Archives for June 2012

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Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/03/high-risk-offenders-and-crime-fighting-governing-magazine-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host Leonard Sipes.  Ladies and gentlemen, we are celebrating our 150th radio show.  We’re currently up to 133,000 requests per month for the radio/television blog and transcript at media.csosa.gov.  Our program today is going to be a focus on high-risk offenders with John Buntin.  He is with Governing Magazine, www.governing, G-O-V-E-R-N-I-N-G, .com.  I want to focus on three particular issues during the interview—a different way of administrating the criminal-justice system, incarceration levels must be sufficient, but the real impact of an article that he wrote is a focus on the truly high-risk offenders.  What John did was write an article called, How Game Theory is Reinventing Crime Fighting.  It is probably, in my 42 years within the criminal-justice system, one of the most readable and one of the most interesting and one of the most impactful articles I’ve ever seen and that’s out of reading tens of thousands of articles.  John Buntin, Governing Magazine, welcome to DC Public safety.

John Buntin:  Thank you for having me Len.

Len Sipes:  All right John, how game theory is reinventing crime fighting.  Give me an elevator speech as to what that means.

John Buntin:  Well, we’re at a really interesting moment.  State and local governments have, the last few years, been squeezed by falling revenues—by the recession and as state policy makers have stepped back and looked at their fiscal situation, they have realized something, which has been obvious to those best who covered the criminal-justice system for a while.  And that is that for the past decade, corrections and healthcare costs have risen dramatically.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  Twenty years ago, the state spent about $12 billion a year on corrections.  That’s now over 50 billion.  And in response, they’ve had less money to spend on things like education.  States across the country are feeling the squeeze, and they’ve starting looking, as a result, for innovative solutions—ways to incarcerate fewer people and to supervise offenders more effectively.

Len Sipes:  Now, let me go back to a premise.  In the last two years, the principal story that I’ve seen from the new services that I subscribe to is—are cutbacks within the criminal-justice  system or cutbacks in government across the board, but specifically, you know I’m only interested in the criminal-justice  systems, so I see Illinois laying off 500 state troopers.  I see dozens of stories of states closing prisons.  I see public defenders complaining bitterly that they don’t have the money to conduct business.  I see the same thing from prosecutors.  The system is being squeezed from all sides, so this becomes a philosophical discussion as well as a fiscal discussion.

John Buntin:  That’s right.  In public safety agencies, like all agencies, you know, had been squeezed in cuts, and you know, in particular, areas.  I think the court system is one that comes to mind.  The cuts have really had a very negative impact, you know, on the ability of the courts to provide justice.  You know, I think there’s also been, over the course of the past four or five years, another discussion and I think that discussion really started in Texas back in 2007.  You know, Texas, as you and your listeners know, is a state which does not shy away from punishment.

Len Sipes:  No.

John Buntin:  It has—

Len Sipes:  Fairly conservative state.

John Buntin:  —a very high incarceration rate—the highest of any big state and you know, during the ‘90s and into the [INDISCERNIBLE], you know, expanded capacity with great enthusiasm.  You know, but in 2007, as a result of an unusual, kind of, bipartisan coming together of two legislators, in particular, the legislators decided not to appropriate funding to further expand the state prison system.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.  The governor wanted to build three more prisons.

John Buntin:  The governor and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice wanted to add 14,000 beds to the system.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  Instead, the legislature decided to spend $240 million on treatment and diversion programs and there were two things that were really striking about this.  You know one is that it marked a kind of break in the partisan war over crime and going back to the ‘60s—I think 1968 was the year that crime emerged as the primary concern in voter’s mind.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And it really sustained that position until about 1994.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  It was a very politicized issue.  You know, what happened in Texas in 2007 showed legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, that this was something they could work together with.  The other striking effect of what Texas did was, you know, their diversion—their investment and treatment worked.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  The inmate population leveled off—fell slightly.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And demonstrated to states elsewhere that there was a way to be smarter, while still being tough.

Len Sipes:  Right, but states our doing this—I don’t think from a point of view of a philosophy.  I don’t think they’re looking at it criminologically.  I think they’re saying to themselves, we’ve gotta stop spending so much money on prison system.  Is there a better way of doing it?  And then you have groups like Pew and the Department of Justice and other organizations coming in and saying, yeah there is a better way of administrating the criminal-justice system, right?

John Buntin:  There’s no doubt that finances is driving the desire to reexamine the criminal-justice system and that the way that politics—this issue has become depoliticized.  It’s also created a kind of space to talk about it in a more creative way.

Len Sipes:  And that’s the other really interesting thing because now you have conservatives and Democrats coming together, and they’re speaking from the same wave length.  They’re speaking from the—singing from the same sheet of music because they want money to build bridges, they want money to go to colleges, and they want money to go to schools, and if you keep pouring money into corrections, they don’t have that money to spend on other issues.

John Buntin:  As difficult as it is to operate an environment of cuts, you know, I really think that the criminal-justice system and some of the reforms that are playing out in the sector are a unique bright spot in American government.  It is one of the few areas where legislators, chief executives from both parties, have been able to make really meaningful changes.

Len Sipes:  Right.  And everybody is basically saying, there’s got to be a better way of doing this.  Okay, if we’re going to making all these cuts, if we’re forces to be making all these cuts, what can we do and what can we do better and from that, there’ve been an array of programs that have shown a certain level of success.

