wp-auto-updater
domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init
action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/csosamed/public_html/podcast/transcripts/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114genesis
domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init
action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/csosamed/public_html/podcast/transcripts/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/10/parole-and-probation-officer-stress/
Leonard Sipes: From the nation’s capitol, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, by our microphones today, Lorenzo Hopkins. He’s supervisory community supervision officer known elsewhere as a supervisory-prone probation agent from my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, www.csosa.gov. Lorenzo, welcome to DC Public Safety.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Thank you for having me, Len.
Leonard Sipes: Today’s topic is parole and probation officer stress. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most ignored topics that you can possibly imagine. I see all the time. I witness all the effort to deal with police officer stress and that’s a mighty subject. We know what’s been happening throughout the country over the course of the last six months, and in terms of fully integrating law enforcement in the community and the controversy that that has entailed. Everybody’s looking at police officers. Nobody’s looking at the stress of parole and probation agents. Am I correct or incorrect?
Lorenzo Hopkins: You’re correct, Leonard. I’ve been in this business for over twenty years, and I’ve seen it change. What I mean by that is, probation and purple agents are asked to do more. The government is talking about reducing the prison population, which is going to mean more people coming back on community supervision. When you have that, you’re going to have those increased stressors. Again, some of the prison criminal probation population is getting more and more violent. They’re getting younger. I’ve seen the national trend. DC, again you can see the shootings went on the street, how young people are getting and our agents are going out into the community in those environments, dealing with people just released from prison, some of them just fresh off of probation. Really, there’s limited to no talk about the stress that they undergo each day.
Leonard Sipes: Now, I have to, just for the sake of grounding the people who are listening to this program, there are five million people caught up in the criminal justice system on any given day in the correctional system. Two million are involved in prisons and jails, which means the bulk are under community supervision with parole and probation agencies. When you talk about correction in America, when you talk about incarceration, when you talk about America’s response to crime, the vast majority of Americans’ response to crime are individuals assigned to parole and probation agents, correct?
Lorenzo Hopkins: That’s correct. We have a huge impact as relates to attempting to reduce [inaudible 00:02:46]. What that entails today was much different than it was when I entered the business over twenty years ago. Back when I first started, you simply received a court order and it told you, “Pay restitution, do community service and things.” We made sure they did that. We’ve since transitioned CBI, cognitive behavior intervention, motivational interviewing. Now you’re going to take those four thousand people, most agencies have trended that way, and instead of checking boxes saying they’re completed, no. You have to actually change behavior and change thinking patterns.
Leonard Sipes: When I was first involved in the correctional system and we’re talking about a quarter of a century ago, I was told by parole and probation for the agency that I represented, which was the Maryland Department of Public Safety, that our role in parole and probation is to enforce the will of the court and enforce the will of the parole commission. That was it. It wasn’t talking about changing individuals. It wasn’t talking about intervening in their lives. It wasn’t talking about providing them with the support they needed to deal with their substance abuse, deal with their mental health issues, deal with their reunification of their children. It was simply to enforce the will of the parole commission and enforce the will of the courts.
Now, as you’ve just said, it’s much more than that. What we have to do is to intervene, is to get into the lives of individuals under community supervision to find out what makes them tick, what makes them angry, what their issues are, what their hopes and dreams are and try to provide wrap-around programs to support that individual. The mission of being a parole and probation agent has changed dramatically just within the last ten years.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Certainly it has. What hasn’t changed is the fact that we’re still required to put public safety first. That’s primary, but I would say our biggest job now is being change agents, meeting a person where they are, CBI.
Leonard Sipes: Cognitive-
Lorenzo Hopkins: Cognitive behavior intervention. Right.
Leonard Sipes: Cognitive behavioral intervention.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Yes. What happens is, we used to just take people and say, “Okay, the court says you need to go substance abuse treatment.” Now, you have to say, “Is that person ready to go to substance abuse treatment?” If that person is not ready, you’re wasting money. That’s what research has shown. If you make a person just go to treatment for the sake of going to treatment, they will program, as we call it. They will go through a program, complete it just to satisfy it. They still have the same cognitive thinking, the negative thinking that they used to have and eventually they go back to using.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, well let’s talk a little bit about the people under supervision before we get onto parole and probation agent stress. The vast majority of people under supervision have histories of substance abuse, and in many cases, really raging histories of substance abuse. I’ve seen surveys where up to fifty percent of the offender population have histories of mental health problems, lack of job history, did not do well in school, many with anti-social attitudes. If you talk to women caught up in the criminal justice system as I have before these microphones, the great majority have had histories of sexual violence directed at them as children, as teenagers by people they know. The point is that they bring an awful lot of baggage to the table. Suddenly they come and they sit in front of Lorenzo Hopkins and Lorenzo Hopkins has got to somehow, some way, break through all those barriers, deal with all of the issues that that person brings to the table, and do it in such a way that does not make him crazy, correct?
Lorenzo Hopkins: That’s correct, because right now when we talk about dealing with the substance abuses you spoke about, and I’m glad you prefaced it by the other issues, the trauma and things of that nature, for years, when I say “we,” parole and probation, we’ve treated the symptom. The symptom was substance abuse. We never really got to that underlying trauma.
A brief story. I was briefly assigned to the mental health branch as a supervisor. I had this older lady, mid fifties, maybe. She was a heroin user for years. She and I had a conversation and she kept getting violated. That’s when the parole commission, if you violated substance abuse, you will get violated and go back and go back under supervision, correct. I sat her down one day in my office and said, “Tell me what’s going on.” She said, “You’re the first person who asked me about what’s going on instead of just saying, ‘You need to stop using heroin.'” Then she went to a story about being sexually molested as a child and all those things. I’m like, “Wow, if we don’t treat that trauma, we’re going to fail with substance abuse.
Leonard Sipes: You know, we’ve increased our rate of successful completions here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency from about sixty-two to about sixty-nine percent. Our rearrest rates have been down, as of late. Obviously, we’re moving in the right direction, but we have a fifty to one case load. I know of parole and probation agents in various states that have a hundred to one, a hundred and fifty, two hundred to one, and more. When you’re carrying a case load of a hundred and fifty to two hundred individuals caught up in the criminal justice system, it doesn’t strike me as that person having a snowball’s chance in Hades of actually breaking through those barriers and to meaningly intervene in the lives of the human beings under supervision. If they’re talking about doing cognitive behavioral therapy, as you’ve said, getting into the heart and soul as to why people are doing certain things and training them as to how to deal with those problems, when you have a case load of two hundred to one that seems to me to be impossible.
Lorenzo Hopkins: It’s extremely difficult and that’s where a lot of stress come in. Even with case loads in DC being fifty to one, if you could imagine. Let me put you in a probation officer’s seat on a reporting day. On reporting day, let’s say it’s Thursday. You may have thirty of your people coming in on that day for drug testing, to speak to you. Could you imagine hearing thirty different trauma stories every day and the kind of stress you would take home with you every day?
Leonard Sipes: That’s just it! Half of our contacts need to be made in the community. You could be walking through the community and see your person under supervision. You could be going into their home. It could be a surprise visit. You could be taking along a police officer with you. All you’re hearing all day long is trauma, trauma, trauma, correct?
Lorenzo Hopkins: That’s absolutely correct.
Leonard Sipes: How do you escape that?
Lorenzo Hopkins: The thing is typically most people don’t. They don’t recognize it. That’s one thing I talk to my staff about right now, even being in diagnostics. People think that they are the report writers. They don’t have to hear. They don’t have to see the finish. Could you imagine interviewing someone at the local jail, even someone at the office, and they’re telling you about the trauma they’ve suffered, the sexual abuse they’ve suffered, standard sibling murder, their mother mother murdered, and you read that day in and day out? That’s secondary trauma and I don’t think people pay much attention to secondary trauma.
Leonard Sipes: If you’re going to get into the heart and soul of that person, if you’re going to use cognitive behavioral therapy and intervene in the life of that person, you’ve got to somehow, some way, take on the emotions that that person is talking about. It cannot be just, “I dismiss it at the end of the day. I’m going to go home and have a beer and walk the dog and play with the kids.” That trauma stays with you. It’s inevitable that that trauma is going to stay with you to some degree.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Well, to be human, it has to. The problem, Len, is a lot of people don’t know what the symptoms look like. They think going home and just having a beer or two is normal. That could be their way of coping. You’ve seen research about law enforcement professionals, correction officers. They end up with substance abuse problems, drugs, and alcohol to cope.
Leonard Sipes: There are higher rates, I’ve seen, of substance abuse amongst people in our profession than in terms of the larger society.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Absolutely, because that’s a coping mechanism. Some people can’t sleep at night. Look at the divorce rate among people in our profession also, because you take things home.
A quick story. Before I started working in probation and parole, I worked as administrator at a juvenile detention facility. I went home after hearing this stuff and seeing these kids every single day who weren’t doing well. You know what I did?
Leonard Sipes: What?
Lorenzo Hopkins: I was a young married guy and I said, “I don’t want any children.” Seriously. My wife said, “Honey, are you serious? These are just the children you see. All children aren’t like that.” I tell that story to say when you are starting to become jaded in this business, you start to become skeptical of everyone.
Leonard Sipes: It takes its toll on you. I’ve always said after forty-five years in the criminal justice system, I’ve become acidic. I see the world differently than the average person because I understand bands in humanity towards man. We had a woman at a conference one time dealing with women caught up in the criminal justice system who stood up in the conference and said, “The woman I live with pulled a knife on me last night and pulled a knife on me and my child and we had a huge argument. I had to get out of there. I now have no place to live. I now have a child and I now have to go back and get my private possessions out of this apartment from a woman who pulled a knife on me.” Then she took a look at everybody in the hall and said, “Now, what are you going to do for me to help me out of this situation?” That’s what our people deal with every single day, correct?
Lorenzo Hopkins: That’s correct. When you have young officers just into the business, or even some more seasoned ones, if you get that every day, you’re in, I call it crisis mode every day because you never know what’s going to happen.
Again, before I went to diagnostics and mental health, I had my day planned out most days but it never failed. Someone came in. They started to decompensate. One of my staff and I had to take them to the CPAP, for the condition they’re dealing with [inaudible 00:13:39] medicine to admit them. Your days are not yours. Then, you run into another stressor is, when you try to get help, as you talked about the young lady at the meeting you were at, take that and multiply that by decreasing city budgets and town budgets when there really is no housing out there.
Leonard Sipes: Right. Yeah, finding housing for people caught up in the criminal justice system is really difficult.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Absolutely, and then you try to put them in a shelter. The shelter could be full. Then you have women and children, which is another difficulty trying to place because there are limited resources.
Leonard Sipes: My phone number is the only phone number on the website and I get calls at night. I get calls on the weekends. “Why is my son on probation? Why did my son was taken to jail? What’s happening with my son? He was supposed to go to this rehab clinic and he’s not doing well. Now he’s out. Are you guys going to get a warrant for his arrest?” There’s a certain point. It’s like, “Folks! I can’t just do this every night. I can’t do it every weekend. I’ve got my own life to live,” but you can’t tell them, “No.” You cannot not listen to them. If I’m experiencing that and I’m the spokesperson for the agency, what are you all going through?
Lorenzo Hopkins: Well, that’s a huge stressor. When I first left mental health and went to diagnostics, my staff at my first meeting were saying, “Well, Mister Hopkins, we’re working on weekends and evenings trying to get these reports done.” I said, “That stops today.”
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
Lorenzo Hopkins: “That stops today, because I understand that you have to have healthy work-life balance. That’s extremely important in this business because what happens is, I found myself doing it late. I’m not telling you something I’m thinking of or guessing about. I found myself with my Blackberry on at my child’s karate meeting contest.
