tim Murray, to discuss this whole issue of pretrial. The problem is that states and local jurisdictions throughout the country are complaining bitterly.  Their jails are filled to capacity and what they’re saying is that either builds another jail – either invests hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of construction and operating costs – or we have to make decisions as to who we let go before trial. That the more dangerous individual needs to stay – nobody would doubt that, but the lesser offender – that means that he is going to be put out on some sort of bail or some sort of pretrial release. In the District of Columbia we have an entire organization, The Pretrial Release Agency, The Pretrial Services Agency, who’s there to supervise people on pretrial, but citizens object to that, that somebody gets arrested and three hours later the person is back on their block. So there’s a lot of controversy involved in this. Will, did I frame all this correctly?

Will Marling:  Yeah. I think you covered the bases pretty well, but the question and the whole operation for us is where do victims stand? How are they involved? Are their needs represented specifically, first and foremost, for safety and security? But then, of course, the approach to justice and all of these things, mixed together sometimes not clearly and we’re just constantly trying to affirm that victims always…the Pew Institute’s research regarding safety and security, the one thing that comes out in that research is…that’s the number one thing in all of these discussions communities agree on and that is we want safe and secure communities. Of course, the disagreement or the discussion, if I could soften it even there is, well, what does that look like and how does that work? And so when we’re looking at this pretrial justice issue and saying what are the realities because most people aren’t well educated on it? And I’m coming up to speed myself so that I can better serve victims.

Len Sipes:  Tim?

Tim Murray:  Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this on your broadcast and I appreciate the opportunities that have developed with Will and with NOVA. When Will and I first started having conversations about these issues we both shared a remarkable number of concerns. I think criminal justice professionals have done a less than adequate job in recognizing and effectively dealing with victim issues, needs and concerns and that’s despite the fact that many localities have passed very robust victims’ Bills of Rights and similar legislation. When you get to the bread and butter practitioner, the men or women that are working in our courts or our jails or with our probation or parole populations, they’re relatively unversed as to what services are available to victims; how victims access those services and they’re relatively unversed in how to deal with victims who confront them regarding their dissatisfaction or misunderstanding of how the justice system works. The one thing that Will and I come to constant and consistence agreement regarding is the public’s demand and expectation for safety and even though we both work at organizations that on the face of it might seem fields apart in terms of our individual interests, there is congruence when we start talking about public safety. I think that victims, as you’re described, Len, often don’t understand how the justice system works and I think the justice system often – these are my words – runs and hides from victims when victims raise concerns and I think Will and I have agreed to agree to do what we can with our organizations to remedy both of those situations.

Len Sipes:  Tim, the issue here, it strikes me, is making a proper assessment of the individual within our custody on a pretrial basis and to make sure that if the person poses a clear and present risk to society that that person is kept behind bars. If the person is not that clear and present risk or danger to society, alternative means need to be considered either through monetary bail or through what we do in the District of Columbia is actually have a Government-funded organization to supervise offenders in the community on a pretrial basis. So I think the heart and soul of this in terms of being fair to victims and fair to the larger issue of justice is our ability to figure out who’s dangerous and who’s an acceptable risk. Am I correct?

Tim Murray:  Yeah. I think you’re correct on most of that. I would probably pick apart a couple of assumptions you’re making, but let me first start by saying I think that all of us expect the justice system to make sense and in this particular part of the criminal process it often does not. In this part of the criminal case process if you have a pocketful of cash, regardless of how dangerous you are, you are likely to be released in almost every jurisdiction in this country except the District of Columbia and one or two others because in most localities in this country, cash is what’s used to determine who gets out of jail and, conversely, who stays in jail and cash on the same front does absolutely nothing to enhance or maintain community safety. Once I pay that money as someone’s has been arrested to a bail bondsman, I don’t get that money back if I behave and I don’t lose more money if I misbehave. That money has already changed hands. The jail door has opened and I’ve walked back into the community unfettered by supervision, accountability or monitoring. The conversations that I’d had with Will have focused on the need to change that paradigm. Cash is often used as a reason why the bail system is broken in this country because it discriminates against the poor and while that is absolutely true, what is not discussed often enough is that it also pays no service to community safety. It endangers victims. It endangers communities as a whole. Just within the last few months there have been tragic instances where people have paid money to a bondsman shortly after arrest – the kind of area you described, Len, at the beginning of your show – a case just in the last two weeks that the man was arrested in a domestic violence case.