John Buntin:  There have been.  And the literature is fairly clear that, you know, certain interventions, you know, are successful.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  One of the most widespread interventions are, of course, drug courts.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  They’re cost effective.  We’re fairly clear on that.  There are now about 2500 drug courts serving over 100,000 people.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  Drug courts—they do work.  They’re also challenging to ramp up.  They’re very personnel intensive and one of the interesting things that I noticed, which prompted me to write this story, was the way in which there are some other types of interventions, which really make a virtue of scarcity—of limited resources in which sort of suggest a very effective and very different way to thinking about and responding to public-safety issues.

Len Sipes:  One of the things that I’ve noted about your article is that it takes a multi-decade approach—just not talking about recent events.  You go all the way back to the 60s; you go back to incarceration levels, you basically state that there’s a certain point where incarceration levels fell beyond a certain point; a point that they were back, I think, in 1962 before crime started skyrocketing and there’s a certain point, within the late 1990s, where we’ve reached those incarceration levels that existed back in the 1960s, but the question was, do we need to continue that?  I mean how many people do we need to lock up?  The criminal-justice system in the United States holds about 7 million people, 2 million under incarceration on any given day, a lot more than that in the jail system.  So, the question becomes, okay, if we cannot afford to sustain that level of incarceration, looking at it from the standpoint of decades and in terms of how we got there, what’s the better way of doing it?

John Buntin:  Well, our society has started to have a conversation about mass incarceration, and it’s a very overdue conversation.  In particular, there has been a great deal of completely warranted discussion about mass incarceration’s effect on the African-American community, particularly, when it comes to young African-American men.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  The statistics are truly breathtaking.  You know African-Americans make up about 15% of the population, but account for 40 to 50%—40% of the prison population.  One in nine African-American men under the age of 34 is in prison.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  The Children’s Defense Fund estimated, about a decade ago, that one in three, you know, black men born in 2001 would, you know, on current trajectory, enter the prison system.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  It’s horrifying and I think that the argument that made by, among others, David Kennedy at John Jay that we are destroying the village in order to save it, is correct. Where I am somewhat at odds with the mainstream discussion is why it’s happening.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  Probably, the most influential book and voice in this debate has been Michelle Alexander.  She is the author of, The New Jim Crow and at the risk of simplifying her book, she does make the argument that mass incarceration is—should be seen as, kind of, the next step in a long history of American impression of minorities.  I see it as something which was born of policy decisions taken for understandable reasons in the 1970s and kind of a story of unintended consequences, and you know in the 1970s the argument was made by, among others, James Q. Wilson, Gary Becker, that U.S. society had made a wrong turn.  Faced with arising crime, we were shutting prisons.  The punitiveness level, which is what academics calculated was falling, and so, in many ways, the decision to respond to a crime wave by increasing incarceration was a reasonable one.  What isn’t reasonable, what hasn’t been reasonable, is the decision to continue to increase prison capacity, you know, past the point of diminishing return.

Len Sipes:  And if you take a look at Department of Justice statistics, half of the states are—the population of their prison systems are declining, but half are increasing.

John Buntin:  Yes.  I mean the punitiveness level of the early ‘60s, you know, was matched in about 1996.  So, by 1996, we were punishing people at the same rate we were in 1963, which is the year that Jim Wilson, kind of, famously described as the epic where everything went wrong.

Len Sipes:  Right, well, where crime just took off—I remember in criminological school once—I left the law enforcement profession, and looking at a trend line and it went up like a rocket in 1963.

John Buntin:  Yes, it’s, you know his identification of that is as a year to study is certainly correct and in addition to my work at Governing, I recently wrote a book called L.A. Noir, which is about the LAPD in this era.  It’s a biography of former LAPD chief William Parker.  And so, looking at what happened there, to my mind, it’s, you know, inescapable that there was a crime response and that the public demand that there be some public-safety response, was warranted.

Len Sipes:  Oh, it was on every—the cover of every magazine in the country, hundreds, if not thousands, of times.  The crime issue was the dominant issue in the late ‘60s and the ‘70s and the’80s.

John Buntin:  But now we’ve reached a point where, you know, even people like Professor Becker, who were influential on laying the groundwork for thinking about—for applying sort of the Chicago School of Economics to criminology, I have concluded that we’ve gone too far.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  So the question is, you know, how do we pull back, and I think—

Len Sipes:  Noting that we have no choice but to pull back at the state level because they can’t sustain the level of funding.

John Buntin:  States are fed up with sacrificing spending on things like higher education and education in general, to build prisons, particularly, when the evidence mounts that there are more effective ways to address the problems.

Len Sipes:  Okay and that’s a good place to break.  We’re halfway through the program, ‘cause I do, in the second half of the program, want to talk about those more effective ways.  We’re talking today to John Buntin.  He is with Governing Magazine, www.governing, G-O-V-E-R-N-I-N-G, .com.  John wrote, you know, an article that is being thoroughly discussed within criminal-justice circles and very few people ever have the influence that John’s article has had because it’s not only extraordinarily well written, easy to read, it goes over a multi-decade worth of research in just four or five pages and comes to some pretty interesting conclusions.  His article, How Game Theory is Reinventing Crime Fighting, again, in Governing Magazine, February of 2012, and I’ll have, in the show notes, the direct link to the article.  So John, let me go back to the—okay, so, we’ve all come collectively through osmosis to a point in the criminal-justice  system where we say we probably have a level of incarceration we need.  The states can no longer afford to really do anymore.  So, we now have a programmatic approach.  We’re now trying to figure out, within the criminological community, led by the Department of Justice, led by Pew, led by lots of organizations; we’re now coming to grips with an alternative way of conducting business.  So give me a sense of Project HOPE in Hawaii.

