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Sex Offender | DC Public Safety (Transcripts)

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Human and Labor Trafficking in the US-Urban Institute

Human and Labor Trafficking in the US-Urban Institute

DC Public Safety Radio

http://media.csosa.gov

Radio Show available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2014/10/human-and-labor-trafficking-in-the-us-urban-institute/

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety and I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We are doing a show ladies and gentlemen on human trafficking. Back at our microphones from the Urban Institute we have Colleen Owens. She again is with the Urban Institute. She did a heck of a program last time on the issue of human trafficking. Joining her today is Justin Breaux and also Isela Banuelos. Did I get that correctly Isela, so I want to welcome all three of you to DC Public Safety.

Colleen Owens: Thank you.

Isela Banuelos: Thank you.

Len Sipes: Alright now we are going to go with Colleen because Colleen did the program before and Colleen gave me a very quick overview of what it is that we mean by human trafficking.

Colleen Owens: Well thanks so much for having us on the program Len we are really happy to be here. So human trafficking as it is defined in our federal law, which was passed in 2000, essentially, you know, centers on the use of three elements of forced fraud or coercion to compel a person either into I guess two very broad areas of labor trafficking or sex trafficking. If the person is under the age of 18, for sex trafficking you don’t have to prove forced fraud or coercion but for labor trafficking you would.

Len Sipes: I was running the research report. This is the one statement that just really jumped out at me: “To a public largely unaware of it crimes resembling slavery take place in America.” Is that overkill or is that a justifiable description of what we are talking about when we talk about human trafficking?

Colleen Owens: I mean that is absolutely justifiable. If you actually look at the root of the law that we have on human trafficking in the United States, it’s based upon the 13th Amendment principles of slavery. The language is actually directly relation to the language that we have since the 13th Amendment around debt bondage, peonage and slavery and so what we are talking about is actually, you know, the limitation of a person’s liberties and freedom. And this crime that we call human trafficking is somewhat new parlance since about the early 2000s but it is a crime that has existed for a long period of time in the United States.

Len Sipes: Now we are talking about literally tens of millions of people throughout the world?

Colleen Owens: The best estimate that we have actually comes from the International Labor Organization and there estimate is that 21 million people are victims of forced labor around the world.

Len Sipes: And so, but we don’t know the exact number of human trafficking/slavery in the United States but we do know in all probability that millions are involved in this type of behavior in the United States?

Colleen Owens: Right, we don’t have actual any estimates on the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States but we do know that victims have been identified both of labor trafficking and sex trafficking across the country.

Len Sipes: Because last time you and I did the show, in preparation for all my shows I do talk to different people about the topic before actually doing the show and to a person they just said human trafficking in the United States, they found that incredulous and they did not buy into the fact that there is human trafficking in the United States. So to satisfy them, once again, is there human trafficking in the United States?

Colleen Owens: Yes absolutely.

Len Sipes: Okay. So this is appalling, I mean this is absolutely literally appalling that we have forced labor and forced sexual bondage within the United States right now and it’s not all that unusual nor is it all that rare and it is probably happening throughout the country.

Colleen Owens: It is defiantly. I would say that no community is immune to it.

Len Sipes: You did a report which I do want to site and I will put it in the show notes. “Understanding the Organization, Operation and Victimization Process of Labor Trafficking In The United States.” You did this again with Urban Institute coupled up with North Eastern University?

Colleen Owens: Right.

Len Sipes: And so this, I have been seeing in my email lots of material coming out of Urban on human trafficking. This is something that Urban is taking very seriously in terms of putting out seminars and reports on it. I mean it is just not a one shot deal. You guys are steadily pounding the streets talking about human trafficking.

Colleen Owens: Absolutely it is an issue that we see as very central and important in the research field and it is something that myself and my colleagues Justin and Isela and Meredith Dank, also of Urban Institute, as well as my colleagues at North Eastern University – Amy Farrell and Jack McDevitt have dedicated a lot of our time conducting research on over the years and it is something that we do feel strongly. There is still so much that needs to be known, a lot of unanswered research questions and it is something that we do remain committed to conducting research on in the future.

Len Sipes: Isela give me a sense as to the report. You’ve talked to what 28 victims and 58 social service providers to get a sense as to what’s actually happening in terms of human trafficking, not just in the United States but throughout the world but in terms of this report particularly in the United States.

Isela Banuelos: That’s correct so we have talked to service providers and victims who have been able to get services and we talked to people who were trafficked into various industries including agriculture, domestic work, hospitality and also restaurants. Thank you, right.

Colleen Owens: Restaurants.

Len Sipes: These are people who are hiding in plain sight according to the report. These are people who we interact with every day; we just don’t know they are being held in bondage. Correct?

Colleen Owens: That is correct.

Len Sipes: And it strikes me that there is a parallel here and any one of you can enter into this conversation. I’m from the main stream criminal justice system and I have dealt with an awful lot of women who are caught up in the criminal justice system who we have supervised in my experience, over the course of the last 25 years and it is not unusual, there is a new piece of research out for one particular state were 85% of the women caught up in the correctional system had histories of violence and sexual violence before the age of 18. And so many of the women who are involved in the criminal justice system are there because, stereotypically I understand but it is true, some male has used physical force or a threat of physical force or a threat of economic force and basically told her, “I’ve got two pounds of cocaine you are going to drive it to New York City.” They are going up Interstate 95. They get pulled over, the drug dog alerts on the car and suddenly she’s in jail or prison for the next 10 years, because principally she was forced to be there. It is sort of a type of bondage as far as I am concerned. And you sit down and you talk with them about their background, it verges on being disgusting. I get the sense that when we talk about human trafficking; we are talking about basically the same thing, force, threat of force, psychological bondage, people who feel paralysis and other people who take advantage of them, Justin?

Isela Banuelos: I think you would want to add fraud in there. What we found was that in most of our cases that was, you know most of our survivors were heavily defrauded in terms of their interview, their recruitment and things of that nature.

Len Sipes: Am I over playing my hand in terms of comparing human trafficking to what I see in the main stream criminal justice system, in particular women offenders?

Isela Banuelos: I think there are absolutely some similarities there and in fact in some of cases, women came to the United States, and you know they were working in homes, they were forced to board flights, and they really didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Len Sipes: The bottom line and the heart and soul of all of these issues that we are talking about today is physical or physiological coercion, to coerce a person in terms of doing something by threatening them physically or threatening them psychologically. So that is a form of slavery.

Colleen Owens: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: But in terms of human trafficking, they’re hiding again, as we said in plain sight. We interact with people on a day to day basis but they don’t feel that they can get out of it. The victims don’t feel that they can escape it because they are not quite sure that the criminal justice system is going to be sympathetic towards their cause, even though they are in the county legally and I do want to get around to that part of it. They feel that they’re going to be deported. They think that terrible things are going to happen to them, happen to their kids, happen to their families back in the countries that they came from, so they don’t escape it. That is a form of bondage. Correct? Talk to me about it.

Colleen Owens: Absolutely, well you know we collected a lot of really interesting information around the escape experiences and my colleague Isela can speak a little bit more on that, but you are absolutely correct that folks are laboring you know in plain sight, often times. They are working in hotels. They are working in construction and restaurants. They are here on a visa for work in these industries, primarily in our sample, that’s what we found. And they are under threat of deportation, threat of being reported to the police if they complain. Their family members are being threatened back home because oftentimes they have been recruited back home in their country of origin and a lot of information has been collected about their personal background. So the traffickers use this against them.

Isela Banuelos: Sorry can I also just add that in addition to having this threat of you know having their family members hurt in their home countries, I think that for folks who are coming into the country authorize and unauthorized, there is this tremendous just fear of contacting law enforcement because of their visa. So contacting law enforcement would mean that they are jeopardizing their status, and so because they don’t want to be deported so they are not contacting law enforcement.

Len Sipes: But Justin, they are here legally and not just the fact that they have visa’s when they come, but they paid.

JUSTIN BREAUX: Right, exactly.

Len Sipes: They paid to come here and they paid quite a bit of money.

JUSTIN BREAUX: Right and I think it starts with the recruitment phase. So we were looking at the continuum of the labor trafficking experience and what we found was that it all begins with recruitment oftentimes in their home countries, through their social networks they come across this opportunity. They usually meet with a recruitment agency. This agency will use high pressure coercion tactics to convince them. Many times they are using fraud. The victims are paying large fees. On average it was over $6,000. So that sort of sets the stage. So now they are in debt. They have used their family’s money as collateral and that really lays down the foundation.

Len Sipes: They are here legally, which meant they had to get visas, which meant they had to come into contact with the State Department.

JUSTIN BREAUX: Precisely.

Len Sipes: So there is nobody at the State Department asking questions?

JUSTIN BREAUX: We also highlight that in our report. It is sort of these actions that are taking place and what we found was that for many of the survivors that we interviewed, they had very routine sort of interactions with the State Department. Our survivors were often coach by their traffickers on what to say. In a few instances the trafficker actually participated in the interviews with the victim and the State Department and in that situation the victim, you know had no, didn’t speak English and really didn’t say anything throughout the course of the interview. So we did find that the traffickers played sort of a critical part there. But we do want to add a little bit of a caveat in that we are looking at a subsample of the individuals who have been victimized and received visas from the State Department. We don’t know the universe of individuals who are at risk of trafficking, who have applied for visas and been denied.

Len Sipes: You can only talk about what you know and I understand but there is a certain point where we do need to extrapolate beyond your numbers to the larger issue. The criminal justice system does not come off very well in this report. Again, we are inundated with rapes, robberies, burglaries, what I call the garden variety types of crimes every single day. I have been in law enforcement, I have been in corrections. I understand the stresses and strains upon our system. If you came to me as a police officer and said human trafficking, I guess my response is going to be, what? Because, again, I am overloaded with the day to day crimes that people are very concerned about and nobody at a community meeting brings up human trafficking. Our politicians don’t bring up human trafficking, the medial doesn’t bring up human trafficking and suddenly you present me with an extraordinarily complicated case where I don’t know the law, I don’t know the procedure, I don’t exactly know what to do with this. All I see is a mountain of work and when you are talking about a person being brought over and being worked half to death in a factory, I’m saying to myself what a minute, did you voluntarily come here, do you have a visa? You went through the States Department, you know, you paid for this and your complaint is what? So.

Isela Banuelos: That’s it. I mean that is a very legitimate response and perspective. You know that is something that other research has been done on actually NORC did a study a few years back that indicated that over half of law enforcement, including investigators and prosecutors that they surveyed, had no knowledge of the fact that their state had a law against human trafficking and that there was a high level of misinformation around definition. So folks thought maybe trafficking equaled smuggling. That there had to be movement involved. And so I think that there is a lack of awareness but I also think, and a huge need for training, but I also think something that’s distinct for labor traffic from sex trafficking that we found is that there is really a question about who’s job is it to enforce the laws around labor trafficking. And essentially we found what I would call a black hole of enforcement and it makes sense when you actually look at what we did in our study, which was we categorized and we reviewed cases of labor trafficking victimization and found that there were high rates of labor exploitation. So folks were experiencing crimes that you know sort of civil violations rather, that fall under the jurisdiction of Department of Labor. So wage and hour violations, you know denial of pay or you know failure to give someone a pay stub. You know, lack of meal breaks for example. That is all under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor. What is under the jurisdiction of law enforcement are when it rises to a criminal level, so you know, monitoring and surveying your workers, basically using the threats, the violence, the coercion against them.

Len Sipes: Human bondage is not a Department of Labor crime; I mean what we are talking about are real crimes that we would define them as being real crimes. We are just a little confused when a person comes here voluntarily on a visa that has been processed by the State Department and we would have one person’s word against another. I mean that is almost an impossible situation but we are talking about real crimes. We are talking about real bondage. We are talking about sexual abuse, we are talking about rape. We are talking about some extraordinarily serious issues.

Isela Banuelos: Exactly, but I think Department of Labor is in a place where they could be doing more to help identify because they are going into work places routinely. When you look at local law enforcement your prior experience, you know as a law enforcement official, it is not really in the routine of law enforcement to be going into work places and looking for crimes unless maybe somebody calls because they were assaulted for example.

Len Sipes: It’s a fascinating conversation. We are more than half way through the program and these programs do go by very quick because again I find this to be extraordinarily interesting. The report, “Understanding the Organization, Operation, Victimization Process of Labor Trafficking in The United States” as put out by the Urban Institute www.urban.org. Back at our microphones we have Colleen Owens from the Urban Institute, we have Justin Breaux and we have Isela Banuelos, am I getting that correct.

Isela Banuelos: Banuelos.

Len Sipes: Banuelos, okay than you very much and again all from the Institute in conjunction with North Eastern University. Is this Department of Justice supported?

Isela Banuelos: Yes it was funded by the national institute of justice.

Len Sipes: Okay the National Institute of Justice, so some rather prestigious organizations are involved with this and I would imagine Justice is involved in this because they see a problem that nobody seems to be willing to deal with, am I right or wrong?

Colleen Owens: Well basically the study came about because we have been, you know the field has been doing research around human trafficking, I would say, for a little bit over the past decade. And what we have all sort of come to is that we know more, though we still need to know more, about sex trafficking but we really don’t know much about labor trafficking. Does this exist in the United States, what does it look at, how are people being victimized? And so the study came out of that question. And we know that if we wanted to find – our approach was to find cases that have actually been identified and to study those cases.

Len Sipes: You don’t have an empirical basis to make this statement but I have read a couple of your reports and certainly it is justifiable to suggest that you are talking about a couple of hundred thousand people, if not more in the United States who are going through this problem and it is criminal in nature, more than it is labor in nature. I mean, I am trying to set the stage for the person listening to this program who is trying to relate to this. Again, human trafficking, the conversation I had with other people surprised that there is human trafficking in the United States. It impacts more than just a couple of hundred people.

Colleen Owens: Sure absolutely. I mean some of the cases that we looked at actually we may have been reviewing, you know, the cases of one or two victims but in fact the actual labor trafficking case had hundreds of victims that were victimized through that one experience.

Len Sipes: That one experience but is there, we have to somehow in some way put some sort of, I mean people are trying to wrap their heads around what it is that we are talking about and they are sitting there now saying well this is horrible, this is disgusting I did not know about but again it is not really prevalent in the united States. It is, is it not?

Colleen Owens: Well we know that , you know thousands of people have been identified that have been victims of labor trafficking. And I think based on what we found out in our report in terms of how difficult it is for those folks that have actually come forward, to come forward, and all of the barriers that they face in doing so, it does raise question about the extent to which this is happening. And I think also we looked at, I think what was surprising to me was how systematic a lot of this is. That it’s, you know, a lot of the factors that are leading to the labor of folks, of workers being forced you know exist through a lot of these temporary work visa programs. Not to say that they should be cancelled but we that we really need to you know have some serious oversight and look into making some adjustments around these programs to, you know, limit the risk that the workers are facing coming in under those programs.

Len Sipes: But Justin the bottom line is that we, within the criminal justice system have got to start paying attention to this so it has got to be on our radar screen. We’ve got to be talking to our attorneys. We’ve got to be talking to experts. This isn’t anything that we can ignore. This is something that we just should be paying attention to.

JUSTIN BREAUX: Yes you are absolutely correct and in our interviews with law enforcement what we did find was, in fact, a lot of confusion about the issue. Oftentimes they referenced it as being a purely a labor issue. So yeah, there is the need there and there is the need to raise awareness within the public as well.

Len Sipes: And again this is why I am playing this card too many times resembling slavery taking place in America. I’m trying to get a point across that we are not talking about somebody working 60 hours instead of 40 hours in a factory, who is from another country.

JUSTIN BREAUX: So what we are talking about is for example one of our cases. A woman made a mistake, she was a domestic worker. The family, the traffickers said she made a mistake; she was not given food for four days. When she “stole” two pieces of chocolate, she was forced to stand from 4am to 6pm for the remainder of the day. So those are the types of situations we are talking about. Death threats things of that nature. “If you try to run I will shoot you.” I mean these are things that sort of came out in our findings.

Len Sipes: And again this is something, I think, is just happening way too much in the United States. So they got here from what countries, principally what Asia and Latin America?

Isela Banuelos: That’s correct yes.

Len Sipes: Okay and they got here through visas.

Isela Banuelos: Yes the majority of the people in our sample came here through a visa and 79% like actually don’t quote me, 71% yes and they were flying in. I mean if you are thinking about places like Latin America and Asia these are folks who are coming in through there.

Len Sipes: They are not coming across the Canadian line, walking across the Canadian or the Mexican border. They are flying in with a visa?

Isela Banuelos: That’s correct, yes.

Len Sipes: There is a certain point where most of their visas are now expired?

Isela Banuelos: Yes and that creates further challenges for escaping. Right? So you have a situation where someone did everything right to come into the country legally and now they are caught in a trafficking situation, and their visa has expired. So that’s just creating future challenges to contact law enforcement since they know that they are now unauthorized.

Len Sipes: Justin, go ahead.

JUSTIN BREAUX: One of the first things that the traffickers did upon arrival into the United States was actually seize those documents and that was one of their primarily mechanisms of control over their victims.

Len Sipes: Alright, they believe because their visa has expired that they cannot go to law enforcement, they cannot escape because their visas have expired they are simply going to be deported back to the countries that they came from?

Isela Banuelos: Yeah, that is one of the many challenges that they have to overcome and I think there is also physical barriers. You are talking about people who work in agriculture. We are talking about folks who live in very rural parts in the country and you know it is going to take miles and miles until they come into contact. With some other folks who are in domestic work that is illegal in the privacy of someone’s home and don’t have any contact with anyone. They are under constant surveillance and so how do you create an opportunity for them to access other people?

