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Social Impact Bonds

June 10, 2016 by

DC Public Safety Radio

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See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/can-social-impact-bonds-reinvent-government-urban-institute/

Leonard Sipes: From the Nation’s capitol this is DC Public Safety, I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and Gentlemen, Social Impact Bonds pay for success or making government more evidence based, more creative and more receptive to new ideas. Back at our microphones, John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. John welcome back to DC Public Safety.

John Roman: Thank you very much.

Leonard Sipes: All right you’re my favorite guest because all I have to do is wind you up and let you go, so that’s what we’re going to do today. Social Impact Bonds, what the heck are Social Impact Bonds?

John Roman: This is a new idea and it’s probably the biggest idea that’s out there today in terms of reforming criminal and juvenile justice systems. Along with public health, workforce development, economic redevelopment, pretty much anything you can think of. What we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to get private companies to invest in traditionally public sector activities. Which will allow governments to do all kinds of things that they’ve wanted to do but never had the resources to pursue.

The basic idea is Goldman-Saks in the deal that we’re going to talk about in a minute. Invested in a program to help prisoners at Rikers Island, which is the New York City jail. Which is a very distressed little corner of the world.

Leonard Sipes: It’s crazy.[crosstalk 00:01:29]

John Roman: A place that needs new resources to invest in a new program that hadn’t been implemented there before with the idea that the government of New York city would only pay back Goldman-Saks if the investment met performance targets that all of the parties agreed to, before the transaction was implemented.

Leonard Sipes: What was the program? What were they trying to do?

John Roman: What they were to do was basically a program called, “Moral Reconnation Therapy” through a program called, “Able”. The idea was to work with 16 to 18 year olds. New York is 1 of only 2 states left in the country that 16 and 17 year olds automatically enter the adult criminal justice system and so you have certain responsibilities to treat these young people in different ways then you would adults. This program was an attempt to try and deliver more services to them. To the tune of over 9 million dollars worth of new services to hundreds of not thousands of young people in Rikers Island in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to receive.

Leonard Sipes: Okay for the non-criminal justice people out there it’s a jail, so it’s not a prison so they are either awaiting trial or they’re serving shot sentences which category do these people fall in?

John Roman: The goal was, and this was really why this was very complicated, so the goal here was to try and serve people who were there on a sentence or were serving a long period of pre-trial detention. That just means they’re somebody who had done something that meant that the court wasn’t going to let them out on the street until their case was adjudicated in the courtroom or people who got a short sentence, less then one year 3, 6, 9, 12 months. Who were there for long enough that they had … There was the potential that you could actually deliver some services with some real dosage.

Leonard Sipes: Okay, that’s the point they were there long enough to deliver the services and were the services delivered as designed?

John Roman: Yeah, they really weren’t.

Leonard Sipes: Yes or no?

John Roman: No, they were not. The idea here is to say … We should take one gigantic step back if you like and say this is an idea that has been implemented around the world. There are Social Impact Bonds in the United Kingdom, there are 20 of them. There’s half a dozen in Australia. There are Social Impact Bonds, I was reading a piece today about Social Impact Bonds being developed in Brazil and Mexico. I know Israel is looking at them, Netherlands … They’re all around the world.

Leonard Sipes: Okay, so this is much bigger than any of us realize?

John Roman: That’s exactly right. This is the new idea, and the new idea is that we have all of these programs that have some evidence base right? People don’t really understand that we know so much more about how to help really disadvantaged populations then we did 20 years ago. I started at Urban in 1197 and what we know about what’s effective in serving people is completely exponentially grown since I started. What hasn’t grown is the resources to fund these programs to test whether they work and then implement them at scale.

Leonard Sipes: Why? When I talked to people about this program, getting ready do do the program they were saying, “Leonard, really intriguing idea, but if the ideas were so good why isn’t government funding?” Why isn’t government funding these programs if they are so evidence based, if they’re so impactful?

John Roman: I have two responses to that and one is really simple. They don’t. We’ve talked on this program before and you’ve probably talked a lot about drug courts.

Leonard Sipes: Yes.

John Roman: Drug courts are an idea where you take people who are drug involved and it’s their drug usage that’s causing them to offend and if you address the underlying substance abuse issue you could get them to stop offending and lead more productive lives and that would save tax payers money.

Leonard Sipes: Drug courts are generally seen as effective.

John Roman: Drug courts are seen as effective, there’s an enormous amount of research around drug courts that they have an effect.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: We’ve been doing these things for 25 years.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: They’re in every major county, there are 3,000 counties in America, they’re are probably in 2,000.

Leonard Sipes: Right, and that’s just the point. I mean they’ve shown to be effective and government has implemented them in hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the United States and Canada and throughout the world.

John Roman: That’s right where you hit the problem. The problem is we did a study about 5 years ago where we went and looked at of the 1.5 million people who enter the criminal justice system every year, which is an astonishingly large number.

Leonard Sipes: Yes.

John Roman: We estimated that of the 1.5 million offenders who enter the American criminal justice system, who are at risk of substance abuse disorders, of that 1.5 million, maybe 3% got a drug court. Then some really smart researchers at the University of Maryland came on behind us, redid our studies and different data and they estimated that we were wrong that in fact it’s less than 1%. Here we have an idea that is universally accepted, this is a way to stop future offending, this is a way to help disadvantaged people. This is a way to make America a better place and we don’t do it in any large numbers.

Leonard Sipes: I do want to get on the Social Impact Bonds because it’s intriguing and you’re saying it’s a national effort or an international effort. We should really be paying attention to it. Again the people I’ve been talking to are saying, “Leonard if it’s so dag-gone effective, why aren’t we getting the funding for it? Why do we have to go to Goldman-Saks, why do we have to go with hat in hand?” I mean, why don’t we just start kick-starter programs for drug treatment and for mental health? Why doesn’t the government, if government is saying they want fewer people in the criminal justice system, if government is saying we cannot stand the strain of the correctional budget as it currently is. We want to have fewer people recidivate, fewer people enter the criminal justice system, why the heck doesn’t government pay for it?

John Roman: Well government doesn’t pay for it.

Leonard Sipes: Why?

John Roman: There’s a bunch of reasons for it. One of the reasons for it is the results of these interventions occur way down the road. They’re not today, they’re distant. The administration that funds it today won’t be around when those benefits accrue so they’d rather fund things where the benefits will occur while they’re in office. That makes total sense. The populations we’re talking about are very difficult to serve. A drug involved population is … Drug courts are a great example, drug abuse treatment is a great example.

It’s not effective for everybody every time right? Relapse is part of recovery and so you have to know that you’re going to make the overall average population better but you’re not going to help every person. What that means is you’re going to be putting people out on the street instead of in prison, which is what you normally do with these folks and some of them are going to commit new offensives and that’s politically untenable for some populations. Then at the other end of the spectrum a lot of the people that we’re talking about helping with these kinds of programs just don’t have a political constituency they aren’t very sympathetic.

Leonard Sipes: All right, I don’t want to take away from the program on Social Impact Bonds but I promised others when I was doing the research for the program that I would ask that question. Social Impact Bonds very big, they are happening throughout the world. Why Social Impact Bonds? You may have just answered the question. Government unto itself really does not want to take these programs on.

John Roman: There are 3 things going on here that are really important. If you think about the research, I’m a researcher so I come at it from an evidence base and I come at it from the perspective of trying to get government to invest more in outcomes rather then good intentions. What I’d like to see for social service providers to get good evidence around their good works instead of just good intentions. Which is where we are today. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on out there that sounds good on paper that does not have any research support around it. Part of what these bonds do is because you have to go to an investor who’s going to write a check and in some cases these are really big checks right?

The Department of Labor, The US Department of Labor has funded a couple of these transactions to the tune of 15 million dollars so we’re talking about real large investments. If you’re going to get somebody to write a 15 million dollar check for you, you’d better have some sound evidence to demonstrate to them what their expectations should be for how effective this thing is and whether you’re going to be able to achieve the performance goals that you’ve outlined in the agreement.

Leonard Sipes: I mean people watching the Shark Tank program, I would imagine you have that sort of atmosphere. They’re saying, “Hey, prove to me that there is a research base behind this program. We’re not going to write you a check for anything until you come along and provide us with enough evidence that leads us to believe that we’re going to get a return on our investment.” There has to be an evidence base or is the private sector better at understanding evidence based procedures the the government?

John Roman: There’s two questions in there, one is am I willing to put my scholarship aside and admit that I watch Shark Tank? I do.

Leonard Sipes: It’s my wife’s favorite program.

John Roman: It’s a wonderful show and it really is exactly the sort of thing we’re talking about here, except that the scale is way smaller then what we’re talking about here. There they’re talking about 6 figures, hundreds of thousands, here we’re talking tens of millions.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: Maybe more, down the road. You have to be able to go to the same kind of investors, high-worth investors and ultra high-worth investors, right? People with 500 million dollars that they want to invest and you have to convince them that you’re going to reinvent Cleveland. You are going to do urban redevelopment in Akron. You are going to solve asthma in Fresno. You’re going to cure blight in Baltimore and if you can make a case that is evidence based to these folks they are going to invest in a way where they don’t actually get a market rate of return.

Leonard Sipes: Because if the program doesn’t succeed and are endless issues in terms of whether or not a program succeeds, implementation is one of the hardest things on the face of the Earth. If it doesn’t succeed it may not have anything to do with the evidence it may just be how it’s implemented that may be how faithful were to the original program design. They don’t get anything at all, they only get the return on their dollars. The program is paid for by government if it works. In this case the question becomes recidivism, in this case it didn’t reduce recidivism there by Goldman walks away from the table with nothing in it’s pocket.

John Roman: I want to come back to the Rikers Island deal, because it’s really important to the development of this concept to understand what happened in New York City.

Leonard Sipes: Okay.

John Roman: What I want to say about your point of implementation fidelity. Fidelity to best practice is really critical and that’s actually part of what’s going on here and it’s part of what’s so exciting about this whole prospect. Department of Labor funded the state of Massachusetts to do a program for young adult offenders in Massachusetts. Called “Roka” what they’re are trying to do there is to understand if they reduce the number of jail bed days that you would have expected from new offending compared to people who don’t get this program.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: The other thing that they’re doing that’s really important is … The Urban Institute is doing that validation. Another group Apt Associates is doing an implementation, the question they’re asking is, “Have you implemented this program as close to best practice as possible?”

Leonard Sipes: A process evaluation.

John Roman: A process evaluation yes, but more than that an implementation science is what we call it, right? What we’re learning is, we’re learning whether government cam come together and get the data together to do this big system reform. We’re learning whether this kind of program helps young people involved in the criminal system, and we’re learning how to put these things in place in a way that will inform the next time we try and replicate this in another place in another time.

Leonard Sipes: Any answers to any of those questions?

John Roman: We don’t have them yet, but what we think is really important in all of this process is the process itself is a reform. What we want to do is we want to go to a juvenile and adult criminal justice systems and we want to say to them, “Who are the drivers of your cost and populations? Who are the people you serve over and over again?”

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: “Why have you failed with this population?”

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: Getting people to admit that they’ve failed is really, really hard. Why is it that the same people keep coming in over and over, because that is evidence of failure. “Is there evidence out there about a program that you could be implementing that would help these people be more successful with their lives and save your tax payers resources and is a Social Impact Bond the way to finance that?”

Leonard Sipes: Now is a Social Impact Bond part of that Massachusetts initiative, I heard Department of Labor, who else?

John Roman: It is funded, it’s third sector is the intermediary there is private financing that’s associated with it. All of the dollars that are paying for this up front come from somebody’s pocket other than the Massachusetts state government. The federal government is paying for some of the implementation pieces and the evaluation pieces and the data integration and [crosstalk 00:14:52]

Leonard Sipes: So the private sector is putting up money?

John Roman: The private sector is putting up another 15 million dollars so it’s about a 30 million dollar transaction.

Leonard Sipes: That’s a huge investment.

John Roman: It’s a huge investment and so what we’re doing here is we’re thinking about investing in chronically disadvantaged populations on a completely different scale then we’ve thought about it at all. If you think about the Second Chance Act that was a hundred million dollars across all 50 states. That’s 2 million dollars a state. Here we’re talking about 30 million for one state.

Leonard Sipes: I want to talk about how expensive these programs are and I’m not quite sure the average person realizes when in terms of what we do at the court services and the defendant supervision agency for high risk people is to put them in a 28 day residential program then put them into a 90 day residential treatment program them put them in an after care program. All that carries an enormous expense, but ladies and gentlemen, back at our microphones John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. Talking about Social Impact Bonds.

John, this is exciting, so what you’re saying is we can sell hard-nosed, demanding individuals who only invest their money if they see the potential for return on their dollars and there’s enough evidence out there or they’re willing to do social change or intervention programs on a very large scale.

John Roman: Right, so let me give you one example and I can give you others if you want to hear them. There is a new drug therapy that actually cures Hepatitis C. That’s important for our discussion here because something like two thirds of people with Hepatitis C in America contact the criminal justice system at some point right? You get Hepatitis C because of prostitution or intravenous drug use or something like that.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: We actually have this medical therapy that is a 3 month course of pills basically, that you take that at the end of the 3 months you no longer have Hepatitis C. The only other cure for Hepatitis C is a liver transplant which is like a million bucks.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: The course of treatment is about $85,000 over 3 months right? We’re talking something like-

Leonard Sipes: For 1 person?

John Roman: For 1 person.

Leonard Sipes: Oh my God.

John Roman: We’re talking about 7% of the criminal justice population has Hepatitis C.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: Almost a hundred thousand dollars per person.

Leonard Sipes: Got it.

John Roman: When you talk about needing resources on that scale there is no solution, right?