John Buntin:  Well, so, a lot of the tension is paid, in these discussions, to the prison system—to the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated in prisons, understandably so, but often we ignore the fact that a larger number, about 5 million people, are in community supervision.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And one of the fascinating things about Project HOPE is the way in which, in a very cost effective way, it’s a sketch shot in approach to dealing with probation, which allows the system to address a very large number of offenders—a much larger number of offenders than a typical drug court can address, in a strikingly effective way.  It also has a really fascinating personal story.  So back in 2004, Judge Steven Alm got interested in his—in the caseload that he’d been assigned.  He’d been on the bench for about three years.  He was a very unusual—is an unusual figure.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  He was a former U.S. Attorney.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  He is an ex-boxer.  In fact, he had even fought, in his youth, at the central jail in Hawaii.

Len Sipes:  Interesting.

John Buntin:  Yes.  If you ever encounter him, ask him what episode of Hawaii Five-O he was on.  And when he looked at his docket, he asked a kind of obvious question that only a relatively new judge, who’d had a broad experience, would ask, which is you’re asking me to remand all these people to prison custody after they’ve amassed, you know, 20, 25 violations.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  Why am I only dealing with this now?

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  He said, you know, think about parenting, you know.  If you have a kid when you’re—what would happen if when your kid was acting out, you didn’t do anything?  You didn’t do anything; you ignored violation after violation, and then suddenly and arbitrarily, the hammer came down, and you inflicted an extreme punishment on the kid.

Len Sipes:  Right, right, right, right.

John Buntin:  It wouldn’t work very well; it’s not a good way to parent, and your kid would feel like they were being mistreated.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And that is basically what he argued that the criminal-justice system was doing.  So he came up with a different approach, which was guided by, you know, a couple of simple precepts.  You know one was that punishment should be swift and certain, but not necessarily severe.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John:  So, you fail your drug test, you miss your appointment, you know, you’re gonna go into jail, not for two years, for two weekends perhaps.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John:  If you have a job, well, then you’ll serve your jail time on the weekends.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And because he had been a U.S. Attorney, he was able to call in some favors, for instance, appealing to the U.S. Marshals to make warrant enforcement a priority for his court.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  In other words, to make good his threat.

Len Sipes:  They track the guy down and put him in jail.

John Buntin:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  For a positive drug test.

John Buntin:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  And they did it over and over and over again until they stopped pulling positive drug tests.

John Buntin:  Well, you know two things happened that were interesting.  One was he decided instead of just having a drug test every now and again, everyone in my court is going to call an 800 number every morning and that 800 number will tell you whether you have to come in for a drug test that very day.

Len Sipes:  Interesting.

John Buntin:  And if you were called in, you were tested on the spot, results were generated on the spot, and if you failed, you can even go into custody on the spot.

Len Sipes: That day?

John Buntin:  That day.

Len Sipes:  That day.

John Buntin:  And it was a rather shocking innovation and one of the things that resulted from this was a dramatic falloff in positive drug tests.

Len Sipes:  Well, a dramatic falloff in positive drug tests, a dramatic falloff in the behavior that sends people to prison, and startling, in terms of recidivism rates with recidivism as defined by new arrest or new incarcerations, that dropped dramatically as well.

John Buntin:  It did yes.  I mean the drug test positive falloff rate was in the vicinity of 80%.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  Recidivism dropped around 50%.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  And there’s another component of the HOPE experience that’s really fascinating, and it was this—once you demonstrated that the threat, if you will, was credible, you didn’t have to enforce it very frequently.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And most people quickly got the message this was real and as a result you didn’t have to expend a lot of organizational capacity enforcing.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And that has allowed him to you know expand the number of people supervised.

Len Sipes:  And so, basically what we have here is a set of circumstances where literally, over time—literally, over time, thousands of individuals who were headed back to the prison system didn’t go back to the prison system.  You have literally thousands of crimes, over time now considering the length of the program, of people who did not come back into contact with the criminal-justice system.  I know not all crimes are reported, so that’s a very iffy proposition, but we certainly know and can speculate that there were a lot of crimes that were not committed because they stopped drugs, and they also got themselves involved in treatment.

John Buntin:  And what connects to the wonderful world of game theory, is the way in which Hawaii, or at least Judge Alms caseload, moved from an unsatisfactory equilibrium with a lot of frequent offenders, to a very virtuous equilibrium where you didn’t have to do much enforcement, you didn’t have much offense.  And you know that’s something that we’ve seen, you know, not only in programs like HOPE, but in other parts of the criminal-justice world.  You know, particularly with some of the operations, cease-fire-style drug market interventions.

Len Sipes:  Right and that’s the other thing I wanted to bring up.  David Kennedy and a variety of others, including ourselves here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, what we have tried to do is to focus on the bad actors.  And here it gets by—and one of the things with Project HOPE—these were high-risk offenders.  These were not low-risk offenders.

John Buntin:  Yes, these were high-risk offenders, and you know, Judge Alm in recent months, years, has said something very interesting as well.  I believe that he is currently in the process of bringing a drug court, you know, into his caseload as well.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  And in effect, he is—one of the striking results has been that a surprisingly large number of people in his system are able to stop using without undergoing the type of expensive drug treatment that, you know, drug courts typically provide in an earlier stage.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  So, Judge Alm has sought to sort of used the drug court in the more intensive treatment for that subset of offenders, you know, who he believes is actually quite a small subset who really don’t respond to these swift, but certain, sanctions.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.  [PH] Vrand, a long time ago, basically said that many offenders take vacations from drugs.  I mean, we have this sense that drugs are, you know, the—you cannot kick drugs.  And offenders stop using drugs all the time, so.  And drugs are heavily correlated with the amount of criminal activity that you do, but get back to David Kennedy because one of the things that Kennedy seemed to be—have done, and others throughout the years, is to say, you know, one of the things that we should be doing is focusing on, again, the high-risk  offender.  Not everybody within the criminal-justice system, but the really bad actors and going after them, correct?