Len Sipes: And how do they escape.

Isela Banuelos: So the majority of our people in our sample, 59% escaped by running away and the second most common way of escape was through the support of a friend. And you know I think it is important to recognize that for folks who have to be under constant surveillance and there is physical barriers, there is psychosocial abuse from the traffickers and there is a very complicated relationship with law enforcement because of their immigration status, they are relaying on narrowed windows of surveillance to escape. You know we had a situation where a women, you know the trafficker left the door open and she just ran out and waved down a cab. That was one of the stories we heard and for other folks who are working in maybe a more populated setting like hospitality, they are relying on a network or support of friends or colleagues who can help them, you know be more strategic about their exit. Helping them find a way to escape. So it’s, I can’t emphasis the importance of bystanders in this process of escape. A lot of times it took just someone you know to stop someone in the street and say like, “You know, there is something off. What is going on here?” and them having, you know, the power to contact law enforcement to check on the situation and I think that is really, really important.

Len Sipes: Nobody is taking them; nobody from the criminal justice system is taking them back to the trafficker are they? They are not making that mistake are they?

JUSTIN BREAUX: Well so we did have one person that we interviewed and she actually was able to call 911 and when law enforcement arrived they interviewed both the trafficker and the victim and they sided with the trafficker and actually told the victim that if she called law enforcement or 911 again, she would go to prison.

Colleen Owens: Yes, exactly and there was another case where an agricultural worker was shot at by the trafficker farmer and basically then he was arrested and put into deportation proceedings because his visa had expired. And it’s all as a result of the trafficking experience that happens.

Len Sipes: I’m just hoping that people who have listened long enough to this program at this stage of the game are now beginning to get a sense as to what we mean by human trafficking. I just get the sense that it is not taken seriously. And it’s – people see it as a matter of a labor dispute, it’s not. It’s bondage, it’s bondage in the United States. All right, so what is the role of the public to get them to understand how difficult this is? What should we do? Not just the criminal justice system but the general public.

Colleen Owens: Well I think as Isela mentioned, one of the things that we found that was so important was the role of bystanders and how much they were actually involved. And sometimes there was unrealized opportunities for escape. So. you know, we heard from survivors that for example they were out cutting the grass with scissors, you know, a domestic worker at 4am. And a neighbor was coming home and saw that and they tried to reach out and maybe they had, you know, limited English capacity but they were at least able to communicate that something was wrong and it was an unrealized opportunity for escape.

Other stories we heard they would, you know, ask neighbors for help but they might say, “I don’t want to get involved.” So there were these opportunities where folks were reaching out. What’s really key to understand, I think, and what is different in some cases from what we see with sex trafficking is that in our sample at least of labor trafficking victims, about 96% of all of the victims that we looked at in our case files actually realized something was wrong and they didn’t call it labor trafficking, they didn’t say, “I’m a victim of labor trafficking” but often they would say things like “I realize I am being tricked and I realize that I am being coerced” and so I think that is an opportunity where they are reaching out for help. They do realize something is wrong and it is getting the resources and the awareness out there so that we can actually capitalize on that and get people the help that they need.

Len Sipes: But maybe it’s the term. I mean I am not even quite sure that I understand and I have been in the criminal justice system for 45 years. I mean I’m not quite sure I understand labor trafficking. Human trafficking gets me somewhat to where I need to be and that is why I am constantly brining up this sense of bondage because that, that’s what we are talking about. So isn’t that what we need to get across to the American Public? I mean we are talking about human beings in bondage.

Colleen Owens: Right, but I think we also need to pay close attention to the psychological forms of coercion because sometimes the focus on bondage is important and it’s important to underscore the fact that, you know, people are laboring against their will but sometimes they think people get hung up because they might see a case, for example, of a domestic worker and they might say, “Well why don’t they just leave?”
Or, “They’re a farmer, why don’t they just leave, why do they stay?” and it is really important to understand all of the mechanisms that are being used against them to compel them to stay. The difference with slavery of the past is that people aren’t in chains for the most part but there are other forms of coercion that are being used to keep them in bondage, so –

Len Sipes: But the same question is being asked of domestic violence victims and I am not going to suggest that the question is repulsive. I understand that the question may be somewhat natural but they don’t understand all the complexities involved in this and this bondage. This is psychological bondage in terms of domestic violence. It sounds exactly the same things is happening here. You can entrap a human being in chains but those chains could be psychological. If the trafficker is going to say that your kids are going to be sold off or, you know, “I am going to make sure that your family back in Guatemala goes through utter and complete hell and I am going to make sure that they have no livelihood if you continue fighting me.” That is just as strong of a chain.

Colleen Owens: Right, exactly and back to your original question I mean it’s important then for the public to understand that and so awareness campaigns need to be created that really highlight not just, “are you a victim of labor trafficking” but “have you experienced these thing and if so, you know here is the number to call.”

Len Sipes: You know, again it is just an amazing report. Understanding the organization, operation and victimization process of labor trafficking in the United States. Our guests today: Colleen you bring a sense of real insight in terms of this so it is the second time you have been here but you are always welcome back.

Colleen Owens: Thank you.

Len Sipes: Justin and Isela both of you guys, I really appreciate you being here, again it a program or a research effort by the North Eastern University by the Urban Institute and by the US Department of Justice. You can find the report on the website of the Urban Institute: www.urban.org. Ladies and gentlemen this is DC Public Safety, we appreciate your comments, we even appreciate you criticisms and we want everybody to have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

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Human Trafficking-The Urban Institute

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2014/04/human-trafficking-urban-institute/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s show examines human trafficking. Research shows that there’s a common misperception about human trafficking. Most believe that it’s something that happens predominately outside of the US, not in our own backyards. Research from the Urban Institute tells us why so many human trafficking cases slip through the justice system and where new efforts could make a difference. Our guest today is Colleen Owens. She is a Research Associate with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center where she directs several national and international research projects on human trafficking spanning eight countries and five continents. She currently leads a National Institute of Justice study to examine the organization, operation, and victimization of trafficking in the Unites States. Colleen Owens, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Colleen Owens:  Thank you very much for having me.

Len Sipes:  Colleen, this is just an extraordinarily important topic, because as I told you before we hit the record button, I was talking to a friend of mine who said, “What’s the topic of today’s radio show?” and I said, “Human trafficking in the Unites States.” And he said, “Human trafficking in the Unites States; is there human trafficking in the Unites States?” So answer the question for my friend.

Colleen Owens:  Yes, absolutely. There is human trafficking in the United States. I think unfortunately that’s not an uncommon reaction. I think it happens more than people realize. And there are reasons why a lot of people in the United States don’t think that it actually happens here. The way that I often describe it is that it’s sort of hidden in plain sight and that even cases that do come forward and are identified by our criminal justice system will still become hidden in the criminal justice system later on. And we can get into reasons why that is.

Len Sipes:  If you take a look at the research on rape, and it’s something undoubtedly that you have and I know Urban has over the course of years, it’s so underreported. I would imagine this equals that degree of non-reporting.

Colleen Owens:  Exactly. And I think there are differences when you look at sex trafficking versus labor trafficking, both of which happen in the United States, and no community is immune to it. But what we found in our research is that very low percentages of victims actually self-identify and come forward to law enforcement and report themselves as being victimized by labor or sex trafficking, and there are a lot of reasons why that is. So for sex trafficking victims, for example, they might perceive themselves to actually complicit in the crime of prostitution. They might view themselves, instead of being victims, they might view themselves as being criminals, violating our prostitution laws, regardless of the fact that they’re forced or that there’s fraud or coercion used to compel them into that.

Len Sipes:  So they see themselves as vulnerable to the criminal justice system. They don’t see the criminal justice system as being necessarily on their side. They see them as potentially victims of the criminal justice system.

Colleen Owens:  Yeah. That’s part of it, the other issue is, so both US citizen victims as well as foreign nationals in our country are victimized by labor and sex trafficking. And so for US citizen victims they don’t have the issue that, for example, foreign nationals might have where they might be undocumented either prior to the trafficking or as a result of the trafficking they become undocumented, and so they might fear that coming forward would mean that they’d be put in jail for being undocumented.

Len Sipes:  The website for the Urban Institute, www.urban.org. They’ve been before our microphones many times in the past and we hope many times in the future. Look for human trafficking on their website. Colleen, do we have a sense as to the extent of the problem in the United States and throughout the world?

Colleen Owens:  Yeah. Prevalence is the biggest question; it’s also the biggest unanswered question. The best statistics that we actually do have are from the International Labor Organization and they estimate that approximately 21.9 million individuals around the world become victims of labor and sex trafficking.

Len Sipes:  Wait a minute, 21.9 million, so 22 million human beings.

Colleen Owens:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  22 million human beings are victims of sex or labor trafficking.

Colleen Owens:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  And explain to me what is sex trafficking and what is labor trafficking.

Colleen Owens:  So there’re a variety of laws, but within the United States our federal law, which is the TVPA, was passed in 2000, it’s been reauthorized several times, and all states now actually have state laws against human trafficking. Sometimes those state laws vary in term of the definition and also the criminalization of human trafficking. But the TVPA, our federal law, defines human trafficking as essentially the use force, fraud, or coercion to compel a person into labor or services, and so that can be two broadly different things, so compelling a person into forced labor situations or into forced commercial sex situations.

Len Sipes:  Okay. So we’re talking about, what, principally labor or sex do we know?

Colleen Owens:  I’m sorry.

Len Sipes:  Are we talking about principally people being forced into labor situations or sexual situations or do we know?

Colleen Owens:  We don’t know actually. So there’s what the available statistics tell us, and that is one piece of the puzzle. So the available statistics are few and far between, but when you look at investigations that local, state, federal law enforcement have undertaken into human trafficking, they’re primarily investigations into sex trafficking.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

Colleen Owens:  So that might lead some people to believe that sex trafficking is more prevalent. However, through the research that I’ve done and that I’ve done with colleagues from Northeastern University we’ve looked at, we’ve gone into communities and we’ve spoken with criminal justice actors and what we found is that primarily criminal justice actors are operationalizing human trafficking as sex trafficking and mostly sex trafficking of minors. So that means if they are looking for these cases, which is a big if, they’re primarily looking for sex trafficking of minors, and they’re not proactively out there looking for labor trafficking in communities, for the most part.

Len Sipes:  Do we have any sense, with this 22 million worldwide; do we have any sense as to the extent of victimization in the United States?

Colleen Owens:  We really don’t know. We don’t have good statistics on that. There’ve been a few attempts to get an accurate measure that have been unsuccessful. I think like a lot of crimes you’d mentioned earlier, like rape for example –

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  It’s unreported.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  And so those that actually do come forward and report cases that go forward in the criminal justice system are always going to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the prevalence.

Len Sipes:  But feel free to push back –

Colleen Owens:  Sure.

Len Sipes:  If it’s not valid to make this assumption. But is it proper to suggest that out of the 22 million certainly we could say that millions of people in the United States are victims of sex trafficking and labor trafficking, is that possible to extrapolate to the Unites States?

Colleen Owens:  So the International Labor Organization, which came up with that number, estimated that when you look at the United States as well as other EU, or what I think they called industrialized –

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  Nations, they estimated that 1.5 million victims of labor and sex trafficking were in those countries.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

Colleen Owens:  So within the Unites States we still don’t have a good count of how many victims are in our country.

Len Sipes:  Why is it that – we’re talking about something despicable, we’re talking about something disgusting, we’re talking about I’m assuming female victims.

Colleen Owens:  Both men and women, as well as children.

Len Sipes:  Does one category lead the other?

Colleen Owens:  No. And you do start to see differences when you look at labor trafficking versus sex trafficking. But again, sometimes the numbers that we see are more as a result of investigative priorities and available services and outreach to communities. And that influences who you see coming forward.

Len Sipes:  I’m making the assumption, and quickly tell me where I’m wrong or it’s not supported at all, but the overwhelming majority of what we call the sexual assault problem in the United States is male perpetrators and female victims. I do understand that males are subject to being raped, males are subject to being sexually abused, but it’s principally male perpetrators, female victims. So I can’t make that assumption here?

Colleen Owens:  Well, with sex trafficking what we’ve been seeing is that primarily the offenders been coming forward through the criminal justice system are male, but we’ve seen an increasing trend in female offenders as well.

Len Sipes:  Huh.

Colleen Owens:  And so this is a real grey area for a lot of criminal justice actors. Law enforcement officials that we’ve spoken with have talked about you have a situation where traffickers are victimizing for example female victims and then over a period of time those victims then are sort of groomed in a sense to become offenders. And so they’re used by the trafficker to then recruit other victims and to also enforce the rules and keep the victims compliant. And so they’re sort of in this victim and offender category.

Len Sipes:  So help me put it in perspective, and, again, pushback, because you’ve made, said very clearly that this is very difficult to put numbers and groups regarding this problem within context. But what we are talking about is either labor, and I’m going to stereotype now, tell me where I’m wrong, of where the person works in the house, the person is brought in from another country, the person is recruited within the United States, the person is taken to a house, the person acts as a sort of a servant within the house, or the person is recruited for sexual activities and they’re held in bondage almost and they’re moved from one location to another location. So what we’re talking about is bondage, what we’re talking about is trafficking human beings in the most significant and serious ways. We’re not talking about finding somebody for prostitution. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of people who are either coming in from outside of the country or being recruited inside of the country for sex bondage or for labor bondage, are we not?

Colleen Owens:  Yes. No. That’s exactly what it is. I mean I think at the root of our trafficking laws, they’re actually rooted in 13th Amendment principles of slavery. And so often you hear human trafficking described as modern day slavery. But really what is at the heart of it is that somebody is being, their labor is being used against their will, that person’s freedom is being denied.

Len Sipes:  I remember reading some of the literature, or the list of the literature that you provided before the program, and the word slavery did come to mind and I’m saying to myself, “Why is the word slavery not in here? Is it too politically incorrect of a word?” I don’t know where to take this topic. I’m trying to be fair and slice it right down the middle. But it strikes me as being disgusting and despicable, and it strikes me as being slavery, it strikes me as human bondage. In the cases that I’ve been exposed to throughout the criminal justice system, I’m going to be stereotypical I suppose, the women involved were held in psychological and physical bondage, they were told that if they left they would be killed, their families would be killed, they would be injured, they were threatened, they felt that they had no place to go. I mean is that what we’re talking about?

Colleen Owens:  Yeah. No. That is definitely part of what we’re talking about. I think another part where sometimes to be honest there is sort of a wide variety of different stakeholders within the anti-trafficking movement. And sometimes what you do see is that there are arguments or discussions about sort of the role of prostitution versus sex trafficking and when does something become trafficking versus when is somebody voluntarily involved in prostitution. And so –

Len Sipes:  Well, is anybody ever voluntarily involved in prostitution?

Colleen Owens:  That’s a good question. It’s sort of what our laws say and how our laws are enforced. But, yeah, I mean that a question that people debate.

Len Sipes:  I mean I know it’s legal in certain areas of the country, but for the vast majority of my exposure throughout my years within the criminal justice system, prostitution has been, I can’t use the word, “If you don’t do this and if you don’t comply with me and if you don’t give me 60% of what it is that you make, I’m going to kill you.”

Colleen Owens:  Yeah. No. That is –

Len Sipes:  I mean that to me is –

Colleen Owens:  That is 100% of trafficking situation.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

Colleen Owens:  So it’s that a person is using force, fraud, or coercion. And if you’re under the age of 18 then our laws say that you don’t have to show force fraud or coercion, because the thought is that if you’re under the age of 18 you can’t voluntarily consent to the commercial sex act.

Len Sipes:  All right, are these – I’m sorry, I may have asked this question already – are these outside of the United States coming into the Unites States or recruited within the United States?

Colleen Owens:  So it’s both. So US citizens as well as foreign nationals are both groups that are victimized by human trafficking. So when you look at sex trafficking in the Unites States, US citizen victims are involved. So you have for example runaway homeless youth that are often on the street looking for a place to stay and somebody might approach them and say, “If you do x, y, and z, I’ll give you a place to stay.” And so in our laws actually we say that exchanging anything of value, so it doesn’t actually even have to be money that’s being paid, but offering someone a place to sleep or food to eat can actually be used to coerce a person into sex trafficking.

Len Sipes:  So we’re talking about very vulnerable human beings –

Colleen Owens:  Yes.

Len Sipes:  To begin with, either outside of the United States or inside of the United States. Those vulnerabilities are played on, they’re exploited, and suddenly the person ends up in bondage. And by that I mean a situation that they cannot extract themselves out of and they’re afraid to go to the authorities because they’re afraid that they may be implicated in crimes.

Colleen Owens:  Right. And I think so there’s a really important piece of what you said, this is that they feel that they’re in bondage, and I think that is often a misperception, and you see that really affects cases, even when they go forward, if they go forward in the criminal justice system, which is, well, this victim wasn’t being held in chains, they weren’t locked in a basement, therefore they could’ve left. But understanding the psychological coercion that goes into compelling a person to do things against their will is very important, and our laws protect people against that, but actually proving those cases in court and holding offenders that use primarily psychological means of coercion is very difficult.