We’re all familiar with the challenges associated with domestic violence and hopefully we would all agree that a rational response to domestic violence is not requiring someone to give someone else a couple of hundred bucks. In this case, in Washington State, there seemed to be a joint charge for domestic violence. He pays the $2,000 bond, goes homes, burns down his house with his five children in it as well as him killing himself and I wish that was an isolated instance. It is not. We know that people who get arrested are problematic. Some of them pose significant dangers. We believe and support the idea that danger can’t be addressed, identified in lesser degrees of danger can be transparently managed in the community rather than hide behind dollar amount and pretend we’re all safer because a dollar amount has been fixed on someone’s pretrial freedom or liberty.

Len Sipes:  I’m going to brag for a second. Our Pretrial Services Agency here in the District of Columbia, which is a federally-funded agency, has a much lower failure to return rate than most Pretrial Service Agencies throughout the country and that’s a pretty decent track record and they’ve been able to combine both public safety and getting the overwhelming majority of people in court to trial, but, Will, again, Tim mentioned it, this is a real dichotomy for victims. This is a real dichotomy for citizens. I agree with Tim that the average person doesn’t really understand the criminal justice system and if think that’s principally our fault within the criminal justice system for not being vocal enough, which is why we do these programs, but it is tough for that person to understand. I mean the person has committed a crime. As far as they’re concerned, the person is as guilty as sin because they watched him do it or they were the victims themselves and how that person could be released within hours of being arrested as far they’re concerned their safety is jeopardized by that release and how we overcome that, how we explain that, well, we’ve got limited finances. We can’t keep everybody behind bars for every crime that’s been committed. We have to pick and choose between the most dangerous and the people who pose an acceptable risk to public safety. That’s an almost impossible concept for victims of crime to understand.

Will Marling:  Well, sure. If you take each individual victim and look at the loss that they’ve experienced, the injustice that they’re endured, we naturally absorb a reaction from them, an anger from them that says, “I’d really like something to be done about the perpetrator.” We recognize that and we certainly honor and respect it. We also try to educate victims on these issues to say, “Now, what’s realistic in the world in which we live, in the justice system in which you are now engaged? What is truly realistic?” And victims were sensible people, most of them, before they were victimized and they’re sensible people after they’re victimized. So you can discuss these issues. I think what Tim and I have engaged on in respecting and reflecting on this issue, respecting one another, is that there are some clearly nonsensical things going on that to say that a person and the risk that he or she poses to society is based solely on a relatively subjective monetary standard…

People don’t realize that’s what’s transpiring. They figure that there’s got to be some sophisticated thought that went into determining that and that it has some level of protection and what we’re realizing is that is just not the case. So we want to look at the issue for the sake of victims because you go to the doctor and you want that doctor’s opinion on behalf of your medical condition, even though you might have perceptions. You might defer saying, “Okay, I understand that you’re focused on this.” So we want to be representing the needs of victims while also working sensibly to bring about meaningful change within the system and so that’s why Tim and I, we’re collaborating on this issue because we believe ultimately it serves society, it serves victims and it serves the process. We’re in a period in our lives, in our culture, in our society, where finances have to be considered. So now we’re driven to consider these things because the jails are overcrowded. We can’t build enough prisons and so on. So this is a good time actually to discuss this. What truly works, what’s truly meaningful in addressing the risk factors? What is sensible for serving victims?

Len Sipes:  I think your example yesterday, Will, when we were talking about this. Okay, so the guy is a major drug dealer. He’s involved in organized crime and what happens is he gets $10,000 bail. He gets a $25,000 bail. That’s a considerable amount of money, but for people involved with organized crime it may not be and that person posted the $25,000 bail and the person’s suddenly out. So there the decision is not necessary made on the dangerousness to society. It’s done purely because he has access to the money.

Will Marling:  Well, absolutely.

Tim Murray:  Len, if I can jump in here.

Len Sipes:  Yeah, Tim.

Tim Murray:  I think it’s important for everybody who is listening to remember that our nation’s court have always dealt with the issue of danger when they set pretrial release conditions, but our traditional way of dealing with danger is setting a dollar amount and keeping our fingers crossed that the bad guy doesn’t have the money and in many cases that turns out to be exactly the case, but decision-makers never know for sure. Maurice Clemens was a defendant in Tacoma, Washington, a year and a half ago or so. They sent a $190,000 bond on this guy with, I believe, child molesting, sexual molestation of an underage child – $190,000 bond. He pays it and shortly thereafter he walks into a diner and shoots and kills four deputies.