John Buntin:  Correct, I mean one of the—one of, I think, David Kennedy’s insights has been that in most cities, people talk about problems like gang violence or talk about problems like drug markets, but that when you convene the players, the agencies who are trying to address the problem, and you ask let’s drill down to the individual level, you know, typically a fairly small subset of people are responsible for the most violence.  And, you know, Kennedy, you know, first originally in Boston, back in the early ‘90s, came onto the scene of, you know, a preexisting, kind of, intervention and the Boston Police Department, Court Probation, The Department of Youth Services, you know, a kind of group had already come together and was working across agency to deliver a message to certain violent offenders that if they persisted in doing violent things, they’d get a lot of attention.  Unwelcome attention.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And Kennedy, to his great credit, recognized that there’s something very interesting happening here.  I mean most academics will tell you that criminals are not highly rationale.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  Crime doesn’t pay well.  We know that, you know, contrary to public perception, drug dealing, for most people, you know, is basically a minimum-wage job.

Len Sipes:  I’ve never seen such poverty in my life then in a drug dealer’s home, yet every television show I see, shows just the opposite.

John Buntin:  And so the notion that, you know, gangbangers, who, as we know, police frequently refer to as knuckleheads, will respond in a rational fashion, was a little bit of a stretch.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  But, you know, in Boston, David tried it.  You know the first element was concentration, which he described as focusing on the high-risk people.  You know, David and his group added to that something interesting, which was a direct message.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.

John Buntin:  You know, that was probably best illustrated in High Point North Carolina, which had a very robust open-air drug market in the African-American west end.  The police did traditional police work.  They got all the information they needed to, you know, round up a group of the biggest dealers.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  But instead of arresting them and seeing them replaced by their understudies, they called them in, and they delivered a message saying, we know what you’re doing, we have these binders, we’re ready to prosecute, but instead we’d like to suggest something else.  You shut down the drug market.

Len Sipes:  Right.

John Buntin:  And, you know, identifying exactly who the actors were communicating a clear threat, was very effective.  You know it shut down High Point, and in Boston, at least for a while, you know, it shut down the kind of epidemic levels of youth violence that were making news throughout—

Len Sipes:  And the threat was that in either one instance within the article that an offender had a bullet in the pocket, which is a felon in possession of a bullet, which is prohibited, and he goes to prison for 15 years.

John Buntin:  Kennedy brought in the U.S. Attorney, which is very supportive, and they decided to make an example of one gangbanger, so yes, he was found with a bullet, and he’s—

Len Sipes:  And that influenced everybody else.

John Buntin:  Federal time was a powerful threat.

Len Sipes:  So in essence, we have to wrap up.  We’re really about a minute and a half left before I have to close.  What the article says, looking at it from a multi-decade point of view, looking at a variety of philosophies, a variety of points of view, it says principally what?

John Buntin:  The article says that we should concentrate our resources on the worst offenders.

Len Sipes:  Mm-hmm.  We should bear in mind that the world is dynamic, and we should think about how we can tip criminal activity from a bad cycle, which we’re all familiar with.  The cycle of reoffending, the cycle of recidivism, the cycle of, you know, failed probation visits.  A third of prison—of the prisoners going into the prison systems are there because of probation violations, and we should think about ways to create virtuous circles.  And then if we communicate our expectations clearly and carry through on those on our message, you know we can see some really startling changes in behavior.  We can move to a virtuous equilibrium, which doesn’t require a great deal of resources to maintain.  And very importantly, we can also create a sense of fairness.  The system seems fair because while I’ve talked a lot about deterrence, that sense of fairness is also very important and a lot of the most interesting work now in criminology I think is occurring around those issues of fairness and legitimacy.

Len Sipes:  We’re approaching the criminal-justice system with surgeon’s tools instead of a sledge hammer.

John Buntin:  Exactly, yes.

Len Sipes:  All right.  Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today has been—it’s been a pleasure interviewing you John and reading your article.  John Buntin, Governing Magazine, www.governing.com, he wrote, what I consider to be a groundbreaking article, How Game Theory is Reinventing Crime Fighting.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.  We really do appreciate all the cards, letters, e-mails, phone calls suggesting new programs, comments, criticisms.  If you have suggestions for new shows, we would love to hear ‘em and we want everybody to have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system. We currently average 90,000 page views a month.

The portal site for “DC Public Safety” is http://media.csosa.gov.

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/03/successful-youth-reentry-program-garrett-college-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.  I’m your host, Leonard Sipes.  The title of today’s program is Successful Rehabilitation Efforts.  I travel frequently through Maryland’s Garrett County, one of the most beautiful places in the United States, resting on the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, and there I read a local newspaper called the Republican, an editorial, and it addressed a college program by Garrett College and serving youth in the area, actually from Baltimore City at a youth camp in Garrett County, and I’ll read very briefly from this editorial.  The focus of the story is the Garrett Backbone College Program, which affords an opportunity for youth incarcerated at the Backbone Youth Center to obtain college credit, and more importantly, an avenue for productive life outside of the correctional system.  The editorial goes on to say that the recidivism rate ordinarily for juveniles is 70-80%.  However, since the Garrett Backbone College Program has been in existence, the recidivism rate of youth who have been in the program is 38%.  Not only have two-thirds of the participants converted to a law abiding way of life, but a number of them have become highly successful.  To talk about this program today, we have Elizabeth Grant.  She is the Director of Liberal Arts and Justice Studies there at Garrett College.  The internet address for Garrett College is www.garrettcollege.edu.  Elizabeth, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Elizabeth Grant:  Hi, Len.  Thank you, it’s good to be with you today.