Len Sipes:  Okay. We’re going to go back to my original question then in terms of public misperception, in terms what a person asks me about the radio show, the topic of my radio show, and I said human trafficking, and they’re going, “Where?” And I’m saying, “In the United States.” And so, but we’re going to reintroduce you. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today is Colleen Owens. She is a Research Associate with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center where she directs several national and international research projects on human trafficking. The website for the Urban Institute is www.urban.org. So, Colleen, let’s go back to that question once again. If it is as you describe and if we know that 22 million human beings are involved and within the western industrialized world, the United States, Canada, and the EU, you’re talking about at least one to two million human beings. This is a significant and serious problem in the Unites States that we don’t recognize as a significant and serious problem, correct?

Colleen Owens:  Yes and no. So I think we do recognize it as a significant and serious problem in the sense that so in 2000 we passed a federal, it was the first federal to actually criminalize human trafficking. I should mention that human trafficking is not a new crime; it’s a crime that has existed for –

Len Sipes:  Centuries.

Colleen Owens:  Forever, for centuries.

Len Sipes:  Yes.

Colleen Owens:  It’s just a newly defined crime and there are new penalties to combat it. It’s being taken seriously in the United States and many other foreign countries. At the time that the US law was passed this was also the same time that the Palermo Protocol was passed. So this was a sort of international movement to really take this crime seriously and to not only hold offenders accountable, but to create and provide services for those victimized by the crime. Since 2000, all states in the United States have passed laws to criminalize human trafficking, but laws vary, some states don’t criminalize sex trafficking, some have different definitions of labor trafficking, for example. So on the one hand we have taken it very seriously, but our research shows that we have a long way to go and these laws aren’t actually being enforced as they should be. So a lot needs to be done in terms of more awareness and resources to identify victims to hold offenders accountable and to provide services for those victims.

Len Sipes:  A tough, tough topic. I mean where does the criminal justice system need to go with this? I mean I’ve spent the first half of the program trying to understand the degree and the extent of the program for myself. I’m not quite sure that everybody – when you say prostitution, people very rarely ever come to grips with the fact that these are victims that are slapped, punched, threatened, have a gun held to their head, they’re in bondage. It’s just people say the word “prostitution” they really don’t understand how nasty it is for the lives of the individuals involved. So you say human trafficking, the words human trafficking roll off the tongue, and thank you very much for helping me create the context for the first half of the program. What must the criminal justice system do, in terms of the second half of the program, what must we do, and what should society do across the board, because I will constantly go back to that conversation, “What do you mean there’s human trafficking in the United States?”, so?

Colleen Owens:  Right. So that’s a big question with a lot of answers, but I mean I think first and foremost those that are in charge of enforcing our laws should be made aware of what those laws are, there needs to be a lot more training, and it needs to be on the state and local level. The federal government does do training on human trafficking and it is very helpful and they should continue to do that. But we really need more state and local training that involves both investigators, as well as prosecutors working together to understand what their laws are and then how to operationalize those laws. So what evidence do you need to collect to be able to take a case forward and prove it in court? What indicators do law enforcement need to be aware of to identify that that person is actually a victim of crime and not arrest those victims and charge them as criminals. So in sex trafficking cases, for example, victims may be arrested and charged with prostitution and in labor trafficking cases victims may be arrested and charged and placed into deportation proceedings if they’re here and they’re undocumented. And so there really needs to be a lot more awareness for criminal justice system actors. The other piece of it actually is we need to actually create spaces in the criminal justice system to bring these cases forward. So in our study that we conducted with Northeastern University on challenges investigating and prosecuting human trafficking, we found that there were actually no state labor trafficking prosecutions in our study.

Len Sipes:  What?

Colleen Owens:  And when we went to local state prosecutors and asked them about what would happen if a labor trafficking case came to your desk, they actually said, “We don’t what we would do with it. We don’t know who would actually take that case.” And so there really aren’t actors in place in our system in many ways that are even in charge of finding these cases and then bringing them forward, and the same is true with investigating labor trafficking. So we’re doing a study right now that will be released in the summer and we’re finding in our study that those victimized by labor trafficking in our sample anyway are primarily from other countries, they’re either here undocumented or they were – a significant percentage of our sample was actually brought into the United States on temporary work visa programs, they were promised certain jobs, certain hours, certain wage, some of them were promised that if they remained in the job for a certain period of time that they would have their visa extended and they could get a green card. That of course was all fraudulent –

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Colleen Owens:  And never happened, and then the person finds themself undocumented. But when you look at local law enforcement, for example, and you compare sort of the investigations of sex trafficking versus labor trafficking, sex trafficking, while there’s still a long way to go in terms of investigating those crimes, law enforcement at least has been in the business of doing investigations into prostitution.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  So they sort of it’s now requiring them to take a step back and ask, “Is this person in this situation willingly? Is this actually their choice? Are they being forced?” So that change is happening slowly. But when you look at labor trafficking, local law enforcement has never been in the business of enforcing workplace regulations or something that would even be similar to a labor trafficking situation. That’s been the business of the civil justice system, so Department of Labor. But the Department of Labor is not able to open cases criminally. So they’re not always trained to look for criminal elements. They might identify back wages, they might identify workplace hazards, but they are not trained to pull together all the criminal elements that amount to a labor trafficking situation and that would make it distinct from just, I don’t want to say just labor exploitation, because that is serious, but sort of taking it to that next step.

Len Sipes:  I’ve interviewed dozens of women in the criminal justice system who have been caught up in the criminal justice system, and I’ve interviewed them at these microphones, and I’ve interviewed them on television shows. And when I sit down with them, either before or when we hit the record button, it is routinely this, it is, and this is going to be very stereotypical, I apologize for it, but this is what I hear over and over and over again, that the women are involved in the criminal justice system in probably, I’m going to guess, 60% to 70% of the cases where a male is forcing them to move drugs. A male is forcing them to be engaged in criminal activity, and they’re doing it through physical violence, through threat, through literally a gun pointed to the head.

And these are women who’re coming from histories of sexual violence, histories of sexual abuse themselves. So they go out and they’re involved in all this criminal activity and then they’re saying to themselves, “How can I extract myself from this? How can I get out of this, because I’ve been doing drug dealing? I’m running huge amounts of drugs down the interstate 95 corridor. I carry guns. I carry false IDs. I’m just as vulnerable as the people who’re making me do this.” So they don’t come forward. So when they get caught up in the criminal justice system we find when we have them under supervision on parole and probation here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, that in many cases they are just as much victims as perpetrators. We have them on a drug charge and they come out of the prison system and we find that they’ve lived terrible lives. They’re just as much victims as anybody else in the process, even though they committed federal trafficking, drug trafficking laws. So I’m assuming that that carries over to this topic.

Colleen Owens:  Yeah. I often actually – sometimes you hear people describing the phenomenon of human trafficking through a supply and demand framework, and while I think that is valid, I actually prefer to describe through where vulnerabilities meet exploitation type of a framework. And I’ve done research in many other countries as well and I find that the phenomenon sort of looks the same through that lens no matter where you go. So it involves asking yourself in this local context, in this city in the United States, in this village in Cambodia, what are the vulnerabilities and where is the exploitation happening, where are people taking advantage of those vulnerabilities? And so for example with labor trafficking in the US, US citizens one would think they might not be at risk of labor trafficking because often a tool is to use someone’s undocumented status against them.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  But in fact there was just a big case that came out that was reported by the New York Times of US citizens with disabilities that were forced to work in a turkey processing plant for 30 years. And so we are seeing that, US citizen victims with disabilities. There are other cases, there was one in Philadelphia as well, are being used for labor trafficking scenarios. And then the same is true with sex trafficking. A lot of the vulnerabilities and the past histories of abuse are there for sex trafficking victims. You see a lot of runaway youth, a lot of youth that have been caught up prior in the criminal justice system, they may have been arrested for quality of life issues, they may have had previous records being charged with prostitution, even though technically those should be sex trafficking charges if they were under 18, or they should’ve been treated as sex trafficking victims if they were under 18. But you do see a lot of these past histories of abuse and vulnerability. And I think what really needs to happen on the front end is being able to identify those factors sooner and develop programs to prevent a lot of that from happening, because it’s as much addressing the sort of demand side of holding offenders accountable, as it is addressing the supply side, and identifying what vulnerabilities are leading victims, are sort of leading to people being victimized and how do we address those vulnerabilities?

Len Sipes:  The criminal justice system needs to understand that people are not coming forward; they’re not escaping these situations, because they feel vulnerable. The victims themselves feel vulnerable. The victims themselves believe that there’s a possibility that they’re going to be prosecuted. So that’s one of the big reasons why they don’t come forward and that’s one of the things that we have to do was to make sure that we have the sensitivity and the wherewithal and the knowledge to reach out to these individuals and offer them immunity from prosecution as long as they help us prosecute the bad guys.

Colleen Owens:  Right. And some states actually have passed on the side of minor victims of trafficking, sex trafficking, they’ve passed what’s known as safe harbor laws. So basically stating, passing additional laws that you cannot be charged crimes, quote, “crimes that are committed as a result of your victimization”. But we don’t have a lot of those laws for, for example, victims of labor trafficking that may be charged with crimes pursuant to their labor trafficking situation.

Len Sipes:  But we have a criminal justice system that sees itself as overburdened, overwhelmed. We have a criminal justice system that’s having an extraordinarily hard time processing the day to day burglaries, robberies, sexual assaults, homicides. There’s criticism directed toward cities throughout the United States and urban areas in terms of their inability to prosecute. So when something like this comes along they’re saying to themselves, “I don’t have the resources –”

Colleen Owens:  Exactly.

Len Sipes:  “For this type of investigation.” Is it a matter that they’re not looking for it because they don’t have the resources?

Colleen Owens:  It’s sort of a self-perpetuating cycle I guess you could say. They’re not looking for it because they don’t have the resources, and they don’t have the resources because they’re not looking for it.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  So, right, I mean we hear that often that we need more resources, we need more resources.

Len Sipes:  More training.

Colleen Owens:  Exactly, more training. You need agencies to prioritize this, because exactly as you said, you may have people calling about the fact that their cars were broken into, and so that sort of leads the priorities, right?

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  When you see what’s going on in your community and you’re making those calls for service. This is a crime that does not rely on calls for service for the most part.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Colleen Owens:  And yet when we speak with law enforcement their main approach to investigating this is to wait for calls to come in. And so it’s not being investigated basically.

Len Sipes:  But we do, I mean in general, we within the criminal justice system and society in general do need to understand that this does exist in the United States, it is an ongoing problem, it involves literally millions of human beings, and we have to take this seriously and we have to be looking for this.

Colleen Owens:  Exactly. I think if we’re a country that believes in freedom, then this is something that we need to take seriously. And it’s a serious human rights abuse. And people in our country are being abused by traffickers. And they engage in it, because for the most part it’s very low-risk.

Len Sipes:  Colleen Owens, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you were on the show today and that the Urban Institute is taking this on. Congratulations to the Urban Institute for taking a very tough topic, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Supervision and Treatment of Sex Offenders-DC Public Safety Television

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2013/03/supervision-and-treatment-of-sex-offenders-dc-public-safety-television/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi, and welcome to DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s show is on the supervision and treatment of sex offenders and there are few topics that gather more media and criminological interest than sex offenders. It’s our contention at my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, that we employ state-of-the-art strategies for the supervision of sex offenders. To discuss national standards on sex offenders, we are proud to have Scott Matson, Senior Policy Advisor, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, and also we have Thomas Williams, the Associate Director of Community Supervision Services. Again from my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and to Scott and Tom, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Scott Matson: Well, thanks for having me.

Tom Williams: Thank you.

Len Sipes: It’s an important topic and a complicated topic, and people really are interested in this whole concept of sex offenders. Scott, the first question goes to you. Who are sex offenders?

Scott Matson: Well thanks, Len. That’s a good question. It’s a tough one too because what we know is that there isn’t a typical offender. They can come from any walk of life, all walks of life. They can be focused just on children. They can be focused on adults only. They can be focused on women. They can be focused on little girls, little boys. They could cross over as well. So to say that there’s one type of sex offender just isn’t quite accurate.

Len Sipes: But when you talk to somebody in the public, when you say “sex offender,” they immediately have a stereotype in their minds as to who that person is, and one of the ideas and one of the reasons for doing the show today is to get across the complexity of what we’re calling the sex offender and the difficulty in terms of supervising that person and treating that person.

Scott Matson: That’s right, and most people think of the sex offender as a stranger, somebody who might jump out of a bush to steal a child or rape a woman. We know that that’s just not what most sex offenders are. Most sex offenders are known to their victims. Most sex offenders commit their offenses within the context of a relationship, which again, makes it very easy for the sex offender to manipulate the victim in those contexts because they know their victims.

Len Sipes: That’s a key issue; they know their victims in the majority of cases. The majority of child sex offenders know their victim, the majority of victims know their offender, the majority of people say in say rape settings, sexual assault settings, it happens in their home or the home of the offender. So it’s not the stereotype of the woman cutting through the alley and getting raped, although that does happen. The bulk of it per data that just came out happens within a residential setting amongst somebody who they know.

Scott Matson: That’s right, and that makes supervision strategies and treatment strategies very important to tailor them to the type of offender that you know you have in your midst, the offender that’s on your caseload. Once they’re caught and convicted, then you know a little bit more about them but until they’re caught and convicted, you really don’t know who they are.

Len Sipes: And Tom, that’s one of the reasons why, when you do – you’re in charge of Supervision Services at Court Services and Offender Supervision, and we have 16,000 offenders on any given day, 25,000 offenders in any given year – on any given day there’s about 700, round it off, sex offenders that you’re in charge of supervising, and you start off with what, some sort of an analysis as to who that person is to get to the complexity issue that Scott just raised.

Tom Williams: Well, that’s very true, and this dovetailing with what Scott was mentioning, the sex offenders can come from any walk of life, so there isn’t one particular individual that somebody should be concerned about or one particular profile that someone could be concerned about. What the public really needs to understand is that they just have to have high-level vigilance with regards to who they have in their midst, whether it’s a child if you’re going to drop them off at the daycare or with the little league, and so that there’s certain standards that these organizations have to have with regards to checking on the backgrounds of folks in boy scouts and things like that, leaders. But the other things that really can help the public with regards to staying vigilant is there’s a sex offender registry that’s open to the public, that anyone can go online if they have access to a computer. They actually go and see, is this person that I’m involved in, is he really on the rolls of criminal justice, is he known to criminal justice. And in some of our outreach to public school systems, for an example, we also really encourage them to make sure that they do check the sex offender registry, certainly as a higher requirement in terms of checking the background of an individual, but that’s something that’s very quick that they can do, just go to the registry, run an application, and then check and see if the person’s listed.

Len Sipes: And we’re going to have you on the second half with Dr. Celena Gates to talk about the treatment, and again, the supervision and treatment of sex offenders. But Scott, we talked about the fact that we have 700. Here we’re talking about somewhere in the ballpark of people under parole and probation supervision throughout the country currently, not the past but currently, and we’re about 200,000?

Scott Matson: That’s correct according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, yes.

Len Sipes: Okay, and there’s about over 700,000 people on sex offender registries?

Scott Matson: Somewhere around 720,000 that are registered in the U.S.

Len Sipes: So that’s an immense number of people.

Scott Matson: Yes.

Len Sipes: And we in the criminal justice system, we’re responsible for public safety number one, but that’s an immense task for both of us, so let me talk a little bit about that because Tom brought it up and I think the public wants to understand, what do we tell parents, what do we tell individuals, principally women? The vast majority of people who are victimized, sexually victimized, are women although men are sexually victimized as well but it’s 80% I think and higher women who are sexually abused, children who are sexually abused, so let’s start off with parents. What do we tell the parents about age-appropriate conversations, letting them know that they can always come to them and have a conversation about what happened to them?

Scott Matson: That’s right, and the thing you have to stress the most is for the parents to be involved in the children’s lives so they know who they’re talking to, so they know who they’re around all the time, they know who’s paying a lot of attention to them, and as you mentioned, age-appropriate conversations. I think it’s important to start early. I think a lot of advocates in this area, in the sexual assault prevention realm, will talk about starting as young as 4 or 5, and getting them to talk about this is part of a safety kinds of planning, and continuing that conversation as they get older and into their teens, and eventually into adulthood. – Ways of protecting themselves, families, it’s always a good idea to come up with a safety plan and what to do if something might happen to a child or youth in the house. There’s some really good resources out there too for this, and I’m not speaking of anything of the work I’ve done necessarily but there are lots of good advocacy organizations out there that have done really good work.

Len Sipes: And we’re going to put up the website.

Scott Matson: Yeah. I think you’re going to put up our website, which is smart.gov, and I would like to make a plug also for the National Sex Offender Public Website. Tom mentioned DC’s public website. There’s a National Sex Offender Public Website where you can search from one place all the registries throughout the entire country.

Len Sipes: Exactly, and we’ll put that website on the program throughout the program so people can have access to that. – But it’s principally age-appropriate conversations. The child must know that he or she can say anything to their parents because in some cases, a sex offender will commit the act and say that your parents will never love you again if you tell your parents this.

Scott Matson: That’s right. That’s a common theme in grooming behaviors with sex offenders, especially child molesters.

Tom Williams: I think the message should go a little bit further than just parents because a lot of times the child may not be in a position to actually talk to the parents so an adult, someone that they have trust with.

Len Sipes: Okay. Good point.

Tom Williams: It might be a minister in a church or a deacon in a church, or it could be a school teacher, or someone that they really feel close to that they can then relay that information to, a police officer for an example. A lot of police officers do a lot of outreach in school systems right now, so I think instead of saying parents, because certainly you want the child to go to the parent if possible but sometimes the child may not be in a position to feel comfortable about that and so any adult, any responsible adult, I should say, would qualify that, that they should be speaking.