Leonard Sipes: Yes, yes, yes.
Lorenzo Hopkins: I found myself checking the newspaper to see if a defendant was ever arrested. What do I have to face tomorrow?”
Leonard Sipes: Every time somebody goes out and commits a homicide or commits a crime, you’re sitting there going, “Oh my God, I hope he’s not on my case load.”
Lorenzo Hopkins: Exactly! You take your eight hour day, just an average eight hour day, and you go home and you take it home with you. That’s twenty-four hours a day besides the time you’re sleeping that you’re dealing with something about seeing so-and-so or about this profession.
Leonard Sipes: Well, we’re halfway through the program. I do want to reintroduce you, ladies and gentlemen. We’re talking to Lorenzo Hopkins, a supervisory community supervision officer with my agency, our agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, www.csosa.gov. We’re talking about parole and probation officer stress.
Lorenzo, you went to the American Probation and Parole Association in Los Angeles and you gave a seminar on parole and probation officer stress. What are the key points of your address in Los Angeles dealing with a national audience on this topic?
Lorenzo Hopkins: Well, one thing we have to realize is that, and I actually said it like this, oftentimes in this business, we take far too much credit for peoples’ success and far too much blame for their failures. We’re always looking at something that, “Well, did I do this or did I do that?” We try to be but we are human and you can’t be everything to everyone. That’s one. Two, when you leave your work and you’re not on duty, the biggest mistake people make is leave that cell phone or Blackberry on. They check it religiously. I told them in LA that actually it’s an addiction. It’s an addiction because you find yourself in conversations with people. You’re checking your work phone. When that occurs, you’re actually cheating your family because your family deserves some you time.
Leonard Sipes: Some work-life balance.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right. You also deserve some time away because you can’t continue at that pace. You can’t. You’ll be surprised how many people, Len, that work for me that I have to make take vacation. What you get to carry over in the government two hundred forty hours, or whatever the case may be?
Leonard Sipes: Yup!
Lorenzo Hopkins: I’m sitting down with them doing a life plan. “You need to take off some days.”
Leonard Sipes: I do want to emphasize this, is that our rate at successes here at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency is going up, so we are succeeding in getting people to do the right thing. I understand that there’s no such thing as the perfect offender on supervision. I understand that they all bring a tremendous amount of issues with them, in particular, substance abuse. We have done a better job. We have been able to get into the lives of individuals. We’ve gotten into the lives of their families. We have helped them deal with all the different things they had to deal with to the point where our success rate is going up. What toll is that taking on what we call community supervision officers?
Lorenzo Hopkins: It’s taking a tremendous toll. We talked about earlier, we put a lot of effort into CBI, cognitive behavior intervention, motivational interviewing, things that change the thinking of the defender or defendant population. The problem is, as you alluded to earlier, there’s not a lot of research or anything about people who actually do the work. We have to really start to think, as managers, I’m a supervisor, take a look at your people and start speaking to them about how are things impacting them.
Leonard Sipes: Your employees, yes?
Lorenzo Hopkins: Yeah, my employees. You have to start talking to your employees the same way you want them to invest in the defender population, you must invest in them.
Leonard Sipes: You’ve got to do the same thing for them.
Lorenzo Hopkins: You have to, because guess what. A lot of these ladies and gentlemen are young.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
Lorenzo Hopkins: They’re young. Half of that stuff they’re reading about or talking to the defenders about, they haven’t lived it.
Leonard Sipes: It’s interesting. They are college educated. Everybody comes to us with a bachelor’s degree. The great majority of our agency have master’s degrees. Some have above. That’s a very well-educated workforce that we have, but they’re still people. Regardless of their education, regardless of their understanding, regardless of their grounding, they’re still people subject to the same levels of stress as any police officer, as anybody in any profession.
Lorenzo Hopkins: That’s true, Len, because you alluded to the national epidemic what’s going on between law enforcement and many communities. In that whole conversation, you don’t hear people talking about probation and parole because guess what, we’re in the community also. We’re there daily. We’re engaging people in conversations, so a police officer’s law enforcement. We’re law enforcement also, so that same sense of heightened expectations and anxiety when we go into some of the worst neighborhoods in our cities is there. It’s natural. The hair stands up on the back of your neck.
Leonard Sipes: It rubs off on everybody, whether you’re a police officer or whether you’re a parole and probation agent. The trauma that you deal with, you could not simply separate that from your life. There’s just no clean break. You’ve got to acknowledge the fact that this exists.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right, and that’s why it’s imperative on partners being partners. When you have a partnership with people you work with, if your supervisor doesn’t do it, look out for your colleague. Look out for your co-worker. You can see when they’re under undue stress. You can speak to them about it. Most of our friends, let’s be honest, in law enforcement, you’ve been in law enforcement a long time, they’re other law enforcement people. Guess what we talk about when we go out.
Leonard Sipes: Oh yeah!
Lorenzo Hopkins: The job.
Leonard Sipes: We sit there and we gripe about the criminal justice system. We gripe about those idiots at headquarters, and I always laugh because then I became an idiot at headquarters as a spokesperson for, again, Maryland Department of Public Safety. The point is is that we sat there and we griped and we drank too much.
Lorenzo Hopkins: There was no release.
Leonard Sipes: We drank too much.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right.
Leonard Sipes: I’m not quite sure when I went home from one of these drinking-too-much, griping-too-much sessions, I’m not quite sure I felt a whole heck of a lot better.
Lorenzo Hopkins: No, because guess what. If you’re anything like I used to be when I entered the business is that I still thought about, well come the other night, thought about, “Did I do this? Did I do that? Maybe I should have done this differently.”
Leonard Sipes: Because we are talking about the lives of people in crisis and there’s no way of leaving that behind. You have to acknowledge that, deal with it, and come to grips with the tools that help you cope with it. Alcohol or drugs certainly is not part of that coping mechanism.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right, and you have to have balance. When I talk about work-life balance, work-life balance isn’t splitting time between work and life. Work-life balance is what’s important to you. If you’re a person who loves playing golf, make some time. Take some time out of your week to play some golf.
Leonard Sipes: Yup, play that golf.
Lorenzo Hopkins: You deserve that, because you need a release. If you’re not going to release it doing something you enjoy, you’re going to release it doing something destructive, i.e. drinking too much.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, now what I was told years ago, I was told when I entered in the law enforcement, take meditation. Take classes on meditation. Learn how to meditate. I was taught to talk to your spouse. A lot of us, when we bring work home, when we come home we don’t want to talk about work. The last thing in the world we want to talk about is work. If you’re in a bad mood and if you’re affected by your experiences throughout the course of the day, you owe it to your spouse to tell your spouse what’s going on. There are tools for coping.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Absolutely, Len. We do the same thing in my household. I’ve been in this business a long time. My wife and I give each other fifteen minutes apiece to vent about work, to decompress.
Leonard Sipes: Oh, that’s a great idea.
Lorenzo Hopkins: After that … huh, it’s over. You have to have that because she understands that my job is stressful. She’s an accountant but she also has those stressors also and she needs to understand, “If my husband comes home in a not-so-good mood what’s going on out there.” Certainly, we don’t use names because that’s privacy, but we also are human because you can’t take it. We’d like to take your hat off when you get home and that’s all I’m thinking about, home. Our lives blur and they blend all the time.
Leonard Sipes: Sure. Well, it’s like the woman who I talked to one time about her history of sexual abuse and she just said, “You know, I was raped multiple times before the age of eighteen by family members and people who I know, who I knew.” Then she just looked at me in front of the same microphone you’re sitting in front of now and said, “Now, what is the system going to do for me in terms of my trauma?” It’s like, “One human being. Excuse me. I can’t undo the fact that you were raped multiple times before the age of eighteen.” That’s what our folks go through every single day.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right, and the difference is though, we have to get to the point where we recognize when we’ve had too much. I’m not talking about retiring, I’m talking about taking leave. I’m talking about making sure you have your supervisor having your people schedule leave before the end of the year, because they need some time away and apart to spend with their family. I encourage it. When I speak to my staff at mid-year or whenever, I talk about work-life balance. What are you doing for you and you family? What are you doing to improve yourself outside of work? That way, I keep that in the forefront of their mind to let them know it’s not only about work, you know?
Leonard Sipes: Mm-hmm (affirmative), but you can tell in law enforcement because the person becomes too aggressive.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Yes.
Leonard Sipes: You can tell it when the person apprehends somebody and instead of just cuffing them, they’re slammed against the police car and that’s the point where you’ve got to walk over, and we did, whether people believe it or not, walk over to that person and say, “You know, Johnny, you’re taking this too far. You need to back off. Do you want me to finish this?” What do you see in terms of parole and probation agents?
Lorenzo Hopkins: Well, typically what happens when I see stress is they’re short-tempered. When I’m short-tempered, I don’t mean exploding but their conversation is about evil in the defendant or defender population, you can tell they’ve become certainly desensitized. “I’m going to start going through the motions like a robot,” you know? “I’m just going to do the job because I have to, but I’m not really caring.” People can feel when you don’t care. When it gets to the point where it starts to become not a good situation, I typically have the defendant wait, if I hear it from my staff, pull them aside, and say, “Hey, decompress. Take a deep breath and just relax a little bit,” because sometimes we have to recognize the symptoms. Not us, because if I don’t sometimes you don’t see yourself in this situation.
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
Lorenzo Hopkins: As colleagues, we have to make sure we’re paying more attention to what’s going on because you’re going to start saying, “Offenders, stop coming in.”
Leonard Sipes: That hurts the mission. That hurts the bottom line in the same way that the police officer being overly aggressive hurts the bottom line because he’s breaking confidence with the community. We, on the front lines, you all on the front lines whether you be parole and probation agents or whether you be police officers, people need to understand how unbelievably stressful these jobs are. People need to provide some space, work-life balance, and some tools in terms of whether it’s deep breathing exercises, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s talking to your wife, whether it’s playing that game of golf, everybody needs to come to grips when that stress is enormous. That stress exists in all folks caught up in the criminal justice system.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Right. I think what gets lost when you’re talking about probation and parole professionals, that’s what I like to call us, is that we wear so many hats, because you’ve got to realize we’re the person who, in most jurisdictions they can have arrest powers. This one, you do reports. Actually, it’s also your responsibility to be able to take someone’s freedom. They gave it to you, more or less. However, however, but what we have to really start to understand is that people who do that are humans and they don’t want to take peoples’ freedom. When you start dealing with non-compliance, it doesn’t make people happy so when you go that house the next time to do a visit, how are going to be received? You don’t know that. Because guess what, that person just got released from prison after you did a report that got him sent back for two or three years.
Leonard Sipes: Right, right, right, but that’s the part of the stress and part of the dilemma of being a parole and probation agent, again what we call community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia, is that cognitive intervention, you’ve got to get into the mind, get into the heart of that person. Build bond. Build trust, but at the same time, you have that responsibility to protect public safety and send them back to prison, if necessary.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Absolutely.
Leonard Sipes: No therapist on the face of the earth would work under those circumstances.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Could you imagine wearing all those hats?
Leonard Sipes: No.
Lorenzo Hopkins: Because you’re a social worker one day, no, not one day, one second. The next second, you’re saying, “Oh, you’re violated. This is unacceptable. I’ve got to put a VR, a violation report in.” Those are those fine balances that a lot of people don’t understand. The difference between us and police officers, again, great work. A police officer can arrest someone on the street. They throw them into the court and that’s it. That’s it.
Leonard Sipes: And walk away from that, entirely. You’ve got them for the next five years.