Len Sipes:  Well, I’m really, really appreciative of you being with us today, because one of the things that I have seen in my 42 years within the criminal justice system is that most programs, when they’re dealing with offenders, the success rate generally speaking is somewhere in the 10-20% ballpark, and when you consider that this editorial says that two-thirds of the people who have attended your program, the Garrett Backbone College Program, that two-thirds have gone on to become successful.  To me, it’s a phenomenal accomplishment.  So I have two questions to start the program: describe the program, and how did you achieve such wonderful results?

Elizabeth Grant:  Oh, you’re going to have a hard time with me keeping me reeled in!  I am so excited about this program, and I love an opportunity to brag on it!

Len Sipes:  Well, brag on it!

Elizabeth Grant:  This started as a brainchild shortly, well actually, prior to my arrival at Garrett College, but I got swept in it in short order, and it was an effort by Mike Lewis, who is currently the principal for the Western Maryland Youth Centers through the department of juvenile services, and our former president, Dr. Steve Herman, and it was centered around an idea that they referred to as redemptive justice.  Now restorative justice is kind of on the scene now where offenders have a duty to make good for the harm that they’ve created to society, and redemptive justice goes a step further and says, you know, you’ve harmed yourself as well.  You the offender have harmed yourself as well, and you need to do what you need to do to get put back together again, whether it’s getting vocational skills or understanding the impact that your behavior has on the larger culture, and so on and so forth.  So they said, wouldn’t it be great if youth that are in the custody of the state have an opportunity to go to college or to have exposure to things that otherwise they may not have, and the youth that we have in Western Maryland actually come from all over Maryland, not just Baltimore, and we do actually serve some kids in DC as well.  So we started out in 2006 with 12 kids, and we were at Backbone Mountain, which is one of the four youth centers in Western Maryland, and decided to start small with two classes, so we offered an English class and a Sociology class, and it was very well received, and since that time, we have actually served 180 students for a collective of over 1,000 college credits.  We’ve offered 368 college courses, and the students are able to achieve graduation with their GED.  So in the short time, which is usually about six months, students are able to get a leg up on getting their GED, so that chapter is accomplished, but then also to move on so that they’re able to see that college isn’t really that scary, and that they have options.  The idea has never been to keep them here in Garrett County and at Garrett College, but that this is an opportunity for them to be exposed to, oh, so this is what college is like, and gosh, I can do this.  And I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a number of the courses, and I tell you what, they wear me out.  I did a course one summer, the summer semesters are condensed.  We meet for a longer period of time over a shorter number of weeks.  So I ended up doing a sociology class that was four hours long, which ordinarily is just punishment for students and faculty alike!  But it was absolutely thrilling to do it up in Backbone, because the students were making connections.  For the first week or so, no butter’s going to melt in their mouth, and they’re just too cool for all of this, and then when they have their first taste of, oh my gosh, I get this.  I’m not stupid, I can do this, then they just catch on fire, and they ask questions, they integrate the material, they actually do their homework.  Now there may be some truth to, they truly are a captive audience, and there isn’t a lot to distract them from doing their assignments, but the reality is, they do their assignments, and they’re, for the most part, an exceptionally bright bunch of kids.  I mean, they’re not there for singing too loud in the choir.  But they’re able to make the connections and connect the dots, and so over time, we were able to offer a couple of semesters, we were able to offer as many as fifteen credits, which is a full load by any college standard, and so students coming out of their six month, what started out to be getting in trouble and getting sent away, at the end of that, they’re able to leave not only with their GED, but with a semester of college under their belt, and then go home to Montgomery Community College or Anne Arundel or any of the colleges that they want to go to, and these credits, we have decided to make them general education requirements so that these credits will transfer to wherever they are going.  They’re not starting cold.  They don’t have to make that leap from, “I don’t know what college is like” and whether I can do it.

Len Sipes:  One of the things I do want to get into is because I have direct experience as a gang counselor in Baltimore City, I did a year of, where the judge said either go to a job corps or go to jail, and so I ran a group within a prison system, and so these are not easy individuals to deal with.  These are not the cream of the crop that you’re talking about, these are individuals that are caught up in the criminal justice system, they’re juveniles, to the point where the state of Maryland has decided to put them into a center.  I’m not quite sure the word incarceration is the best choice of words, but they’ve basically removed them from their homes and put them in these centers, so these are tough kids.  These are not easy kids to reach, which is one of the reasons why traditionally, we’ve had such a high recidivism rate with that particular population.  Tell me why two-thirds succeeded.  What is the secret sauce?  What is the magic formula where — I said at the beginning of the program, these efforts, when they’re successful, generally range in the 10-20% level, two-thirds of your people did well.  How?  Why?