Len Sipes: Good point, good point. And any adult that the child trusts.

Tom Williams: Right.

Len Sipes: In terms of older individuals, again, it’s whose home you go into. It’s who you let into your home. The vast majority of these per research just the other day were committed within residential settings, not necessarily the stereotype, although it does happen, like I said, the stereotype of walking through the back of the alley. It’s happening in homes so it is a matter of who you trust, is it not?

Scott Matson: Right. It’s again, who’s in your life, and most of those crimes are committed in the context of a relationship.

Len Sipes: So a person has to know who they’re willing to trust, and understanding that if you don’t trust that person, don’t let them into your house, don’t go into their home.

Scott Matson: Right.

Tom Williams: That’s a very good point, and that gives my message about vigilance. The parents or significant others really have to be vigilant with regards to who’s involved with that child or in a relationship they’d like to establish as well. I mean, the vigilance is the key thing that we have to be ensured, that we want the public to be understanding.

Len Sipes: Okay. The other part of the program that I wanted to set up beyond the complexity of what we call the sex offender is the sense of national standards. Now Scott, you and I were talking before the program that there are no national standards. The American Probation and Parole Association, National Institute of Corrections, other organizations have come out with recommendations, and in terms of what it is that we in Parole and Probations should be doing in terms of supervising sex offenders, can you give me a sense as to what some of those are?

Scott Matson: Sure. Yeah, as you mentioned, there aren’t any national standards but there are recommendations and there are some things that research does show to be a little more effective.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Scott Matson: I think it really starts with the idea of what we call risk needs and responsivity that is assessing the risk of the offender, the risk that they pose to reoffend and the harm they might pose, then assessing what the needs are of the offender, both what they need to help them stop the behavior and what we need to do to make sure that they don’t continue to commit it.

Len Sipes: So we have to assess and figure out who they are —

Scott Matson: — and then finally develop intervention strategies, supervision plans, treatment plans that address their needs and the risk.

Len Sipes: Based upon that analysis as to who they are.

Scott Matson: Who they are, exactly, so who, what, and who, what, and how I think is a good way to think of it.

Len Sipes: But there has to be treatment involved to some degree for those people who are amenable to treatment?

Scott Matson: That’s right. I think that what most of the research says is that treatment is effective overall with sex offenders. There are some kinds of offenders that might be “lower risk,” quote-unquote, that might not benefit as much from treatment as the higher-risk or moderate-risk offenders but treatment is an integral part of any supervision strategy, any reentry strategy for sex offenders.

Len Sipes: But I would imagine some of those recommendations are going to be a small caseload. I mean, some parole and probation agencies carry 150, 200 people per one parole and probation agent. In the District of Columbia we call them Community Supervision Officers, so the caseload’s got to be appropriate.

Scott Matson: Right, and a lot of the jurisdictions that use more specialized kinds of supervision tactics for sex offenders will have much lower caseload sizes so we’re talking 25-to-1 or 20-to-1, sometimes with a surveillance officer as well to check in on the offender off-hours, and usually this is all involved with the treatment provider closely at hand so they are understanding what those supervision strategies are so they’re in constant communication with the supervision officers.

Len Sipes: It has to be done as a team. Where it’s appropriate, there’s no separation between supervision and treatment. It has to run hand-in-hand.

Scott Matson: It really does. They have talk to each other, they have to really collaborate, and in some jurisdictions, a polygraph examiner is also involved.

Len Sipes: A polygraph examiner. Tom, now the question goes to you, we do all that. That’s one of the things that I want to make clear is that the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, every national standard that’s ever been promulgated, your unit already does that. And how do you think it applies to sex offenders?

Tom Williams: That’s true, and what we’ve done is actually looked at the research and then, as the series of meetings within the organization, determine what’s the best way that we can actually manage this group when they come out. But one other point that I would like to say is certainly it’s a responsibility of the Supervision Agency to help manage and control this population when they come out but also it begins within the correctional setting as well. If you look at the 1.5 million folks who are incarcerated, about 10% or maybe 150,000 of them have been diagnosed or classified as sex offenders within the institution.

Len Sipes: Wow.

Tom Williams: Well, when you look at the lack of resources, that many of the state and maybe the federal systems don’t have because of budget cuts, we know that what gets cut first is naturally treatment but I think the institutions try to do a very good job in trying to identify folks who actually need services and then try to start that process right there. So when a person really comes into the institution from intake or reception, that’s when the identification has to happen and that’s when the plan really should start there to help that person before he actually gets distributed.

Len Sipes: So it has to be holistic across the board from the correctional institution to parole and probation but oftentimes that doesn’t happen.

Scott Matson: No. In an ideal world, that’s what would happen.

Len Sipes: That’s what would happen but that, I mean, that’s the unique part about our agency, and I’m sorry to use this as a forum to boast about our agency, but we do all that stuff now. Our offenders go to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and they’re a bit more resource advantaged than most correctional settings.

Tom Williams: That’s true, and then when those folks are actually identified within the institutional setting, prior to being released, then we work basically on a release plan or reentry plan for those individuals, and certainly there are halfway houses within the district where a person can transition from the maintaining institution to the community, you know, where they can go and then we kind of collaborate on those services. We get that information and send it to the institution, and then we follow-up on our cases when they come out.

Len Sipes: We only have a couple of minutes left. Let’s talk about how difficult this is. I can’t think of a more difficult caseload. I mean, I looked at a Google search this morning on the last couple days, these are national articles on sex offenders, there’s 50. I mean, this is just 50 in the last couple days. They’re a difficult population to supervise, correct, any one of you?

Tom Williams: Well, absolutely. This population is difficult but as Scott mentioned, the key thing for us is assessment. I mean, you have to determine the assessment right out front in terms of who you have. That’s where your information from the institutional side is actually transferred to the community supervision side so that we don’t be duplicating work that’s already been initiated and started; but once we actually do the identification through the assessment process, then as Scott mentioned, then we have to develop that plan of action and that’s where collaboration is key between supervision staff as well as the treatment staff with regards to what are the plans that we need to mitigate that risk for that individual, and it can’t be a one-size-fits all, it has to be specific to that individual and specific to that offense.

Len Sipes: And we have the resources here at Washington, D.C., to do that. Scott, a final sense as to the difficulty of offenders, the type of offender to supervise?

Scott Matson: Sure. I think that they can be quite difficult, and when you talk to a lot of probation officers who might be new to this or who didn’t receive any specialized training, they might say something along the lines, “Well, sex offenders are my easiest probation.”

Len Sipes: They’re compliant, aren’t they?

Scott Matson: Because they’ll oftentimes follow the rules, they don’t want to get in trouble; they don’t want to rock the boat.

Len Sipes: They could be grooming the officer; they could be grooming the psychologist.

Scott Matson: Exactly, just like they groom parents, they groom children, they could be grooming the treatment provider, they could be grooming the supervision officer. So again, it’s really crucial to do that assessment, to get involved in the offenders’ lives, and make sure you know what they’re doing.

Len Sipes: Scott, you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, look for us on the second half as we continue this extraordinarily interesting issue of the supervision and the treatment of sex offenders. Stay right there. We’ll be right back.

[Music Playing]

Second Half: Hi, and welcome back to DC Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes, and we continue to discuss sex offender supervision, and our guests for the second half are Thomas Williams, the Associate Director of Community Supervision Services, my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Dr. Celena Gates, CSOSA’s Director of Treatment for our Sex Offender Program, and Dr. Gates and Tom, welcome to DC Public Safety, and Tom, welcome back from the first half.  I can’t think, again, of a more difficult topic than this whole concept of sex offender management, sex offender treatment. We talked with Scott Matson on the first half from the Department of Justice to gain a sense of the enormity of this whole concept. You know, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that we consider sex offenders that we and the criminal justice system have to deal with. There are 700 in the District of Columbia. Treatment is an extraordinarily important part of the process. Treatment and supervision seem to go hand-in-hand. Dr. Gates, you came from a maximum-security prison, did you not, in terms of your background?

Dr. Celena Gates: I did. My first job was at a juvenile facility called Culpepper in Virginia, yeah.

Len Sipes: Wow, and so you came from that process to CSOSA?

Dr. Celena Gates: Not directly but I work in a private practice setting at this point that works with sex offenders so it was through that practice that we developed a relationship with CSOSA and provide the sex offender treatment services for that agency.

Len Sipes: So you’ve got a lot of experience as well as the academic training in terms of dealing with sex offenders.

Dr. Celena Gates: Oh absolutely, sure.

Len Sipes: Is this group of people as complex as we made it out on the first half because when I discuss sex offenders to friends, family, again, they have this image in their mind that’s pretty simplistic. It’s not simplistic at all, is it?

Dr. Celena Gates: Not at all, and this is the way that it should be discussed. It should be discussed as a complex group of people who are not homogenous, who have a lot of differences between them, and who are best handled when that’s well understood. It’s when the idea is that they are the same that people make mistakes and misjudgments, and don’t do what’s in the community’s best interest or for that matter the offender’s best interest.

Len Sipes: Right, and we talked about, Tom and I and Scott in the first half, about the assessment process and the crucial sense of getting to know who this person is because there’s such a huge difference between some who lays in wait – we call it in the criminal justice system “malice aforethought.” It’s planned. Their sexual assault is planned versus somebody who’s grooming a child over the course of months versus somebody who does the wrong thing, it’s clearly illegal, but we don’t have a history of sex or criminal offense for that person. That’s the level of complexity we’re dealing with, right?

Dr. Celena Gates: It is, and that level of complexity is a part of who they are. It’s also a part of how we treat them. It’s a part of their management. It’s a part of their future. Keeping those differences and those distinctions in mind is what contributes to the success of dealing with this population.

Len Sipes: Tom, our problem is that the public, all they want is safety. They want to be protected, they’re afraid of the sex offender, and when they hear – I mean again, when I talked about it in the first half, 50 articles from around the country on sex offenders basically doing something wrong over the course of the last couple – 50. They get a lot of publicity. When it happens to us, the media comes to me, comes to you, and says, “Why?” – And the people don’t seem to have a full grasp as to how difficult this is, how complex it is, and the resources you give to it.

Tom Williams: Well, that’s exactly right. In the public’s mind, if you put these folks away and throw away their key, they’d be just as happy but we recognize that you can’t really imprison folks for a long period of time.

Len Sipes: You can’t put everybody in prison. That’s impossible.

Tom Williams: No, you can’t, and punishment is not going to be sufficient to – well, punishment is sufficient to I guess suppress deviate behavior but eventually the person needs to get treatment. So our studies are indicating, in terms of the length of stay that folks have been in prison before they come out, you know, we have a much older population on the CSOSA with regards to sex offenses. Only 6% of our population are under 25 but a large majority of our population are between the age of 40 and 60 so you know they’ve spent significant periods of time incarcerated.  But when they come to us, the important thing that we attempt to do is we have our own assessment with regards to the risk to reoffend but when we also have collaborations with Dr. Gates and her group, there’s an additional assessment that’s done as well, so that establishment is looking at what’s that risk to that individual with regards to his future sex offending.

Len Sipes: And we have smaller caseloads, we use polygraph, we have specially-trained community supervision officers. What most people know as parole and probation agents, we call them community supervision officers in Washington, D.C. So the case load is fairly small, they’re well-trained, they use GPS surveillance in some cases, they use polygraph in some cases, correct, so we do it right is the point.

Tom Williams: Well, we do do it right but we are extremely fortunate with regard to the caliber of CSOs, of men and women that work in this particular program. First of all they have a passion for their work, which is really key, and they are well-educated with regards to their advanced degrees, and also they are well-educated with regards to additional training in this discipline. So they come to the agency with a wealth of knowledge, and we too increase that knowledge base while they’re with us. But the important thing that really helps us a lot in terms of managing this population well is the relationship that the CSO has with the treatment provider and the polygraph.

Len Sipes: Right, and that gets back to Dr. Gates. I mean, that’s one of the unique things. You’re not on your own. This is an entire organization surrounding you and supporting you, and supporting what you and the staff does in terms of getting at what’s causing this issue with people for their own good and for public safety.

Dr. Celena Gates: Um-hum. That collaboration is key, and that word was mentioned a couple of times in the first segment. It’s relevant this population in a way that perhaps isn’t the same for other types of offenders or other types of mental health issues. The collaboration and working together, and having a complete, accurate understanding of the who the offender is, what his risk issues are, when he’s likely to be more or less at risk, what can be done about those situations, who can intervene – all of those are very, very complicated questions but they can be answered, they can be effectively addressed if everyone is working together, communicating consistently and effectively, there’s cross-training. There are a number of different ways that we can make that effective.

Len Sipes: Some of these offenders are obviously in denial in terms of their own acts and how culpable they are in terms of their own acts, correct?

Dr. Celena Gates: Yes, they are. They can start off that way.

Len Sipes: They can start off that way.

Dr. Celena Gates: This is not the easiest subject to talk about, you can imagine, and the stigma associated with being a sex offender is incredibly difficult. So they’ve often had to go through the judicial process of that, whatever that entailed, and now they’re being asked to hold themselves accountable to it again, and a lot of them feel like, “I’ve done my penance,” so to speak.

Len Sipes: Yeah, they’ve served time in prison and they’re coming out, and suddenly they’re in a small caseload and they’re —

Dr. Celena Gates: There’s an awful lot of attention being paid to them.

Len Sipes: We at Court Services, we really do have a high level of contact with the people under our supervision, we really do, so they’re having that high level of contact and then they have you to deal with.

Dr. Celena Gates: Coming in saying, “Let’s talk about this more.”

Len Sipes: Yeah, let’s talk about this more.

Dr. Celena Gates: And so that can be incredibly difficult on a lot of levels – emotionally in terms of their relationships with family, what it’s going to mean for their lives, and that sort of thing. But part of what we try to do is give them a sense that, although we’re talking about the past, we’re talking about behaviors that perhaps they’re embarrassed about – and rightfully so, should be – but we’re doing so for the purpose of moving forward. We want them to understand their risk factors. We want them to understand their behaviors. We want them to have the tools that they need to avoid engaging in future problematic behaviors. As was mentioned earlier, most offenders are not the jump-out-of-the-bushes kind of guy. They’re guys who have gotten themselves into situations that they themselves may not fully understand, and that’s part of the task is to help them understand how this benefits them, how it benefits the people in their lives, and obviously then ultimately that translates to having safer communities.

Len Sipes: When I talk to community supervision officers, oftentimes I get the sense of manipulation on the part of sex offenders, that they are by trade a pretty manipulative bunch. True?

Dr. Celena Gates: I think that’s a generalization, and I think we’ve already established that it’s hard to make generalizations about the population, but there are certainly certain kinds of offenders for whom you want to pay extra attention to what they say, for whom you want to collaborate and corroborate even more than you would, but that’s the key to the assessment, really. It really is about being able to identify what a person’s particular traits and tendencies and proclivities are, and educating the people who work with them about how to operate against those, so to speak. And on the other hand, if someone isn’t manipulative, because there are offenders who don’t have that trait, then we don’t over-supervise them or over-treat them or over-analyze everything that they say.

Len Sipes: The key is the uniqueness of that individual offender. Nothing is done in a cookie-cutter approach. We design a program and a supervision strategy around that person’s uniqueness and that, Tom Williams, seems to be the key to all of this.

Tom Williams: Well it is, and the kind of behavioral treatment seems to be the one that work best with this population, and that’s the program or the theory basically that Dr. Gates and her group are integrally involved with, and all the staff are actually trained in that discipline as well. So with the combination of the treatment, the supervision, as well as the polygraph, just to look at potential deceptions that may be coming through, because we can talk to the person and they can tell us one thing but the polygraph itself will help us to determine if there’s any kind of deception that’s going on that may increase that person’s risk to reoffend in the community, and then that’s when we kind of get together with the treatment provider and say, “What is it that we’re looking at here that actually resulted in that polygraph?”

Len Sipes: Only three minutes left, very quickly, we do employ GPS so if we’re concerned through the polygraph test or any other evidence that we have with our law enforcement partners or working with the family or working with the community, we put them on GPS and we can follow them that way. We can overlay maps. We can overlay Google earth to see if there’s a playground there and that’s why he’s hanging out, correct?

Tom Williams: Well, that’s part of it. That’s one of several strategies that we use. We don’t want to say that’s something that we do for every person but it’s just one of several.

Len Sipes: I understand, but the larger issue is through treatment and through these supervision strategies and through the small case loads, but particularly treatment, we can in many cases stabilize that individual and minimize that individual’s risk to public safety. That is true, is it not?

Tom Williams: That’s exactly right, and that’s the whole key that we’re working with.

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Tom Williams: That’s the goal, the main goal, but also with regards to that is there comes a point in time when a person’s going to complete the services. The important thing is what’s that relapse prevention plan and how can we exercise that plan, and what are your triggers, as Dr .Gates mentioned before, that I need to be attentive to, situations that I need to not be involved in or put myself in where the potential could be for me to reoffend.

Len Sipes: And that’s an extraordinarily important point, Dr. Gates, and in the final minute or so of the program, you give them tools because they’re going to be off supervision at a certain point.

Dr. Celena Gates: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: You give them tools to carry into the future, and that may be possibly the most critical part of treatment.

Dr. Celena Gates: Indeed, I think it is. I think that often we begin the process by thinking about what the end of it will be. Once we have an understanding of who the offender is and what their risk factors are, we’re thinking about what do they need in order to stay out of situations where they talk to people like me or have to meet people like at Mr. Williams’ agency. We want them to be in the community safely, to have developed enough skills and knowledge of what their risk factors are so that they don’t reoffend.