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: This is the solution, you could come along and you could go to Goldman, or JP Morgan-Chase, or Bank of America, or Deutsche Bank, or whoever, these folks have all expressed interest in this concept and say to them, “Look, we will as the government have this enormous financial benefit for having treated these people for this condition, because we won’t have to treat them. We won’t have prisoners that need liver transplants that we have to pay for so we’ll bay you back for a profit.”

Leonard Sipes: Is this actually happening?

John Roman: This one is on the books but we’re talking about these things around, another big one is asthma. Very similar idea.

Leonard Sipes: All right the medical part of it I understand, the criminal justice system often times to me strikes me as being a hard sell, which is one of the reasons why the data that I’ve seen in the past is that fewer than 10% of all people in prison have access to substance abuse treatment.

John Roman: Right.

Leonard Sipes: Even the substance abuse treatment that’s there is not very good and the numbers are tiny, so if 80% have histories of substance abuse, 10% are getting it. You say to yourself, “Is it that government doesn’t care?” What you’re talking about is revolutionary. What you’re talking about is not Social Impact Bonds, what you’re talking about is a process, a sea change, a different way of conducting criminal justice, a different way of conduction public health, it’s not government that’s driving the boat anymore it’s industry. It’s investments, it’s people who are very demanding, very specific, very evidence based. There are the people that possibly could bring upon significant change within public health and the criminal justice system crawls to the board. What you’re talking about is monumental.

John Roman: Yeah, I mean I think we’re talking-

Leonard Sipes: Am I exaggerating or not?

John Roman: NO I think it’s a totally different way of thinking about the world and we’ve talked about it in Ottawa, to the Canadian government, in Israel, in London, all over the world and people see the opportunity here. The idea here is really simple, we want to turn the problem upside down. The problem has been, how do we get resources to help people with a particular problem. What we want to say instead is, “Hold on, we have evidence on how to solve some particular problems, how so we get resources to those things instead of the things that we are funding as business as usual now?” In some respects what we want to say is really simple. Some things that we do don’t really work, right? I mean we’ve talked about, you and I have talked about-

Leonard Sipes: What don’t work very well.

John Roman: What don’t work like DARE, right, every schools got a Dare, a police officer comes in.

Leonard Sipes: People love it.

John Roman: People love it, or scared strait, there’s absolutely no evidence that changes anybody’s behavior and in someways it might cause worse behavior. When the DARE guy cones in and shows your kid his suitcase full of drugs, some of these kids are going to be like, “Oh, so that’s what cocaine looks like. Cool, that’s not what I thought.” That’s not good for them.

Leonard Sipes: The weird thing about government is because we do all sorts of things that make people feel good but really don’t have an evidence base behind it.

John Roman: Right, what we want to do here is say “look, I could give you a laundry list of things that I have in evidence, that I believe have an evidence base that is overwhelming, that we should do at scale. That everybody that needs this help should get it right?

Leonard Sipes: Yeah, of course.

John Roman: We’re talking about in our world we’re talking about high-risk adolescents, we’re talking about family based therapies, we’re talking about multi-systemic therapy. We’re talking about programs with evidence bases that are so compelling that the most sophisticated researchers in the world, the most skeptical researchers in the world are saying, “$15 in benefit for every dollar in cost, only they’re really expensive how do we raise the money to get those benefits?” This is the answer.

Leonard Sipes: It’s not just the answer, it’s not just the matter of money, from dealing with business people in the past, and dealing with government throughout my entire career, the business people have an entirely different mind set. Very polite, very nice, but very demanding.

John Roman: Yes.

Leonard Sipes: Very precise, they are … especially I worked with marketers, in the past, and marketing in the private sector is a different world. It’s very precise it’s like driving a jet plane. It’ like driving a 747 it’s a very precise set of rules and understanding and operations. If you don’t follow these precise, rules, procedures, and understandings they ground you. It’s do not pass go, do not collect $200. Government is far mushier then the private sector so if you’re telling me that the private sector is convinced of evidence based procedures and they’re going to start coming in and they’re going to start funding this it’s a seed change in terms of what we’re talking about not just for the criminal justice system, but for the delivery of services to undeserved populations across the board.

John Roman: I think what’s really been interesting in this is that when we approach this, and we started thinking about this in 2009. The Rikers deal happened shortly after that, the first deal in the United Kingdom happened at about that time, and every year it grows more and more quickly. When we first thought about this we knew there were 3 players in this equation, there was the government, there was private philanthropy, people who give grants, give away their money, and commercial investment bankers. We assumed the government would love this idea because what it says to the government, “Here’s some money to do something you can’t do, and you only have to pay us back if it works.”

Leonard Sipes: The government loses control.

John Roman: You’re getting ahead of me but that’s where I’m headed. Philanthropy, we thought this would be very interesting to them because they, this allows them to leverage their giving and give the same dollar over and over again. We thought investment bankers would be the hardest sell. We thought these people would be very hard headed and they wouldn’t be interested in the rates of return that they were getting. The actual operational practical realities, the absolute reverse. The investment bankers are extremely interested in this idea, in fact there are hundreds of million of dollars if not a billion dollars or more on the sidelines looking for deals to invest in. They cannot find the deals.

The philanthropists have been a little scratching their heads at this whole concept and haven’t weighed it in as deeply as we had expected. The governments, probably for the reason that you just raised, which is when they get engaged in these deals they lose control. Have really had people come to them and say, “I will give you a hundred million dollars and I can solve this problem for your entire population in your state. Would you like me to do it? You only have to pay me back if it works.” and they said, “No thank you.”

Leonard Sipes: You’re not … I’m not the first person to suggest to you as a lifelong researcher that government doesn’t trust [inaudible 00:24:17] Government likes to do what government wants to do. We do that from a very common sense perspective, because we believe that the delivery of this particular service is going to work, We’re not interested in somebody coming along and measuring it and telling us whether it does or it does not. We believe that it works thereby, do not pass go, do not collect $200. We’re comfortable with that and that’s how we proceed. You’re talking about a different world, you’re talking about a different mindset, you’re talking about a “prove it to me and prove it to me consistently and we’re going to hold you to these markers. Have you met these markers, at the eighth point, at the quarter point, and if you didn’t why not?” It puts government under a spotlight and we’re not happy about that.

John Roman: What I think what’s really important what’s happened and we started out by talking about the Rikers deal and the Rikers deal ended up not going all the way to the end because it wasn’t meeting the performance measures that had been agreed upon at the outset by Goldman-Saks and Bloomberg Foundation who were the one’s who underwrote it. Who basically insured the deal. What Mayor Mike Bloomberg did and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs did in New York City was really brave and really critical. Because what they said was, “No, were going to take the biggest, I think it’s the biggest city government in the United States, and we’re going to get behind this concept and we’re going to test it. We know there’s a chance it’s going to work, but that will provide a precedent for other cities and other counties and other states to think about investing in this.” and that propelled this field forward.

Now you have Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams is really pushing this and Corporation for National Community Service is 11 million dollars behind this and Department of Labor and Department of Justice. It’s probably a hundred million dollar industry and none of that would have happened without some government having the courage to step forward knowing it might fail, and that happened and that sparked everything that has gone through.

Leonard Sipes: We’re not talking about Social Impact Bonds, I said this before and I’m probably being repetitive to the point of fault, but we’re not talking about Social Impact Bonds, we’re not talking about delivery of services. We’re talking about fundamentally changing the way that government operates through a public/private partnership.

John Roman: I think the metaphor that I always tell and I think it works, is we’re sitting in the heart of Washington DC, there’s a big commercial corridor right around the corner, 7th and 8th street, there’s a big stadium there. There’s tons of bars and restaurants and at some point tonight I can just about guarantee you that a metropolitan police department officer is going to engage with somebody who is in crisis. They might be drunk, they might be having a mental health problem, they might have a substance abuse problem. They might just be unhappy with their station in life.

Leonard Sipes: Yes.

John Roman: That police officer is going to have to serve as a social worker to try and guide that person to engage in better behavior so they don’t end up in the DC jail that night.

Leonard Sipes: Sure, of course.

John Roman: They shouldn’t be in that position, we should have the community infrastructure to help serve that person. If it’s mental health care, if it’s drug abuse treatment, if it’s alcohol, whatever it is that that person needs, we don’t have the infrastructure to do it. What this does to create a way to fund that infrastructure in ways that just simply aren’t going to happen if we don’t go down this road. The idea isn’t to privatize policing, the idea is to let that officer go back to being a police officer.

Leonard Sipes: Right.

John Roman: Which is what they are trained to do and they know how to do and they’re good at. We’ve sort of forced all these people throughout our government to take on jobs that they aren’t trained for and we’ve over the last couple of years we’ve seen the results of that. A lot of it’s been not very pretty.

Leonard Sipes: Final minute of the program. What percentage who aren’t getting substance abuse treatment to day are going to get substance abuse treatment? What percentage of people who desperately need mental health treatment are going to be getting mental health treatment? What percentage can we say the people who are undeserved, who are not getting services now will get services say in 10 years through a private/public partnership.

John Roman: If you think about the family based therapies that I talked about, which are ways to treat high-risk young people in their homes with mom, with grandma, with their cousins, with their siblings, with their friends.

Leonard Sipes: Which is the most effective program I’ve seen out there.

John Roman: It’s the most effective program that’s out there and it probably serves less then 10% of all the people it could.

Leonard Sipes: Yes.

John Roman: We could get to 70% by using this a s a way to raise funding, to package together all of these things. The idea is called “Scale finance” Steve Goldberg, Caffeinated Capital, is pushing this idea. It’s a wonderful thing. We could get a long ways to getting to 100%.

Leonard Sipes: What are the odds of really doing that?

John Roman: I think we can do 1 state in the next 2 years.

Leonard Sipes: That’s amazing, that’s amazing. The most effective program that I’m aware of, that does provide fundamental change and has a long term impact on criminality and use of the criminal justice system. We could fund 75% in terms of one state.

John Roman: I think within the next few years, some state will sign on to this and we’ll be able to take this to every young person that needs it.

Leonard Sipes: We proposed to have a program today, a program on Social Impact Bonds. It’s turned out to be much more than that and I hope everybody stuck with us through the program to the final conclusion. John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. He has 3 articles talking about the situation in Rikers Island and I’ll put all 3 in the show notes. Ladies and gentleman this is DC Public Safety, we appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms and we want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasant day.

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Offender Employment

April 7, 2016 by

DC Public Safety Radio

See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov

See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/03/improving-offender-employment-through-employer-focused-programming-national-institute-of-corrections/

Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, a special show for you today on offender employment with two really knowledgeable individuals. John Rakis, he is consultant to the National Institute of Corrections, he is a workforce development specialist. Also at our microphones, back at our microphones, Francina Carter, she is a correctional program specialist for the National Institute of Corrections. She’s also the program manager of Offender Workforce Development.

To John and to Francina, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Francina: Thank you.

John: Thank you.

Leonard: John, let me start with you. What is workforce development? What is workforce development within the context of employing people within the criminal justice system?

John: It’s not charity work. Workforce development in the context of the criminal justice system is about serving the needs of both, to two customers really, of the person who’s involved in the criminal justice system, the offender, and the employer. Right now, we’re shifting our focus, I think, to look at what the employer needs. We need to be examining and understanding what the employer needs are and addressing what those needs are. We’ve been very unsuccessful in the past, I think, by just pushing people out into the system without doing that.

Leonard: The whole idea is to prepare people that come out of the prison system or are on probation to give them the best preparation possible to find a job because a job is indicative of success while under supervision, correct?

John: That’s a part of it. We want to prepare people but we want to prepare people to meet the needs of the employers. We need to be focusing on what their needs are and understanding what their needs are. All too often I think we push people out and either they’re not ready for employment but even if they are ready they’re not meeting the employer’s needs, what the employer wants. That’s where the new focus is right now.

Leonard: Okay. Francina, you put together through the National Institute of Corrections a wonderful set of documents that address the employer’s need, address the offender’s needs, address the needs of everybody involved in the process, correct?

Francina: Yes.

Leonard: Okay. Tell me about those. Those are very clear-cut, very easy-to-read documents about all of the different steps that people need to take, anywhere from getting the offender prepared to go out into the work world, working in partnership with other organizations. They’re very comprehensive. Tell me about these documents.

Francina: Okay, Leonard. We really looked at developing a model. It’s a very simple four-part model. At the base of that model is using labor market information. I think too often we are preparing offenders for jobs that aren’t available in their communities. We really have to take a look at what is the labor market information telling us? What are the forecasts? What are the emerging occupations? If we’re going to be spending dollars, much needed training dollars, we need to make sure that there are viable options for employment for people who take advantage of those training programs. Everything we do, we need that base of the labor market information.

John: There are too many training programs out there where there’s a saying, “We train and pray. We train them and then we pray that we can place them.” We need to change that. That’s where labor market information is really important. There are two ways that a practitioner in the field can obtain labor market information. Much of it is on the internet. The US Department of Labor has just a wealth of information by community, by zip code, by state, any way you want to look at it. They can tell you where the growth is going to be, not only for this year but for five years down the road. That’s one of the most valuable resources that practitioners have today.

It is also important to develop relationships with labor market information specialists. Virtually every state has a labor market information specialist. Most of the one-stops that exist in our communities have people who are experts in labor market information. We urge practitioners to go out there and get on the phone, look on the internet, but meet and talk to those people. Find out in your community where the growth is going to be. Very frequently, these labor market information specialists who are based locally, they know which companies are coming into town to start a new business. They’re the ones that have the heads-up on that information. Knowing these labor market information specialists not only will help you with the long-term forecasts but it helps practitioners know what’s happening today and what’s going to be happening in the next couple of months.

Leonard: You can find the tool kits that I mentioned on the website of the National Institute of Corrections, www.nicic.gov, www.nicic.gov. One is when an employer-driven model and tool kit suggestions for employment opportunities, strategies for developing employment opportunities. It just goes on and on with the various components of the criminal justice system, preparing job-seekers for employment. The whole idea is what’s the key, what’s the secret sauce in all of this to successfully employing people who are under criminal justice supervision.