Lorenzo Hopkins: I have to deal with that. If they go in and out, in and out, I’m still the person who’s there.
Leonard Sipes: You’ve got to deal with them for the next five years, which is stressful unto itself. Lorenzo Hopkins, I’ll tell you. This has been a fascinating conversation. Lorenzo is a supervisory community supervision officer for my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. We’ve talking today, ladies and gentlemen, about parole and probation agent stress. Lorenzo, I really want to thank you for a fascinating conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, our website, www.csosa.gov, ww.csosa.gov. This is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments and we even appreciate your criticisms, as stressful as they may be. We want everybody to have themselves a very pleasant day. Thank-
The post Parole and probation officer stress. first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
Seed the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/09/the-challenge-of-parole-and-probation/
Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I am your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, The Challenge of Parole and Probation from an Officer’s Perspective. At our microphones today, David Mauldin, he is a Community Supervision Officer, known elsewhere as a Parole and Probation Agent, and Keith Cromer, again, a Community Supervision Officer, again, known elsewhere throughout the country as a Parole and Probation Agent. Our agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, www.csosa.gov. David and Keith, welcome to DC Public Safety.
David: Thank you very much.
Keith: Good afternoon.
David: [crosstalk 00:00:39] to be here.
Leonard: Gentlemen, what a tough job. We’re here to talk about the challenge of parole and probation agents, again, what we call community supervision officers in the nation’s capital. I cannot think of a more challenging job. I’ve been in the criminal justice system for 45 years. I’ve been a cop, I’ve been a spokesperson, I’ve ran group decades ago, within the prison system. I did Job Corps, where the judge said to the young individuals, “Go to jail and go to Job Corps.” I’ve done a lot of what it is that you guys do, but it’s a long time ago. I found that being a cop was simple, being a parole and probation agent was a thousand times harder than being a police officer. Am I right or wrong?
David: I would definitely agree with that. Our job is unique in a sense that we’ve got multiple roles in it. We have a client/offender/person under supervision come to our office, and we are given all of these resources to provide them. We’re encouraged to provide motivation and counseling, and we should, that should be part of our role, but at the same time, there’s another side to what we do, which is, if the supervision, if what is expected of the person is not occurring, if they’re not responding to the resources and directives we’re giving them, then there’s this side of our job, which we end up in court.
We write a violation report, and we can find ourselves in front of a judge recommending that the person’s freedom be taken away, the very same person sometimes where maybe even a few weeks earlier, you were sitting down and talking with them about really powerful reasons why they fell into a life of crime and you were trying to counsel them. Sometime, I know for myself, it can seem a sudden switch, and I’m sure for the clients as well, it can be like, “Wait a minute, you were just encouraging me and counseling me and now you just requested that my freedom be taken away.” It’s a hard balance.
Leonard: When I ran group, I was told not to tell anybody I was an ex-cop, ran group in the prison system and doing a cognitive-behavioral therapy group session. I did end up telling people that I was a former cop, and the people who were part of the group said, “I wish you hadn’t told us that, because now we don’t trust you.” Keith, most of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are not trusting human beings. How do you break through that barrier when you’re there to get into their heads, help them deal with their lives in a pro-social way, but at the same time, you hold the authority to send them back to prison if necessary?
Keith: It takes a lot of time. It takes effort to get to know the individual on a one-on-one basis. They’re not willing to come forth all the information that you might need in the first couple of meetings, so you got to keep pushing towards to know exactly what their needs are in order for them to trust you. You want to try to get to know their families, their kids, their needs for employment, their needs for education. At that point in time, they start trying to break down barriers and allowing them to know you, to allow them to know who you are.
Leonard: The whole idea is … Our successful case completions keep going up and up and up, so we’re doing something right. We’re well above the national average in terms of successful case completions, so we’re doing something right. We’re helping men and women overcome extraordinary barriers. When I say extraordinary barriers, we’re talking about massive substance abuse, we’re talking about mental health issues. The substance abuse, 80% of our population, the mental health can go, in terms of self-reported, mental health can go as high as 50% according to some surveys, so we have problems.
When individuals come to us, they come to us with not much of a work history, not much of an educational history. Women who come out of prison, they have higher rates of substance abuse, higher rates of mental health, their backgrounds typically involve being sexually abused by somebody they knew when they were children, and they have children themselves. There’s a certain point where the deck is so stacked against the individuals, not necessarily just in the District of Columbia, but throughout the country. I’ve had offenders sit there and tell me, “Leonard, what you’re asking me to do is impossible. I can’t deal with all of the ills of my past life.” That’s why so many individuals were revoked in years past, because they came to us with immense difficulties. David?
David: What was on my mind as you were saying all of that is, and maybe I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but I think because the clients can come and often do come to supervision with such an enormous array of issues, I don’t think we can solve all of their problems. Sometimes they come to supervision, they’ve got these special conditions, we’re supposed to help them do their anger management class, drug test, get treatment if they need it, but sometimes I just think that maybe what we need to be focusing on is, by the time that somebody gets done with supervision, have we assisted them ,in whatever way that looks like, but have we assisted them to have the confidence that they can, moving forward, have control over their lives.
I was talking to Cromer on the way here, I got a call from a gentleman just released from incarceration about a week ago crying on the phone because he’s telling me, “I don’t have family, I don’t have food, I don’t have housing, and I’m expected to meet all of these requirements [inaudible 00:06:17] probation and parole. I have no idea how I’m going to do it.” On one hand, I think our job is to look at him and say, “Come into the office, let’s get you connected to our resources,” but I think there’s fundamentally something else going on there that he’s saying, “I don’t feel like I have control.”
My goal is, man, if we can help the men and women who come to us feel that when they leave supervision that they can have an impact, a positive impact on their life, that they can affect positive things in it, I think that would be a positive thing, but meeting every single need they have, I think that’s where, if we don’t realize we can’t meet every need, that’s where burnout can come in. [inaudible 00:06:57].
Leonard: Keith, I’m going to throw this question to you. I’ve interviewed lots of people under supervision by these microphones, hundreds over the course of years, and when I ran public affairs for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, interviewing them there as well. Oftentimes they were telling me that their parole and probation agent, again, in this case, in Washington, D.C., community supervision officer, they would say that their officer was the key, in many senses, of them crossing that bridge from law-breaking behavior to law-abiding behavior, from drugs to no drugs. They would give the credit, in many cases, to the parole and probation agent/community supervision officer as being the person who helped them make that transformation. Is that true? Do community supervision officers here in the District of Columbia, can they make that degree of change in a person’s life?
Keith: Yeah, I believe they can. Actually, one of my offenders in the past has, he crossed over tremendously. He had a plan when he came out and I helped him work his plan together. He wrote his own books, we helped him get it published. He started his own security company. He’s doing really well. I think that we can help out, as long as we continue to help them with their plan. We have to find out exactly what their needs are. As soon as we find out their needs, we can just help them out with moving forward in their lives.
Leonard: You can break through the barriers that they bring to you. I always say, I use the example, the chip on their shoulder the size of Montana. They don’t trust anybody. People listening to this program need to understand that people caught up in the criminal justice system, they may trust their mother, they might trust their mother, they don’t trust you, they don’t trust anybody. They don’t trust the religious leaders, they don’t trust the Governor, they don’t trust the President. They don’t care who it is, they’re not trusting individuals, yet you’ve got to break through those barriers to help that person, right, David?
David: Yeah, we do. I’m thinking, I’m not 100% convinced that … I think the clients know how to trust. I think it’s difficult for them, I think they’re hesitant, but what I found is that whether it’s working here in probation and parole or in [inaudible 00:09:19] Covenant House, working with homeless young adults, I think there’s hesitancy, but as soon as the client sees that this person is willing to listen to where I’ve been, as soon as I see that this person is not assuming that they’ve figured me out, to me, I’ve seen that’s a huge one, don’t assume that we know them. Once they see that willingness to hear who they are, hear where they’ve been, and that we’re willing to listen to maybe where they want to go as we try to develop that plan with them, I’ve found that the trust does come.
Then in my mind it becomes the issue of, okay, so they learn to trust you, then, though, all of their issues are still there, and so how, once you have their trust, how do you keep it, because I think it can be lost very easily, because they’ve been disappointed before, whether by family, the system, themselves, how do you keep that trust, and again, as I was saying earlier, especially in a position where on one hand we can counsel and motivate them, but if things build up where their supervision isn’t going a good direction, we got to take them to court. I feel like I’ve actually lost the trust, and I’m sad to say this, but I think I’ve lost the trust of clients before when I had to take them to court, and my hands were tied, I had to.
Leonard: I do want to explain that, but first of all, a piece of context for people listening throughout the country, our ratios, supervision ratios, are the best in the United States. We have one community supervision officer for 50 people under supervision. I know of states where it’s one to 150. I know of counties where it’s one to 250. I have seen data from jurisdictions where it’s one to 300.
We’re a federal agency, and because we’re a federal agency, we have funding. We do provide substance abuse, very comprehensive substance abuse therapy to 25% of our population who needs it. We have a mental health team, we have learning labs. We have a ton of resources that the average parole and probation agency doesn’t have, but still, even though you’ve got the best circumstances within parole and probation probably within the United States, when I talk to community supervision officers, they remind me that it’s the hardest job that they’ve ever had. That true?
Keith: Yeah, that’s true. Even though we have all those resources, if the individual doesn’t want to take advantage of those resources, it’s not even needed. It’s just we’re sending them to waste their time and waste everybody else’s time, wasting money, because it’s on the individual to really want to move forward in his life and to change and get away from that substance. No matter how much resources that we have, it can go out the door in a heartbeat by just going outside the front door and seeing what’s going on in the community.
Leonard: It’s our job to break through those barriers. It’s our job to convince a person who doesn’t want to participate. It’s our job, with a person who is struggling to participate, to successfully enter his world, her world, and help that person out. How do you help a person out who doesn’t want to be helped out?
Keith: First and foremost, I think they have to establish trust. Once they start trusting who you are, actually think that you have the best need for them, then they’ll start realizing and saying, “Okay, I’m going to go ahead and give this a opportunity and get my substance abuse worked out, get my employment worked out.” Those are the factors that may be having a barrier in their lives. I think this basically boils down to trust.
David: I definitely, yeah, I was shaking my head yes as Keith Cromer was talking, that it’s once the trust is there, then I think someone else too can come into it, that you can help the person experience exposure is what I’m thinking. Oftentimes I think a lot of clients come to parole and probation, at least from my experience in D.C., they come to parole and probation, and their lives have been focused around a specific neighborhood for many, many years, the resources they’re looking to are within that specific neighborhood.
I think there’s some goodness to that, that they feel like they know where they’re from and they can access those resources, but there are so many things in Washington, D.C., and so many opportunities, that once they trust us, that we can encourage them to take advantage of, “Maybe don’t apply for the job right down on your block, why don’t you go downtown and apply for a job?” or, “Don’t go to that GED program down the street, but why don’t you go to the one Uptown?” For those that don’t live here, Uptown’s a different part of D.C. from where Cromer and I work. I think exposure is important, and it can take away some fear to try new things. I think exposure can maybe help clients not stay and keep repeating the same things over and over again.
Leonard: Keith, go ahead. You want to jump in?
Keith: Oh yeah, I was, just get them out of a box. I think a lot of times they’re boxed in and they think they have no way of getting out. I think the opportunities that are around them, a lot of these guys know where these resources are, but they don’t take the opportunity, because I think a lot of times it’s self-doubt, negative-
Leonard: They’re frightened by it.
Keith: Yeah, they’re frightened by it, by the chance.