Len Sipes: And once again, it’s all based upon the individual assessment. That’s the key here, and the individual assessment, the individual treatment, the individual supervision strategies, and those individual treatment strategies to carry that person not just a year beyond supervision but 20, 30 years beyond the supervision without reoffending.

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Len Sipes: And protecting public safety. That’s the bottom line, correct?

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Tom Williams: That’s how we can do our part to ensure that this person is healthy, maintaining good relationships, and not come back within the criminal justice system. We just can’t continue to incarcerate them and expect that’s going to have an effect versus to treatment.

Len Sipes: All right, Tom, you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us for this what I consider to be extraordinary discussion on the supervision and treatment of sex offenders. Please have that age-appropriate conversation with your children. Please use good judgment in terms of whose home you go into or who you let in your home. Watch for us next time as we look at another very important issue in today’s criminal justice system. Have yourself a pleasant day.

[Commercial Break]

Len Sipes: Hi, and welcome to DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s show is on the supervision and treatment of sex offenders and there are few topics that gather more media and criminological interest than sex offenders. It’s our contention at my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, that we employ state-of-the-art strategies for the supervision of sex offenders. To discuss national standards on sex offenders, we are proud to have Scott Matson, Senior Policy Advisor, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, and also we have Thomas Williams, the Associate Director of Community Supervision Services. Again from my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and to Scott and Tom, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Scott Matson: Well, thanks for having me.

Tom Williams: Thank you.

Len Sipes: It’s an important topic and a complicated topic, and people really are interested in this whole concept of sex offenders. Scott, the first question goes to you. Who are sex offenders?

Scott Matson: Well thanks, Len. That’s a good question. It’s a tough one too because what we know is that there isn’t a typical offender. They can come from any walk of life, all walks of life. They can be focused just on children. They can be focused on adults only. They can be focused on women. They can be focused on little girls, little boys. They could cross over as well. So to say that there’s one type of sex offender just isn’t quite accurate.

Len Sipes: But when you talk to somebody in the public, when you say “sex offender,” they immediately have a stereotype in their minds as to who that person is, and one of the ideas and one of the reasons for doing the show today is to get across the complexity of what we’re calling the sex offender and the difficulty in terms of supervising that person and treating that person.

Scott Matson: That’s right, and most people think of the sex offender as a stranger, somebody who might jump out of a bush to steal a child or rape a woman. We know that that’s just not what most sex offenders are. Most sex offenders are known to their victims. Most sex offenders commit their offenses within the context of a relationship, which again, makes it very easy for the sex offender to manipulate the victim in those contexts because they know their victims.

Len Sipes: That’s a key issue; they know their victims in the majority of cases. The majority of child sex offenders know their victim, the majority of victims know their offender, the majority of people say in say rape settings, sexual assault settings, it happens in their home or the home of the offender. So it’s not the stereotype of the woman cutting through the alley and getting raped, although that does happen. The bulk of it per data that just came out happens within a residential setting amongst somebody who they know.

Scott Matson: That’s right, and that makes supervision strategies and treatment strategies very important to tailor them to the type of offender that you know you have in your midst, the offender that’s on your caseload. Once they’re caught and convicted, then you know a little bit more about them but until they’re caught and convicted, you really don’t know who they are.

Len Sipes: And Tom, that’s one of the reasons why, when you do – you’re in charge of Supervision Services at Court Services and Offender Supervision, and we have 16,000 offenders on any given day, 25,000 offenders in any given year – on any given day there’s about 700, round it off, sex offenders that you’re in charge of supervising, and you start off with what, some sort of an analysis as to who that person is to get to the complexity issue that Scott just raised.

Tom Williams: Well, that’s very true, and this dovetailing with what Scott was mentioning, the sex offenders can come from any walk of life, so there isn’t one particular individual that somebody should be concerned about or one particular profile that someone could be concerned about. What the public really needs to understand is that they just have to have high-level vigilance with regards to who they have in their midst, whether it’s a child if you’re going to drop them off at the daycare or with the little league, and so that there’s certain standards that these organizations have to have with regards to checking on the backgrounds of folks in boy scouts and things like that, leaders. But the other things that really can help the public with regards to staying vigilant is there’s a sex offender registry that’s open to the public, that anyone can go online if they have access to a computer. They actually go and see, is this person that I’m involved in, is he really on the rolls of criminal justice, is he known to criminal justice. And in some of our outreach to public school systems, for an example, we also really encourage them to make sure that they do check the sex offender registry, certainly as a higher requirement in terms of checking the background of an individual, but that’s something that’s very quick that they can do, just go to the registry, run an application, and then check and see if the person’s listed.

Len Sipes: And we’re going to have you on the second half with Dr. Celena Gates to talk about the treatment, and again, the supervision and treatment of sex offenders. But Scott, we talked about the fact that we have 700. Here we’re talking about somewhere in the ballpark of people under parole and probation supervision throughout the country currently, not the past but currently, and we’re about 200,000?

Scott Matson: That’s correct according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, yes.

Len Sipes: Okay, and there’s about over 700,000 people on sex offender registries?

Scott Matson: Somewhere around 720,000 that are registered in the U.S.

Len Sipes: So that’s an immense number of people.

Scott Matson: Yes.

Len Sipes: And we in the criminal justice system, we’re responsible for public safety number one, but that’s an immense task for both of us, so let me talk a little bit about that because Tom brought it up and I think the public wants to understand, what do we tell parents, what do we tell individuals, principally women? The vast majority of people who are victimized, sexually victimized, are women although men are sexually victimized as well but it’s 80% I think and higher women who are sexually abused, children who are sexually abused, so let’s start off with parents. What do we tell the parents about age-appropriate conversations, letting them know that they can always come to them and have a conversation about what happened to them?

Scott Matson: That’s right, and the thing you have to stress the most is for the parents to be involved in the children’s lives so they know who they’re talking to, so they know who they’re around all the time, they know who’s paying a lot of attention to them, and as you mentioned, age-appropriate conversations. I think it’s important to start early. I think a lot of advocates in this area, in the sexual assault prevention realm, will talk about starting as young as 4 or 5, and getting them to talk about this is part of a safety kinds of planning, and continuing that conversation as they get older and into their teens, and eventually into adulthood. – Ways of protecting themselves, families, it’s always a good idea to come up with a safety plan and what to do if something might happen to a child or youth in the house. There’s some really good resources out there too for this, and I’m not speaking of anything of the work I’ve done necessarily but there are lots of good advocacy organizations out there that have done really good work.

Len Sipes: And we’re going to put up the website.

Scott Matson: Yeah. I think you’re going to put up our website, which is smart.gov, and I would like to make a plug also for the National Sex Offender Public Website. Tom mentioned DC’s public website. There’s a National Sex Offender Public Website where you can search from one place all the registries throughout the entire country.

Len Sipes: Exactly, and we’ll put that website on the program throughout the program so people can have access to that. – But it’s principally age-appropriate conversations. The child must know that he or she can say anything to their parents because in some cases, a sex offender will commit the act and say that your parents will never love you again if you tell your parents this.

Scott Matson: That’s right. That’s a common theme in grooming behaviors with sex offenders, especially child molesters.

Tom Williams: I think the message should go a little bit further than just parents because a lot of times the child may not be in a position to actually talk to the parents so an adult, someone that they have trust with.

Len Sipes: Okay. Good point.

Tom Williams: It might be a minister in a church or a deacon in a church, or it could be a school teacher, or someone that they really feel close to that they can then relay that information to, a police officer for an example. A lot of police officers do a lot of outreach in school systems right now, so I think instead of saying parents, because certainly you want the child to go to the parent if possible but sometimes the child may not be in a position to feel comfortable about that and so any adult, any responsible adult, I should say, would qualify that, that they should be speaking.

Len Sipes: Good point, good point. And any adult that the child trusts.

Tom Williams: Right.

Len Sipes: In terms of older individuals, again, it’s whose home you go into. It’s who you let into your home. The vast majority of these per research just the other day were committed within residential settings, not necessarily the stereotype, although it does happen, like I said, the stereotype of walking through the back of the alley. It’s happening in homes so it is a matter of who you trust, is it not?

Scott Matson: Right. It’s again, who’s in your life, and most of those crimes are committed in the context of a relationship.

Len Sipes: So a person has to know who they’re willing to trust, and understanding that if you don’t trust that person, don’t let them into your house, don’t go into their home.

Scott Matson: Right.

Tom Williams: That’s a very good point, and that gives my message about vigilance. The parents or significant others really have to be vigilant with regards to who’s involved with that child or in a relationship they’d like to establish as well. I mean, the vigilance is the key thing that we have to be ensured, that we want the public to be understanding.

Len Sipes: Okay. The other part of the program that I wanted to set up beyond the complexity of what we call the sex offender is the sense of national standards. Now Scott, you and I were talking before the program that there are no national standards. The American Probation and Parole Association, National Institute of Corrections, other organizations have come out with recommendations, and in terms of what it is that we in Parole and Probations should be doing in terms of supervising sex offenders, can you give me a sense as to what some of those are?

Scott Matson: Sure. Yeah, as you mentioned, there aren’t any national standards but there are recommendations and there are some things that research does show to be a little more effective.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Scott Matson: I think it really starts with the idea of what we call risk needs and responsivity that is assessing the risk of the offender, the risk that they pose to reoffend and the harm they might pose, then assessing what the needs are of the offender, both what they need to help them stop the behavior and what we need to do to make sure that they don’t continue to commit it.

Len Sipes: So we have to assess and figure out who they are —

Scott Matson: — and then finally develop intervention strategies, supervision plans, treatment plans that address their needs and the risk.

Len Sipes: Based upon that analysis as to who they are.

Scott Matson: Who they are, exactly, so who, what, and who, what, and how I think is a good way to think of it.

Len Sipes: But there has to be treatment involved to some degree for those people who are amenable to treatment?

Scott Matson: That’s right. I think that what most of the research says is that treatment is effective overall with sex offenders. There are some kinds of offenders that might be “lower risk,” quote-unquote, that might not benefit as much from treatment as the higher-risk or moderate-risk offenders but treatment is an integral part of any supervision strategy, any reentry strategy for sex offenders.

Len Sipes: But I would imagine some of those recommendations are going to be a small caseload. I mean, some parole and probation agencies carry 150, 200 people per one parole and probation agent. In the District of Columbia we call them Community Supervision Officers, so the caseload’s got to be appropriate.

Scott Matson: Right, and a lot of the jurisdictions that use more specialized kinds of supervision tactics for sex offenders will have much lower caseload sizes so we’re talking 25-to-1 or 20-to-1, sometimes with a surveillance officer as well to check in on the offender off-hours, and usually this is all involved with the treatment provider closely at hand so they are understanding what those supervision strategies are so they’re in constant communication with the supervision officers.

Len Sipes: It has to be done as a team. Where it’s appropriate, there’s no separation between supervision and treatment. It has to run hand-in-hand.

Scott Matson: It really does. They have talk to each other, they have to really collaborate, and in some jurisdictions, a polygraph examiner is also involved.

Len Sipes: A polygraph examiner. Tom, now the question goes to you, we do all that. That’s one of the things that I want to make clear is that the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, every national standard that’s ever been promulgated, your unit already does that. And how do you think it applies to sex offenders?

Tom Williams: That’s true, and what we’ve done is actually looked at the research and then, as the series of meetings within the organization, determine what’s the best way that we can actually manage this group when they come out. But one other point that I would like to say is certainly it’s a responsibility of the Supervision Agency to help manage and control this population when they come out but also it begins within the correctional setting as well. If you look at the 1.5 million folks who are incarcerated, about 10% or maybe 150,000 of them have been diagnosed or classified as sex offenders within the institution.

Len Sipes: Wow.

Tom Williams: Well, when you look at the lack of resources, that many of the state and maybe the federal systems don’t have because of budget cuts, we know that what gets cut first is naturally treatment but I think the institutions try to do a very good job in trying to identify folks who actually need services and then try to start that process right there. So when a person really comes into the institution from intake or reception, that’s when the identification has to happen and that’s when the plan really should start there to help that person before he actually gets distributed.

Len Sipes: So it has to be holistic across the board from the correctional institution to parole and probation but oftentimes that doesn’t happen.

Scott Matson: No. In an ideal world, that’s what would happen.

Len Sipes: That’s what would happen but that, I mean, that’s the unique part about our agency, and I’m sorry to use this as a forum to boast about our agency, but we do all that stuff now. Our offenders go to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and they’re a bit more resource advantaged than most correctional settings.

Tom Williams: That’s true, and then when those folks are actually identified within the institutional setting, prior to being released, then we work basically on a release plan or reentry plan for those individuals, and certainly there are halfway houses within the district where a person can transition from the maintaining institution to the community, you know, where they can go and then we kind of collaborate on those services. We get that information and send it to the institution, and then we follow-up on our cases when they come out.

Len Sipes: We only have a couple of minutes left. Let’s talk about how difficult this is. I can’t think of a more difficult caseload. I mean, I looked at a Google search this morning on the last couple days, these are national articles on sex offenders, there’s 50. I mean, this is just 50 in the last couple days. They’re a difficult population to supervise, correct, any one of you?

Tom Williams: Well, absolutely. This population is difficult but as Scott mentioned, the key thing for us is assessment. I mean, you have to determine the assessment right out front in terms of who you have. That’s where your information from the institutional side is actually transferred to the community supervision side so that we don’t be duplicating work that’s already been initiated and started; but once we actually do the identification through the assessment process, then as Scott mentioned, then we have to develop that plan of action and that’s where collaboration is key between supervision staff as well as the treatment staff with regards to what are the plans that we need to mitigate that risk for that individual, and it can’t be a one-size-fits all, it has to be specific to that individual and specific to that offense.

Len Sipes: And we have the resources here at Washington, D.C., to do that. Scott, a final sense as to the difficulty of offenders, the type of offender to supervise?

Scott Matson: Sure. I think that they can be quite difficult, and when you talk to a lot of probation officers who might be new to this or who didn’t receive any specialized training, they might say something along the lines, “Well, sex offenders are my easiest probation.”

Len Sipes: They’re compliant, aren’t they?

Scott Matson: Because they’ll oftentimes follow the rules, they don’t want to get in trouble; they don’t want to rock the boat.

Len Sipes: They could be grooming the officer; they could be grooming the psychologist.

Scott Matson: Exactly, just like they groom parents, they groom children, they could be grooming the treatment provider, they could be grooming the supervision officer. So again, it’s really crucial to do that assessment, to get involved in the offenders’ lives, and make sure you know what they’re doing.

Len Sipes: Scott, you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, look for us on the second half as we continue this extraordinarily interesting issue of the supervision and the treatment of sex offenders. Stay right there. We’ll be right back.

[Music Playing]

Second Half: Hi, and welcome back to DC Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes, and we continue to discuss sex offender supervision, and our guests for the second half are Thomas Williams, the Associate Director of Community Supervision Services, my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Dr. Celena Gates, CSOSA’s Director of Treatment for our Sex Offender Program, and Dr. Gates and Tom, welcome to DC Public Safety, and Tom, welcome back from the first half.  I can’t think, again, of a more difficult topic than this whole concept of sex offender management, sex offender treatment. We talked with Scott Matson on the first half from the Department of Justice to gain a sense of the enormity of this whole concept. You know, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that we consider sex offenders that we and the criminal justice system have to deal with. There are 700 in the District of Columbia. Treatment is an extraordinarily important part of the process. Treatment and supervision seem to go hand-in-hand. Dr. Gates, you came from a maximum-security prison, did you not, in terms of your background?

Dr. Celena Gates: I did. My first job was at a juvenile facility called Culpepper in Virginia, yeah.

Len Sipes: Wow, and so you came from that process to CSOSA?

Dr. Celena Gates: Not directly but I work in a private practice setting at this point that works with sex offenders so it was through that practice that we developed a relationship with CSOSA and provide the sex offender treatment services for that agency.

Len Sipes: So you’ve got a lot of experience as well as the academic training in terms of dealing with sex offenders.

Dr. Celena Gates: Oh absolutely, sure.

Len Sipes: Is this group of people as complex as we made it out on the first half because when I discuss sex offenders to friends, family, again, they have this image in their mind that’s pretty simplistic. It’s not simplistic at all, is it?

Dr. Celena Gates: Not at all, and this is the way that it should be discussed. It should be discussed as a complex group of people who are not homogenous, who have a lot of differences between them, and who are best handled when that’s well understood. It’s when the idea is that they are the same that people make mistakes and misjudgments, and don’t do what’s in the community’s best interest or for that matter the offender’s best interest.

Len Sipes: Right, and we talked about, Tom and I and Scott in the first half, about the assessment process and the crucial sense of getting to know who this person is because there’s such a huge difference between some who lays in wait – we call it in the criminal justice system “malice aforethought.” It’s planned. Their sexual assault is planned versus somebody who’s grooming a child over the course of months versus somebody who does the wrong thing, it’s clearly illegal, but we don’t have a history of sex or criminal offense for that person. That’s the level of complexity we’re dealing with, right?

Dr. Celena Gates: It is, and that level of complexity is a part of who they are. It’s also a part of how we treat them. It’s a part of their management. It’s a part of their future. Keeping those differences and those distinctions in mind is what contributes to the success of dealing with this population.