Francina: Okay. Let’s go back to the model. We mentioned labor market information as being the undergirding of this model. In the middle is the target, employment. Three components of that model are: addressing the employer needs, preparing the job-seekers, and engaging partners. All three of those are equally important.

John has already mentioned that we really need to keep the employer’s needs in focus. We look at the labor market information. We see the emerging occupations. We see where the need for employees will be. We know we need to partner with these businesses to find out what their training needs are, to make sure that the training that we’re providing for the offenders is training that is industry-recognized, industry-standard training because we know that the employers are looking at their bottom line. They need people who are going to help them to deliver the services or the products that they are producing to make their businesses grow.

When we look at the job-seekers, we need to do some assessments. We need to see what their interests are, what their skills are, and put them into appropriate training programs where they will not only be able to get entry-level jobs but they will be able to pursue additional training, additional experience so that they can advance in those jobs and that promotes job retention. We know it’s really job retention that’s going to keep people out of the prison system. It’s the job retention that’s the protective factor against recidivism.

Leonard: I do want to remind everybody that on our own website here at Court Services of Offender Supervision Agency on the front page of that website, www.csosa.gov, www.csosa.gov, we do have a section called “Hiring Offenders”, hiring people under supervision where we have radio and television shows where we’ve interviewed both individuals caught up in the criminal justice system as well as employers and asked them about their experience in terms of the employment process when people are out under supervision.

This is a multi-stage process. That’s the most important thing in all of this. John, it’s just not a matter, as you said, to train them and pray but it’s a matter of systematically gaining information about the labor market systematically, preparing individuals for employment systematically, working with partnerships and working with potential employers. It’s a multi-stage process to do this correctly, correct?

John: Exactly. Assessment is so important. It’s not just a quick assessment. All too often I think people are in a hurry to get things done and they don’t do a thorough assessment. One has to look at risks and needs. What are the strengths that a person has? What are the barriers that they face? As Francina mentioned, what are their interests? What are their values? You don’t want to place a person in a job where they have no interest in doing the work for the long-term. You want to give them a career ladder so you want to match them to a job that meets their interests and their values. You want to determine how well they can work as a team. How flexible are they? How adaptable are they? Do they have the ability to accept criticism? These are all things that need to go into an assessment before you even think about sending somebody out to meet with an employer.

Do the assessment, deal with every barrier that exists. I frequently tell people that it’s the barrier that you don’t address, the one that you miss, the one that you just “We’ll deal with it later”, that’s the one that’s going to cause someone to either not get a job or to lose a job in a few months. It’s so important to identify all of those barriers, address the barriers, get that person ready, identify what their interests are, and then begin to make the match.

Leonard: I’m sorry, go ahead.

John: I think the same thing holds true when one meets with employers. I’ll let you ask your question. I know you want to follow up.

Leonard: I was talking to our employment people before the radio program. They were telling me that we have comprehensive services here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in terms of both education and in terms of employment. It’s a multi-stage, very comprehensive process. Our shtick, if you will, our main approach to communicating this message is that we have people who are job-ready now. We don’t have risks to public safety. We have people who are job-ready now who need to find work. We’re encouraging employers to work with us.

They also said in many cases you have to stabilize them first before they get involved in these services. If there are mental health or substance abuse issues or other issues, anger management, you have to go through the process of fixing those issues first before getting them involved in the job preparation part of it or the education part of it. Are they right or wrong?

John: No, they’re 100% right. People have to be ready for work although the first message that I would give employers is not that we have people that are ready to work for you. The first thing that you want to actually do is listen to the employer. Find out what their needs are. All too often I think what happens is that we get people ready for work and they are ready for work, they are job-ready. Then we run out and we tell employers we have job-ready people for you. That’s not the right approach.

The right approach is listen to what the employer has to say. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine if you walked into a car dealership and you were going to buy a sedan. A car salesman ran up to you and said, “Do I have a van for you. It’s a great van. It’s the best-selling van that we have. You’ve got to buy it.” You’d walk right out of the store because you’re not there to buy a van. You’re there to buy a sedan. He didn’t ask you what you wanted.

It’s the same thing with employers. One has to asses what their needs are, know the business really well before you make that referral. That’s where I think this tool kit … There’s a lot of emphasis in the tool kit on that, listening to what the employer has to say, understanding that employer when you go out and meet with an employer for the first time. You only have one chance to make a good first impression. You have to listen first, not sell. What are your needs? What are your hiring challenges at this point? Find out what those are and then you can start making matches.

Leonard: The question that I [crosstalk 00:11:50]. The question, either one of you, is because of the comprehensive nature of the documents that I have made reference to from the National Institute of Corrections, the multi-stage process, are probation agencies throughout the country prepared for that systematic approach to finding employment for people on supervision? Do they have the resources? We have them here at Court Services but we’re a federally funded agency. We have more resources than most. Is this level of complexity … Do most probation agencies, do they have the resources and the personnel to give this level of complexity justice?

Francina: You know Len, the most important thing is people need to look at partnerships. None of us can do all of this work by ourselves. I think most agencies look within themselves to see what their capacity is and how they can do this work. That’s certainly a good place to start but then they need to look at other agencies within their community, not just government agencies but also community-based agencies, your nonprofits and your faith-based organizations. There should be an engagement of partners in this work. Partner with the workforce investment board in your area. Partner with the Chamber of Commerce. Partner with nonprofits that do much of this work. Partner with other criminal justice agencies, even educational institutions. Look at who’s offering apprenticeships and if they have apprenticeships, who offers the education component of those apprenticeships. Each agency does not have to do all of this alone. As a matter of fact, some of the best programs are those that have these multi-agency partnerships as well as a public/private partnership, so public agencies as well as private and nonprofit agencies.

Leonard: John, I’m assuming that you would agree that this is not just a job for parole and probation, it’s just not a job for community corrections, it’s a job for the entire community and it has to be approached through a partnership basis.

John: It is. One of the things that I always recommend that agencies do is map their stakeholders. Who would be interested in this? That would include employers. It would include the Chamber of Commerce. It would include the workforce investment board. Map out your stakeholders, everyone that would be concerned or interested in this work, and then reach out to them. Then develop partnerships along those lines.

Leonard: We’re just about halfway through the program. I want to reintroduce our guests. John Rakis, he is a consultant with the National Institute of Corrections. He is a workforce development specialist. We also have in our studios Francina Carter. She is a correctional program specialist and a program manager. She is program manager for the Offender Workforce Development Program of the National Institute of Corrections, www.nicic.gov., www.nicic.gov, for these amazingly good documents in terms of laying out this whole process.

Going back to either one of you, the real skill here from what I’m hearing from both of you, the real skill in all of this is having somebody in parole and probation who has those organizational skills, who has those public outreach skills, the public relations skills to pull together a rather large coalition and bring them all together and say, “We have a common problem. I can’t do this. We can’t do this on our own. Catholic charities and the local construction company and the workforce development people and everybody else involved in the process, you need to help me. We need to sit down and figure out together how we’re going to do the very best job possible to get people under supervision employed.” That’s a real skill on the part of somebody in parole and probation, is it not?

Francina: It is. It can often start as a steering committee, putting together a steering committee. John talked about mapping stakeholders, inviting those people to the table. It may just start with something pretty informal like a breakfast or a luncheon, kind of a brown-bag luncheon to talk about what the issues are, how they need to be addressed, and who needs to be at the table. A lot of jurisdictions have such steering committees and they meet on a regular basis.

Another way to start is with training. Have an opportunity for a half-day training where you bring people into the room. Oftentimes they have these same needs and they are struggling with some of these same issues. Having a training program where you really look at what are the skills needed, the competencies needed by the service providers to be able to do this work. NIC offers training programs such as re-entry employment specialists and bringing folks together in the room to share some of these common issues but also some of the common solutions to the issues. There are some ways to get some folks up to speed on how to do this in a community.

Leonard: One of the things that we’ve done here at Court Services is to get the employers themselves to sit here before these very microphones and to go into television studios and to explain the process, why they’ve hired people under supervision and the fact that it’s worked for them, to hear it directly from them. That testimony needs to come from the employers as well as the people in community corrections, right?

Francina: Absolutely.

John: One of the things that we recommend is that any program that serves the employment needs of justice-involved individuals should have an employer advisory committee. That committee should meet on a regular basis and then it should be taken … Get employers involved in that way. Many will contribute. They will let you know if you’re doing the right thing or if you’re doing something that doesn’t work for them.

Once you’ve engaged them in that activity, over time engage them as champions for your work. Get them to join you on radio shows like we’re doing today and to speak to the public about their involvement with the program and what they’re doing to make it work and how well it’s worked for them. Videotape them, if you can, and put them on your agency’s webpage, talking about their involvement with the program. Employers like to see other employers talk about how things work.

Have a page. I believe every probation agency should have a page. Every program that works with justice-involved individuals in terms of meeting their employment needs, should have a webpage dedicated to employers which sells the benefits to employers that your program has to offer. That’s where a testimonial would work really well. Use a brief video. It’s not difficult to do. Upload it to YouTube and link it to the website, the employer talking about his experience with the program.

Leonard: Having a really strong social media component to this campaign would really help.

John: Not only will it help, I think it’s mandatory at this point in time. As more and more companies get involved with social media, more and more people are getting involved with social media, it’s the way to go. It’s inexpensive. You can reach a number of different people really very, very quickly.

Most recruiters nowadays, 90% of all recruiters are using LinkedIn to identify candidates for jobs. If you’re working to get somebody a long-term career opportunity, they need to have a LinkedIn profile, perhaps not for an entry-level job but for the future, for the jobs that really pay well, pay a sustainable wage, a client must have a LinkedIn profile if he or she is going to be found by a recruiter.

A page that’s dedicated to employers, we want to get the message to employers that we have a service to provide. We have benefits to provide. Here are the candidates that we have. One of the ways you advertise that, one of the ways you market that is through the web and having a page that employers can find. I’m urging programs, if you have literature, brochures describing the services that you have to offer to employers, use QR codes. You know what QR codes are, those little square boxes that you hold your smartphone to and then it automatically connects you to the webpage. I think every brochure that’s out there marketing programs like this to employers needs to have a QR code. The QR code should take them immediately to the webpage which describes the benefits that companies, probation, parole agencies have to offer. This way, they can quickly find out what services are available, what benefits are available, and how they can connect.

Leonard: Go ahead, please.

John: We basically just have to … Time is money for employers. We really need to, if we’re going to reach out to them, we have to be efficient in the way that we do it. If we’re going to give them information, they have to obtain it as quickly as possible.

Leonard: I’ve always been under the impression or the belief that what we should also do is to put up videos of the individual offenders themselves. I think they would be in the best position to describe their own skills and their own attributes. I’ve done a lot of interviews, again both on television and radio. We have stigmas. We have stereotypes of people who are under criminal justice supervision. Those stereotypes seem to melt and seem to disappear when somebody sees the individual in a coat and tie talking about the fact that he does have a good work history and talking about his skills, talking about who he is and what he is. I think that’s something that we in the criminal justice system should be doing, not only employers but the individual people under supervision themselves.

Francina: Absolutely. I think we need to show our success stories. We need to see people who have been the product, the beneficiaries of some of these training programs who have successfully entered the world of work, who are retaining employment, who are advancing on their jobs. Seeing those success stories, I think it speaks volumes. I think, like you said, it dispels some of the myths, some of the stereotypes about people who have a criminal record. They can serve as role models for other individuals who are just starting their path and just starting to get into the world of work. It’s almost, “If I see you … If you can do it, I can do it.” I think it’s very important to highlight our participants who have been successful.

Leonard: I’ve also talked, once again, to the people who are job developers here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. They tell me that the bias against people caught up in the criminal justice system is strong. The fact that they’ve had very employable individuals, people who there’s no reason, absolutely no reason for that person not to be employed. The person hasn’t had a drug-positive in a long time. The person hasn’t had any problems under supervision. The person has real skills from the past. We’ve even had people with college degrees under our supervision and yet the barrier to employment in terms of the stereotype of people who are caught up in the criminal justice system, they say it’s one of the most difficult things that they have to deal with. Either one of you want to comment on that?

John: It’s a challenge. It always will be a challenge. It has been a challenge. It’s improving, I think. What’s important is developing those relationships with employers. It takes time, understanding what their needs are, meeting their needs. Over time, you will build trust. That’s what it takes to work in this field. Nothing happens overnight. As I said, you approach the employer, you make a good impression the first time by listening to what they have to say, hearing what their needs are, meeting those needs. Over time, then people trust you. When people trust you, they’ll accept referrals. It’s all about trust but trust takes time to build. There’s no shortcuts to this.

Leonard: Go ahead, John.

John: You can prepare people well, obviously identifying all the barriers, doing the proper assessment, making sure that they’re ready for employment. One of the things that I always like to recommend, encourage the person coming out of prison to do some volunteer work, put that on their resume. Even if it’s only for a few hours a week, it’s something that shows the employer that they’re keeping busy while they’re searching for employment and that they’re contributing back to society. They’re doing something that’s positive. It always reflects well. It doesn’t matter who that person is. That goes for people that even aren’t ex-offenders that are looking for work above the age of fifty-five. Put something on your resume that shows that you’ve been active and that you’re contributing to your community. That will reflect well and that increases the odds that you will be called in for an interview.

Leonard: In terms of developing the relationship with the employers, again, I talked to our six workforce development people, our job developers, within Washington DC it’s almost impossible to reach out to every employer in Washington DC. In some cases, you may find “X” company is receptive in terms of that company’s executive but the branch offices may not be. Forming that bond, forming that relationship with all employers when you’ve got six people is almost impossible. Are we not talking about something larger in terms of engaging them, John? We were talking a little while ago about social media, talking about doing this systematically, it’s really hard to one-by-one-by-one to every employer within the metropolitan area to reach out to them personally.