Now, as a result of that tragedy the state of Washington is looking at creating legislation that resembles the legislation in the District of Columbia and that’s something that Will and I have talked about. The court should have the power to detain someone pending trial and the Prosecutor makes a case, rebutted by Defense in an open evidentiary hearing and when the Prosecutor makes the case that this defendant is so dangerous that no condition of supervision or combination of conditions can reasonably assure appearance, then that individual, as is currently the case in DC and in the federal system, is helped. He has some safe bets that go along with that. Their trial has to be accelerated. You can’t just keep them locked up on an accusation for years at a time, but that is a fair transparent and rational and, I believe, an honest way of dealing with an issue that the courts have always had to deal with, but have done so in a hypocritical way – by pretending that a $100,000 bond is actually going to protect the community. It only protects the community if the defendant doesn’t have it and in some cases…the case that you discussed yesterday. Those cases raise the issue….in the case of a drug dealer who get s $25,000 bond, where did he get the money to pay the bond? And it’s not unheard of in this country that defendants make deals with commercial bondsman. They pay them over time. They literally get released. Go out and commit further crimes, creating more victims, in order to pay the bounty for their release. It’s just no way to administer justice and it’s really time to end it once and for all and I think the voice of the victim’s community is a powerful one and when people like Will start having these conversations out loud, officials take notice and listen and I think that’s an important conversation for officials to pay attention to.

Len Sipes:  We’re way more than halfway through the program. I want to re-introduce our guests. Will Marling, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trynova.org. Tim Murray, the Executive Director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, www.pretrial.org. Gentlemen, in the final minutes of the program, the final ten minutes, I want to cut to the chase now, okay? We’ve had a larger philosophical discussion. What I’m hearing is…what you’re saying, Tim, is that you want to see supervision upon release and you want to see that the person released from pretrial incarceration from our jails throughout the country, that release decision should be made solely upon the person’s level of dangerousness. So it’s supervision plus that conscious decision as to the degree of dangerousness. Do I have that correct?

Tim Murray:  Yeah. Let me try and give you very succinct answer. We had had the right to bail in most countries since 1789. That accompanies are presumption of innocence, but as you’ve described it, many people see the crime occurs. It’s a slam-dunk the crime occurred, as are that particular defendant. It’s not a shocking surprise to see the tremendously high conviction rate of those who are arrested. Cops arrest the right guy for the right reason most of the time. There are due process considerations, which we all support and defend. In making the constitutional right of determining who is released pending trial, when I am asked base that decision on the risk of that defendant not by the number of dollars he can get a hold of and if that defendant poses a risk that is greater that the community supports to manage it, then hold that defendant without the option for release and bring them to trial in a speedy manner.

Len Sipes:  Will Marling, the other issue is that we have these wonderful tools now and we’ve have thirty years of development trying to figure out who poses a clear and present risk to the public and who’s an acceptable risk in terms of release on a pretrial basis, but you’re not perfect.

Will Marling:  Sure.

Len Sipes:  And even under the best of circumstances the decisions that we within the criminal justice system make, some of them are going to blow up in our face and then the victims community is going to…well, not just the victims community, but society in general is going to rightly sit back and say, “Well, what’s up with this? I mean, don’t you guys know what you’re doing?” I mean, so somewhere along the line the victims community and society at large really has to give us a lot of leeway because we’re going to get it right 95% of the time, but that other 5% is going to kill us.

Will Marling:  Well, sure, and accountability works its way in there, hopefully, appropriately so because when things don’t go as they should go we naturally say, “Was there a gap? Did there need to be a change somewhere? Is there a policy change in view?” I think what really gets us is when the state is designed to fail, okay. When somebody gets out on bail and goes and injures children, for instance – like Tim was articulating in a recent story, a recent reality – we ask the question: Well, okay, where was the gap? Well, when you discover the gap is built in, the process is built in, that’s what creates the greatest outrage for us and victims, again, they’re sensible people and they say, “You mean actually it wasn’t based on risk assessment there? It was just based on money?” And that’s where we stop and say, “Now wait a minute. Come on. Let’s work on this.” Nobody can solve this problem perfectly because we’re humans, but clearly there’s a gap that we’re either brushing over or for other agenda reasons ignoring. That really becomes problematic and that’s what we’re advocating.

Len Sipes:  Tim, we have a criminal justice system. I’ve been in it for over forty years. You’ve been in it for quite some time. We’re overburdened. We have high caseloads. We have literally thousands upon thousands of offenders entering and leaving the criminal justice system. We have severe budget cuts all throughout the United States. The local jails as well as the prison system are basically saying that we’re maxed out. We just don’t have the capacity to hold everybody that everybody wants us to hold. So there’s almost at times a natural inclination. I mean, this isn’t NASA. I mean, this is really dealing with thousands upon thousands of decisions and I mean, are we that precise? Are we that good within the criminal justice system that we can get it right the vast majority of times?