Leonard: Somebody, a person under supervision, an offender, one time told me, scariest thing that he’s ever done in his life is go through substance abuse treatment, because he had to confront his entire life and the reason why he was so desperately in need of drugs every single day, and that was the scariest thing he’s ever done, because he had to relive everything that propelled him towards substance abuse. Is he right?
David: I would lean towards yes. I was thinking that a lot of the older guys that I have on my caseload, maybe guys in their 50s and 60s, what I’ve found is that they’re more, not all of them, but for the most part, they’re more willing and able to look back on where they’ve been and what they’ve been through, and to demonstrate insight on how it’s affected them. I’ve found that is extremely helpful in their ability to stay out of the system, whereas the younger guys, it’s like Cromer was saying, or like we’ve been saying, that it’s almost too frightening, because if they look at it and accept what’s happened to them, accept what they’ve done, accept what they’ve been through, it could almost paralyze them.
Leonard: We’re halfway through the program, I do want to reintroduce everybody. The Challenge of Parole and Probation from an Officer’s Perspective is a program that I’ve looked forward to doing for quite some time, because I do think the role of parole and probation agents is probably one of the most difficult jobs that you can possibly imagine. David Mauldin, he is a Community Supervision Officer, Keith Cromer, Community Supervision Officer, both with my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, www.csosa.gov.
Gentlemen, I have two questions. Number one, you’re talking to a national audience, so first of all, what do you want somebody in Des Moines or somebody in Hawaii, 20% of our audience is international, somebody from Europe to know about what it is to be a parole and probation agent?hen the second question after that is, when do we have to revoke and send that person back to prison because of transgressions, problems, new crimes? First of all, in terms of, what do you want people throughout the country to know about being a parole and probation agent? Cromer? Easy question, just simple.
Keith: To be a probation officer, a parole officer, you have to wear multiple hats. You have to b a counselor, a mentor, sometimes their father, their mother, their brother. You have to be a lot of things for them at certain times in their life, and you also have to be law enforcement as well. You have to be able to look them in the eye and tell them exactly what’s going on, and the right time, be on them, be hard on them, and then learn at the same time, break, fall back and say, “Tell me what’s going on. Allow me to cry for you, I’ll cry with you,” and then all at the same time, tell them how to, lift them up and show them how the ways to go to the next level in their lives.
Leonard: If you were dealing with an individual without problems, without substance abuse, without mental health, without educational deficiencies, who had a good job history, who doesn’t have an anger manage problem, who wasn’t abused as a child, if you’re doing that with the best possible person under the best possible circumstances, it would still be an extraordinarily difficult job.
Keith: That is correct. I have found that a lot of those guys have no other outlet, because a lot of people that are around them are negative as well, so they come to my office and speak to me friendlier than anyone, anybody else, so they dump a lot on us, what’s going on in their lives. We have to take that and process it and try and help them stay on a right, narrow path, because even though they’re doing everything correctly in their lives, a lot of times, that negative influence is still around them that they may want to go back to it.
Leonard: Both of you are out in the community, seeing them in the community, seeing them in their homes, going into their homes, talking to their parents, talking to their wives, talking to their children, talking to their grandmothers, right?
Keith: Correct.
Leonard: You’re out in the community, both at that person’s job, in their home, seeing this person in the community on an announced and unannounced basis, correct?
Keith: That’s correct.
Leonard: You roll up on a guy and the guy is standing on the street corner. The guy was fine and everything’s compliant and he’s doing fairly well and he’s getting his GED and he’s getting his plumbing certificate and he’s going to Narcotics Anonymous, and you roll up and he’s smoking a joint sitting on his front porch step with his friends. Now we get around to this issue of revocations. Look, a parole and probation agent from the state of Maryland told me that if you revoked everybody under supervision for smoking a joint on his front porch, there would be no sense in parole and probation, you would just automatically send them back to prison after a day.
David: Yeah. The clients on our caseloads, they’re on drug testing regiments, so we get notifications daily on the results of their drug test.
Leonard: Intensive drug tests.
David: Intensive drug tests. Many of them are on twice a week. If we had to respond with strong, immediate sanctions, taking them back to court every positive drug test, the jails, the prisons, would have even more people in them than they do now.
Leonard: We’d have to build four to five times the amount of prisons-
David: We would.
Leonard: … than we currently have now.
David: Absolutely. The thing is, the way I think about it is, is something becoming a pattern. I had a guy when I first started, he tested positive for cocaine. He had been clean as a whistle prior to that for several months, and then boom, positive for cocaine. Of course, we call him into the office and I sit down with him and I show him the positive and we have a conversation about, first of all, the surprise of it, “You’ve been doing well. Are there any triggers that have come up recently that hadn’t been there for a while?” We try to provide support. He no longer tested positive after that, but if that had become a pattern where it’s cocaine, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine, then we go to treatment. If that didn’t work, then we …
After treatment doesn’t work, I think that’s when you come back and take a look and say, “Okay, what else can we do?” If all options have been exhausted, I think then, yes, you can go to court and request revocation. I would just want to make sure that before I requested somebody’s freedom be taken away, that I have truly tried every single thing and given that person every opportunity to turn things around.
Leonard: I do want to emphasize, anywhere from the Department of Justice to [PU 00:21:31] to the National Council of State Governments to the American Probation and Parole Association, and I could go down the list and name 15 more, they want us to remediate, to the best of our ability, I’m saying “we,” I’m talking about parole and probation throughout the country, to try intermediate sanctions, to try to hold the person accountable, provide those sanctions, and provide those resources to help that person. Every organization out there is telling us to do exactly that, so now becomes the key issue, when do you maintain, when do you try to remediate, when do you try to provide these intermediate sanctions, and when do you revoke? Is there a magic formula?
Keith: I think it’s on a individual basis. There’s no such thing as a magic formula. I think every individual comes in front of you is different and you have to treat them differently. To revoke somebody for using cocaine one time would not be a great decision for that individual, because everybody makes mistakes.
Leonard: It’s not going to be one time. Let’s be honest.
Keith: That’s true.
Leonard: Our folks screw up on a regular basis.
Keith: A regular basis, right.
Leonard: Yet at the same time, 69% successfully complete supervision, so obviously, the community supervision officers are working with that individual, with their parents, with their families, with their treatment providers, to try to provide some sense of stability so that person can safely complete supervision, but nobody does it without screw-ups.
David: Very true.
Keith: That’s correct, that’s correct. Then the more they screw up, the more they dig a hole for themselves, and eventually, no matter how much you try to do as far as intervention for them, revocation is on the way. You either tell them that you are doing this for them, you’re trying to help them out, trying to find a cause of what’s going on behind it, treatment, modality, inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, it doesn’t matter, at one point in time, revocation is inevitable. You can talk to them as much as you can, but some people, no matter what you do, they’re still going to want to, they’re not going to follow the rules and regulations of supervision, so they’re going to go back.
David: I want to throw this out there too, to consider too. Sometimes when we think about revocation, it is a hard thing to think about, taking somebody’s freedom, but I had a few clients actually that have said to me before, after they’ve been released, that they feel, and it’s a touchy subject, it’s something for debate, but they said that they feel like their time in jail saved them.
Keith: That’s true.
David: Now you can look back in their histories and see PCP, cocaine, heroin, constant use, homelessness, no employment, so those are strong risk factors for possible recidivation, but sometimes I think our society as a whole looks at prison and jail and says, “It’s the worst thing ever. It’s the worst thing ever. It needs to change.” There are things that need to be adjusted, most definitely, but when I hear clients who have said that’s what saved their life, it really gives me pause to say, “You know what? There is a time when we have to go to the judge and say, ‘Take their freedom.'” I was going to throw that out there. I think one thing, can I go back for a second?
Leonard: Yeah, please do.
David: You asked the question about what would we recommend to people across the country listening and about our role as probation officers, and I think one thing too is that, remember that we are on the front line of behavior change, of trying to instill behavior change in a very, very, very difficult population, the people that you read about who have committed the armed robberies, the people that you have read about that are running through the streets high on cocaine and heroin. Those are the people we meet with. Those are the people who we get to know their grandmothers, their children, their spouses, and it is difficult. I think people need to remember that if a client messes up, even several times on supervision, it’s not just a cut and dry process. If it took 20 years for somebody to get involved with the criminal justice system and they’ve got a year on probation, we need to keep in mind what sort of issues. It takes a while.
Leonard: I go back to my experience in Maryland where the person said that if you’re going to revoke them for one, two, three, four, five drug positives, then just revoke them now, just revoke everybody. They come out of prison on a Tuesday and they’re back on a Wednesday, because what’s the sense? They’re not going to go to treatment or they’re going to be disruptive in treatment, they’re not going to get a job or they’re going to take too long to get a job, and they’re going to pay their fines in restitution, but not pay all of it.
There’s always problems with people under supervision. Your job is to break through the barriers, understand that person, understand their family, understand their circumstances, use cognitive-behavioral therapy, establish a relationship with that person, and at the same time, magically induce these individuals to participate in programs, encourage their successful participation in programs, and hold them accountable when they screw up.
David: Yeah, correct.
Leonard: That’s a huge, huge, huge task. People need to understand, people listening throughout the country, people need to understand that out of the correctional population, which is 7,000,000 individuals on any given day, 5,000,000 belong to us in parole and probation. The vast majority of people involved in the criminal justice system are not behind bars. The vast majority of the people in the criminal justice system are beholden or responsible or reporting to parole and probation agents.
Keith: That’s correct.
Leonard: Can I throw out a question to Cromer real quick?
David: Yeah, please.
Leonard: Keith, I have a question for you. We had talked about this earlier, but you said before you had had clients that on supervision were doing stellar, they were meeting all their special conditions, coming to the office visits, drug testing clean, working, but then something happened where everything just falls apart. You mentioned earlier the importance of helping the clients build a plan. Was it just that they didn’t have a plan that they fell apart or was there something … How does something go from this really positive trajectory and then it just evaporates?
Keith: Yes, either one, they have a plan or …
Leonard: Back in the mic. There we go.
Keith: One, they didn’t have a plan, or two, something in their lives that destroyed them. A lot of times they don’t know how to cope with issues that come up in their lives, so the first thing they do is go to drug use. The friends, the family, things happen, or death in the family, everybody goes out with everybody, but a lot of people [inaudible 00:28:07]] surroundings tend to cope with using drugs, marijuana, cocaine, whatever the case may be, or celebrating, the same direction. That’s the reason what you have to figure out is how to let them know that that’s not okay to celebrate or to go into mourning regarding using drugs regarding an issue. Then also a lot of times, they’re going well and then they sabotage themselves because they don’t know, “I’m doing so well, I don’t know how to-“
Leonard: “I don’t know what to do from here,” maybe.
Keith: “… [crosstalk 00:28:39] do from here,” so they do, the fear comes in, and so they use cocaine or whatever drug.
David: Because in my head I was thinking, that’s one of the most difficult parts for me as a supervision officer is when somebody’s doing fantastic, and so in your head you’re like, “Wow, this person, they’re going to have a great life. 20 years from now, they’re going to be great,” and then everything falls apart.
Leonard: I think that struggle is with every person out there. You’re going to have good days and bad days and some points where they’re doing well and some points where they’re not doing well, and somehow, some way, you’ve got to work your magic regardless of the circumstances. We got about 15 seconds left. Comments? Comments?
David: I was going to say, just remember that we’re on the front lines of behavior change with folks involved in the criminal justice system, not easy.
Leonard: Look, we have better results in the last couple years here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, higher case closure rates, fewer arrests. Congratulations to you and everybody out there that chooses to be a community supervision officer, and a parole and probation agent, outside of the District of Columbia. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been talking to David Mauldin, CSO, Keith Cromer, CSO, with my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. This is D.C. Public Safety. We appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a pleasant day.