Francina: I think a couple-

John: You could do things like, for example in St. Louis, the federal probation office developed a public service announcement video that was aired on TV. It actually featured the mayor of St. Louis and four probationers, federal probationers, who spoke to the camera about their success. That was Mayor Francis Slay. I believe the video is still out there on the internet, a simple thing that had ramifications city-wide.

Leonard: That’s a great idea. Francina?

Francina: A couple of things come to mind. One is the Ban the Box Initiative that is really taking hold in a lot of jurisdictions. What Ban the Box means is that a lot of cities and some jurisdictions are taking off that question about have you ever been convicted of a felony from the application. It doesn’t mean that the question can’t be asked later. All offenders should be rehearsed and prepared to be able to respond very directly to that question. At the same time, it moves it further along in the process, in the hiring process, so they get their foot in the door. They get to show who they are. They get to talk about their skills and their abilities and what they bring to the table.

The other important thing, I think, is a good job match, to make sure that the kinds of employment opportunities that are out there fit not just the individual’s interests and skills but also the criminal record so that there’s nothing that would prohibit them through any kind of statutory requirements or licensure requirements that would prohibit them from seeking that kind of employment, making sure that there’s a good job match in the kind of work that the candidates are going for.

Leonard: Final minutes of the program. Go ahead.

Francina: Those are just a couple of things that help a little bit to reduce that barrier. We talked about the success stories, even employers and their testimonials, breakfast, an awards breakfast for employers who have been successful in hiring and retaining individuals who have criminal record and telling their stories. All of these are ways that we start to mitigate that big barrier of having a criminal record.

Leonard: Okay. We also have tax credits and the bonding program, correct?

Francina: Absolutely.

Leonard: There are direct incentives for employers. Okay, final minute of the program. Bottom line behind all of this is that this is not an academic discussion, this is a public safety issue. This is a matter of putting people who are caught up in the criminal justice system into jobs, becoming taxpayers, not tax burdens, supporting their kids. Much rests upon this, correct?

Francina: Absolutely. We know that employment actually stabilizes people. If a person is in the community and he has employment or she has employment, they’re able to take care of their families. They’re able to pay their fines. They’re able to pay their taxes. They’re able to find housing. For any of us, employment really is a stabilizing factor in our lives so we are talking about public safety when we’re talking about employment.

Leonard: Our research shows that they do much better under supervision if they are employed. John, do you have any final wrap-up words, thirty seconds worth?

John: It’s not only the offenders that are being assisted but it’s their families. Many, as you know, a high percentage of the people coming out of prison that are on probation and parole have family members. If we can help them get back to work, their families will do better as well.

Leonard: It’s a fascinating conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, by our microphones today, via Skype, John Rakis. He is a consultant through the National Institute of Corrections. He’s a workforce development expert. Also, we had Francina Carter, correctional program specialist, program manager of the Offender Workforce Development. The documents that we mentioned today are available at www.nicic.gov, www.nicic.gov. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms. We want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasant day.

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Veteran Treatment Courts

March 21, 2016 by

DC Public Safety Radio

See the main page at http://media.csosa.gov

See the radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/11/the-growth-of-veterans-treatment-courts/

Leonard Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, veterans treatment court is the topic for today. We have three extraordinary guests before our microphones. Aaron Arnold is the Director of Treatment Court programs at the Center for Court Innovation. Aaron oversees the Center’s national training and technical assistance for drug courts. Greg Crawford is a Correctional Program Specialist at the Community Services Division at the National Institute of Corrections. Greg’s experience prior to the National Institute of Corrections includes over fourteen years as a probation department person and a community based mental health agency expert. We have Ruby Qazilbash. Did I get that right or did I screw that up? Qazilbash.

Ruby Qazilbash: Qazilbash. Good enough.

Leonard Sipes: Ruby is the Associate Deputy Director for Justice Systems Policy at the Bureau of Justice Assistance within the US Department of Justice. She leads a team of policy staff in program and policy development aimed at improving safe local and tribal justice systems. To all three of you, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Greg Crawford: Thanks, Len.

Leonard Sipes: Veterans treatment court, it is exploding. It is growing like wildfire throughout the United States, so Greg, give me an overview of what veteran’s treatment court is.

Greg Crawford: Basically what a veterans treatment court is, is a hybrid integration of drug court and mental health court that serves military veterans, and sometimes active duty personnel. The first veterans court was implemented in 2008 up in Buffalo, New York by Judge Robert Russell, and since then, there’s been over three hundred implemented across this country.

Leonard Sipes: That’s an amazing amount of growth. Aaron, to my knowledge, I can’t think of another criminal justice program that has grown as much or as fast as veterans treatment courts.

Aaron Arnold: I’d have to agree with you. I mean drug courts have been around longer, and there are more of them, but they didn’t grow quite as fast as we’re seeing veterans treatment courts grow today.

Leonard Sipes: Ruby, the role of the Bureau of Justice Assistance within the US Department of Justice, you are the Associate Deputy Director for Justice Systems Policy. Obviously, you’re here to support BJA’s involvement in veterans treatment courts, correct?

Ruby Qazilbash: That’s correct. BJ provides training, funding. In fact, we’ve set up almost two hundred veteran treatment court teams around the country, training soup to nuts, making sure that those team members understand what their roles and responsibilities are, that they come out of that training with a policy and procedures manual, and they’re ready to go and open those doors to veterans. We, also, provide federal funding to the drug court programs, solicitation, and veteran treatment courts are eligible to come in for federal funding, federal grants to support the implementation of these courts around the country.

Leonard Sipes: I can’t think of any other program where everybody’s on board. Everybody’s enthusiastic, everybody wants this to occur. The question is why? Why is it growing so fast? Why is everybody on board with this?

Aaron Arnold: I would say because they work, Len. First of all, veterans are not typically criminals prior to their military service, and some veterans have experienced things and done things that most of us can’t imagine, and they come home, and sometimes they struggle. Sometimes they self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, and they, unfortunately, find themselves involved in the criminal justice system, and really what veterans treatment courts do is they’re an opportunity to intervene in the lives of veterans before things escalate for them in the system. What they’re doing, is they’re restoring veterans’ lives. They’re reducing recidivism. They’re enhancing public safety, and saving taxpayer dollars, so it’s checking all the boxes.

Leonard Sipes: Is there an issue with veterans and a crime?

Aaron Arnold: Well, typically, like I said, veterans are not criminals prior to their service, and they’re coming home and they’re really struggling with post traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury, and it’s taking them down a path, and I think that’s why it’s so critical for our system to intervene before they go down a deeper path.

Leonard Sipes: People so far are seemingly bullish about veterans treatment courts, and the question either goes out to Aaron or to Ruby. Most people seem to feel that they do better than the typical drug courts or the typical treatment courts, that veterans, given the chance, have an opportunity to rearrange their lives and straighten their lives out, but they need assistance. First of all, am I right with the perception that veterans treatment courts seem to have greater potential than other specialty treatment courts?

Ruby Qazilbash: There are obviously a proliferation of drug courts around the country. As Aaron said, that movement has been building and growing for the past twenty-five years, but, since then, we’ve, also, seen other specialty or problem solving courts address the special needs of individuals in our communities, including mental health courts, and then, of course, veterans treatment courts. I think that the issue is to find the diversion opportunity. You want to reduce incarceration and get people the help and the services that they need, so they can lead productive lives, crime free, to find the right intervention for them, and the project that we’re talking about today we hope is going to lead us down that road.
Do they see equal or better outcomes as drug courts that we know of? I think more research, for sure, needs to be done, but outcomes are looking good so far.

Leonard Sipes: Everybody seems to be very encouraged about that. Everybody seems to be very encouraged in terms of the outcomes thus far. We’ve had 2.5 million men and women serve in our country since 9/11, and 1.5 million serving overseas. Veterans come home. They struggle with combat related issues. As Greg said a little while ago, PTSD, major depression, homelessness, suicide, and some are ending up with us, within the criminal justice system. This is not just a matter of good criminal justice policy. This has a moral issue attached to it as well, does it not, Greg?

Greg Crawford: I think so. Absolutely. Here’s the deal, like you said, we had 2.5 million serve our country since 9/11, and really it’s a volunteer service. These people are serving our country as volunteers, so the rest of us don’t have to go overseas and fight our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or wherever they are, so absolutely, I think we have an obligation to try to help them.

Leonard Sipes: Where are we going with all of this? The Bureau of Justice Assistance in the US Department of Justice is providing funding for the expansion of drug court. We are talking about evaluating drug court. We are talking about creating specialized instruments for drug court. The National Institute of Corrections is coming out at a certain point with a white paper that describes what best practices in drug court.

Greg Crawford: Yeah. What we want to talk about here today is … The white paper actually served as a platform for all of NIC’s veterans specific initiatives. We’ve, also, done a three hour live satellite broadcast on veterans treatments court, and, also, with that, I contacted Ruby over at BJA about a potential collaboration to develop a risk needs assessment tool that factors in trauma for justice involved veterans. As a former probation officer, back in the day I would get cases, and these veterans coming in from joint base Lewis McChord over in Pierce Country, Washington. They would be ordered to do domestic violence treatment, and nothing on the court order would touch their underlying issues of PTSD and TBI that I think are a major cause of them bleeding into the system, and that’s why we partnered on this project, because we thought there needs to be some science behind what we’re doing in these veterans treatment courts. I don’t want to steal Aaron’s thunder, but I’ll let him talk a little bit about the project.

Leonard Sipes: Go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron Arnold: Thanks, Greg. Greg hit it on the head. We’re trying to put some science behind what veterans treatment courts are doing, and I should just give a little context to say that in the drug court field, for a number of years now, courts have been eager to adopt evidence based risk need assessments, and all that means is to use a standardized set of questions that courts or probation departments will ask to offenders who are coming into the court system to try to identify what are their actual needs that we can help to address to reduce their risk of re-offending, and those tools exist. There are many of them that are being used in the drug court context. They have been proven over and over again in the research to help courts do a better job of getting people the appropriate kinds of supervision and treatment they need, and reduce their long term risk of re-offending.
What has not existed, up till now, is a specialized risk need tool designed specifically for the justice involved veterans population. That’s what this project is intended to create. Here at the Center for Court Innovation … We’re a nonprofit justice reform organization in New York City, and what we’re doing is, with our in house research department, is to create the first evidence based risk need assessment tools for use in veterans treatment courts.

Leonard Sipes: It’s important that whatever risk instrument that we come up with, that it really works with that particular population, whether it be juveniles, whether it be women, whether it be men, whether it be adults, whether it be pre-trial, whether it be supervision, adult supervision, whether it be … It doesn’t matter. The whole idea is to create a risk instrument that is going to be germane to that particular population. What is unique, Aaron, about the veterans and in a risk instrument?

Aaron Arnold: That’s exactly right. We’ve actually spent the last twelve months working, like I said, with our in house researchers, with our partner agencies around the country, like the National Association of Drug Court Professionals and Justice for Vets, other organizations who work in this field, as well as a hand picked committee of experts in the field, who are helping us to identify what are the specific unique factors that veterans bring to the justice system, and how can we reflect those in a new evidence based risk need tool. Some of those we’ve already talked about: the exposure to combat trauma and the resulting post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and other mental health issues that emerge from that, the substance abuse and other behavioral health factors that can emerge after folks return home. Making sure that all of those very specific needs are reflected in the instrument itself, so that courts have the tools they need to make sure that folks are getting the appropriate levels of supervision and treatment.
The tools are essentially done at this point. We’re excited. After a year, we’ve drafted up the tools, and they’re ready to be tested in the field.

Leonard Sipes: Ruby, this is exciting. You represent the Bureau of Justice Assistance from the US Department of Justice, and within the Obama Administration, what they have done through federal agencies and through funding to state, local, tribal agencies, is to expand the concept of alternatives to traditional ways of conducting criminal justice. This is exciting, because it’s moving in a dozen different directions. We are basically reinventing the way that we operate the criminal justice system on a wide variety of platforms. The veterans treatment court is just one of them.

Ruby Qazilbash: Without a doubt. I think we know so much more about what contributes to criminal behavior, and what this project lends itself towards is furthering to narrow that, and to get the right people into the right program at the right time, and I think Aaron hit on it when he said that the intention for this risk and needs assessment is to figure out for the individual that you’re presented with in that courtroom and that day.

With using an assessment tool that’s accurate for that population and for that person’s peers. What is their risk level, so that we can assign supervision accordingly. We don’t want to over supervise. We don’t want to under supervise. We want to get it right. For needs assessment, what kinds of potentially substance abuse treatment might that individual need, what kind of mental health counseling. What should that look like? What should the dosage be, so that we can give people what they need. The point here is to increase their functional outcomes, the way that they behave and act in society in a way that’s beneficial to them and to the rest of us, and to reduce recidivism, thereby enhancing public safety for the community that those folks live in.
Leonard Sipes: The larger question is that it becomes a larger issue. Veterans treatment courts go hand in hand with regular treatment courts, go hand in hand with all sorts of opportunities and endeavors that the federal government, and state governments and local governments are trying to employ nowadays to operate the criminal justice system differently, to intervene in the lives of individuals earlier, to defer them or to keep them out of the mainstream criminal justice system, if at all humanly possible, to provide treatment services in prison, and on post release.
This is part of a larger effort, correct?

Ruby Qazilbash: Without a doubt. It is the move towards risk based decision making, while striking a balance between reducing unnecessary incarceration and maintaining or increasing public safety. That’s the goal.