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, you’ve touched upon a really critical differentiation between the criminal justice system and the juvenile justice system, and it’s a philosophical different that unfortunately doesn’t always filter down to practice.  The juvenile justice system was created by an act that separated youth, and the term juvenile varies from state to state, but generally anyone under 18, from the adult population because there was this belief that youth are not, don’t think things through as well, and actually a lot of the research on brain development is beginning to bear that out, and that there is a better hope that young people can turn it around.  They make stupid mistakes, and they should learn from their stupid mistakes, but then go on to be productive citizens rather than being a drag on the whole society by being an incarcerated adult.  Now ideally, we could also employ this kind of mindset in a criminal justice system, but the prevailing thought is that, by the time they are adults, particularly as they get into middle age brackets, they’re less likely to be able to change their behaviors, change their mindsets, understand the impact of their behavior, and so forth.  So understanding that the approach to juvenile justice is much different than the approach in criminal justice, has been where, I think, we’ve had our success.  Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a juvenile justice bachelor’s degree or graduate degree.  They’re all a specialty of criminal justice which, in my mind, is unfortunate, because it’s not the same.  You can’t take someone that has a criminal justice mindset and assume that they’re automatically going to understand the nuances of juvenile justice, particularly when it comes to these concepts of redemptive justice and rehabilitation, and for some of the people we work with, it’s not even rehabilitation, because they haven’t had the skills in the first place.

Len Sipes:  All right, but I’m going to take you back to what I read from the Republican newspaper.  70-80%, ordinarily within the larger juvenile justice system, fail.  The bulk of adult offenders, two-thirds are rearrested after three years, 50% go back to prison.  That’s Department of Justice statistics.  What is the secret sauce here in your program?

Elizabeth Grant:  We take a radical departure from the lock ‘em up and throw away the key, and all they need’s a little discipline, and by god, they’re going to do it our way, and they’re going to learn how to respect authority, and those are the tools of the criminal justice system, by and large, and I’m trying to be careful with the way I choose my words, but we basically want to beat them over the head with, you have been a bad member of society, and we’re going to punish you, and that trickles down into juvenile justice because we don’t have a ready pool of people that understand that you’ve got to say, you know what, what you did was a problem, how are we, how are you going to turn it around?  Let us show you perhaps some options you might want to think about, including education and so on.  And what we have done, and one of the things that puts Garrett College, I think, in the forefront nationally is that we have an Associates’ Degree in juvenile justice, so our specialty and our focus is, this is what it is to work with young people.  It is not the same as working in the criminal justice system.  So for example, we refer to the students that are in the Garrett Backbone College Program as scholars, and there’s this thread that runs through everything we do that we create things by speaking it, and if we expect these young men to be young men and scholars and gentlemen, I mean, when I refer to them collectively in a group and I’m addressing them, I will say “gentlemen.”  And how often has that happened in their life?

Len Sipes:  I don’t know, but I remember my experience in Job Corps.  It was not an easy experience.  These kids were not easy to deal with.  There was, and now again, ours ranged from, say, 16, up to, I think at that point, 22 or 23.  It was the most exhausting job that I’ve ever had, and I will, again, go back to the fact that two-thirds of your people, the people who entered this program, were successful.  That’s phenomenal.

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, and it takes a willingness on the part of the adults, first of all, to be adults to be willing to pay for the crimes of everyone else that’s ever worked with this youth, because we come into the college program, and actually, we’ve established a little bit of a reputation so that some kids will actually stay longer than they have to just so they can finish the college program, but we come into it, and those, none of the scholars in the Backbone College Program have any reason to take us at our word, or to believe that we are there for anything other than self serving purposes, and so we, the adults going on, have to be willing to earn their respect and pay our dues.  I mean, it’s kind of flipping the whole model, it’s like, these, the youth that are in these programs have been through things I can’t even imagine, and probably things that most people don’t even think about, and for us to go in and approach them as, you’re broken, we’re going to fix you, you’re going to do it our way, we’ll tell you what to do, is just more of the same for them.  But when you go in and you address them as “sir,” or you say, all right gentlemen, we’re going to do this, and you expect, of course you can do this, because you’re bright, and it’s –

Len Sipes:  But you mentioned –

Elizabeth Grant:  – it wrecks their equilibrium.  I mean, they’re used to being tough, and nothing’s going to get through –

Len Sipes:  Right, that’s exactly right.

Elizabeth Grant:  – you know, and we disrupt that, and it throws them off balance, so that the responses they’ve always given that are essentially defense mechanisms don’t work for them anymore.  While they’re groping around looking for things, we’re suggesting like interpersonal skills and responsibility and accountability, and that sort of thing.

Len Sipes:  But let’s go back before the break in terms of talking about the kids in the program, because most have raised themselves.  Most have gotten up and poured their own cereal at 7:00 in the morning and sent themselves off to school.  Most –

Elizabeth Grant:  And their younger siblings.

Len Sipes:  And their younger siblings.  Most didn’t have a father inside.  A lot of times, the mother is not there, they have a lot of times, not all, but certainly a lot of times, they have grown up, and I’m not making any excuses for their criminality, I’m not making any excuses for their behavior, I’m simply stating facts as they are, a lot of times, they are self-raised, and when you become, when you’re self-raised, you have a hard edge towards the rest of the world that is sometimes unbreakable.

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, I think it’s the rare exception when it’s unbreakable.  The approach that I like to take whenever I’m working with someone that’s going to be challenging is to truly believe they’re doing the best they can, and that their behavior is serving a purpose for them.  Now it may be anti-social behavior, it may be destructive behavior, but it’s serving a purpose for them, and that is certainly true for a number of the students, and almost all of them do have a hard edge.

Len Sipes:  We have –

Elizabeth Grant:  Some of them come from –

Len Sipes:  Go ahead.