The post The Challenge of Parole and Probation from an Officer’s Perspective. first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/10/prison-reentry-from-a-former-offenders-perspective/
Leonard Sipes: From the Nation’s Capitol this is DC Public Safety, I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen this is going to be a fun show. Reentry from a former offender’s perspective. We have Randy Kirsch, Randy is a formerly incarcerated person, he is an author, public speaker and a reentry strategist. His website, www.reentrystratigies.com, www.reentrystratigies.com. Randy Kirsch, welcome back to Public Safety.
Randy Kirsch: Thank you very much Leonard, I appreciate being here again, being able to chime in about reentry and hopefully something that his said in this conversation will help somebody, somewhere.
Leonard Sipes: The criminal justice system doesn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to the very people who are caught up in the criminal justice system so that’s the point of this program, and a series of other programs where we interview people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system. You and I happen to be Facebook friends, and one of the very few professional Facebook friends that I allow onto my personal Facebook world. I love the posts that you do on Facebook. Let’s get down to your background a little bit Randy. You were caught up in the criminal justice system and can I ask why?
Randy Kirsch: I got caught up in the criminal justice system at a early age. Actually from 17 years old I would find myself involved in getting in trouble for different various reasons and it escalated. I found myself at 26 years old caught up in a drug conspiracy, a Federal drug conspiracy that sent me to prison for 15 years. What I tell people is that I actually … August 10th this August 10th is a very profound date for me because it’s the first time in 33 years that I will be free of any type of criminal justice system supervision or anything like that. August 10th my parole ends, they gave me 10 years supervised release when I got released from the Federal system. From the age of 17 to the age of 50 I’ve been under some type of criminal justice, either I was in jail, in prison or on probation, on parole.
Running from the police, going back to [inaudible 00:02:20] court, so August 10th, next Monday I will be officially free from any type of connection to the criminal justice system.
Leonard Sipes: I know that makes you very happy.
Randy Kirsch: Id does, it does, but it’s also a sober reminder that even though I will be free from that context I will still always have the residue, I might say, the past. I will always have a record, I will always be limited to certain things when it comes to, maybe even a job or things like that. Even though I’ll be free, but it will always be there something to remind me.
Leonard Sipes: The criminal record is going to follow you for the rest of your life.
Randy Kirsch: Yes, yes.
Leonard Sipes: Yeah and that has an impact on probably everybody you talk to.
Randy Kirsch: Yes, yes.
Leonard Sipes: Does it have an impact on family and friends?
Randy Kirsch: It does, it does, and I was just at a reentry gathering last Saturday and we talked about how reentry and incarceration impacts the family. Because a lot of times the family is not that well prepared for their loved one to reenter society because they have to now adjust their life and their roles and their well-being to bring this person back into the fold of being a part of the family unit. There’s sometimes a lot unrealistic expectations for people that are coming home. I mean you have a family or a parent or a wife or girlfriend who wants that person to immediately go out and get a job. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen and then that puts pressure on the person as they’re living in that situation and not being able to contribute to the household. It’s a lot. It’s a lot for the family and it’s a lot for the individual who is reentering society.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, we have a short amount of time, 30 minutes, I do want to talk about the book that you’ve written. In fact it’s the 4th book that you’ve written. First I want to talk about the strategies that you have for those of us in the criminal justice system. Right now you’re talking to people, mid-level managers, higher-level managers within the criminal justice system. You’re talking to aides to mayors, aides to congress people. You’re talking to the academic community because the colleges and universities take the radio and television programs that we do and run them verbatim in their classrooms and have class discussions afterwards. You’re talking to a fairly wide audience today. What are the key messages you have for those of us in the criminal justice system?
Randy Kirsch: I would say it’s time to rethink reentry in a way that initiates some bold and innovative type of approaches. What has been the norm or what has been going on in reentry up to this point, a lot of it is good but not enough of it is working. I mean, we see the recidivism rate and it’s pretty much the same from 10 years ago to now. To 20 years ago. Evidently you have to look at it as, what do we need to do to change that. You’ve got to look at it and say, “We’ve got to do some different things.” There are a lot of different good programs out there but they’re not reaching, they’re not impacting enough people to make a dent in the recidivism rate.
What I propose and what I talk about especially to those that are in a position to make some changes and to come up with some new policies is to think about what we can do to reach more of the incarcerated population and in a way that we can have a greater impact on them and a greater success rate for them not to come back. That’s where I come in, in doing the work that I do and coming up with these strategies that I’ve created and I helped create. Because who better to be able to tell someone how not to go back to prison is somebody who didn’t go back to prison. These are the things that I would say, and work with some of the successful people who have come come home from incarceration who are now business owners, who are now entrepreneurs, who are self-sufficient and doing positive things in the community. Work with them, find out what worked for them and then use that, duplicate that all over the system.
Leonard Sipes: You have that opportunity right now. What works? What do we in the criminal justice system, students, aides to congresspeople, aides to mayors. What do we need to understand first of all, about the system of people coming out of the prison system and specifically what can we do to have better outcomes for people who are caught up in the criminal justice system?
Randy Kirsch: I think everybody understands the challenges that a person faces when they come out. I mean that’s first and foremost when it comes to housing and employment and things like that. I think that where we would do a better service for individuals that are coming out is to prepare them while they’re in to get out. Not just say, “Well this person needs a job, this person needs housing.” This person that’s incarcerated, and I know from personal experience, needed a change in thinking, needed a change in behavior, needed a change in the way he sees the world, the perspective. We need to focus on how do we get those people to do that behavioral, cognitive behavioral transition from the mind set that they had prior to going to prison. The mindset that they had in prison. To get them to shift that mindset for when they get out and prepare them for those challenges for when they get out.
Leonard Sipes: We’re talking about more programs in prison?
Randy Kirsch: We’re talking about more programs that will help connect the person who is in prison to the challenges that they’ll face. Honestly and truthfully. I did my research from being incarcerated, some of the programs that are available in the prison really don’t connect the individual that’s going through the experience with the experience that he’s going to face when he get’s out. A lot the stuff that’s out there and the programs that are out there are being developed and created by people who haven’t actually lived that experience. It’s hard to connect someone to an experience if you haven’t actually been through the experience. In theory it sounds good, it really does, I mean I’m sure it’s meant well in intention but it’s not the same. As far as me going into a situation to talk to a formerly incarcerated individual and tell him, “Listen, this is what you need to do. These are the challenges you’re going to face. This is how I was able to face those challenges. This is how I was able to overcome those challenges.” We have to be able to create those types of programs that actually connect the person who’s incarcerated to the actual reality of the challenges they’re going to face when they get out.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, Randy so your bottom line message is an issue of authenticity then. What you’re saying is that what we should do is to get folks like Randy Kirsch and others, put them in a rum and have them design programs.
Randy Kirsch: Yes.
Leonard Sipes: You guys could come up with better programs then the people in the criminological community and the penal community and the criminal justice system. You guys could come up with more authentic programs that are going to be reaching more people. Is that the bottom line?
Randy Kirsch: Yes, yes, I think that would a be great approach. Again, I mean it’s not, to me, which one is better. I guess it is, which one better connects to the individual experience, that’s the whole thing. Because you’re going to have a person, and I’ve seen it, you have a guy come from the outside and he’s teaching this reentry program and he goes home everyday and he can’t make that connection because he never actually understand what … You can tell a person to be patient, but they have to really connect with, “wow he did that. This person did that. He did 20 years and came home and was able to be successful.” It does add an air of authenticity when it comes to actual practice.
Leonard Sipes: Well, quite frankly randy I don’t disagree with you. It’s something that I’ve bee advocating for years, for there to be a think tank of people like yourself to guide the rest of us within the criminal justice system. Job training programs seem to be rather straight forward, teaching a person how to be a carpenter, teaching a person how to be a electrician. Teaching a person how to lay bricks, that’s all pretty much straight forward, you don’t really need to have a background within the system to teach carpentry.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, understanding people, making that connection with people. Drug treatment, these are all pretty straight forward modalities in terms of helping people. It comes from the psychological literature. It comes from the criminal justice literature. What you’re saying drug treatment from a person whose never been in your shoes lacks the authenticity to reach the individuals?
Randy Kirsch: The thing is to, that’s part of it, but you have to teach a person not only a skill in a job sense, you also have to teach him how to keep a job, how to act on a job. What is the relationship between him and his supervisor and how that he can’t allow certain situations to force him or make him think that he has to react in a kind of way. It’s about teaching people life skills. A lot of people who have been incarcerated haven’t been, haven’t had the teachings of how to navigate through life itself on a basis that will keep them out of prison. We’ve been taught this mindset that we have to be aggressive or we can’t take orders or we can’t do certain things because it hurts our pride. It’s a lot of things that we need to teach people on how to actually live life. Life skills that will make them before they decide to get in an argument with their supervisor or their boss to think about they have a family to fee and what the consequences are versus them speaking up or speaking out. Those are the things that make all of those components that you said, with the drug treatment, with the job training and everything like that. Those are components that have to work together in order for someone to stay out of prison.
Leonard Sipes: Okay I want to go to larger criminal justice policy but final question and if I could get a quick answer. Because I did want to start talking about your book at a certain point. Are you talking about psychologists and social workers and treatment specialists who have degrees and years of training in this sort thing. Are they going to be replaced by people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system or are they going to be supplemented by people caught up in the criminal justice system?
Randy Kirsch: I think they should partnership with people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system. That’s what I think.
Leonard Sipes: Larger criminal justice policy, right now there is a huge debate all throughout the United States, the sense that we over incarcerate, the sense that we could release people. Not the people involved in crime and justice issues in the prison system. To cut back significantly on the amount of incarceration that we have. Which means the great bulk of these individuals fall on agencies like mine. I represent the court services and offender supervision agency, a federal parole and probation agency here in the nations capitol. The burden would fall on parole and probation agencies, do you have any thoughts about this larger criminal justice policy discussion that’s been going on throughout the United States?
Randy Kirsch: There’s going to be no quick fix to a problem or situation that has been building for years, and years, and years, until we work with these individuals to show them that there’s a different way to go about living. It’s hard, because we have to be able to show people opportunity, in all facets. Whether incarcerated, or probation or parole. Parole plays a very important role in helping people transition back into society so I think that that is a lot of times impacts a persons decision and causing them to go back sometimes. Because they feel pressurized or pressured from probation or parole. Hiring more supervisors … There’s a compassion issue here too.
Some of the people that work in corrections or parole or probation, they have no real compassion for the people that they’re working for. There’s no feeling of empathy for these people. When you can give a person the sense of dignity I’m going to tell you, a sense of dignity will help build the persons self-esteem to the point that they will really behave in a whole different way. The system has become so cold towards a lot of offenders that sometimes they just give up. They don’t feel like there’s nobody there to help them but if you find someone who has a compassion. For me, the 10 years that I’ve been on parole and probation, I’ve had nothing but support from my parole officers and it helped a lot. It helped a lot. I had nothing but their willingness to work with me and allow me to do the things that I was doing. That made a difference.
Leonard Sipes: We’re half way through the program, more than halfway through the program. Reentry from the offender’s perspective, Randy Kirsch is by our microphones, back at our microphones. Formerly incarcerated person, author, public speaker, reentry strategists, www.reentrystratigies.com, www.reentrystratagies.com. Randy what’s the name of your book?
Randy Kirsch: The name of this book is “Changing your game plan. How to use incarceration as a stepping stone for success.” It’s not a book per se, it’s a workbook. It’s more of a workbook than a novel or any type of nonfiction book. What makes my workbook so unique, it can be done, it can be used in a group setting, it comes with a facilitators manual, or it can be done as an independent study guide where individuals can go with in his own cell or on his own and actually work through this program.