Leonard Sipes: Because every governor in every state has had a conversation with their state public safety secretaries or their directors of corrections, and basically said look, the correctional budget is now the second largest component of our state budget. We cannot continue to bring in the numbers of people that we have. It’s impossible to sustain this level of funding, so we need alternatives. You can look at that from a cost effectiveness point of view. You have now both sides of the political aisle. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on. They are now supportive, because they want a bigger bang for tax paid dollars. They want more results.
This is all part of a unique and growing and interesting aspect to criminal justice administration. I’ve been in this system for forty-five years, and I have never seen what I’m seeing now in terms of that emphasis on programs, that emphasis on treatment, that emphasis on is there another way of handling this person besides simply throwing them in prison, so the veterans treatment court seems to be a natural outcome of that. It’s the growth that astounds me for veterans treatment courts.

Aaron Arnold: Yeah. You talked about the numbers. Since the early 80s, we’ve seen nearly a four hundred percent increase in the US prison population, and I think the writing was on the wall. I think everybody’s on board that alternatives are critical to turning this thing around for our country. We have basically one in thirty-five adults under some from of correctional supervision, whether it be prison, probation, parole, so something needed to be done. When this first court was implemented in 2008, we immediately started seeing results, and not only is it effective, it’s a humane way to go about treating our veterans.

Leonard Sipes: We’re more than halfway through the program, ladies and gentlemen. We’re doing a show today on veterans treatment courts with the National Institute of Corrections, and with the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and with the Center for Court Innovation. Aaron Arnold is Director of Treatment Programs for the Center for Court Innovation, Greg Crawford, is a Correctional Programs Specialist at the Community Services Division of the National Institute of Corrections; and Ruby Qazilbash … I hope I’m not screwing that name up. Ruby is the Associate Deputy Director for Justice Systems Policy at the Bureau of Justice Assistance within the US Department of Justice.
Where do we see drug treatment courts going. Aaron, I’m going to start off with you. For the next ten years, if we’ve had this explosive growth, and since 2008, we have three hundred veterans treatment courts throughout the country. Where does that take us ten years from now?

Aaron Arnold: I think part of the trend is what we’re discussing here today, is to make science based decisions. There’s tons and tons of research from the last twenty-five years on drug treatment courts, and we can be very confident, at this point, that drug treatment courts, when implemented correctly, reduce the risk of re-offending, keep people in treatment longer, promote recovery, and all of the things that we’re trying to accomplish in the justice system.
There is less research, as Ruby mentioned earlier, that’s focused specifically on veterans treatment courts, so one area that we need to continue to push in the next decade is to bolster the amount of research that’s specifically geared toward veterans treatment courts, verify, as we’ve done in the drug court world, that we’re getting the results that we want to see, and create tools, like we’re creating in this veterans treatment court enhancement initiative, to help these courts make decisions that are rooted in science and help to get the best long term outcomes for the justice involved veteran population.

Leonard Sipes: I would imagine somewhere along the line what we want is for every court system in the United States to have a veterans treatment court component to it, correct? I mean if we’re expanding the reach of the criminal justice system into dozens of different specialty courts … Here in Washington, DC there are probably seven specialty courts dealing with domestic violence, dealing with child custody cases. This is something that we see, I would imagine, expanding to every court system in the United States. I would imagine if there’s any particular group of individuals that people feel some sense of allegiance towards, it would be our veterans.

Aaron Arnold: I think you’re right, and as you mentioned earlier, there seems to be very broad based support for these courts, even more so than some of the other specialized court models, and I think we’ve already established that part of the reason for that is a desire to help veterans who have volunteered, as Greg was saying earlier, and risked their own lives to protect all of us, so there’s definitely plenty of reason that we want to see these courts spread, and, again, part of the reason for creating these specialized risk need tools and other tools to support these courts, is so that we can facilitate their spread in all kinds of state, and county, and local jurisdictions that want to create them.

Greg Crawford: Len, real quick. I just wanted to say that, building off what Aaron just talked about, NIC’s vision for this, and I’m hoping BJA and CCI, I’m pretty confident to say that this is our vision, to have this risk needs assessment tool and protocol be the standard for the field. We’re trying to, as we talked about, develop the science, and we want to make this available to the field, and think Ruby can talk about the funding opportunities that would support this tool.
Leonard Sipes: Ruby.

Ruby Qazilbash: Happy to. Every year, the Bureau of Justice Assistance releases a drug court program solicitation, and courts can come in for funding to implement brand new programs, to enhance existing programs, and that means ramping up your capacity and the types of services that are being provided, to ramp up the number, the percent of the arrestee population for whom this is a good option, has the option to go through a drug court or a veteran treatment court program.
I, also, just wanted to mention that for the past couple of years, the Bureau of Justice Assistance has seen a new appropriation, a line item to the tune of five million dollars that is aimed just for support for veteran treatment courts, so we’re, also, seeing an increase in appropriations to be able to support these courts.

Leonard Sipes: Where are we going with this in terms of growth? Right now, we’re talking about five million dollars from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. You agree with me, that we would like to see this in every jurisdiction in the United States, and an opportunity for every veteran to partake in these sort of programs?

Ruby Qazilbash: I think that is a noble goal. I think we’ve got thirty-three hundred counties around the country. We’ve got pretty close to that in the number of drugs courts, and I think you need to look at your population. If you have a sizable amount of veterans, then it makes sense to develop a track where you can attach these resources, and we should talk about some of the things that make veteran treatment courts different than drug courts.

Leonard Sipes: Please.

Ruby Qazilbash: Greg started out by saying these are hybrid drug and mental health courts. I think that is one potential difference. There are a lot of resources and partnership that come from the Department of Veteran Affairs, and access to benefits, and supports, and services through the VA that are attached to these courts in most jurisdictions. The idea, the mentor is new, and I think is not a part of most drug courts around the country, and I think a theme or a trend, and Aaron or Greg could talk more about this, but the people that choose and self-select to work in veterans treatment courts oftentimes are veterans themselves: judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and others that support the services within that court, so there’s a camaraderie, and there’s a feeling as if we want to support our fellow veterans to heal, to recover, and to stay crime free.

Leonard Sipes: I have a friend of mine, who fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. He’s a veteran, and he’s not being taken care of in terms of his medical needs, and I was assisting him in terms of trying to get him the attention that he was looking for, and I didn’t have to search far. All the veterans’ groups that I contacted and said, “Look, we’ve got a World War II ex-Marine who fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima and survived, and he needs help,” and, boy, that help came rather quickly, so within the veterans community, there is support across the board for fellow veterans, is there not?

Aaron Arnold: Absolutely. What we’re seeing when we go out into the field is, as Ruby mentioned, mentors. There’s not a shortage of mentors out there. Veterans volunteer to help other veterans, and they live by the motto to leave no veteran behind. You go into the courtroom, and a veteran is immediately assigned a mentor, and the mentor will take him in the hallway and they’ll start talking to them. They’re not part of the veterans treatment court team. They’re there to help them through the labyrinth of the criminal justice system.
A veterans treatment team will consist of a judge, a prosecutor, defense, probation, court coordinator, and critical to the success of these programs is the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the community treatment providers. Basically it’s the court system, the VA, and the community treatment providers working together for a common goal, but the mentors are really as, Judge Russell called them, in our live broadcast, the secret sauce. They’re the ones that really make this thing work. They fill in the gaps, get them a mattress, a bus ticket, help them overcome the obstacles, have a cup of coffee and just talk them through it, and that is very unique to these diversionary programs. That doesn’t happen, as Ruby mentioned, in other courts.

Leonard Sipes: No. We have our own mentors here at the court services of the federal supervision agency, but there is not enough of them. That’s the thing that I find really interesting about veterans treatment courts is that there always seems to be that league of veterans, who are willing to help this individual in trouble.

Aaron Arnold: Yeah. I’ve been out to several sites. I’ve been to a couple of national conferences, and without a doubt, everybody I’ve come across is not just collecting a paycheck.

Leonard Sipes: But theses are volunteers. This is what I’m talking about.

Aaron Arnold: I’m talking about both the people working in the courts, and, also, the volunteers. Volunteers are committed to helping other veterans.

Leonard Sipes: This is a mission. This is just not a criminal justice program. This is a mission. These are people who are wildly enthusiastic about veterans treatment courts. This is something that’s growing rapidly. Fastest growing program I’ve seen, and different people that I’ve talked to about this concept, you can have an individual veteran before the bench, and find himself or herself with not just a mentor, but two, three, four, five mentors. That’s exciting, and that’s why I’m predicting that veterans treatment courts is going to continue to grow like wildfire, and continue to show good results, because of that treatment team, because of the volunteers who are willing to help that individual. Aaron.

Aaron Arnold: I agree with you. One of the things that we see at the Center for Court Innovation in the last twenty years, is a little bit of fatigue sometimes with the fact that, as you mentioned earlier, the creation of all these specialized court parts. There are people who wonder why do we need so many specialized court parts, and are we going to have a specialized court part for everything under the sun, but with these veterans courts, whatever you’re feeling on that question, is with these veterans treatment courts, we see that having veterans together with other veterans, supported by mentors, supported by, as Ruby said, staff and judges who themselves oftentimes are mentors and have requested to be part of this team, it creates a special environment that gets better results, and, at the end of the day, I think it’s hard to argue against a system that gets better results and treats people in a more thoughtful, humane manner, and gets them the support that they need.

Leonard Sipes: Judges seem to have a magical place within the criminal justice system. We, within the adult correctional system, can intervene in the lives of individuals all day long, but nothing seems to get the attention of the individual before the bench as a judge does, so a very involved judge seems to be the secret sauce in some ways, as to why specialty courts work. Anybody want to take a shot at that?

Ruby Qazilbash: That bears out in the research. I think some of the strongest research effects are seen in judicial interaction with a participant in that court program. It is the way that they interact, the eye contact that they make, the amount of time that they spend with that individual, remembering personal details about the individual’s life, celebrating successes or milestones that they’ve been able to reach has borne out to be very impactful, and definitely have better outcomes for those folks.

Leonard Sipes: I would guess as well is that the reason why this is growing like wildfire, is that judges themselves seem to have that magic ability to bring the entire criminal justice system together for change in ways that others within the executive branch cannot. Judges have a way of producing these specialty courts or veterans treatment courts. Maybe it’s because of the judges themselves that this is growing as quickly as it is.

Greg Crawford: That’s exactly right. In fact, you said exactly what I was thinking, is that … You were asking earlier about where do we see the growth going. In many cases, it is the motivated judge at the local level, who is a veteran, or has family members who are veterans and has a special place in their heart for this kind of work. They’re oftentimes the ones who are driving the creation of these programs and making them successful, rather than having a statewide administrative decision making process. These are oftentimes locally driven initiatives, because people care about serving their veterans.

Leonard Sipes: Ruby, we’ve got about a minute left.

Ruby Qazilbash: I was just going to add, I think this is an area that we can learn from drug courts. Drug courts began with a leader judge in that community or judicial district, that got a team together and used the power, the authority of the bench to be able to do that. When drug courts became institutionalized in communities, and that started to be a rotational judgeship, or you had people that didn’t self-select into those positions, sometimes you lose some of that secret sauce, and so I think we need to learn from the drug court movement, and make sure that we’re setting up veterans treatment courts in a way that they’re sustainable.

Leonard Sipes: Ruby, you’ve got the final word. I find this to be a fascinating concept, an encouraging concept and I really want to thank Aaron Arnold, the Director of Treatment Programs at the Center of Court Innovation, Greg Crawford at the National Institute of Corrections, and Ruby Qazilbash, the Deputy Director for Justice Systems Policy at the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

 

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Tablets in Corrections

March 18, 2016 by

DC Public Safety Radio

See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov

See the radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2016/03/tablets-and-corrections/

Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s topic is tablets in corrections, a pretty interesting topic, I think so. Chenault Taylor, Director of Public Relationships for Edovo, www.Edovo.com, is by our microphones. Randy Kearse, a re-entry consultant at www.ReentryStrategies.com … Randy has a book and a video. The video is Beyond Prison Probation and Parole. To Chenault and to Randy, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Randy: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Leonard: All right. Guys, give me a sense at to … I’ll start off with you, Chenault, and give me a sense at to what Edovo does, and how you got to meet Randy and incorporate Randy’s materials into what you’re doing.

Chenault: Yeah, absolutely. Edovo is an educational technology company that operates in correctional facilities, and we use tablet technology to bring daily access programming to incarcerated users across the country. We focus on educational programming, meaning academic, vocational, and behavioral therapy programming. We connected with Randy. Actually, Randy reached out to us about bringing his theories and the work he does onto our tablets. I’ll let him speak more in depth as to what he does, but his resources and his time, both in incarceration and [inaudible 00:01:36] work he’s done since, has been enormously interesting to us. Particularly, from a social psychology perspective, it’s always more valuable when you have people who have been in their shoes, people who have been incarcerated, and people who have been successful afterwards, talking to you as an incarcerated individual. That’s how we connect with Randy, and I’ll let him tell you exactly what he does. We’re really excited about it.

Leonard: Randy, go ahead.

Randy: As you know, I’m a prison re-entry consultant, based on my personal experience of being incarcerated. I have a company Prison Re-entry Strategies, and we create media content to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals successfully transition back to society. What we do through books, and film, and interactive media, we create programs that will hopefully help people make that transition back to their communities, their families, and society as a whole. I connected with Edovo because I liked what they were doing, the innovative, bringing tablets into prisons.

Most importantly, I did the research on them, and I liked their model for focusing on the education and vocational, and all of the things that they do to prepare people. I’m sure we’re going to get into the pros and cons of tablets being in the prisons, but I created a film series called Beyond Prison Probation and Parole. It’s a series that focuses on people who have formerly been incarcerated and have transitioned back to society successfully, so it was a good fit. What they did was take what I’ve done, the film series, and created a whole curriculum around that film series, which … It’s an awesome opportunity to help people make that successful transition back to society.