Len Sipes: Tom, our problem is that the public, all they want is safety. They want to be protected, they’re afraid of the sex offender, and when they hear – I mean again, when I talked about it in the first half, 50 articles from around the country on sex offenders basically doing something wrong over the course of the last couple – 50. They get a lot of publicity. When it happens to us, the media comes to me, comes to you, and says, “Why?” – And the people don’t seem to have a full grasp as to how difficult this is, how complex it is, and the resources you give to it.

Tom Williams: Well, that’s exactly right. In the public’s mind, if you put these folks away and throw away their key, they’d be just as happy but we recognize that you can’t really imprison folks for a long period of time.

Len Sipes: You can’t put everybody in prison. That’s impossible.

Tom Williams: No, you can’t, and punishment is not going to be sufficient to – well, punishment is sufficient to I guess suppress deviate behavior but eventually the person needs to get treatment. So our studies are indicating, in terms of the length of stay that folks have been in prison before they come out, you know, we have a much older population on the CSOSA with regards to sex offenses. Only 6% of our population are under 25 but a large majority of our population are between the age of 40 and 60 so you know they’ve spent significant periods of time incarcerated.  But when they come to us, the important thing that we attempt to do is we have our own assessment with regards to the risk to reoffend but when we also have collaborations with Dr. Gates and her group, there’s an additional assessment that’s done as well, so that establishment is looking at what’s that risk to that individual with regards to his future sex offending.

Len Sipes: And we have smaller caseloads, we use polygraph, we have specially-trained community supervision officers. What most people know as parole and probation agents, we call them community supervision officers in Washington, D.C. So the case load is fairly small, they’re well-trained, they use GPS surveillance in some cases, they use polygraph in some cases, correct, so we do it right is the point.

Tom Williams: Well, we do do it right but we are extremely fortunate with regard to the caliber of CSOs, of men and women that work in this particular program. First of all they have a passion for their work, which is really key, and they are well-educated with regards to their advanced degrees, and also they are well-educated with regards to additional training in this discipline. So they come to the agency with a wealth of knowledge, and we too increase that knowledge base while they’re with us. But the important thing that really helps us a lot in terms of managing this population well is the relationship that the CSO has with the treatment provider and the polygraph.

Len Sipes: Right, and that gets back to Dr. Gates. I mean, that’s one of the unique things. You’re not on your own. This is an entire organization surrounding you and supporting you, and supporting what you and the staff does in terms of getting at what’s causing this issue with people for their own good and for public safety.

Dr. Celena Gates: Um-hum. That collaboration is key, and that word was mentioned a couple of times in the first segment. It’s relevant this population in a way that perhaps isn’t the same for other types of offenders or other types of mental health issues. The collaboration and working together, and having a complete, accurate understanding of the who the offender is, what his risk issues are, when he’s likely to be more or less at risk, what can be done about those situations, who can intervene – all of those are very, very complicated questions but they can be answered, they can be effectively addressed if everyone is working together, communicating consistently and effectively, there’s cross-training. There are a number of different ways that we can make that effective.

Len Sipes: Some of these offenders are obviously in denial in terms of their own acts and how culpable they are in terms of their own acts, correct?

Dr. Celena Gates: Yes, they are. They can start off that way.

Len Sipes: They can start off that way.

Dr. Celena Gates: This is not the easiest subject to talk about, you can imagine, and the stigma associated with being a sex offender is incredibly difficult. So they’ve often had to go through the judicial process of that, whatever that entailed, and now they’re being asked to hold themselves accountable to it again, and a lot of them feel like, “I’ve done my penance,” so to speak.

Len Sipes: Yeah, they’ve served time in prison and they’re coming out, and suddenly they’re in a small caseload and they’re —

Dr. Celena Gates: There’s an awful lot of attention being paid to them.

Len Sipes: We at Court Services, we really do have a high level of contact with the people under our supervision, we really do, so they’re having that high level of contact and then they have you to deal with.

Dr. Celena Gates: Coming in saying, “Let’s talk about this more.”

Len Sipes: Yeah, let’s talk about this more.

Dr. Celena Gates: And so that can be incredibly difficult on a lot of levels – emotionally in terms of their relationships with family, what it’s going to mean for their lives, and that sort of thing. But part of what we try to do is give them a sense that, although we’re talking about the past, we’re talking about behaviors that perhaps they’re embarrassed about – and rightfully so, should be – but we’re doing so for the purpose of moving forward. We want them to understand their risk factors. We want them to understand their behaviors. We want them to have the tools that they need to avoid engaging in future problematic behaviors. As was mentioned earlier, most offenders are not the jump-out-of-the-bushes kind of guy. They’re guys who have gotten themselves into situations that they themselves may not fully understand, and that’s part of the task is to help them understand how this benefits them, how it benefits the people in their lives, and obviously then ultimately that translates to having safer communities.

Len Sipes: When I talk to community supervision officers, oftentimes I get the sense of manipulation on the part of sex offenders, that they are by trade a pretty manipulative bunch. True?

Dr. Celena Gates: I think that’s a generalization, and I think we’ve already established that it’s hard to make generalizations about the population, but there are certainly certain kinds of offenders for whom you want to pay extra attention to what they say, for whom you want to collaborate and corroborate even more than you would, but that’s the key to the assessment, really. It really is about being able to identify what a person’s particular traits and tendencies and proclivities are, and educating the people who work with them about how to operate against those, so to speak. And on the other hand, if someone isn’t manipulative, because there are offenders who don’t have that trait, then we don’t over-supervise them or over-treat them or over-analyze everything that they say.

Len Sipes: The key is the uniqueness of that individual offender. Nothing is done in a cookie-cutter approach. We design a program and a supervision strategy around that person’s uniqueness and that, Tom Williams, seems to be the key to all of this.

Tom Williams: Well it is, and the kind of behavioral treatment seems to be the one that work best with this population, and that’s the program or the theory basically that Dr. Gates and her group are integrally involved with, and all the staff are actually trained in that discipline as well. So with the combination of the treatment, the supervision, as well as the polygraph, just to look at potential deceptions that may be coming through, because we can talk to the person and they can tell us one thing but the polygraph itself will help us to determine if there’s any kind of deception that’s going on that may increase that person’s risk to reoffend in the community, and then that’s when we kind of get together with the treatment provider and say, “What is it that we’re looking at here that actually resulted in that polygraph?”

Len Sipes: Only three minutes left, very quickly, we do employ GPS so if we’re concerned through the polygraph test or any other evidence that we have with our law enforcement partners or working with the family or working with the community, we put them on GPS and we can follow them that way. We can overlay maps. We can overlay Google earth to see if there’s a playground there and that’s why he’s hanging out, correct?

Tom Williams: Well, that’s part of it. That’s one of several strategies that we use. We don’t want to say that’s something that we do for every person but it’s just one of several.

Len Sipes: I understand, but the larger issue is through treatment and through these supervision strategies and through the small case loads, but particularly treatment, we can in many cases stabilize that individual and minimize that individual’s risk to public safety. That is true, is it not?

Tom Williams: That’s exactly right, and that’s the whole key that we’re working with.

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Tom Williams: That’s the goal, the main goal, but also with regards to that is there comes a point in time when a person’s going to complete the services. The important thing is what’s that relapse prevention plan and how can we exercise that plan, and what are your triggers, as Dr .Gates mentioned before, that I need to be attentive to, situations that I need to not be involved in or put myself in where the potential could be for me to reoffend.

Len Sipes: And that’s an extraordinarily important point, Dr. Gates, and in the final minute or so of the program, you give them tools because they’re going to be off supervision at a certain point.

Dr. Celena Gates: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: You give them tools to carry into the future, and that may be possibly the most critical part of treatment.

Dr. Celena Gates: Indeed, I think it is. I think that often we begin the process by thinking about what the end of it will be. Once we have an understanding of who the offender is and what their risk factors are, we’re thinking about what do they need in order to stay out of situations where they talk to people like me or have to meet people like at Mr. Williams’ agency. We want them to be in the community safely, to have developed enough skills and knowledge of what their risk factors are so that they don’t reoffend.

Len Sipes: And once again, it’s all based upon the individual assessment. That’s the key here, and the individual assessment, the individual treatment, the individual supervision strategies, and those individual treatment strategies to carry that person not just a year beyond supervision but 20, 30 years beyond the supervision without reoffending.

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Len Sipes: And protecting public safety. That’s the bottom line, correct?

Dr. Celena Gates: That’s the goal.

Tom Williams: That’s how we can do our part to ensure that this person is healthy, maintaining good relationships, and not come back within the criminal justice system. We just can’t continue to incarcerate them and expect that’s going to have an effect versus to treatment.

Len Sipes: All right, Tom, you’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us for this what I consider to be extraordinary discussion on the supervision and treatment of sex offenders. Please have that age-appropriate conversation with your children. Please use good judgment in terms of whose home you go into or who you let in your home. Watch for us next time as we look at another very important issue in today’s criminal justice system. Have yourself a pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Technology in Corrections-Corrections Technology Center of Excellence-DC Public Safety Radio

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/05/technology-in-corrections-corrections-technology-center-of-excellence-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes:  From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Today’s show – do parole and probation caseloads have an impact on offender recidivism in crime. To discuss this topic, we have two principles. We have Sarah Cooke-Jalbert. She is an associate at Abt Associates. She is a sociologist and public policy analysis with research interest in Criminal Justice Program Evaluation, Michael Kane. The second guest is a Senior Associate with Crime and Justice Institute at Community Resources for Justice. He’s been working in the Criminal Justice field for the past eight years. They wrote a really interesting piece of research on the fact that caseload size done right seems to reduce recidivism and when I say ‘recidivism,’ I remind most people that that indeed involves reduced crime. So let me, for the next 15 seconds, read the beginning of it and we’ll have an interview with Sarah and Michael.

“A Criminal Justice researcher has studied caseload size to determine whether smaller caseloads improve probation outcomes. With exceptions, the findings have been disappointing. Reduced probation officer caseloads have not reduced criminal recidivism for high-risk probationers and have increased revocation rates.

One explanation is that officers with reduced caseloads do not change their supervision practices when caseloads are reduced. This raised the question – would reduce caseloads improve supervision outcomes for medium to high-risk offenders in a probation agency that trains its officers to apply a balance of control and rehabilitative measures”

To Sarah and Michael, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Thank you.

Michael Kane:  Thank you.

Len Sipes:  Okay, that was a ridiculously long introduction, but in setting the stage, it’s really difficult, but Sarah, also give me a sense. You work for Abt Associates Abt. In my 42 years in the Criminal Justice system, Abt Associates always seems to have been there and producing some of the better known research throughout this country and throughout the criminological community. So tell me a little bit about Abt Associates.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Sure. We’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and we are probably one of the oldest public policy analysis companies and we have, as you mentioned, been doing a number of projects for the Department of Justice and various other government agencies. Mostly in the [INDISCERNIBLE] program evaluation. We also do global international technical assistance and evaluation for various governments and government agencies domestically.

Len Sipes:  This research is funded by the Office of Justice Programs of the US Department of Justice. Michaels Kane, give me a sense as to the Crime and Justice Institute at the Community Resources for Justice.

Michael Kane:  Sure, Community Resources for Justice is a nonprofit operating in Boston. Our larger organization also operates halfway houses, both federal and state, and homes for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The Crime and Justice Institute is a division of CRJ and we work to improve the effectiveness of criminal justice systems nationwide. We provide nonpartisan consulting, policy analysis, evaluation services and technical assistance to improve public safety in a lot of jurisdictions working directly with corrections and community corrections agencies.

Len Sipes:  The website for Abt Associates – www.abtassociates.com. The website for the Crime and Justice Institute at Community Resources for Justice is www.cjinstitute.org. Alright, so both to Sarah and Michael, let’s begin talking about this. In the research that you did – again, funded by the Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice – it took a look at parole and probation or, in this case, rather probation caseload size and we said in the introduction that caseload size really does not seem to matter in terms of the research in the past. In fact, reducing caseload size, making it the number that the parole and probation officer or the probation officer in this case has to supervise and to assist, lowering that number in the past seemed to increase the rate of recidivism, but basically what you guys said was, “Well, if you guys lowered the ratio, if you made the caseload smaller, if you trained this parole and probation agent or probation agent in evidence-based practices, if you gave him the top skills, the top knowledge that we had today,” I wonder what would happen.  Am I summarizing the research correctly?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  I think that’s right. I think one of the reasons that the National Institute of Justice felt that this was important to revisit is that some of the best evaluations in Criminal Justice were done on supervision intensive probation. These were large, random assignment studies that produced some pretty irrefutable outcomes, but as you said, decreasing the caseload size for probationers who are supervised intensively did not seem to improve outcomes and, in fact, worsened outcomes in a lot of ways. The takeaway from that research was both that these were probationers, not in the traditional sense. These were people who were diverted from jails and prisons and put onto probation and supervised in the community very intensively, but also, there were a couple of exceptions to those core findings in a couple of agencies. They did combine the sorts of things that we associate today with evidence-based practices with these reduced caseloads and in those couple of places, they had improved outcomes. So there’s really a foundation for revisiting this now that evidence-based practices have become so widespread in probation agencies across the country.

Len Sipes: So it’s just not a matter of trail them and jail them. It’s just not a matter of enforcement. It has to be combined with services if that person has any chances at all of not going back to prison and in saying that, there were two jurisdictions that you studied out of the three where not only were there reductions. There were significant reductions in terms of the overall rate of recidivism. I think in the Oklahoma City area there was about a 30% reduction in recidivism. In Polk County, Iowa, in one case, was up to 40% in some categories. So that’s significant and that’s what immediately caught my eye and said that I wanted to interview Sarah and Michael today because , ordinarily, when you get successful outcomes for reentry programs, if you will, they generally range in the 10-15% range. These are significant – 30% for Oklahoma, 39% for some categories in Polk County. Those are significant reductions.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Correct and I want to just clarify one thing in that we’re talking about reduction in risk of recidivism, which is a fine point to make, but I think important because it’s a probabilistic kind of thing rather than an absolute these people stopped reoffending. So there’s a little bit of a difference and that’s due to the nature of the study design.

Michael Kane:  It’s not a 30% absolute reduction in recidivism, but compared to the control commission…

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  What it would have been otherwise.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Michael Kane:  It is a 30% reduction. Yeah, that’s important to point out.

Len Sipes:  Okay, but I mean do you…

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  You’re right. These are significant. You’re right.

Len Sipes:  That’s my question. My premise is considering the low percentage rates in so many other programs that I’ve encountered, this seems to be doing significantly better than previous reentry-related research programs. Am I right?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Yes, but I do want to qualify that a little bit because reentry programs are generally dealing with offenders who are coming out of jail and prison and because of that, are at higher risk for recidivism. We’re talking here about probationers who, at least for this particular offense or case, they have not been incarcerated.

Len Sipes:  Right, but you are talking about medium to high-risk probationers.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Correct, but probationers in general, overall, are a little bit lower risk than say parolees.

Len Sipes:  True, but it’s not unusual for them to have prior incarcerations in their backgrounds.

Michael Kane:  Right, the population don’t overlap.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Correct and higher risk probationers often do have a more extensive criminal history. So, yes, we are talking about who are people who are at high risk for recidivism, but not quite as high-risk as a parolee.

Len Sipes:  Michael Kane, we talk about evidence-based practices within the confines of this study. What are we talking about?

Michael Kane:  Sure, within the confines of this study, we’re talking about three major things. The things that we look for in the sites that we chose were sites that had implemented a third-generations risk and needs assessment and used that risk assessments to target based on risk.

Len Sipes:  Figure out who the offender is.

Michael Kane:  Right, figure out who the offender is and concentrate probation services on offenders that are medium and high-risk. The second thing we looked for were sites that do some kind of case planning based on need. The third-generations need assessments, they typically generate a list of criminogenic needs and these sites base case plan on what needs are determined by that. The third thing that we’re looking for is sites that train in and practice motivational enhancement techniques. In some cases, that might be like motivational interviewing. So those were the three things that we looked for in terms of [INDISCERNIBLE].

Len Sipes:  So it’s basically– they implemented a risk needs assessment. They figured out who this person truly was. They engaged a case management process based upon that risk and needs assessment, which is basically saying, “You’re low-risk. You really don’t need these services nearly as badly as somebody with a high score in terms of antisocial personality or violent tendencies. So we’re going to figure out who gets what based upon their scores in terms of the risk and needs instrument and training the officers there on how to motivate the people on their caseloads to do better.”

Michael Kane:  Right.

Len Sipes:  That’s the heart and soul of it.

Michael Kane:  Yeah and so I think it’s important to know that we’re not saying that that’s all evidence-based practices are or trying to condense them, but we had to make some decisions about what kind of things we were looking for in sites and those are the three things that really stood out to us. They’re also things that are easier as researchers to measure. We can see what the risk and need assessment that they’re doing is and we can see whether or not they target individuals based on their risk level and whether or not they target based on need. They can program evidence that they did the training around motivational enhancement techniques. So those are kind of things that we can confirm. There are plenty of other components of evidence-based practices that are more difficult to confirm.

Len Sipes:  Right, but the bottom line of this is that they went through all of this – the case management, the risk and needs assessment, the motivational interviewing – to get them involved in programs. You guys didn’t measure the programs. You measured those things that I mentioned, but all of this is predicated on getting them involved in the programs that were necessary even though you didn’t measure that part of it.

Michael Kane:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Because that part of it had some methodological difficulties.

Michael Kane:  Right.