What I’ve created is a what I like to call a rethinking, readiness, prison reentry, rethinking, readiness program where it actually walks you through the steps you need to be doing while you’re incarcerated to prepare you for getting out. This book, honestly it’s an awesome book. It took me over a year and a half to write, to put together. It’s over 50 thought provoking chapters and after each chapter there’s questions that an individual will have to read and answer. Those questions bring you face to face with your own personal truth. It brings you face to face with the questions that really would hopefully make a person really think about their future. Really think about where they are and how they got there. This book has the potential to really make a difference in people’s lives.
What inspired me to write this book to be totally honest with you is my original book is “Changing your game plan. How I used incarceration as a stepping stone for success.” It chronicles my journey of the lifestyle of being in the streets and dealing drugs and eventually dropping out of school and going to prison and all of the things that led me to where I was doing 15 years. How I was able to change that all the way around. I’ve gotten letters from people all over the country, people who are incarcerated as well as councilors and reentry councilors and stuff like that. They tell me how they were using that book, the original book, “Changing your game plan. How I used incarceration as a steppingstone for success.” As a program, as a way to help people to reenter society and prepare themselves. I always thought this would be a better, have a better impact on people and help people better so I went about creating the book.
It’s a wonderful book, again 50 chapters, there’s also a reading component where in each chapter there are words that are highlighted and there’s a glossary defining the words in the back of the book to help people build their vocabulary. I talk about everything that a person needs to do in order to successfully, not only transition back into society but to stay out here.
Leonard Sipes: Randy what was the key issue that kept you out of prison? You came out of prison, you were under supervision by parole and probation. What was the key issue, the key element where you said to yourself, “No more, I’m going to go straight, I’m going to be using this experience for the better good.” What was your key experience and what do you think is the key experience for most people coming out of the prison system? There are two questions.
Randy Kirsch: My key experience was the fact that I didn’t have ownership pf mu life. That after 15 years people had to tell me what to do, when to do it, how to do it, where I should do it. Having to be powerless, and I felt powerless, when I was incarcerated. I never wanted to ever feel that feeling again, I never wanted that feeling that I couldn’t go somewhere because I was constricted. I didn’t want that feeling ever again. That I think a lot of people who are incarcerated feel, but when they get out they rush, too busy to rush back into life and they don’t pace themselves. Then they wind up finding themselves in the same situation. I’m not going to say since I’ve been out that I’ve made all the right choices. I’ve made some missteps here and there but none have been ever detrimental to send me back and I’ll always tell my elf, “I need to do better, I need to do better, I need to do better.” It’s a constant reminder of where I was at.
I never forget where I came from, I never forget that experience. That experience shaped me, the food alone kept me from going back. Listen the food alone.
Leonard Sipes: [crosstalk 00:22:02] get used to that good food up there in Brooklyn.
Randy Kirsch: Yeah, the food alone was enough to say I’m not going back.
Leonard Sipes: Yeah, all right look. Two thirds are rearrested, a half go back to prison go back within 3 years. Now that figure has been replicated in various studies by the Department of Justice multiple times. There are others that give different figures but the bulk of individuals are rearrested and some where in the ball park or 40 to 50% go back to prison. Failure is a common occurrence of people called up caught up in the criminal justice system. You mentioned a while ago, empathy. I think a lot of people involved in the criminal justice system have seen so much failure and seen so many attempts to help a person get off of drugs. To help a person get the mental health treatment that he or she needs. To help the person reunite with a family. To help a person find jobs and to put a tremendous amount of time and effort, this is the perspective from the other side of the system. Just to see the person fail.
I think there’s a burn out syndrome of those of us that work in the criminal justice system that would be greatly alleviated if so many people caught up in the criminal justice system were not rearrested, did not go back to prison. My first question is, what is the key ingredient, we heard what happened to you. You didn’t like the food, you felt powerless, everybody else, what do you think the key issue is in the fact that so many people do reenter the criminal justice system?
Randy Kirsch: One, a lot of people don’t come home with a plan. That’s is major problem. People don’t actually plan what they’re going to do when they get out. Also they don’t see, all we hear about are those who go back. That’s all of the figure that you just gave me. The 65% and all of these other figures, but nobody is focusing on the other 35% who stay out. That’s where I come in, That’s why I do what I do to show people there are people who actually never go back. Who actually are settled in society. There are people, like I said, they become businessmen, entrepreneurs, people go back to college and they get Master’s degree and they work in these fields and we don’t see enough of those. We don’t hear enough of those stories to resonate with those who are going through that experience, so they feel hopeless. That sense of powerlessness is a constant reminder of where they are.
What I’m doing, and the work that I’m doing is showing not only people giving you a blueprint on what you need to do while you’re there to prepare for your life when you get out, but I’m showing you. We just shot a film series called, “Beyond prison, probation and parole.” I went and talked to various people who have been incarcerated, came home and are doing phenomenal things. We plan to hopefully get that inside the prison system so people can see and hear and be motivated and inspired by other people. That other 35% who don’t go back, and I think that this is the time, especially when we have access to the media avenues, through videos, through books, these innovative, interactive programs on being able to shift and show people what their full potential is, if they decide to embrace a different lifestyle, a different way of thinking. I think it all starts with the way a person thinks about himself, thinks about where they are and thinks about what they can accomplish in the future.
I know … I’m sorry.
Leonard Sipes: No. Pleas, we’re running out of time, if we had all the programs designed by the people caught up in the criminal justice system. If you had the psychologists and the social workers and the criminologists sitting down with folks with your background, putting together the right programs, I heard two themes out of this, dignity, and programs with input from people like yourself. If we had that what percentage improvement would we have if everybody was afforded programs and with significant input from folks like yourself. If the system really provided the dignity to the individuals who are coming out of the prison system or caught up in probation, how much improvement do you think there would be?
Randy Kirsch: I think that, like I said, that’s just one component. When you put it together with the employment and the housing component, I think we could probably. Oh man, we could make a huge difference in people going back and forth to prison.
Leonard Sipes: We’re talking about 600 to 700,000 people coming out of the prison system, you’re talking about their families, you’re talking about the children. You’re talking about every year at least conservatively 1.5 million people.
Randy Kirsch: Yeah, I think that we can make a huge dent if those type of programs were created that really connect people with the real challenges and the real experiences that they are going to face and make their plans. Make them come up with a plan and have a plan for when they get out, coupled with having some housing available for them and having some job opportunities available to them. Teaching them how to reenter society and stay in society. It’s not enough to teach a person how to reenter, we have to teach people how to stay in society.
Leonard Sipes: That’s also going to require a fairly significant mindset on the part of the people of the United States to provide the tax money to allow all that to happen. To provide that sense of dignity, as you put it, to be more accepting of people coming out of the prison system. Giving them say and opportunity for a job, that’s going to require a fundamental mindset of the part of the American population.
Randy Kirsch: I think society is ready, I think society is ready for people to come back to society. One thing I love about America, and people can say all they want to say about this country or whatever the case may be. There are some issues that we have to deal with a a society, as a country, but this is probably one of the only places in the world that you can get a 2nd, 3rd and sometimes a 4th chance. I mean, come on, it doesn’t get any better than that. I think that society as a whole is willing to give people a chance as long as they’re willing to work for that chance and to be able to put in and be productive citizens in society. We have to teach people how to be productive citizens in society and I think that these programs that we just talked about and having people who have had those experiences have an input. They don’t have to have the total control of creating the programs, just be able to have an input would make a lot of difference. [crosstalk 00:29:17]
Leonard Sipes: Randy we need to close the program, “Changing your game plan”, the new book. What is it subtitled?
Randy Kirsch: “How to use incarceration as a steppingstone for success.” It’s a prison reentry readiness program, again it can be used by an individual on his own or it can be used in a group setting and I’m going to be all over the country trying to promote this program.
Leonard Sipes: Our program, our guest today is Randy Kirsch. Formerly incarcerated person, author, public speaker, reentry strategists, www.reentrystratigies.com, www.reentrystratagies.com. Ladies and Gentlemen this is DC Public Safety, we appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms. We want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasent day.
The post Reentry from a former offender’s perspective first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>
See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/can-social-impact-bonds-reinvent-government-urban-institute/
Leonard Sipes: From the Nation’s capitol this is DC Public Safety, I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and Gentlemen, Social Impact Bonds pay for success or making government more evidence based, more creative and more receptive to new ideas. Back at our microphones, John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. John welcome back to DC Public Safety.
John Roman: Thank you very much.
Leonard Sipes: All right you’re my favorite guest because all I have to do is wind you up and let you go, so that’s what we’re going to do today. Social Impact Bonds, what the heck are Social Impact Bonds?
John Roman: This is a new idea and it’s probably the biggest idea that’s out there today in terms of reforming criminal and juvenile justice systems. Along with public health, workforce development, economic redevelopment, pretty much anything you can think of. What we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to get private companies to invest in traditionally public sector activities. Which will allow governments to do all kinds of things that they’ve wanted to do but never had the resources to pursue.
The basic idea is Goldman-Saks in the deal that we’re going to talk about in a minute. Invested in a program to help prisoners at Rikers Island, which is the New York City jail. Which is a very distressed little corner of the world.
Leonard Sipes: It’s crazy.[crosstalk 00:01:29]
John Roman: A place that needs new resources to invest in a new program that hadn’t been implemented there before with the idea that the government of New York city would only pay back Goldman-Saks if the investment met performance targets that all of the parties agreed to, before the transaction was implemented.
Leonard Sipes: What was the program? What were they trying to do?
John Roman: What they were to do was basically a program called, “Moral Reconnation Therapy” through a program called, “Able”. The idea was to work with 16 to 18 year olds. New York is 1 of only 2 states left in the country that 16 and 17 year olds automatically enter the adult criminal justice system and so you have certain responsibilities to treat these young people in different ways then you would adults. This program was an attempt to try and deliver more services to them. To the tune of over 9 million dollars worth of new services to hundreds of not thousands of young people in Rikers Island in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to receive.
Leonard Sipes: Okay for the non-criminal justice people out there it’s a jail, so it’s not a prison so they are either awaiting trial or they’re serving shot sentences which category do these people fall in?
John Roman: The goal was, and this was really why this was very complicated, so the goal here was to try and serve people who were there on a sentence or were serving a long period of pre-trial detention. That just means they’re somebody who had done something that meant that the court wasn’t going to let them out on the street until their case was adjudicated in the courtroom or people who got a short sentence, less then one year 3, 6, 9, 12 months. Who were there for long enough that they had … There was the potential that you could actually deliver some services with some real dosage.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, that’s the point they were there long enough to deliver the services and were the services delivered as designed?
John Roman: Yeah, they really weren’t.
Leonard Sipes: Yes or no?
John Roman: No, they were not. The idea here is to say … We should take one gigantic step back if you like and say this is an idea that has been implemented around the world. There are Social Impact Bonds in the United Kingdom, there are 20 of them. There’s half a dozen in Australia. There are Social Impact Bonds, I was reading a piece today about Social Impact Bonds being developed in Brazil and Mexico. I know Israel is looking at them, Netherlands … They’re all around the world.
Leonard Sipes: Okay, so this is much bigger than any of us realize?
John Roman: That’s exactly right. This is the new idea, and the new idea is that we have all of these programs that have some evidence base right? People don’t really understand that we know so much more about how to help really disadvantaged populations then we did 20 years ago. I started at Urban in 1197 and what we know about what’s effective in serving people is completely exponentially grown since I started. What hasn’t grown is the resources to fund these programs to test whether they work and then implement them at scale.