Elizabeth Grant:  Some of them come from pretty nice homes that, for whatever reason, something goes south.  But I’d like to be able to approach anyone that I’m working with that I think is going to be challenging with the belief that they’re doing the best they can.  It’s not working for the rest of us, but it is serving some purpose for them, and to be able to get around to what that purpose is, and then as I said earlier, this whole idea of treating them differently than they expect to be treated, kind of throws them off balance.  So now they’re looking for, okay, now what do I do?  And that gives us the perfect opportunity to say, here’s an idea, and it does matter that you’re a member of your community, one of the things that we’re doing very well in Western Maryland, I think, is getting youth from all of the youth centers out in the community to do service in the community.  They get AmeriCorps credit, which they can then later use, but they are all over the county, and in Allegheny County as well, doing a lot of community service type things that give them a sense, I mean, it gives them practice to be pro-social members of the community, which most of them don’t have an experience with, and then the other benefit to that is it gives the community a chance to see these youth as something other than little criminals.

Len Sipes:  We’re more than halfway through the program.  Let me re-introduce our guest, Elizabeth Grant.  She is the Director of Liberal Arts and Justice Studies at Garrett College, www.garrettcollege.edu, talking about a program that has proven to help two-thirds of the juveniles who are involved in this program lead successful lives, which is one of the best statistics I have ever read, which is one of the reasons why, when I read the Republican newspaper, I knew I had to do this interview with Elizabeth Grant to find out more about this program.  So Elizabeth, we’ve basically established that kids from all over the state of Maryland, they come up to Garrett County, Garrett County is sort of like Maryland’s mountainous county, it’s beautiful forest, beautiful area, the Savage River State Forest is the largest state forest in the state of Maryland, I think 60,000 acres, so it’s a beautiful, beautiful area, so they come from all over the state of Maryland, they come up there, they interact with the college, and you have had quite a rate of success with them, and we’ve talked about the reasons for that success, but the downside of all this is that there is a possibility that the program may go away, correct?

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, yeah, that is a black cloud on the horizon that we’re seeing, and I want to backtrack just a minute.  Our students do come from all over Maryland, and we also serve some students from the District area.

Len Sipes:  The District of Columbia, okay.

Elizabeth Grant:  It’s small, and it’s part of Maryland.  Or it’s located –

Len Sipes:  Right next to Maryland, yes.

Elizabeth Grant:  We have a couple of issues that I’m not sure if they’re budget related, or from whence they come, but one of the huge concerns in my mind is that Western Maryland Youth Centers are the last of the Department of Juvenile Services facilities that will be assumed by the Maryland Department of Education, and this was initiated actually under Governor Ehrlich to have MSDE take the education role with the Department of Juvenile Services, and because of the mandates for MSDE, there won’t be time for students at any of the youth centers to be out doing the AmeriCorps activities that they’ve done, which are thousands and thousands of hours, and it provides them a stipend of about $1,200 hours that they can use then for vocation or continued education after they leave, nor will it allow time for the college program that we have going on now, and the great big fly in the ointment is that some of the students that are served in residential facilities operated by the Department of Juvenile Services already have a GED or a Maryland high school diploma, and in those instances, they would not be eligible for MSDE education, so they’ve got this block of time during the day, this six hours that, what do you do?  And in those cases, the option has been, at least historically with the other facilities, they don’t do anything.  They’re basically housed.  They may go out and work on the grounds and that sort of thing, but some of the stuff that is going to be cut out for the students are things like the aquaculture program.  There have been a couple of initiatives where students have learned to raise fish, either for commercial purposes, like Tilapia, or the Rockfish that they’ve released in streams in Maryland, or the sunfish, and in the process of raising these fish, they not only learn everything from soup to nuts about fish, but they also learn about water quality, and they have done a number of projects where they monitor the streams and do stream cleanup, and they plant native species and help filter the water, and the good thing about that is it translates to a marketable skill once they are out of custody of Department of Juvenile Services, they can go down to, and in fact, we actually have some youth that are placed in programs with Parks and People Green in Baltimore.  They’re able to go to the zoo and say, I can test water quality, or they’re able to work with Department of Natural Resources, and the other silver lining to that is that they’re saving DNR a significant portion of their budget in just man hours, because as they’re learning these things and performing these services, then DNR is freed up to do other things.

Len Sipes:  The Department of Natural Resources, right.

Elizabeth Grant:  – organizations that the youth work with, like fire halls and areas, the food pantry and book distribution things, that they go in there, they’re useful.

Len Sipes:  So the whole idea is –

Elizabeth Grant:  There’s value in being useful.

Len Sipes:  The whole idea is to participate in the program through Garrett Community College for the first time to get a leg up on a college education, and at the same time, to go out and do community service work in such a way that it takes the burden off of Garrett County and any county that these camps happen to be located at, so they’re out there basically serving the community, you said the books program, I do a lot of walking on the trails in Garrett County.  I’m assuming that they’ve maintained some of those trails.

Elizabeth Grant:  Oh yes, absolutely.  And it services the state, actually not just Garrett County, but it’s statewide, the benefits of the youth learning ourselves, and the fact that they can practice being a member of community is huge for a number of the scholars that we have, and the youth that are in facilities, that’s not been their experience.  It’s been looking out for number 1 in a dog eat dog world, which they need to be able to do, because they’ll be eaten alive if they can’t.  But at the same time, they’ve had no experience and no practice in being community leaders, or as being viewed as anyone positive, and there’s tremendous value in feeling like you do have value to contribute to a community.

Len Sipes:  Well that would be an incredible shame if the program was altered, don’t you think?  I mean, it is because of administrative changes, there’s the possibility of the program being affected or the program being shut down.