Tim Murray:  No. We check in our decision-making because we’re naming dollar amounts associated with individual charges, not even based on the background on the individual, but simply by what the charge is. The way they all decided in this country, Len, from coast to coast is judges have a card on the bench and that card relates to an offence – let’s say car theft. And it names an amount and that’s what car theft costs in that jurisdiction. It doesn’t matter if you’re Jesse James or Mother Teresa.  That’s what it costs and for the very reasons you’ve just articulated – the fact that we’re in an economic downturn, the fact that public treasuries are smaller than they’ve been in any time in our lifetimes – we must make the best use of the resources available to our justice system. We must make the best decisions we can possibly make. It’s time to throw away the archaic way of doing business of the last hundred and fifty years from an economic standpoint and from a fairness standpoint and from a safety standpoint. It is a win all round. Will it have failure? Absolutely, it will. Is it foolproof? No, sir, it is not. Is it light years better than the system we currently suffer from? Undoubtedly.

Len Sipes:  Is it fair to say that both you gentlemen want an individual supervised regardless of how they’re released, whether it be monetary bond or whether it be by a Pretrial Services Agency? You want them supervised regardless, correct? You want them to be held accountable. Drug tested. You want them to check in with people.

Tim Murray:  Yeah.

Will Marling:  I mean, there should be accountability when a person is charged with a crime. The level and nature of that, of course, is what we’re considering, but any victim wants to know that the person that injured them is going to be held accountable and even before the official court proceedings, the official justice processes, we want to believe that their safety is still in view and they’re being held in good measure, so sure. Absolutely.

Len Sipes:  So the bottom line…

Tim Murray:  I think that accountability reaches the justice professionals that staff of criminal justice systems throughout the country and I don’t believe that we have even come close to the kind of professional accountability, which with regard to victims that is essential to justice. I think victims, as I kind of mentioned at the beginning of the show, are oftentimes simply pushed to the side by this system and by system actors. I think accountability extends not only to the defendant, but to the justice system as well. When a victim shows up at the door of the Pretrial Services in a community and says, “I got hit over the head last night. I hear the perpetrator was in court. Where do I go?” They should get clear and concise and accurate information as how to connect with victims coordinators; how to reach the prosecutor’s office before that court hearing, where and when that hearing will occur and what their options are regarding the same.

Just as they should have explained to them clearly and concisely what the defendant’s obligations are, how we needs to be held accountable if, in fact, he is released. I would argue with you that the law should release me on the year that defendants who post money have done nothing, but move cash from one pocket to another. Money does nothing to ensure community safety. It simply separates those who have I from those who don’t and I don’t believe money is part of this conversation in a meaningful way when it comes to determined pretrial release.

Len Sipes:  Well, you‘re not going to hear any disagreement from me, Tim, in terms of the fact that the criminal justice system really does need to…I mean, it just can’t be a victim’s coordinator. It has to be an entire fundamental change and we have all of these federal and state constitutional amendments talking about what it is that we could do and what it is that we should do. I mean, these are mandates, but I think it’s a philosophical understanding that we have to do a much better job of protecting victims’ rights, but from talking to practitioners, as you do, sometimes I just simply get the sense that we’re exhausted by the process and victims. It’s like “Oh my God! I just don’t have the time to sit with this person for half an hour. I’ve got a thousand other things to do.” I sometimes feel that that’s the dichotomy of very overworked, overburdened, challenge criminal justice system that just lacks the penance, the wherewithal, to give victims the sensitivity and the time that they deserve.

Tim Murray:  Yeah, but we’re not talking about handholding. We’re talking about delivering as public servants essential services that individuals are guaranteed. Whether that guarantee comes under the Bill of Rights for the right to bail or that comes as to the rights that each victim of crime has. We can’t turn our back on either set of lives. We are in the business of serving the public and we have to get better and smarter and more effective at doing that job.

Len Sipes:  We’re out of time and one of the things that I do want to do…Will, let’s do this again in a couple of months because I feel that we’ve barely scratched the surface on this issue, but I really am appreciative that you and Tim were coming on today to discuss this whole issue of pretrial and victims’ issues. It just needs further explanation, I think, but Will Marling, our guest today, Executive Director of National Organization for Victim Assistance; the web address for NOVA – www.trynova.org. Tim Murray, the Executive Director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, www.pretrial.org.

Again, as I said at the beginning of the programs, we’ve been asked to promote the National Reentry Resource Center, www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org, a project of the US Department of Justice of the Office of Justice Programs and the American Parole and Probation Association. Again, they do want you to respect and honor the sacrifice of parole and probation agents, what we call Community Supervision Officers here in the District of Columbia. www.appa-net.org. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We really appreciate all of your calls and letters and interaction with us. Watch for us next time as we explore another very important topic in today’s criminal justice system. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Iowa Reduces Recidivism-DC Public Safety Radio

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-NET.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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