Leonard Sipes: Why? When I talked to people about this program, getting ready do do the program they were saying, “Leonard, really intriguing idea, but if the ideas were so good why isn’t government funding?” Why isn’t government funding these programs if they are so evidence based, if they’re so impactful?
John Roman: I have two responses to that and one is really simple. They don’t. We’ve talked on this program before and you’ve probably talked a lot about drug courts.
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
John Roman: Drug courts are an idea where you take people who are drug involved and it’s their drug usage that’s causing them to offend and if you address the underlying substance abuse issue you could get them to stop offending and lead more productive lives and that would save tax payers money.
Leonard Sipes: Drug courts are generally seen as effective.
John Roman: Drug courts are seen as effective, there’s an enormous amount of research around drug courts that they have an effect.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: We’ve been doing these things for 25 years.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: They’re in every major county, there are 3,000 counties in America, they’re are probably in 2,000.
Leonard Sipes: Right, and that’s just the point. I mean they’ve shown to be effective and government has implemented them in hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the United States and Canada and throughout the world.
John Roman: That’s right where you hit the problem. The problem is we did a study about 5 years ago where we went and looked at of the 1.5 million people who enter the criminal justice system every year, which is an astonishingly large number.
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
John Roman: We estimated that of the 1.5 million offenders who enter the American criminal justice system, who are at risk of substance abuse disorders, of that 1.5 million, maybe 3% got a drug court. Then some really smart researchers at the University of Maryland came on behind us, redid our studies and different data and they estimated that we were wrong that in fact it’s less than 1%. Here we have an idea that is universally accepted, this is a way to stop future offending, this is a way to help disadvantaged people. This is a way to make America a better place and we don’t do it in any large numbers.
Leonard Sipes: I do want to get on the Social Impact Bonds because it’s intriguing and you’re saying it’s a national effort or an international effort. We should really be paying attention to it. Again the people I’ve been talking to are saying, “Leonard if it’s so dag-gone effective, why aren’t we getting the funding for it? Why do we have to go to Goldman-Saks, why do we have to go with hat in hand?” I mean, why don’t we just start kick-starter programs for drug treatment and for mental health? Why doesn’t the government, if government is saying they want fewer people in the criminal justice system, if government is saying we cannot stand the strain of the correctional budget as it currently is. We want to have fewer people recidivate, fewer people enter the criminal justice system, why the heck doesn’t government pay for it?
John Roman: Well government doesn’t pay for it.
Leonard Sipes: Why?
John Roman: There’s a bunch of reasons for it. One of the reasons for it is the results of these interventions occur way down the road. They’re not today, they’re distant. The administration that funds it today won’t be around when those benefits accrue so they’d rather fund things where the benefits will occur while they’re in office. That makes total sense. The populations we’re talking about are very difficult to serve. A drug involved population is … Drug courts are a great example, drug abuse treatment is a great example.
It’s not effective for everybody every time right? Relapse is part of recovery and so you have to know that you’re going to make the overall average population better but you’re not going to help every person. What that means is you’re going to be putting people out on the street instead of in prison, which is what you normally do with these folks and some of them are going to commit new offensives and that’s politically untenable for some populations. Then at the other end of the spectrum a lot of the people that we’re talking about helping with these kinds of programs just don’t have a political constituency they aren’t very sympathetic.
Leonard Sipes: All right, I don’t want to take away from the program on Social Impact Bonds but I promised others when I was doing the research for the program that I would ask that question. Social Impact Bonds very big, they are happening throughout the world. Why Social Impact Bonds? You may have just answered the question. Government unto itself really does not want to take these programs on.
John Roman: There are 3 things going on here that are really important. If you think about the research, I’m a researcher so I come at it from an evidence base and I come at it from the perspective of trying to get government to invest more in outcomes rather then good intentions. What I’d like to see for social service providers to get good evidence around their good works instead of just good intentions. Which is where we are today. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on out there that sounds good on paper that does not have any research support around it. Part of what these bonds do is because you have to go to an investor who’s going to write a check and in some cases these are really big checks right?
The Department of Labor, The US Department of Labor has funded a couple of these transactions to the tune of 15 million dollars so we’re talking about real large investments. If you’re going to get somebody to write a 15 million dollar check for you, you’d better have some sound evidence to demonstrate to them what their expectations should be for how effective this thing is and whether you’re going to be able to achieve the performance goals that you’ve outlined in the agreement.
Leonard Sipes: I mean people watching the Shark Tank program, I would imagine you have that sort of atmosphere. They’re saying, “Hey, prove to me that there is a research base behind this program. We’re not going to write you a check for anything until you come along and provide us with enough evidence that leads us to believe that we’re going to get a return on our investment.” There has to be an evidence base or is the private sector better at understanding evidence based procedures the the government?
John Roman: There’s two questions in there, one is am I willing to put my scholarship aside and admit that I watch Shark Tank? I do.
Leonard Sipes: It’s my wife’s favorite program.
John Roman: It’s a wonderful show and it really is exactly the sort of thing we’re talking about here, except that the scale is way smaller then what we’re talking about here. There they’re talking about 6 figures, hundreds of thousands, here we’re talking tens of millions.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: Maybe more, down the road. You have to be able to go to the same kind of investors, high-worth investors and ultra high-worth investors, right? People with 500 million dollars that they want to invest and you have to convince them that you’re going to reinvent Cleveland. You are going to do urban redevelopment in Akron. You are going to solve asthma in Fresno. You’re going to cure blight in Baltimore and if you can make a case that is evidence based to these folks they are going to invest in a way where they don’t actually get a market rate of return.
Leonard Sipes: Because if the program doesn’t succeed and are endless issues in terms of whether or not a program succeeds, implementation is one of the hardest things on the face of the Earth. If it doesn’t succeed it may not have anything to do with the evidence it may just be how it’s implemented that may be how faithful were to the original program design. They don’t get anything at all, they only get the return on their dollars. The program is paid for by government if it works. In this case the question becomes recidivism, in this case it didn’t reduce recidivism there by Goldman walks away from the table with nothing in it’s pocket.
John Roman: I want to come back to the Rikers Island deal, because it’s really important to the development of this concept to understand what happened in New York City.
Leonard Sipes: Okay.
John Roman: What I want to say about your point of implementation fidelity. Fidelity to best practice is really critical and that’s actually part of what’s going on here and it’s part of what’s so exciting about this whole prospect. Department of Labor funded the state of Massachusetts to do a program for young adult offenders in Massachusetts. Called “Roka” what they’re are trying to do there is to understand if they reduce the number of jail bed days that you would have expected from new offending compared to people who don’t get this program.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: The other thing that they’re doing that’s really important is … The Urban Institute is doing that validation. Another group Apt Associates is doing an implementation, the question they’re asking is, “Have you implemented this program as close to best practice as possible?”
Leonard Sipes: A process evaluation.
John Roman: A process evaluation yes, but more than that an implementation science is what we call it, right? What we’re learning is, we’re learning whether government cam come together and get the data together to do this big system reform. We’re learning whether this kind of program helps young people involved in the criminal system, and we’re learning how to put these things in place in a way that will inform the next time we try and replicate this in another place in another time.
Leonard Sipes: Any answers to any of those questions?
John Roman: We don’t have them yet, but what we think is really important in all of this process is the process itself is a reform. What we want to do is we want to go to a juvenile and adult criminal justice systems and we want to say to them, “Who are the drivers of your cost and populations? Who are the people you serve over and over again?”
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: “Why have you failed with this population?”
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: Getting people to admit that they’ve failed is really, really hard. Why is it that the same people keep coming in over and over, because that is evidence of failure. “Is there evidence out there about a program that you could be implementing that would help these people be more successful with their lives and save your tax payers resources and is a Social Impact Bond the way to finance that?”
Leonard Sipes: Now is a Social Impact Bond part of that Massachusetts initiative, I heard Department of Labor, who else?
John Roman: It is funded, it’s third sector is the intermediary there is private financing that’s associated with it. All of the dollars that are paying for this up front come from somebody’s pocket other than the Massachusetts state government. The federal government is paying for some of the implementation pieces and the evaluation pieces and the data integration and [crosstalk 00:14:52]
Leonard Sipes: So the private sector is putting up money?
John Roman: The private sector is putting up another 15 million dollars so it’s about a 30 million dollar transaction.
Leonard Sipes: That’s a huge investment.
John Roman: It’s a huge investment and so what we’re doing here is we’re thinking about investing in chronically disadvantaged populations on a completely different scale then we’ve thought about it at all. If you think about the Second Chance Act that was a hundred million dollars across all 50 states. That’s 2 million dollars a state. Here we’re talking about 30 million for one state.
Leonard Sipes: I want to talk about how expensive these programs are and I’m not quite sure the average person realizes when in terms of what we do at the court services and the defendant supervision agency for high risk people is to put them in a 28 day residential program then put them into a 90 day residential treatment program them put them in an after care program. All that carries an enormous expense, but ladies and gentlemen, back at our microphones John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. Talking about Social Impact Bonds.
John, this is exciting, so what you’re saying is we can sell hard-nosed, demanding individuals who only invest their money if they see the potential for return on their dollars and there’s enough evidence out there or they’re willing to do social change or intervention programs on a very large scale.
John Roman: Right, so let me give you one example and I can give you others if you want to hear them. There is a new drug therapy that actually cures Hepatitis C. That’s important for our discussion here because something like two thirds of people with Hepatitis C in America contact the criminal justice system at some point right? You get Hepatitis C because of prostitution or intravenous drug use or something like that.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: We actually have this medical therapy that is a 3 month course of pills basically, that you take that at the end of the 3 months you no longer have Hepatitis C. The only other cure for Hepatitis C is a liver transplant which is like a million bucks.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: The course of treatment is about $85,000 over 3 months right? We’re talking something like-
Leonard Sipes: For 1 person?
John Roman: For 1 person.
Leonard Sipes: Oh my God.
John Roman: We’re talking about 7% of the criminal justice population has Hepatitis C.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: Almost a hundred thousand dollars per person.
Leonard Sipes: Got it.
John Roman: When you talk about needing resources on that scale there is no solution, right?
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: This is the solution, you could come along and you could go to Goldman, or JP Morgan-Chase, or Bank of America, or Deutsche Bank, or whoever, these folks have all expressed interest in this concept and say to them, “Look, we will as the government have this enormous financial benefit for having treated these people for this condition, because we won’t have to treat them. We won’t have prisoners that need liver transplants that we have to pay for so we’ll bay you back for a profit.”
Leonard Sipes: Is this actually happening?
John Roman: This one is on the books but we’re talking about these things around, another big one is asthma. Very similar idea.
Leonard Sipes: All right the medical part of it I understand, the criminal justice system often times to me strikes me as being a hard sell, which is one of the reasons why the data that I’ve seen in the past is that fewer than 10% of all people in prison have access to substance abuse treatment.
John Roman: Right.
Leonard Sipes: Even the substance abuse treatment that’s there is not very good and the numbers are tiny, so if 80% have histories of substance abuse, 10% are getting it. You say to yourself, “Is it that government doesn’t care?” What you’re talking about is revolutionary. What you’re talking about is not Social Impact Bonds, what you’re talking about is a process, a sea change, a different way of conducting criminal justice, a different way of conduction public health, it’s not government that’s driving the boat anymore it’s industry. It’s investments, it’s people who are very demanding, very specific, very evidence based. There are the people that possibly could bring upon significant change within public health and the criminal justice system crawls to the board. What you’re talking about is monumental.