Leonard: Many in corrections see tablets as the holy grail, allowing unfettered contact with family and other pro-social elements, plus use of tablets for educational and vocational purposes. I say that from the standpoint and with a recognition that I’ve been around the re-entry movement now for decades. We’ve all talked about the need for vocational training, for substance abuse training, for mental health issues, for making sure that the offender inside of a prison has constant contact with pro-social elements, his family members, his mom, his dad, other people in the community that could help him. Yet, all of that, that whole package, everything that I just described turns out to be enormously expensive, and most correctional systems don’t have the money to do it.

The sense was that if you could have a person in the country, say, from one location, say, the Department of Justice, say, it’s Randy, and Randy could be doing courses either recorded or live, and deliver that information via tablets, we could open up vocational, educational programs, substance abuse programming, to inmates, millions of inmates, if necessary, throughout the United States. That’s the hope, that’s the dream, that’s the promise. I’m going to start with you, Chenault. How far are we away from that, in terms of technology?

Chenault: Even in the few years that we’ve been operating, we’ve seen a huge shift in the mindset of the administrators in corrections. A few years ago when said we’d like to bring wired technology and tablets into facilities, some people looked at us like we were crazy, and now we’re finding a really receptive audience that’s aware of the benefits that the technology and tablets can bring for education, for programming, for a number of reasons. Like you mentioned, some statistics have only 20% of those who are incarcerated getting regular access to programming, and that’s really detrimental.

Edovo was started because we were in the Cooke County Jail and saw that people were watching Jerry Springer, and people were watching the Price is Right, and didn’t really have access to that programming. Like you mentioned, there’s many in corrections who want that to be different, but it’s a real challenge to have programming with an in-person teacher for a lot of reasons, being cost, the fact many incarcerated [users 00:06:04] are not at the same level of education and don’t have the same interests. What we see, and what I think many in corrections are seeing is the tablets are helpful because they’re scalable.

If you have someone like Randy’s program curriculum, upload it, and, as you said, millions could access it. You’re also able to meet users at their level. If they’re at the GED level, if they’re at an early literacy rate, if they’re post-secondary, content can be on there that they can access at any level. It’s also really valuable from a data perspective, and from a continuity of care perspective. What our model does and what tablets can do is give administrators in a facility the ability to see how users are learning, what’s popular. We can use that data [inaudible 00:06:58] offer more courses like that.

Our hope, and what we’re working on now, is making sure that parole and probation officers also have access to that data, and the ability to say, “Look, we see that you completed three courses on substance abuse, here are resources for you now that you’re back and out in the community,” or, “We see that you’re halfway through your GED course, you can continue that course from your time incarcerated now that you’re on the outside.” We see that potential, you see that potential, and we are finding a lot of receptive people in the corrections arena, as well.

Leonard: Now, Chenault, are these programs online or are they loaded into the tablets?

Chenault: What we do, and this is different based on the tablet providers, we have wired technology. The way we explain that is, if you think of the internet as a highway system, what we’ve done is created an internet access point that really acts as a tunnel with no on-ramps and no off-ramps. There’s no access to the broader internet, like Google or Facebook. You are only able to connect to Edovo itself. We think it’s really valuable and important that these devices are connected to the internet.

That is how you’re able to have data, that is how you’re able to track your progress, that is how you’ll be able to use your work and your certificate on the outside, and continue to [fill 00:08:23] your educational and vocational programming. It also allows us to upload new content, so the work that we’re doing with Randy, we’re able to upload videos of success stories and add to our curriculum in a way that’s meaningful and important for those who are inside. We have a connectivity, but it’s not just the broader, if that makes sense.

Leonard: It does. It is online, but only through channels that you provide, nothing else?

Chenault: Exactly, through a secure server. Obviously, in corrections, security is an issue, so we use a server through an [ABTN 00:09:01] tunnel, the same type of security that the finance sector uses, that healthcare data uses. We’ve obviously really thought about this, and this is an essential piece of making this work.

Leonard: Chenault, I do want to come back to you in terms of questions of security, because that’s what’s on the mind of every correctional administrator throughout the country. Randy Kearce, let me go over to you for a second. You and I both know, for you, from your personal experience, and me, from my experience within the criminal justice system and the research that I read. I think Chenault is being generous when she’s saying that 20% of inmates are gaining some sort of educational services. The last time I took a look at data, it was closer to 10%. Whether it’s 10% or 20%, the overwhelming majority of people sitting in a correctional facility are not getting any services at all, period. We’re saying that isn’t it better, that if they have access to Randy Kearce and the material that Randy produces, or the material that other people produce, isn’t it better for inmates to be exposed to vocational, educational, substance abuse, decision-making materials on a tablet. We would prefer a instructor, we would prefer a classroom. We’re never going to get that, so if we don’t do it via tablet, it’s not going to get done, am I right or wrong?

Randy: No, you’re absolutely right. We got to go with the times, and times is dictating that technology has to be brought into these facilities because it just makes sense financially for institutions to implement these type of technology, because you get more bang for the buck. More people will be able to use it, more people will be exposed to the materials, and it just makes sense because if you’re trying to prepare someone to come out into society and function on a level of being able to take care of themselves, you have to prepare them and give them the tools and the resources to help prepare them. The thing we have to look at is, number one, what type of programming will these tablets have? You’re going to have several or more companies come online and say, “Wow, this is a great idea. How can I make money from it?” This is the problem.

I think this is the thing that we have to ask ourselves, is what type of material will we allow inmates to be exposed to. We don’t want an inmate to sit there and be watching videos all day of music videos, or entertainment videos. There should be an allowance for some of it, but the majority of it should be focusing on them being able to properly prepare for getting out, and changing their mindset, and changing their behaviors, and things like that.

Going back to the questions of family and keeping in contact with family, you’re going to have companies that come aboard, and now that there was the decrease in how much phone companies can charge incarcerated individuals to call home, now you’re going to have companies trying to basically monopolize off of these tablets on, “How can we generate money by allowing people to use emails,” or just focusing on how they can stay in contact with their family. Those are the things that we have to watch out for. Those are the things that we have to be prepared for, so it doesn’t become a money-making machine versus an entity that can help people integrate back into society.

Leonard: The companies aren’t going to do it unless there’s profit.

Randy: Excuse me?

Leonard: The companies aren’t going to do it unless there’s a profit motive. Why do it unless there’s a profit motive? I’m just curious. I don’t want to go in there deeply, because I would love to see state government, federal government, come out and pay for these sort of things, but at the moment, they’re not going to do it unless there is a profit.

Randy: One of the things that attracted me to Edovo is that they have a more social model. They don’t focus on profit. I can’t tell you the specifics or how they operate, but it’s not profit-driven. Go ahead.

Leonard: Let me get back to the larger question. Randy, do giving information via tablets in the correctional setting … The correctional setting is loud, it’s ruckus, it’s noisy, it’s not very conducive to a learning environment. You’re sitting in your cell, and your watching programs dealing with substance abuse, or an educational program, or a vocational program, or job hunting. How effective could or would tablets be?

Randy: Very effective because that allows you to go in your cell and tune everything else out around you, that’s going on around you that’s not positive, that’s not productive. You can go in your cell, and you’ll basically have your own teacher. You have your own facilitator teaching you or showing you different programs and taking you, walking you, through these programs. They would be very effective. I guess one of the best-selling items in the commissary would be a radio. Everybody has a radio in the prison because that allows you to escape.

These tablets would definitely be a tool to keep people focused on the journey ahead, and not what’s going on negatively around them. When you factor in the privilege part, as well … Tablets are a privilege, they’re not mandatory. People are going to be on their best behavior to have access to these tablets. You’re going to cut down in a lot of areas when it comes to discipline, when it just unfocused behaviors going on around you, because everybody’s going to want to keep their standings to be able to use those tablets. Trust me on that one there.

Leonard: We’re halfway through the program. Let me re-introduce both of you for a second before we get on to the rest of the program. Chenault Taylor, Director of Public Relations for Edovo, E-D-O-V-O, www.Edovo.com, and Randy Kearce, my Facebook friend and a very nice man, re-entry consultant, www.ReentryStrategies.com. He’s produced a video and a slew of materials including a book, but he didn’t want me to promote the book. He wanted me to promote the video, Beyond Prison Probation and Parole. I appreciate both of you being on the program with us today. All right, for the second half of the program, Randy, I’m just going to be a bit more of a devil’s advocate before going back to Chenault on the security question. You’re not going to be able to teach a person to lay bricks, you’re not going to be able to teach a person to be an electrician via a tablet, you’re not going to be able to teach a person how to read via a tablet. These are things that almost require classroom instruction, do they not, or am I wrong?

Randy: I have to disagree with you.

Leonard: Go ahead.

Randy: I have to disagree with you vehemently because a lot of things that I’ve learned in the last two or three years, I’ve learned on YouTube. Video is very great way to teach people because a lot of people can learn by looking and being able to follow the instructions of … Like Chenault said, literacy is a big problem in prison, and everybody’s not reading and comprehending on the same level, so what people can see, they’re more apt to want to be able to follow those instructions. Everything and anything that you want to learn is on YouTube, so this is just giving people a better or more opportunity to learn in a different kind of way. We’re living in a video society, we’re living in a technology that … We have to incorporate instructive learning via instructors that will be able to give them great courses where they can be able to learn in that way. Video’s the best and great way to help these guys prepare for getting out.

Leonard: Chenault, the security question that I alluded to before … Every correctional administrator in the country is saying, “Leonard, I get it. I think tablets would be nice. I think having online access would even be nice, but how do you do that and protect public safety at the same time? Anything that we bring in via the internet is going to be abused, and in fact, a lot of prisons don’t have any internet connection at all, simply for security reasons.” Do you want to comment on that?

Chenault: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve seen a couple people … It’s not a couple people, many facilities that, fortunately, are addressing that security issue head-on. What we’ve done in a lot of facilities is we do need to come in and bring in that connectivity to a facility. As I mentioned earlier, the way we operate, and I think that the way that … There really is the potential to have connectivity and access to wonderful resources … Is that you can only access Edovo. You have a tunnel vision of internet that can only access Edovo. There’s also the ability to access communications in certain tablets, depending on the facility, and depending on their provider.

What we’ve seen really is that this hasn’t been the issue that people were afraid it would be in the facilities that we’re operating in. What we’ve seen is that all of the content that we’re putting onto these tablets is that it’s both by us and by the administration in these facilities. They have final say on everything. We’re not giving access to Google and Facebook. What we think instead is that having access to technology is really valuable. As Randy said, and we actually spoke a couple weeks ago, he learned about the internet by reading about it from the newspaper. When he was released from the facility, he’d never used the internet, he’d never seen a tablet, he’d never used a cell phone, like an iPhone.

It’s crucial to have that technological literacy. Technology’s only going to become more important in our communities, and [you see that 00:18:59] … I’m sure every one of us every day uses technology in a massive way. This really hasn’t been the security issue that I think a lot of people expect, because we’ve done a lot of diligent work to make sure that we’re using the security mechanisms that the finance sector does, that the healthcare sector does. We’re using our own servers, as well. I understand the concern, but I would encourage anyone who’s thinking about bringing tablets into the facility go visit one of our facilities, and talk to the administrators there. This is something that we’ve figured out.

Randy: Let me add to that little piece.

Leonard: Go ahead, Randy.

Randy: In any prison environment, you’re going to have the guy that is going to try to hack the system. That’s just going to be, but what these tablet providers have to do is just stay diligent and be prepared for those who will try to connect to the internet, find some type of backdoor, whatever the case may be, and if it happens, how to learn from that, to make it even stronger and better. Listen, some of the best organizations or people get hacked. You got financial, banks get hacked. Everybody gets hacked, so what we have to do is learn from those experiences to make it better so that the masses will be able to enjoy and be able to benefit from them. That’s the reality right there.

Leonard: All right, I’m going to take both of you past your comfort levels, and it’s not what Edovo is currently doing, it’s not what Randy Kearce is currently doing, but this whole concept of using tablets as a way of communicating with mom and dad at home … Everybody that I’ve talked to at my organization today, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, when I was telling them about the phone call and the interview this afternoon, they simply said, “Okay, we are all for pro-social contact, but how do you keep the nefarious person off the line?” Whether it’s an email back and forth, which requires pure internet access, or whether it’s a phone call, or whether it’s a video chat, this is a way, theoretically, of constantly having pro-social contacts, even doing job interviews in the community over a tablet, but how do you do that in such a way is to make sure that public safety is not jeopardized and that the right person is on the phone, not the wrong person. I know this is taking us way beyond the boundaries of what we talked about, but Chenault, do you have any sense as to that?

Chenault: Sure. What I would say is that video visitation, and phone calls, and emails, are already occurring in facilities, not all facilities, but in many. The same security protocols and the same monitoring that occurs currently could easily be adapted to communication on tablets. As we’ve seen in the research, some of the most valuable things you can do while incarcerated to ensure successful re-entry are to have access to meaningful, high-quality programming, and to have access to communication with the outside world. We are 100% in agreement with [inaudible 00:22:18] that that’s valuable. I think using security protocols that are in existence, and adapting those to the tablet is not a huge leap. Some of these facilities are already utilizing these forms of communication, and tablets would allow greater access to that.

Leonard: Go ahead, Randy.

Randy: When I was incarcerated, we only had phone calls, but, number one, you had to get an approved phone call list, you had to get approved people. They had to be approved for you to be able to call that certain number. You didn’t just have an opportunity to pick up the phone and call numbers randomly, that’s number one. Number two, you had someone who monitored most of the calls, all of the calls, going in and out of the prison, at any given time. When someone in the administrative felt that the conversation was suspect, or wasn’t going according to the policy of the prison, and there was some type of [thread 00:23:15], or whatever the case may be, they shut it down, they shut you down. Your phone call privileges could be taken, they could be even monitored even more, scrutinized. Those type of security process can be applied to the tablets easy, and I think it would probably be easier because you got a guy sitting there watching, and he can gauge whether or not this conversation is going the way it’s supposed to, and there’s any type of problem, so I don’t see that being a problem. I don’t really see that as being a problem.