Len Sipes:  Alright, what are we talking about in terms of caseload, Sarah? I mean if this whole discussion and research is predicated on reduced caseloads, what do we mean by reduced caseloads?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Well, I think we mean a couple of things. One is a relative measure. As you know, caseloads fluctuate throughout the country and so agencies have very high caseloads depending on their resource levels and some have more medium size caseloads. I would say almost nobody thinks that their caseloads are too low, but for Oklahoma City, when we introduced the reduce caseload and randomly assigned officers to either the reduced caseload or the regular caseload, during our study, their caseload was about 106 probationers per officer on the regular caseload and 54 on the reduced caseload.

Len Sipes:  Okay, basically on probation agent to 54 offenders.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Right, for the reduced caseload.

Len Sipes:  Okay and Polk County?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  In Polk County, it was a little more complicated to determine, but we’re looking at a little bit higher-risk offenders in Polk County and so we were looking at their intensive supervision programming and their caseload was roughly, over the study period, 30 probationers per officer.

Len Sipes:  Okay, about 30:1.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Yeah and about 50 in the comparison officers.

Len Sipes:  We should establish again for anybody listening who doesn’t have the context to understand the discussion in terms of caseload numbers, I have personally witnessed in the state of Maryland, which I was Director of Public Relations for the Maryland Department of Safety for 14 years, caseloads of 130:1. These are 130 real cases. If you counted the inactive cases, it was much higher than that. I’ve known jurisdictions throughout this country that have had 200 offenders on their caseloads. These are regular caseloads. They aren’t administrative caseloads or interstate compact caseloads, but regular caseloads exceeding 200 per parole and probation agent. So first of all, do we agree with my assessment as to the comparison numbers?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Yes.

Michael Kane:  Yeah, I mean I’ve heard 180. Yeah, I’ve heard all kinds of, what I consider to be, fairly high numbers. So, yes, I think that that’s a good range. It really just differs across jurisdictions.

Len Sipes:  It’s amazing as to how any parole and probation agent could ever possibly be effective with those numbers, but we’re halfway through the program. I’m going to reintroduce the two of you and then we’re going to get into – what I consider – the fun part of the program. It took me 15 minutes to set up an understanding of the program and now we’re going to get into the policy implications. Ladies and gentlemen, today we’re talking to Sarah Cooke-Jalbert. She is an associate at Abt Associates. She is a sociologist and Public Policy Analysis with research interest in Criminal Justice program evaluation, www.abtassociates.com. Michael Kane is a Senior Associate with Crime and Justice Institute at Community Resources for Justice, www.cjinsitute.org. Okay, Michael or Sarah, either one of you come in. So to the aid to the mayor, to the aid to the governor, to the aid to the congressional person, to the aid to the parole and probation assistant director, to the different people listening to this program right now, what are the principle policy takeaways from this research that if we lower caseloads and have them do the right thing, we can reduce the number of people coming back to the Criminal Justice system significantly and do I have that correct?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Yes and I want to repeat something that some of the many people of advisors for this project emphasized to me a number of times, which is you can’t just do one. You can’t just introduce these techniques associated with evidence-based practices and keep caseloads the same size because officers don’t have time, as you mentioned. They don’t have time to learn all of these new techniques and still supervise their active caseloads, but you also can’t just reduce caseloads without giving the officers the tools to really make changes and how they supervise probationers. So I think that one major takeaway is that it’s really important to do both and our study kind of highlights the importance of that. We can’t tell from our study which particular components of evidence-based practices that are the most cost-effective or the most beneficial, but what we can say is that this the context in which you should reduce caseloads in order to be most effective for recidivism and probationer outcomes in general.

Len Sipes:  Michael, do you have anything to add to that?

Michael Kane:  No, I mean I think Sarah has it right. We know that both of these things have to go along together. I think that that is really a key finding here. I think another thing that is maybe less associated with recidivism reduction is that from our discussions with officers that were on a reduced caseload size, they really did reflect that they felt they were better able to use the techniques that they learned, that those evidence-based practices that they have learned, they were able to spend more quality time with the offender and help them to explore their issues that they were really able to do a better job in terms of making referrals. Those things that it seems like probation and parole are turning towards, it just seems like in the cases we were able to speak with the officers that had the reduced caseload that they felt like that extra time really enabled them to employ the techniques that they learned.

Len Sipes:  Well, it does take time because I’ve seen both in Maryland and the nine years of being with Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, which is a federal parole and probation agency here in Washington DC. When I was out with one of the – what we call – community supervision officers, what most jurisdictions call parole and probation agents, encountering a woman who basically she was thrown out of her place where she lived. It was violent. It was nasty. Knives were pulled and words were exchanged and she had to escape with her child. I mean the complexity that so many offenders bring to the parole and probation arena requires time. It just required time. If you’ve got somebody who is on their fifth positive for marijuana, yet they’re doing everything else okay, but yet they’re hanging out on the street corner. They’re being a little too loud, the fifth positive for marijuana, it takes time to intervene in that individual’s life and get them into the right treatment modality. These are time-consuming activities.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  They’re time-consuming and also things officers feel responsible for. In many cases, they are responsible in terms of job performance and in some cases they’re responsible in terms of liability for the people that they’re supervising and I think one of the important implications or sort of a finding is that in Oklahoma City, the officers who were on the reduced caseloads stayed in their jobs for the length of this study. The officers who had the double caseload, the regular caseload of 106 offenders, they left. They took other assignments. They left the agency. They got burned out pretty fast and they called us and told us that. They said, “Look, I’m really sorry to be leaving the study, but I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t feel like I can do my job anymore because there are too many people that I’m supervising.”

Len Sipes:  That applies to most parole and probation agents in the country. That’s my sense of it.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Exactly, exactly.

Len Sipes:  I’m talking about anywhere between 80% and 90%.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Right and this study does not cover what the overall retention rate of probation officers in local jurisdictions are, but I think you’ll find that their staff turnover is pretty high. At least, I know anecdotally it is and if you think about the costs associated with hiring new people, training new people to do what’s a pretty responsible job in a community, think of all the money you’ll save if your officers were happy and they stayed and they felt like they were being effective at their job. So I think it’s larger than just finding improved recidivism. I think it’s also a question of is the community safe because I have experienced officers who have a professional commitment that they feel that they can live up to.

Len Sipes:  If you’re talking 30% ballpark and another figure and I know it’s no really as simple as I’m making it out to be, but I’m just going to try to make it simple – 30% in Oklahoma in one category, 39% in Polk County. I mean you’re not talking about a lot of people not returning to the Criminal Justice system. You’re talking about a lot of people not going to jail. You’re talking about a lot of people not going back to prison. You’re talking about 700,000 individuals released from state and federal prisons every year. Now, if we could do 30-39% reduction of people not returning to the Criminal Justice system out of those 700,000, you’re talking about saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  That’s right and I think we all know that the level of incarceration in this country is unsustainable physically and that people are going to be released. The question is how well are they going to be supervised in the community post-release, but also how well are they going to be supervised in a community before they get to jail and prison. I think it’s a really important point to make that when people fail on probation and people recidivate while they’re on probation, they often are going into incarcerations whereas they were remaining in the community and everything. The potential, anyway, to be productive, to be employed, to really both contribute to the community and to improve their own lives and those opportunities are greatly diminished once people fail on probation and end up incarcerated.

Len Sipes:  Right. Is there a secret sauce, either one of you, in this in terms of your own guts and I know that the metrological community, the research community hates this question, but it’s what practitioners are interested in. it’s all those people I talked about – the aids to the mayors and governors. They’re sitting there and saying, “Okay, I’m listening to this.” What do you think, Sarah and Michael, is the secret sauce the key ingredient that really prompted reductions in recidivism beyond the fact of reduced caseloads? Is it getting them involved, figuring to who the person really is and getting the right person involved in the right treatment modality? I’ll start off with that.

Michael Kane:  I mean…can I take a stab at this?

Len Sipes:  Sure.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Sure, of course.

Michael Kane:  I think that it’s really the application of the risk and need principles, for me, that those individuals that are the highest risk based on an objective assessment –  in this case, the third-generation risk and need assessment – that those individuals receive more probation services than low-risk individuals and that we objectively assess what their needs are. One size fits all does not work and I think we know that in probation and parole. We can’t say that everyone should receive substance abuse treatment because while a lot of individuals may have substance abuse issues, that’s not the case for everyone. In some cases, we can be giving them services they don’t need, don’t reduce the recidivism rate and so I think the current climate economically in this country where in governmental budgets we’re making tough decisions, what we need to do is make smarter decisions about who we’re giving what. I think that that’s really at the core of implementing evidence-based practices in probation and parole agencies. We have to use the information that we have – in this case, risk and need assessment – and make decisions about resource allocation based on that so that we’re getting the most for our dollars. I think that’s relates directly to this caseload study because we know that if we supervise individuals on a lower caseload and use these techniques, we’re going to get better outcomes. So it is a tradeoff, certainly. There’s certainly a tradeoff in what we’re able to do with those lower-risk cases, but I think that’s really the takeaway for me.

Len Sipes:  I do want to be fair to the research and the listener community. There was another jurisdiction involved, another state involved, but they did not fully implement the evidence-based practices, so they didn’t have the reductions that you had in Oklahoma and Polk County, correct?

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Well, yeah and I think something important to note about that jurisdiction is that they, in fact, were one of the earliest adopters of evidence-based practices and they did a really good job when they implemented it in the 90s, but they had a series of fiscal crises and were not able to maintain the continuous feedback loop that’s necessary to keep programming like this going and operating well. In fact, during the period of time that we had data for the study, it didn’t appear that a lot of these elements of evidence-based practices were fully implemented, but afterwards, towards the end of the study, they kind of doubled-down on their efforts to do some training and to improve their programming. Who know? Today, those study results could be really different.

Len Sipes:  Could be dramatically different, right.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Right, it highlights the need to not just put something in place and say, “Okay, we’ve got this. We should be good.” It really needs to be a continued effort over a long period of time.

Len Sipes:  Got it. Okay, we have one minute left and the question to either one of you is evidence-based practices reduced caseloads do have a way of reducing crime, reducing people coming back into the Criminal Justice system. It’s unfortunate that a lot of states simply are so cash-strapped for money that they have a hard time doing what is, obviously, in everybody’s best interest.

Sarah Cooke-Jalbert:  Yeah, when you have incarceration, that’s a fixed cost. You need to maintain your prisons and your jails and probation is not such a fixed cost, so I think in my opinion – this isn’t a fact proven by the study – I think probation is a little bit easier to reduce money for than it is for, say, incarceration, but in a perfect world, I think policymakers could see that investing in probation really pays off when you compare those costs to the costs of incarceration.

Len Sipes:  Sarah, you have the final word. Our guests today have been Sarah Cooke-Jalbert. She, again, is an associate with Abt Associates. She is a sociologist and public policy analyst with research interest and Criminal Justice program evaluation – www.Abtassociates.com. Michael Kane is a Senior Associate with the Crime and Justice Institute at Community Resources for Justice. Again, that website there is www.cjinstitute.org. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. One again, we really appreciate all the interaction. We appreciate your emails, telephone calls. We appreciate the fact that you agree and disagree with some of the observations of our programs. We really like it when you come up with suggestions for new programs and I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

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Sexual Exploitation of Children-DC Public Safety-US Department of Justice

Sexual Exploitation of Children – “DC Public Safety”

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

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

Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/07/sexual-exploitation-of-children-dc-public-safety/

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

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes:  Hi, everybody.  Welcome to D.C. Public Safety.  I’m your host, Leonard Sipes.  Today’s show is about sexual exploitation of children, and you know what?  It’s really about a rescue mission.  The FBI estimates that on any given day there’s a million pedophiles online looking for your children.  The attorney general, Eric Holder, what he did was to frame a national effort to look at what we can do, what we in the criminal justice system can do, and to look at what you as parents can do.  To discuss this on the first half of the program, we have Francey Hakes.  She is the national coordinator for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction from the U.S. Department of Justice, and we have Dr. Michael Bourke, chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office, and to Francey, and to Michael, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Francey Hakes:  Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes:  All right, did I frame all this issue?  I mean, we have a lot of people, a lot of concern, a lot of individuals involved in exploiting our children.  So can you frame it for me a little bit, Francey?  And can you give me a sense as to the national effort as announced by the attorney general, Eric Holder?

Francey Hakes:  Of course.  Some people have described the sexual exploitation of our children as an epidemic.  I would certainly describe the explosion of child pornography that way.  So last August, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced our national strategy for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction.  It’s the first ever national strategy by any government in the world, and it’s certainly our first.  It’s supposed to have three prongs: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction.  What we decided to do is bring together all of the federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, all our prevention partners, all our sex offender management partners, our court partners, and most importantly, our parents and community groups together to bring this effort under one umbrella so that we can fight child sexual exploitation on all fronts.

Len Sipes:  The numbers that I’m talking about, they’re going up dramatically.  The numbers are astounding.  We’re talking about a huge number of individuals trying to violate our kids on a day to day basis, and when I say violate, we’re talking about psychological and physical bondage, are we not?

Francey Hakes:  Unfortunately, the children that are being sexually abused, especially the ones whose images are being traded like baseball cards across the internet, across the world, are being violated in increasingly violent ways, and we’re seeing increasingly younger and younger children being violated that way, and that is the reason that the attorney general and all of our partners decided to get together and start this effort, so that we could do something about it, and our ultimate goal is to eradicate child exploitation ultimately.

Len Sipes:  Michael, you’re the chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office.  You are an expert.  You understand these individuals; child sexual predators probably better than anybody else.  Who are they?

Michael Bourke:  Well, for eight years, prior to coming to the Marshal Service, I treated these men in federal prison, and the truth is there isn’t really one mind of a predator, you know, so to speak.  These men come in from all walks of life, they’re from all socioeconomic groups, they’re both genders, frankly, and these men tend not to burn out like other types of offenders do.  So really, when we talk about what is the sex offender, they, they’re folks that are our neighbors; they’re folks that are our coaches and civic leaders in our communities in some cases.  So they, most individuals that offend against children are actually known to those children and some have a very positive relationship in other ways with those children.

Len Sipes:  Well, help me frame it Michael, because on one hand, we have, according to the FBI, a million pedophiles online, and they’re trying to entice these kids into meetings, and they’re trying to entice them to exchange images.  These images are going to haunt them for the rest of their lives.  On the other hand, most sexual exploitations involved people who were known to the victim.  They’re the neighbor.  They’re the uncle.  They’re the coach.  I mean, what do you say to parents?  I mean, the numbers seem to be overwhelming.  What are the chief lessons to be learned here, and what prevention lessons can we put on the table?

Michael Bourke:  Yeah, I think, and Francey may have something to add to this, but from my experience, parents need to be aware of what their children are doing online.  They need to be aware of who their friends are online, with whom they’re chatting at night, they should be paying as close attention to those friends as they do if their child’s going to go spend the night at someone’s home, and frankly, a lot of parents are a little intimidated by some of this advanced technology on the internet, children have a lot of access and avenues by which to access the internet, including mobile devices, and parents need to just get a little, get some additional education, and they need to pay attention to what these kids are doing online.  It’s a very dangerous place.

Len Sipes:  They’ve got to be aggressive.  We run, by the way, in this program, we run a commercial about parents intervening with their kids and their online experiences, but the parents need to be aggressive.  Is that the bottom line?  I mean that’s the principal prevention method, if parents are aggressive in terms of what their kids are doing, and keeping an open line of communication, so if that child is approached, he can go to the parent and tell the parent about this experience.  Am I right or wrong?

Michael Bourke:  Yes, I think that’s accurate.  And also that relationship is very important between the parent and child as well.  For the parent to have a relationship with the child where the child feels comfortable coming to the parent and saying, someone attempted to solicit, or asked me to send them a dirty picture.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: or something like that, so that the parent can take action because so much can occur despite parents best efforts…

Len Sipes:   Right.

Michael Bourke: these children can access the internet in a number of locations in a number of ways.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke:  so building that relationship and that type of rapport with the child is very important.

Len Sipes:  Francey, you mentioned at the beginning of the program that The Department of Justice, for the first time, is bringing a coordination of effort in terms of parents, in terms of community organizations, in terms of law enforcement, in terms of everybody within the criminal justice system.  What is the bottom line behind that coordination, is it to be a more effective tool for prevention, a more effective tool for apprehension and prosecution?  What is it?

Francey Hakes:  Well, like I said, in the beginning, it’s really three prongs.  There are three main focuses of the national strategy: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction.  Interdiction is traditional law enforcement investigation and prosecution.  I’m a federal prosecutor, and I’ve been prosecuting these cases for 15 years.  That’s obviously very important and will continue to be very important.  But we’re never going to investigate and prosecute our way out of the problem.  The numbers are simply too large.  So deterrence is very important, and that’s where the United States Marshal Service and others, our state and local partners, through their sex offender management and monitoring, they are so key, and one of our best tools is going to be prevention.  We’d rather not have the victims to have to rescue in the first place.  We’d rather the children be empowered to protect themselves.  We’d rather the parents have the tools that they need to know how to protect their children, and so that’s why organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Netsmarts, these organizations give out free materials, they have websites, they give out free materials for parents, teachers, students, and groups to obtain the information that they need to protect themselves online.  It’s not just the parents, it’s not just the students, it’s not just the teachers.  It’s all of those groups, plus our community groups, that need to have the materials necessary to protect themselves, not just online, but in their day to day activities, I think sometimes in this internet world, we’ve become, and Dr. Burke is correct, that children have access to the internet through so many devices now that it’s, sometimes, I think, a little terrifying.  But we also have to remember that the majority of children who are being sexually abused are being abused by those that they know, and so arming them with the knowledge, the empowerment, the understanding of what is right and what’s wrong and what’s okay to tell, who to go to, a trusted adult, those things are very important.