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, both, and when you say administrative changes, that’s something that the Department of Juvenile Services is chronically having to deal with.  The secretary is a cabinet position, which is political.  Typically, we’ve had a secretary appointed every four years depending on how long the governor’s able to stay in office, so that’s like new leadership every four years, which each leader wants to come in and leave his or her footprint on things, and sometimes that’s difficult for the people who are actually on the front mind to translate, and it’s certainly difficult on the kids, because policies change with each different administration, so yeah, there’s the change in administration, but there’s also the changes that are coming down that are part of regulations of other agencies, for example, the move with MSDE coming in to take the educational piece of youth that are in DJS facilities.  One of the beauties that Garrett College enjoys, and it’s translated to the college program that we operate, and also to the youth centers in Western Maryland, is we’re able to have a degree of autonomy because we are small, and we can put programs into place, and we know the other partners that we’re working with.  I mean, I know Mike Lewis who is the principal, and we can put things together because he knows people, I know people, and people are willing to come and be involved in this in part because of our professional reputation, Mike’s and mine, but because of the reputation of the program.  They’ve heard about us.  They’ve seen our kids out, and so when we say, how about we come out and help you with your fish fry.  Great!  This is a model that’s understood in juvenile justice, but that’s, it’s still just a corner of the whole industry, if you will.  Unfortunately, the prison industry’s the fastest growing, and it extends down to juvenile justice.  I’m also familiar with a program called Rite of Passage that operates nationwide, but they have facilities in five different states, and they absolutely have hit on the head what it takes, and it’s getting kids engaged in a community setting, and exposing them to various options.  And they have the luxury of being private non-profit.

Len Sipes:  You’ve been able, well let me back up for a second.  But you’ve been able to document the fact that two-thirds of the kids are successful.  That is very rare.  That is very unusual.  That doesn’t happen with the vast majority of criminal justice programs, and certainly, well let me ask my question, my question is, certainly others within the criminal justice system, certainly others within government, within the state of Maryland, beyond the state of Maryland, have heard about this program, correct, and the success of the program?

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, anybody that I can get to listen to me!  And I know that various secretaries of the Department of Juvenile Services have been excited about what we’ve been doing.  But I’m not sure that we’re heard as far and wide as what might be useful.  I mean, we have been called by political leaders and educational leaders a model for Maryland, and I might be so bold to suggest that we are a model for the country.

Len Sipes:  You may be!  With that level of success, you may be.

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, the problem is that we need to have a degree of professionalism and autonomy that requires a degree of trust that, in this day and age, and I don’t know if it’s just the way things are, but some of the things that have happened on the grander scheme is getting hard to come by.  We were right on the money to start keeping statistics the moment we rolled this out –

Len Sipes:  Oh, absolutely!

Elizabeth Grant:  – and I’m so glad that we did, but one of the heartbreaks that we have is the number of students that we don’t know where they are, because through budgeting, and we as a country say that youth are our future, and we want to invest in youth, and every governor I can remember since I was voting has come in on the platform of reform for juvenile justice or juvenile services, or making kids, having more kids turn out well, but the reality, when it comes down to having qualified people in the jobs, not qualified, but highly trained, really, people in the jobs that can distinguish between the criminal justice mentality and the juvenile justice mentality, that’s not as supported by funding and by, quite frankly, status.

Len Sipes:  We only have a couple minutes left, so we’re going to have to start getting down into some very basic facts and questions.  Do you see, is there any hope for this program?  Will this radio show, will the influence of others save the program?

Elizabeth Grant:  I hope so.  I hope so.  You’ve given our contact information.  I would be happy to talk at length with anyone that wants me to, and I would hope that people that are within earshot of this program will feel comfortable in contacting the governor, Governor O’Malley, and saying, you know, I heard this broadcast, this sounds like a really great program, but I understand it might be in trouble.  How can we help support it?  And certainly to share that with Secretary Abed as well.  They’re aware of the good things that are happening, but I don’t know that the powers that be are aware of the groundswell of support that really this program deserves.

Len Sipes:  Well anytime that you have a major editorial in the newspaper talking about the success of the program, I mean, somebody –

Elizabeth Grant:  Well, the headline of the editorial that says GC program saves lives, and I absolutely believe that.

Len Sipes:  Right.  Well if two-thirds are successful, if two-thirds of the kids that you’re touching are successful, considering the rates that we ordinarily get out of programs, there’s something unique and something really interesting happening at Garrett College and the Backbone Mountain Camp.  There’s some secret sauce, there’s something really dynamic that is creating this success, and so I was hoping that we would bring out that program, that secret sauce today, and what I hear from you, that it’s commitment.  You on ly have a couple seconds left.

Elizabeth Grant:  Yeah, it is commitment, and it’s believing that it can work, because if you believe it can work, then you’ll do what you can to make it work, and the two-thirds success is couched a little bit, because we can’t just back that out from the recidivism rate, which actually, I’m glad [OVERLAY] –

Len Sipes:  Don’t have much time left.  It’s now 32%.

Elizabeth Grant:  Right, 32%.  But we also have a big chunk of kids, we don’t know where they are.  So the success rate isn’t quite as high as two-thirds.  It might be.  But we aren’t sure, because we don’t know what’s going on with the kids that we can’t track.

Len Sipes:  Our guest today has been Elizabeth Grant.  She is the Director of Liberal Arts and Justice Studies at Garrett College in Western Maryland, www.garrettcollege.edu.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is D.C. Public Safety.  We really appreciate your letters, cards, phone calls, emails, all the suggestions in terms of future programs, and please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]