Leonard: Both of you alluded to Randy’s lack of technology-savvy when he was in prison, and Randy learned about all of this a little bit in prison, but mostly when he came out. The average inmate is not technologically-savvy. The average inmate has never picked up a tablet in their lives. The average inmate may know about Facebook, may know about the computer, but the tablet technology would be foreign to them. How comfortable are they going to be with this tablet, Randy, and how amenable are they going to be to pick up quickly on this new technology?

Randy: The first thing inmates have a lot of is time, and they’re always looking for something to occupy their time. The tablet will give them an opportunity to fill the void of time, that’s number one. That’s why it’s important to have the necessary resources and tools on the tablets, so when they’re trying to just pass time, that they’re not just passing time like they would do in a day room just watching TV, frivolously doing nothing. You have a huge opportunity to provide them with the necessary tools, and programs, and resources, that as they’re trying to kill time, that they’re learning at the same time. That’s most important right there.

Leonard: Chenault, how many correctional facilities is Edovo involved in now?

Randy: Yeah, we’re operating all across the country, and we have over … We’re launching a couple in the next month. We have around a thousand tablets in the market right now, and we’re working on increasing that number. Just to piggyback off of what Randy said, when we come into a facility, we train people, we train the correction officers, we train the administrators, we also interact with the incarcerated users to make sure that they’re comfortable. This really is something that we put a lot of time and thought into, and it’s a user-friendly interface. As Randy said, this is a two-in-one benefit. You’re both getting access to educational programming, and you’re learning how to interact positively with technology at the same time.

Leonard: Do either one of you envision the day that I spoke about at the beginning of the program, where you have a person at a central location providing GED instruction to literally tens of thousands of inmates at the same time? It’s exactly what colleges are doing now, in terms of long-distance learning and virtual learning. It’s really no different from what many colleges are doing now. Many colleges are doing it live. When I taught for the University of Maryland, and when I taught an online course, it wasn’t live, but a lot of colleges are going to the live format, which I really welcome. Any vision of doing a live format for prison inmates throughout the country?

Chenault: I think that’s a great idea. We’re already utilizing open-educational resources, like you spoke about. I definitely envision the day when we [see 00:27:01] tablets in a number of facilities that are reaching many of those who are incarcerated. Something to add there is that … You asked Randy about headphones, and if this is a good learning environment. What we see is, we come in to a facility, and officers and administrators are skeptical of the value of a tablet at times, but within three to five minutes, the facility is quiet, and there’s real engagement going on. You see decreased instances of violence, and officers and administrators really bought into this, because it’s win/win. I’m really optimistic, and I’m hopeful also that in programs that already have teachers and educational programming, that we can be a supplement to that learning, as homework, or as documentaries, or as extra [inaudible 00:27:55] or real-time videos. That’s something that we see, as well, so absolutely.

Leonard: I’ve been in and out of prisons hundreds of times, Randy, and they’re noisy, they’re raucous. It’s really a chaotic experience. The vision that I have is walking into a prison and seeing eight hundred inmates walking around with tablets and earphones, and it’s quiet, and they get a wide array of educational programming that will keep them content and satisfied throughout the course of the day. Is that your vision?

Randy: That’s my vision, and we’re heading in that direction. It might take a while to get everybody [staying 00:28:33] on-board and seeing that vision, but that’s where we’re headed. Re-entry, it’s a big issue that we have to conquer, and that’s pretty much bringing technology into the [fore 00:28:46] will help that. I just want to say that I envision a day that one day my programs and what I’m doing, and maybe even me, will be like you said, beamed into prisons all across the country, and I’m giving that course, I’m giving those instructions to audience. I think we’re a little far from that, but we’re heading that direction. It just makes sense. It just makes sense, because when it comes to financially, having the ability to do that, it’s going to be more cost-effective to use technology to give people a better opportunity than the old traditional ways. You can pay someone $30, $40 thousand dollars a year to [crosstalk 00:29:27] …

Leonard: Got to wrap-up quickly, Randy. Go ahead.

Randy: Yeah, I see us going in that direction. Technology is here to stay, and it’s making its way into the prisons. It’s just going to be more beneficial as we go forward.

Leonard: Our guests today, Chenault Taylor, Director of Public Relations for Edovo … That is www.Edovo.com. Randy Kearce is also by our microphones. Once again, re-entry consultant, www.ReentryStrategies.com … Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms. We want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasant day.

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Measuring Offender Recidivism-The Urban Institute

April 17, 2015 by

Measuring Offender Recidivism-The Urban Institute

DC Public Safety Radio

http://media.csosa.gov

Radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2014/10/measuring-offender-recidivism-urban-institute/

LEONARD SIPES: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I am your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen our show today is Measuring Recidivism. We have folks from the Urban Institute Ryan King. He is a senior fellow with the Justice Policy Center again at Urban Institute. Brian Elderbroom a Senior Research Associate with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. This is all in preparation for a Wednesday, October 15th webinar at 2’o clock in the afternoon with the Urban Institute and the Bureau of Justice Assistance we encourage everybody to go to the website www.urban.org for the document I am about to mention and the webinar and I will bring up the webinar a couple more times throughout the course of the program. Ryan and Brian welcome to DC Public Safety.

RYAN KING: Thanks for having us.

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: Thanks for having us.

LEONARD SIPES: Like I said that before we hit the record button it’s the Ryan and Brian show. It sounds like a morning drive time radio show, so you know it should be an interesting program. You did a report called Improving Recidivism as a performance measure and I just want to read from it ever so briefly at the very beginning to kick of the conversation. Performance measurement establishing metrics for its excess and assessing results is crucial first top in informed decisions made by all areas of government including criminal justice policy, understanding the outcome, the funding and policy decisions is critical to improving government performance and providing the best return on tax payers investments. If that’s true Ryan or Brian why don’t we do it? Why are we in the criminal justice system, why are we so reluctant to being involved in measuring recidivism.

RYAN KING: Well I would say it’s not a reluctance to be involved but it’s a little bit more about the way that we are doing it. The reason, the impetus behind doing this brief was a recognition that for better or for worse recidivism is a primary performance measure that is being used in the fields of corrections and there are a lot of reasons why that is troubling practitioners and policy makers and researchers a like I think have a range of criticism but recidivism as sort of an end measure basically a measure of, when somebody comes in the system is that intervention while they are in the system, having some sort of positive outcome and result that is leading to a reduction in future offending and so if we have and imperfect measure. I think Brian and I and other folks at the Urban Institute felt it was really important for us to try to sketch out ways that we could improve it because it is not going away and I think one of the key things is sort of flagged right from the get go is that different folks have different criticisms about it and I think the biggest issue is that every individual who comes into the system has a different story, they have a different history and they are touched by a number of different parts of the system and so recidivism traditionally is looked at as a measure of success for prisons. People coming into prison do they succeed when they come back out again?

LEONARD SIPES: Well I am going to go over to Brian on this question. When we say and I talked to a couple of practitioners from around the field saying I was going to do at this radio show today with Urban and they are saying, you know Leonard we have individuals that come to us in the Criminal Justice System that come to us from Community Supervision. They have histories of substance abuse, histories of mental health problems and they have a lousy job record. They spend a lot of time, in many cases in the American Prison System, women offenders in particular come out and they have to deal with kids, really the odds are so stacked against them and it is not as if we have the money and the wherewithal and the resources to remediate so many of the social problems that they bring to us, why should we be held responsible for that persons success when we don’t control all the variables that go into that persons success or failure. Answer that question for me Brian.

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: I think for those very dedicated professionals who are working with people involved in the Criminal Justice System, they care deeply about those outcomes that you are describing, not just whether they desist from future criminal behavior but whether they find stable housing, whether they find a job or that they stop using drugs and alcohol and those are important measures by which they should judge their success as well. At the end of the day what we outline in the brief is that a single state wide rate of recidivism obscures a lot of what you are describing in that comment and we need to incorporate other success measure in addition to the ones that you described. How long is someone successful, how many people are successfully not just how many people fail. What is our success rate at changing people’s behavior and that is a big part of what we outlined in the brief.

LEONARD SIPES: Well you are basically supporting what I’m hearing from the field is that you want those variables measured, that maybe you shouldn’t be held responsible for everything that the person did, if they did not receive drug treatment, if that person did not receive mental health interventions then you compare them against those who did and check the outcome and if those people who didn’t do worse than those people who did, that is a measurement that is very useful in terms of funding sources.

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: Absolutely, that is largely what the report is about, is comparing policy interventions, comparing the impacts of policies and looking at people who receive certain treatments or received certain changes to the ways that they are supervised on Community Supervision or the intervention that they get through prison to measure different populations to see what the impact is of policy and practice.

LEONARD SIPES: Ryan not many states do this well, as far as I can see. I mean I am up on the criminal justice literature as much as anyone else. I’m aware of the Washington Institutes for public policy, they have been before our microphones. I am aware of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority that goes back decades in terms of doing a good job, in terms of measurement. You gave a couple of examples here specifically, Delaware and Pennsylvania was in your report but most states do not do a great job of measure the success of people coming out the prison system or measuring the success of people on parole and probation and why is that.

RYAN KING: I think that we haven’t really sat down and outlined the steps that states need to put in place to measure and so what the brief does is give us the four key areas that a state should be defining recidivism in a broad way. I think that was the point the Brian was just making, that we make it pretty clear and central point of this is that we are talking about multiple measures of recidivism there is no single “right” measure of recidivism. How you measure recidivism depends very much on what type of questions you are trying to answer. There are improvements to collection, to types of analysis and then to dissemination and I would say that there are a lot of states that are doing good things but in terms of a state that is pulling all of these different pieces together and being able to answer these key questions in a really rich and deep way, that’s what I think is lacking and that is what we are trying to point out with the brief.

LEONARD SIPES: Most states I would imagine are not doing it for one particular reason. This is an expensive proposition. You need qualifying people, you need money, you need time, you need data resources, you need to have the sanctity of the collection process to be unimpeachable. There are so many variables that go into good evaluations but this is not an inexpensive proposition, this is something that states are going to say to themselves, okay fine I understand the need, I understand the desire but you know, you are going to ask us to spend another three to four million dollars a year to pull this off, we don’t have three or four million dollars a year to pull this off , so I would imagine expense and technical expertise is one of the reasons why states don’t do this?

RYAN KING: Yeah, I think we have talked about the fact that there are a number of different agencies that get involved and responsible for recidivism, I think that is one of the biggest obstacles is that you can’t just go, traditionally what we see for recidivism comes out of the Departments of Corrections, from prisons because that is usually where the data come from. We don’t have that. The collections across Law Enforcements, Across Community Supervision Agencies, across state lines. I would say that the Bureau of Justice Statistics who has been working on a major initiative to improve national collection of recidivism, has laid out some groundwork that I would like to think could help improve states collection within their own borders. So there are definitely are opportunities to engage. I think there is a lot of assistance particularly through some of the broader national efforts but there is no question that is going to take a serious commitment and it is going to take a serious upgrading of databases. I mean you know, and listeners will know that you know, in states many of these agencies the computers and databases don’t speak with one another and so it is very difficult to measure performance, to measure reoffending performance on any of the types of our indicators that we have discussed, if you are not able to follow somebody through all the different systems that they touch.

LEONARD SIPES: To pick up on one of your points that you just mentioned is that you are looking for a variety of agencies and provide data, that way it is just not the division of Correction or Parole and Probation data it is Law Enforcement, it is Treatment Provision. You are looking for as many data points as humanly possible with an offender who has one unique identifier so everybody knows what they are talking about. So you’re not talking about sharing privacy information because you are not connecting that to a particular name, you are connecting it to a number and it is just an aggregate, it is big data, IBM, it is what Google, it is what Yahoo, it is what everybody else out there is doing, it is what Apple is doing. They are using big data to drive policy decisions. That is exactly what you are talking about, doing nothing more besides bringing the big data concept to the criminal justice system?

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: Exactly and unlike Google which has access to large amounts of data through its own services. Each of the different Criminal Justice Actors has a different piece of the puzzle and that is the challenge with recidivism is that as Ryan said we need data sets that speak to each other so that the agencies that have responsibility for supervision and incarceration have the data to measure reoffending that comes from law enforcement and other agencies that are collecting and housing that.

LEONARD SIPES: Okay what we have in essence, if we have it at all is an emulation of the Bureau of Justice statistic data on recidivism, the report just came out, oh I forget about it, little less than a year ago they updated data in essences talking about two thirds being arrested and 50% being re-incarcerated which is pretty much mimicking the two earlier data sets put out by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, but most states don’t even have that, most states don’t even have that level of survey, that level of following to go three years out and take a look at broader recidivism so you’re saying that number one that is inadequate, number two you need to go much deeper than that, you know first of all most states don’t do that. Correct?

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: It is improving and I think Ryan could probably talk to the National Corrections Reporting Program which is where a large portion of the Bureau of Justice statistics data comes from.

RYAN KING: Yeah there has been a significant improvement in the recidivism measurement. There has also been a really significant improvement in the NCRP, The National Corrections Reporting Program which has now been, they are getting very close to fifty states reporting. They have been filling in back data and this is an individual level data set that is actually structured in such a way that they are what are called Term Record Files. So you can actually follow an individual over time from year to year, it is an annual survey. From year to year and see how they flow through the system. So this gets back to an earlier point about if I’m in a state and I say alright you have sold me on this brief but, and where am I going to get all the money to get this data together, we don’t have the money to build to this capacity. I would like to see some exploration of some opportunities between some of the collection work that is going on within the Bureau of Justice statistics so there is not replication but it is important that you get this relationship where you are reporting data up for national reporting but you are getting something out of it. That is going to get obviously more buy-in from the state locals.