Len Sipes:  Having those age appropriate conversations with the kids, informing them, but not scaring them.

Francey Hakes:  Exactly right.

Len Sipes:  Now, so all these statistics that I mentioned at the beginning of the program, one million pedophiles, and a 914% increase in the number of child prostitution cases,  do we have the capacity to deal with this?  Is the criminal justice system at the federal, state, and local level overwhelmed by this process?  Do we have the wherewithal to deal with this effectively, or are we fighting an uphill battle?

Francey Hakes:  Well I think, sometimes in prosecution, we always used to call it shoveling smoke because it seems like the more you shovel, the more that there is. And I think with respect to child sexual abuse it’s been around for a long time, we hope that we can eradicate it, and where I think, we’ve started well, we’re on a good path.  Are we somewhat overwhelmed?  I think it’s overwhelming.  I don’t think we’re overwhelmed.  There are huge amounts of effort going on at the federal, state, and local level, but the key here is what the national strategy was designed to produce, and that is partnerships, collaboration, and cooperation at all levels of government, including globally.  This has become, of course, an international problem with the advent of the internet.

Len Sipes:  A global issue, right.

Francey Hakes:  It is an absolutely global issue.  And so we’re working with industry on ways to solve the problem.  You probably heard the announcement last week from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Facebook and Microsoft.  Microsoft has invented a new technology called Photo DNA.  They donated it to the National Center.  The National Center, in turn, gave it to Facebook, and Facebook is going to employ this technology throughout their systems which will search for and find known images of child pornography so that they can be eradicated from their systems.

Len Sipes:  Wonderful.  Michael –

Francey Hakes:  So these are things that we have to do to work together and really think creatively between law enforcement, community, and industry.

Len Sipes:  Michael, can we persuade people who are child sex offenders, who are pedophiles, not to get involved in this, or is that drive, that’s going to be with them for the rest of their lives–can the system have an impact on their behavior?  Can we persuade them not to do this–that we’re taking sufficient actions that’s likely for them to get caught, can we persuade them not to do this?

Michael Bourke:  Yeah, it’s a great question, Leonard.  I think the answer is, it’s fairly multifaceted, but the short answer is that there is no cure for pedophilia.  There’s no cure for these fantasies and these drives, per se.  There is, however, for any of these individuals, a possibility of managing that behavior.  This is not something inevitable, this is a choice, these men are responsible for those choices, and women, and we can assist them in doing that with creative external management.  By that, I mean things like the registrations and outpatient treatment programs and things like that.  With proper external management and proper internal management, these men are capable of living a life in which they never harm a child.

Len Sipes:  Right, so treatment does work.  That’s one of the things I did want to get across.  Treatment does work, and we within the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, our sex offender agency, we’re going to talk about that with two people involved in that unit on the second half, but treatment does work,  we can really persuade individuals who are on the edge.  The commercial that will run between the first and second half, we’ll talk about ìwhen did you become a child sex predator?î  Obviously, we’re under the opinion that we can persuade people who are on the edge not to do this.  This is wrong; you’re going to get locked up.  We can meaningfully intervene.

Michael Bourke:  Right, well there are individuals that, with those proper things in place, have a choice not to re-offend.

Len Sipes:  Okay.

Michael Bourke:  That’s correct.

Len Sipes:  The final part of it is aggressive prosecution.  We need to go after them in every way shape and form and that’s what we’re trying to do with the federal, state, and local level, is to set up these dummy operations to pretend that you’re the 14 year old, the 13 year old, to monitor whatever it is that we can monitor, and to go after these people and arrest them and prosecute them.  Is that correct?

Francey Hakes:  Well that’s right, and that’s one of the reasons why we place such a high emphasis on technology and training for our law enforcement and for our prosecutors, because this is often a very high-tech crime, and we need a high tech solution, and that’s why we’re working with industry on things like I talked about, the Photo DNA initiative, but there are lots of other tools that law enforcement uses to keep up with the bad guys who are trying to assault our children.  There are very sophisticated groups out there that have banded together to discuss their deviant fantasies and to plan ways to sexually assault children, and we have to find ways to be just as sophisticated to break their encryption, to get into their passwords, to find a way to infiltrate these groups, and we are doing that at the national level in order to make clear to these would-be predators that they have nowhere to hide, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have very strong, firm sentences as well, because that is part of our deterrent prong.

Len Sipes:  Okay, we have one minute.  So through the national effort, for what attorney general Eric Holder announced, the Office of Justice Programs, US Marshals Office, Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, we can look them in the eye and say that we’re gaining ground, that we have the wherewithal to come after you guys.  Stop it.

Francey Hakes:  I think the message is, to the would-be pedophile out there is you’re probably talking to a law enforcement officer, and watch out for the knock at your door.

Len Sipes:  Cool.  Michael?

Michael Bourke:  I agree.  United States Marshal Service has also set up what we call the National Sex Offender Targeting Center.  It’s a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary intel and operational hub.  We’re looking in all corners for these men.  We are going after them when they fail to register, and we’re putting all of our efforts toward this problem.

Len Sipes:  We have to close now.  I really appreciate this stimulating conversation.  Ladies and gentlemen, Francey Hakes, National Coordinator for the Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction from the US Department of Justice, Dr. Michael Bourke, Chief Psychologist for the United States Marshals Office.  Stay with us on the second half of the program as we talk to individual parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers, who supervise sex offenders on a day to day basis.  Please stay with us.

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Len Sipes:  Welcome back to D.C. Public Safety.  I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes, and we continue to explore this topic of sexual exploitation of children.  The first half, we talked to two individuals from the Department of Justice, and we framed the numbers, and the numbers are truly staggering, but what does that mean in terms of the local level?  We talked about the importance of partnerships, and we talked about the importance of people at the local level enforcing laws and providing treatment services.  To talk about what it is that we do here within the District of Columbia; we have two principals with us today.  We have Ashley Natoli, a community supervision officer for the sex offender unit of my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Kevin Jones, another community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, and to Ashley and Kevin welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Ashley Natoli:  Thank you.

Kevin Jones:  Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes:  All right, Ashley, give me a sense as to this issue of the sex offender unit.  What is it that we do?  What is it that we do in the District of Columbia that’s unique?

Ashley Natoli:  Well, we supervise offenders who have either been convicted of a sex offense, had an arrest for a sex offense, or an offense that is sexual in nature.  They come to our unit and are supervised in our unit.  There is roughly about 450 active cases in our unit right now, about 670 total of all sex offenders right now.

Len Sipes:  Now, the interesting thing is what we at CSOSA do, and this is different from a lot of parole and probation agencies throughout the country, is that if you’ve had a sexual conviction in the past, not your current charge, but 15 years ago, if you had a sexual conviction, or if you had an arrest, you come to the sex offender unit, right?

Ashley Natoli:  That’s correct.

Len Sipes:  All right.  Kevin, I want to talk to you.  This is something that’s intrigued me from the very beginning of my time in corrections, that is, is that so many of the offenders on the sex offender unit are so compliant.  They dress well, they work, they show up on time, they dot their I’s, they cross their T’s, and they give every appearance of people who are compliant vs. other offenders, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that they have issues.  With the sex offender unit, the sex offenders, they can give the impression that nothing’s wrong with me, just spend your time with more troublesome people.  You don’t have to really spend that much amount of time with me, look at me, I do everything right.  Am I in the ballpark?

Kevin Jones:  You’re in the ballpark exactly, Leonard.  These guys are the most compliant guys on our caseloads.  They actually drug test as scheduled, always on appointments, on time.  They’re in the office, they appear to be, have all their ducks in a row.  I think our main focus is, what are you after you leave our office?  So that’s why we use a lot of our safety tactics, are that, we have a lot of collateral contacts with the offenders and the offenders’ families, and we really get to see what kind of guys they are once they leave our office.

Len Sipes:  Now, I guess I shouldn’t brag, but then again, I am the host of the program, and this is our agency, so I am going to brag.  We have one of the best sex offender units in the country, in my opinion, and what I’ve heard that from a lot of people, one of the best sex offender units.  We have very high levels of contact.  We drug test the dickens out of them, we submit them, they have to submit to lie detector tests, polygraphs.  We put them in treatment, sometimes through the treatment process we find out about other things, we search their computers.  We put them under surveillance, if necessary; we work with local law enforcement in terms of joint supervisions.  We go to their home unannounced.  You guys do it, and sometimes with our partners in the Metropolitan Police Department, they’re under a lot of supervision, right?

Ashley Natoli:  That’s correct.

Len Sipes:  Okay, and what does that do for that person, either one of you?

Kevin Jones:  That person, as we do unscheduled contacts, it kind of keeps them off balance. Again, he has to be held accountable for, if he has no contact with minors, we assure that by doing home visits, and when we’re in home visits, we’re actually looking for things that might kind of be off the beat, maybe a possible toy, things of that nature in someone’s home, and at that point, they’re questioned.

Len Sipes:  Now it’s also extraordinarily difficult, at the same time, with handheld computers, commonly known as smartphones.  I mean, the smartphone that I carry every day is as powerful as a desktop computer five years ago.  You can do anything you want with a smartphone.  So yeah, we have the right to search their computers, but they may not be operating off their computers.  They may be operating off of a portable device, correct?

Kevin Jones:  That’s correct.

Len Sipes:  How do you deal with that?

Ashley Natoli:  We look at the smartphones and the handheld devices similar to a computer.  We have the ability to search those just as we would a computer, and in most instances, the offenders will be having these handheld devices as opposed to having a computer,

Len Sipes:  Right. And the other thing that we are aware of too is a lot of the gaming consoles, such as Play Station 3’s, can be manipulated into being a computer as well, so we have to be looking out for a lot more than just a laptop in the home.  We have to be looking into what they’re using as a phone, what they have, and then we’re asking the questions and following up with the searches.  And that becomes the intriguing part of this, because it truly is a cat and mouse game.  Now I don’t want to overplay my hand here.  These individuals, in many cases, are compliant.  You’re supervising them, they are in treatment, treatment does work, you can take individuals, and they can control their impulses.  They don’t necessarily have to be out there offending.  But this is truly the, Dr. Bourke mentioned it in the first half, this is the master psychological game.  It is a psychological game, is it not, of cat and mouse, of looking for nuances of listening to individual little things that may not mean that much to another community supervision officer, but to you, means a lot.  Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli:  That’s correct.

Kevin Jones:  Yeah, that’s correct.

Ashley Natoli:  A lot of these offenders, they are masters of manipulation and deception, and that’s, in most instances, in a lot of instances, how they ended up offending in the first place, because they have an incredible ability to groom these victims, and they’ve mastered the art of manipulation, and so we have to be aware of that so we aren’t taken advantage of.

Len Sipes:  Well, tell me a little bit about the grooming of the victims, because we didn’t get involved in that in the first half.  They will go online with them, and they will have, not just hours of conversations, but days or weeks or months of conversation before they ask for a photograph, or then that photograph moves on to a more sexually suggestive photograph.  This is a process.  They’re very patient individuals.  Correct?

Kevin Jones:  That’s correct.  A lot of the guys that are in the grooming process while on sex offender treatment, a lot of that comes out in the treatment process, and once you find out that a guy might be on supervision, an offender might be on supervision for one offense, during that sex offender treatment process, you will find out that this offender has had multiple victims that he has proposed and that he has groomed, and this makes this offender a little more dangerous than what, from the outside, what it looks like to just this one victim.

Len Sipes:  And again, I mean, the idea of going in unannounced, putting on a GPS tracking device, but all of that, we talk about the technology, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself with the technology, it strikes me, the most important ingredient we have here in terms of protecting the public is the savviness of the people who are supervising these sex offenders.  Do I have it right?  It really doesn’t matter about the computer part, the GPS, and the tracking devices, and the lie detector tests, what really matters is your ability to read the tea leaves as to whether or not this person is truly compliant or not.  Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli:  That’s correct.  You have to be very patient and very thorough and leave no detail unturned.  Like with the GPS, we’re not just looking at, are they complying with their curfew, are they charging their device, we’re looking at, where are they going during the daytime.  So you actually look at all their tracks so you can know, did this offender go to the park, or was this offender near a school, so we’re aware of that, and we can put alerts on there so it helps us to identify that, but we have all this information, and if we’re not doing the right thing with it, then

Len Sipes:  And the neat thing about it is we can overlay Google Earth, so we’re taking a look at that intersection, and we’re not quite sure he’s hanging out at the intersection, but when we overlay Google Earth, a-ha, there’s a playground that didn’t show up on a regular map.  So we do have the technology tools to try and keep up with the individuals, but it’s really is more understanding who that person is.  How long does it take until you get a sense as to that sex offender?  How long does it take before you feel that you’re inside that person’s head, that person’s mind, that person’s modus operandi?

Kevin Jones:  Well, again, with the treatment modal-, coupled with the GPS, you can probably feel your offender out, I guess, in about two months, maybe, to that nature, and a lot of it is, you’re questioning his every move, which makes him uncomfortable, which is, at the same time, holds him accountable for where he’s going, so as long as he’s knows that he’s being tracked, and that we have exclusion zones from the zoo, from parks, and things of that nature, then that kind of keeps him in compliance.

Len Sipes:  And we’ll get word from the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement partners that we saw the guy spending way too much time outside of the St. Francis School.  It was a block away, and maybe he has a legitimate reason for being there, maybe he doesn’t, but that’s also the law enforcement partnership feeding us information, right?

Kevin Jones:  Yes.

Ashley Natoli:  Yeah, definitely.

Kevin Jones:  And apart with the law enforcement contact, we do unscheduled accountability tours, and that’s with our partnership with Metropolitan Police Department, and at that time, we also have what we call GPS clean sweep tours, where we will come do unscheduled accountability tours on an offender who has a GPS curfew of 7:00, just to make sure that they’re in place, that there’s no type of shielding, anything of that nature, and we also are really big on the Halloween project, where, that we will come to the offender’s home between the hours of 3 and 11, and he is to be in that home at that particular time.

Len Sipes:  Right, and we have found violations on the Halloween tour. We have found kids inside the home, and we have found them, they’re not supposed to be giving out candy, they’re not supposed to be decorating homes.

Kevin Jones:  Lights supposed to be off.

Len Sipes:  We roll up to the house, and there’s decorations, and there’s candy, so we’re trying to protect the public in that way.  The other major thing that we’re trying to do is look at social media, look at Facebook, but there are literally hundreds of sites that kids go onto.  I was reading this morning about going onto gaming sites.  You know, it’s not a chat room, it’s not Facebook, it’s now gaming sites.  So we’re now in the process of taking a look at social media and tracking that person through the social media process, correct?

Ashley Natoli:  Yes.

Kevin Jones:  That is correct.

Len Sipes:  Okay, and there’s a certain point where we are going to be expanding this to other offenders beyond sex offenders, but that’s part of their world, and that’s part of the experience of kids, and if they’re going to be there, we need to be there, right?

Ashley Natoli:  That’s correct.

Kevin Jones:  Yeah, and we actually have a mechanism where we are monitoring Facebook, and we’ve had situations where we’ve seen our offenders who may have no contact with minors, and in his profile sheet, he’ll be holding

Len Sipes:  Right!

Kevin Jones:  a child.

Len Sipes:  Right.

Ashley Natoli:  And it’s not as simple as just searching them by their name.  You’re searching their aliases; you’re looking, searching by email addresses and different things, because a lot of it is not going to just be given to us.  We have to find the information.  It’s there if we search for it, deep enough.

Len Sipes:  Right.  We’re not going to give away our secrets in terms of how we’ve figured this out, but Cool Breeze was his moniker, nickname seven years ago, and son of a gun if he’s not using Cool Breeze in terms of his Facebook interactions, so there are all sorts of ways of getting at this issue.  So the bottom line is this.  What do we tell parents?  I mean, you guys are there protecting their kids, you’re protecting all of society, just not the kids, but you’re protecting society, protecting kids from further activities on the part of these individuals.  You know them better than just about anybody else in the criminal justice system.  What do we tell parents?  One of my chief messages is having an open conversation, so if somebody approaches that child, that child talks to the parents.

Ashley Natoli:  I agree, and I also think parents need to be aware that this is something real and that happens every day, and that a lot of people think, oh, it won’t happen to me, or it won’t happen to my children, but you need to be aware that it is a problem and it will happen, and you need to know what’s going on so that you can educate your children appropriately and know that this is real.

Len Sipes:  Well, the FBI is saying one million predators.  That’s just an unbelievable number of people.  I mean, they’re attacking your kids, correct, Kevin?

Kevin Jones:  That’s correct.  And a lot of it is, just like we were stating, collateral contacts.  You have to build a collateral contact with the offenders’ family members.

Len Sipes:  Right, and employers and friends.

Kevin Jones:  Employers, friends, significant others.

Len Sipes:  The bottom line is that you’ve got to get, and we’re going to close with this question, you’ve got to get a complete psychological profile of who that person is.  You’ve got to know that person better than their own mother knows that person, correct?

Kevin Jones:  That’s correct.

Len Sipes:  All right, we’re going to close on that.  Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Jones, community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Ashley Natoli, the community supervision officer, again, with the sex offender unit.  Thank you very much for watching, and please, protect your children.  Please have an open and honest conversation and age appropriate conversation with your children.  Watch for us next time when we explore another very important topic in our criminal justice system.  Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

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