LEONARD SIPES: We are getting better at doing and it is the larger of recidivism data. The second point I wanted to bring up is do we really want to know. I mean the individual discrete variables in terms of recidivism requires us to measure how well we are doing in terms of our drug treatment programs, in terms of our employment programs, in terms of mental health programs, in terms of how we supervise, what we supervise, a lot of folks are scared to know how well they are doing because I mean look national recidivism data is pretty consistent in terms of 50% coming back to the prison system, two thirds being rearrested. The question is do we really want to know. Do state administrators really want to know how well they are doing because that, if there is an indication of failure in terms of how well they are doing and you gave a wonderful example about Pennsylvania figuring out that their Community Corrections Center were not doing nearly as well as they could be, should be, so they rearranged the perimeters of their contracts with what I am assuming private providers saying you know, look you are going to have to do better for us to continue funding. That is exactly the sort of smart big data approach that you guys are talking about, but do we at the Criminal Justice really want to know how well we are doing and how well we are not doing?

RYAN KING: Well the fact is the decisions are being made with the existing recidivism data that we are using right now. So, people are making decisions about specific policies based on broad measures. So if you’re dealing with, let’s say you have got a program or a policy that is dealing with drug offenders a specific slice of the drug offender in your state and you’re looking at the recidivism rates for all drug offenders in your state and say when they have gone up this has clearly been a failure. Well we don’t necessarily know that a huge part of the populations was not participating in this program but you can very quickly see how policy makers will make decisions they will shift funding around. We are very much seeing that in the current budget crisis and the current tightness in many states, moving dollars from spot to spot looking for things that work. So we are all using this data as is, and that is why we felt really strongly that we want to get a brief out there talking about improving it. It is not going away. It is warts and all the best performance measure that we have or at least the most frequently used one. Let’s improve it. There are ways that we can do it in meaning full ways without major over hall. Some of the stuff that we are talking about here is really big picture and it is an ideal and I don’t want to give the impression to listeners that you need to do all of these things or nothing. It is not all or nothing and I think the brief lays out some really small things as well as some really big more ambitious things but each step along the way is an improvement over the status quo because it is important to know policy makers now are making decisions about policies using excising data and in many cases this data is telling misleading stories.

LEONARD SIPES: But we need to be held accountable do we not? Those of us in the Criminal Justice System don’t we need to be held accountable?

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: Absolutely, and I think for Community Supervision Practitioners in particular who have the first hand of experience of working with people who have been released from prison in particular and feel like they have a better opportunity to change their behavior through the intervention of Community Supervision then that person would have received, while incarcerated or if they had not gone to prison at all and I think it is important for in particular, people who provide those services whether its supervision or treatment or otherwise to be able to compare the effectiveness of what they are doing to prison in particular, as an alternative and one of the things that is laid out in the brief is that in order to do that you need to statically control for the population that you are studying and that is something that almost no states are doing right now and it would be great if we got to the point where we could compare probation as an intervention, to prison as an intervention using some of the statistical techniques that we talk about in the brief.

LEONARD SIPES: It could save states tens of millions of dollars but we are more than half way through the program let me reintroduce you, Ladies and gentlemen we are doing a program today on Measuring Recidivism with the Urban Institute. We are here with Ryan King senior fellow with the Justice Policy Center at Urban and Brian Elderbroom Senior Research Associate at the Justice Policy Center at Urban and to remind everybody that this coming Wednesday, October 15th there is a webinar on this topic with Urban and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. You can find information on Urban website www.urban.org Let me get back to the program gentlemen, we discussed before the program [PH 0:16:37.4] Joan and Peter Stillia who I interviewed before these microphones a couple of times and hopefully will interview in 2015 once again, who simply said that we within the Criminal Justice System overpromise and under-deliver when it comes to interventions in terms of the populations that we are dealing with. We really have not lived up to our promise in terms of really lowering recidivism by numbers that we would like to see and she is suggesting that we are promising too much, delivering too little and that may bite us, cause us problems in the near future. So to do that the only way of figuring that out is by doing good recidivism research as to whether or not we are over promising and under delivering correct?

RYAN KING: Doing good research and making it targeted to answer specific policy relevant questions and I would flag there is some really new and interesting work that I encourage your listeners to go check out. There is a new journal article out using some of these NCRP data that I mentioned earlier. So they are able to actually following individuals through the system and it sort of flips recidivism on its head a little bit and I think it is important for us to think about that in our conversation here and looking at the proportion of individuals who go into prison for a first time, come out and never reoffend again basically people who desist and they find that in upwards of 60% of those individuals who go in on the first time don’t come back again. And so the take away point from this is one that I think is not necessarily revelatory but it is worth raising again which is that the recidivism rates that are the 40% or 50% that we see are generally driven by a smaller portion of the population who churned through the system either through new crimes or revocations from Community Supervision. And so one of the pieces is that, there are things that do work and we certainly need to ask questions for these six and ten who don’t return about why are they not returning and more importantly did they ever need to go to prison to begin with or would they have desisted on their own through some other sanctions or no criminal justice involvement. But for the four in ten the people who are churning through who Al Bloomstein and Alan Beck refer to as a reentry as this transient moment between confinement and the community essentially for individuals, this becomes their life. We don’t know enough about that population. We have not asked the right questions about that population to find the right sort of intervention and so I do think that part of what we talk about here is multiple recidivism measure and fine tuning them so that lets talk about the six in ten who desist, lets also look at this four in ten, different types of individuals, how many times have they been in. We have to have the type of recidivism data that can be that granular to be able to really understand these sub populations and I do think certainly that Joan is correct that right now if we are looking around and saying it four in ten it is a failure, it is always been a four in ten. We need to unpack that four in ten a little bit and see what is under there. Some people are failing some people might be succeeding lets learn from the successes and lets fine tune the failures.

LEONARD SIPES: The report again is Improving Recidivism as a performance measure again available through the website at Urban www.urban.org. Right where do we go to from here? Now you are going to be doing this seminar and you are going to be talking to a lot of people in the system, their cynical. Oh god here we go. I had this discussion with my folks upstairs before doing this radio show. Probably my biggest criticism of my people in the field about what it is that I do on the radio and the television side is Leonard, you bring these folks in from NIJ and Urban and Pew and Justice and they talk about these wonderful grandiose ideas for the rest of us, wow don’t they understand what it is that we are dealing with out here. I mean with huge case loads and no money for treatment and no money…, I mean and so we are going to measure what, our ineptitude, our lack of resources, and our lack of public confidence as to why we don’t have the money to really impact the lives of the people on our case loads. How do you respond to them? They are frustrated. What you are talking about is a very detailed big data policy. They are talking about, for the love of god Leonard I have a case load of 150-1, 250-1, how am I suppose to meaningfully intervene in the lives of these people when I have these large case loads. When are the folks from Urban and Pew and everybody else going to deal with my reality? So their reality is, I am going to guess as what I said before. They don’t have the money nor the wherewithal to do the sort of measurement that you are talking about but if they don’t, policy mistakes are going to continue to be made. Tens of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars could be wasted, correct?

RYAN KING: Here is the thing that I think and some of that frustration and hopelessness comes from the fact that we really are using these blunts and imprecise recidivism measures and so you are right, you are doing good work and you may actually, let’s put a side case on, let’s say you are actually doing good work and having a positive impact but an overall say why recidivism measure is not going to point that out, so you’re not going to be able to draw attention on that. What I think is important about this is that the types of things and steps that we point out in the report and again its important to note that there is a lot of things that is big and ambitious but there are also small steps that can be taken. Those actually can help individuals and the corrections and they are designed in a way so that the idea that I shouldn’t be held accountable for the ten different systems that have touched the person’s life. Why should I be the one that is held accountable? We are talking about doing a level of analysis that controls and identifies and is precise enough so that your people are being held accountable for their particular steps, their particular interventions in the system and it is important to note that a lot of the stuff is already going on in states. So we have examples in the report there are other states that are having this webinar. It is primarily focused on practitioners and individuals working in the states to get an opportunity. So some of the stuff it sounds big and the way we are talking about here it sounds ominous and there is no way I can do that but I think you will find that there are states out there that are able to make some really positive impacts and we are going to share some of those stories on the webinar. Of states that are able to use their excising capacity. Some of it is not necessary they may already have the data collection capacity they just haven’t thought about doing an analysis in this way. They just done it one way forever and they just keep doing it. But with some minor modifications and trying to get some people from states to talk with one another we can make some of these improvements.

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: Let me talk a little bit about how one of the measures we outline in the report can actually feed into a policy conversation in a way that helps practitioners. So one of the measures we talk about is time of failure and the research from many people shows that people are most likely to fail in the days, weeks, and month shortly after release and the vast majority and people who go on to commit another crime after being released from prison do so in the first year after they have been released. That is an important finding, it is an important recidivism finding and what we can learn from that is supervision terms of 3, 5,10 years are not affectively deterring criminal reoffending and so what we need is to reduce case loads to the point where we are really focusing on those people who are highest risk and the people who are going to need the most help when they first leave prison. And that is how using a new recidivism measure like time to failure can inform policy in a way that helps practitioners focus on the people who need supervisions and interventions the most.

LEONARD SIPES: You know it is intriguing. Is there the possibility and one of you brought it up before of the idea of Community Supervision as being as effective or more effective than incarceration itself and incarceration rates have gone back up after a loss since 2009 according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Some people have suggested well we are not doing the job we need to do at the state and local and county level in terms of proving how viable we are. It is just not convincing people that we say we over incarcerate, we say we incarcerate for too long, we hold people for too long. That the fiscal burden on the states is enormous, I mean virtually every governor in the country has had a discussion with his or her Corrections Administrator that you have got to bring down the budget. You have got to do something about recidivism. The only way we are going to do any of this is to do good research. I mean how else are suppose to manage the Criminal Justice System and relieve states of this enormous burden that they are crying about. How else are we going to do that unless we do good research?

RYAN KING: And we need to know what works. There states, recidivism rates can go up and they can go down completely independent of any policy changes. That is the important things that we really want to point out in there. As a profile of a prison population becomes more or less risky then you are going to have recidivism rates and so the question is did my recidivism rate go down because I am releasing individuals who are at very low risk of reoffending versus prior release cohorts or they go down because we are putting in place appropriate policy interventions and evidence based practices to adjust recidivism.

LEONARD SIPES: The Washington state’s Institute for Public Policy found that because they were saying it is not a measure of not doing it well but that we were releasing people at a higher risk thereby those people at a higher risk are going to recidivate more. It is not the policy it is the people correct?

RYAN KING: Exactly, that’s exactly we talk about that example in our report. That is a perfect example and another in some prior work looking at recidivism rates in Oregon and Oklahoma or two states that had recidivism rates down in the mid 20% some of the lowest in the country. One of them, Oregon had taken very deliberate steps to try and address recidivism so you would talk to people in the states and they would point to some of those practices. They identified recidivism as a problem and they wanted solutions. Oklahoma on the other hand, we talked to individuals who worked with data there and they said they were filling their prisons up with very low risk people and so naturally their recidivism rates were low and so those are two very different policy conversations. If you had controlling for the underlying population and don’t know that how can you possibly be making informed decisions about directions of your recidivism or to invest your resources.

LEONARD SIPES: You can save literally millions, tens of millions, billions of dollars over time if you had the data to guide you. You can protect public safety if you have the data to guide you.

RYAN KING: Without question. I think we are seeing that now and that’s why it is an exciting time, that’s why I think it’s a good time for this brief because in a time when we have more research and more data and better guides about what works, the question now is how can states invest there resource and one of the first steps they need to be able to do is identify drivers of the population and put in place some of these practices. You do need these data but there are many different steps and as I said there is sort of an ideal perfect system that nobody has but there are a lot of steps that states can take now with a limited amount of additional resources that can really improve their understanding of recidivism in their state.

LEONARD SIPES: This is a terribly unfair question to ask either one of you but does Office of Justice Programs, BJS, Bureau Justice Assistance is anyone prepared. I know that the Federal Government has put tons of money into state analytical centers throughout the years to improve the quality of their data but we have the technical assistance and funding at hand to help states come to grips with what you are suggesting.

RYAN KING: First of all I would say a BJA supported this brief and they are in support of this work so I think that is a great sign right there and certainly in conversations we have there is an acknowledgement and understanding from folks in BJA about the importance of this issue and we will certainly continue to carry that message over there so that is a great area where we love to support and I think again the work that BJS has been doing to improve recidivism in partnership with [PH 0:28:17] Apton and NCRP data collection has been absolutely fantastic. There is enormous improvements that are not just for national level but can have benefits for the states so there is a lot of leadership and understanding this issue is not news to anybody, working here on this issue here in Washington and what we are hoping to accomplish at this webinar is to get folks in the state aware of it and hopefully there can be opportunities down the road for additional leadership and guides and support from the federal government for states.

LEONARD SIPES: Brian, 30 seconds left do you have anything to add?

BRIAN ELDERBROOM: No I think one of your first comments was that these are professionals that are for the most part overworked and under resourced and I think that is an important point to make and part of what we are trying to do with this brief is to help practitioners communicate their success.

LEONARD SIPES: This has been a fascinating conversation and I really do want to encourage everybody this Wednesday, October 15th the webinar on this issue on Measuring Recidivism with the Urban Institute and the Bureau of Justice Assistance at 2’o clock. Go to the website www.urban.org. Our guests today have been Ryan King and Brian Elderbroom from the wonderful Urban Institute and I really appreciate both of you being here. Ladies and gentlemen this is DC public safety. We do appreciate your comments. We even appreciate you criticism and we want everybody to have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

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