John Roman: Yeah, I mean I think we’re talking-
Leonard Sipes: Am I exaggerating or not?
John Roman: NO I think it’s a totally different way of thinking about the world and we’ve talked about it in Ottawa, to the Canadian government, in Israel, in London, all over the world and people see the opportunity here. The idea here is really simple, we want to turn the problem upside down. The problem has been, how do we get resources to help people with a particular problem. What we want to say instead is, “Hold on, we have evidence on how to solve some particular problems, how so we get resources to those things instead of the things that we are funding as business as usual now?” In some respects what we want to say is really simple. Some things that we do don’t really work, right? I mean we’ve talked about, you and I have talked about-
Leonard Sipes: What don’t work very well.
John Roman: What don’t work like DARE, right, every schools got a Dare, a police officer comes in.
Leonard Sipes: People love it.
John Roman: People love it, or scared strait, there’s absolutely no evidence that changes anybody’s behavior and in someways it might cause worse behavior. When the DARE guy cones in and shows your kid his suitcase full of drugs, some of these kids are going to be like, “Oh, so that’s what cocaine looks like. Cool, that’s not what I thought.” That’s not good for them.
Leonard Sipes: The weird thing about government is because we do all sorts of things that make people feel good but really don’t have an evidence base behind it.
John Roman: Right, what we want to do here is say “look, I could give you a laundry list of things that I have in evidence, that I believe have an evidence base that is overwhelming, that we should do at scale. That everybody that needs this help should get it right?
Leonard Sipes: Yeah, of course.
John Roman: We’re talking about in our world we’re talking about high-risk adolescents, we’re talking about family based therapies, we’re talking about multi-systemic therapy. We’re talking about programs with evidence bases that are so compelling that the most sophisticated researchers in the world, the most skeptical researchers in the world are saying, “$15 in benefit for every dollar in cost, only they’re really expensive how do we raise the money to get those benefits?” This is the answer.
Leonard Sipes: It’s not just the answer, it’s not just the matter of money, from dealing with business people in the past, and dealing with government throughout my entire career, the business people have an entirely different mind set. Very polite, very nice, but very demanding.
John Roman: Yes.
Leonard Sipes: Very precise, they are … especially I worked with marketers, in the past, and marketing in the private sector is a different world. It’s very precise it’s like driving a jet plane. It’ like driving a 747 it’s a very precise set of rules and understanding and operations. If you don’t follow these precise, rules, procedures, and understandings they ground you. It’s do not pass go, do not collect $200. Government is far mushier then the private sector so if you’re telling me that the private sector is convinced of evidence based procedures and they’re going to start coming in and they’re going to start funding this it’s a seed change in terms of what we’re talking about not just for the criminal justice system, but for the delivery of services to undeserved populations across the board.
John Roman: I think what’s really been interesting in this is that when we approach this, and we started thinking about this in 2009. The Rikers deal happened shortly after that, the first deal in the United Kingdom happened at about that time, and every year it grows more and more quickly. When we first thought about this we knew there were 3 players in this equation, there was the government, there was private philanthropy, people who give grants, give away their money, and commercial investment bankers. We assumed the government would love this idea because what it says to the government, “Here’s some money to do something you can’t do, and you only have to pay us back if it works.”
Leonard Sipes: The government loses control.
John Roman: You’re getting ahead of me but that’s where I’m headed. Philanthropy, we thought this would be very interesting to them because they, this allows them to leverage their giving and give the same dollar over and over again. We thought investment bankers would be the hardest sell. We thought these people would be very hard headed and they wouldn’t be interested in the rates of return that they were getting. The actual operational practical realities, the absolute reverse. The investment bankers are extremely interested in this idea, in fact there are hundreds of million of dollars if not a billion dollars or more on the sidelines looking for deals to invest in. They cannot find the deals.
The philanthropists have been a little scratching their heads at this whole concept and haven’t weighed it in as deeply as we had expected. The governments, probably for the reason that you just raised, which is when they get engaged in these deals they lose control. Have really had people come to them and say, “I will give you a hundred million dollars and I can solve this problem for your entire population in your state. Would you like me to do it? You only have to pay me back if it works.” and they said, “No thank you.”
Leonard Sipes: You’re not … I’m not the first person to suggest to you as a lifelong researcher that government doesn’t trust [inaudible 00:24:17] Government likes to do what government wants to do. We do that from a very common sense perspective, because we believe that the delivery of this particular service is going to work, We’re not interested in somebody coming along and measuring it and telling us whether it does or it does not. We believe that it works thereby, do not pass go, do not collect $200. We’re comfortable with that and that’s how we proceed. You’re talking about a different world, you’re talking about a different mindset, you’re talking about a “prove it to me and prove it to me consistently and we’re going to hold you to these markers. Have you met these markers, at the eighth point, at the quarter point, and if you didn’t why not?” It puts government under a spotlight and we’re not happy about that.
John Roman: What I think what’s really important what’s happened and we started out by talking about the Rikers deal and the Rikers deal ended up not going all the way to the end because it wasn’t meeting the performance measures that had been agreed upon at the outset by Goldman-Saks and Bloomberg Foundation who were the one’s who underwrote it. Who basically insured the deal. What Mayor Mike Bloomberg did and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs did in New York City was really brave and really critical. Because what they said was, “No, were going to take the biggest, I think it’s the biggest city government in the United States, and we’re going to get behind this concept and we’re going to test it. We know there’s a chance it’s going to work, but that will provide a precedent for other cities and other counties and other states to think about investing in this.” and that propelled this field forward.
Now you have Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams is really pushing this and Corporation for National Community Service is 11 million dollars behind this and Department of Labor and Department of Justice. It’s probably a hundred million dollar industry and none of that would have happened without some government having the courage to step forward knowing it might fail, and that happened and that sparked everything that has gone through.
Leonard Sipes: We’re not talking about Social Impact Bonds, I said this before and I’m probably being repetitive to the point of fault, but we’re not talking about Social Impact Bonds, we’re not talking about delivery of services. We’re talking about fundamentally changing the way that government operates through a public/private partnership.
John Roman: I think the metaphor that I always tell and I think it works, is we’re sitting in the heart of Washington DC, there’s a big commercial corridor right around the corner, 7th and 8th street, there’s a big stadium there. There’s tons of bars and restaurants and at some point tonight I can just about guarantee you that a metropolitan police department officer is going to engage with somebody who is in crisis. They might be drunk, they might be having a mental health problem, they might have a substance abuse problem. They might just be unhappy with their station in life.
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
John Roman: That police officer is going to have to serve as a social worker to try and guide that person to engage in better behavior so they don’t end up in the DC jail that night.
Leonard Sipes: Sure, of course.
John Roman: They shouldn’t be in that position, we should have the community infrastructure to help serve that person. If it’s mental health care, if it’s drug abuse treatment, if it’s alcohol, whatever it is that that person needs, we don’t have the infrastructure to do it. What this does to create a way to fund that infrastructure in ways that just simply aren’t going to happen if we don’t go down this road. The idea isn’t to privatize policing, the idea is to let that officer go back to being a police officer.
Leonard Sipes: Right.
John Roman: Which is what they are trained to do and they know how to do and they’re good at. We’ve sort of forced all these people throughout our government to take on jobs that they aren’t trained for and we’ve over the last couple of years we’ve seen the results of that. A lot of it’s been not very pretty.
Leonard Sipes: Final minute of the program. What percentage who aren’t getting substance abuse treatment to day are going to get substance abuse treatment? What percentage of people who desperately need mental health treatment are going to be getting mental health treatment? What percentage can we say the people who are undeserved, who are not getting services now will get services say in 10 years through a private/public partnership.
John Roman: If you think about the family based therapies that I talked about, which are ways to treat high-risk young people in their homes with mom, with grandma, with their cousins, with their siblings, with their friends.
Leonard Sipes: Which is the most effective program I’ve seen out there.
John Roman: It’s the most effective program that’s out there and it probably serves less then 10% of all the people it could.
Leonard Sipes: Yes.
John Roman: We could get to 70% by using this a s a way to raise funding, to package together all of these things. The idea is called “Scale finance” Steve Goldberg, Caffeinated Capital, is pushing this idea. It’s a wonderful thing. We could get a long ways to getting to 100%.
Leonard Sipes: What are the odds of really doing that?
John Roman: I think we can do 1 state in the next 2 years.
Leonard Sipes: That’s amazing, that’s amazing. The most effective program that I’m aware of, that does provide fundamental change and has a long term impact on criminality and use of the criminal justice system. We could fund 75% in terms of one state.
John Roman: I think within the next few years, some state will sign on to this and we’ll be able to take this to every young person that needs it.
Leonard Sipes: We proposed to have a program today, a program on Social Impact Bonds. It’s turned out to be much more than that and I hope everybody stuck with us through the program to the final conclusion. John Roman, Senior Fellow Justice Policy Setter, Urban Institute, www.urban.org, www.urban.org. He has 3 articles talking about the situation in Rikers Island and I’ll put all 3 in the show notes. Ladies and gentleman this is DC Public Safety, we appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms and we want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasant day.
The post Social Impact Bonds first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/parole-and-probation-officers-and-their-contributions-to-public-safety/
Leonard Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sykes. Today, ladies and gentlemen, parole and probation officers and their contributions to public safety. We’re celebrating, in conjunction with the American Probation and Parole Association and their motto, “A Force for Positive Change”. These individuals come from my agency, the court services and offenders supervision agency. By our microphones today we have: Kaitlin Forshay, a supervisory community supervision officer; we have Jamie Thompson, a community supervision officer; and we have Jasmine St. John, again, a community supervision officer. And to Kaitlin, and to Jamie, and to Jasmine welcome to DC Public Safety.
Jasmine: Thank you.
Kaitlin: Thank you for having us.
Leonard Sykes: In a world where there is just a ton of media and television shows about police officers, and I used to be one, there is only one that I’m aware of, and that’s, I think, A&E’s “Pitbulls and Parolees”, so there is really not a lot of publicity about parole and probation agents. We call you community supervision officers; that’s DC’s term for parole and probation agents. But parole and probation agents throughout the country, community supervision officers, you guys are on the front line. Out of the seven million people under correctional supervision, five are the responsibility of yourselves, people like you and your counterparts throughout the United States. So when you talk about corrections in this country, the vast majority of people are under the supervision of parole and probation agents. How does that make you feel? That’s an awesome responsibility, is it not?
Kaitlin: It is an awesome responsibility but its also an awesome opportunity.
Leonard Sykes: Okay.
Kaitlin: We have a lot of resources here in DC, we have a lot of great people working to make a difference in people’s lives. They come to us for whatever reason it happens to be, with their risks, and with their needs, and we have the opportunity to help them, to make them more productive members of society, which not only makes them better, but makes them available for their families more, makes them contribute to society in a more positive light. So it is a huge responsibility, but its also a great opportunity.
Leonard Sykes: We have people, a large and significant percentage of our case loads have mental health problems, have substance abuse problems. A lot of them have not had a long job history. We have individuals with real challenges. And those challenges are tough to deal with, correct?
Kaitlin: That’s correct.
Leonard Sykes: And tell me about that.
Kaitlin: Well it’s great. I just recently started working with C-SOSA. I started in October.
Leonard Sykes: Welcome.
Kaitlin: And I came from another agency. So being here, not only have I been afforded with this opportunity but I am able to make referrals to the population that I deal with for employment services, school. If they have a substance abuse problem we have our own in-house treatment that would handle that, anger management, mental health, sex offender treatment. Pretty much you name it, we have the resources at our hands to provide them with this opportunity to really help them.
Leonard Sykes: I can’t let you go too far without asking, I came from another state agency too, the court services and offenders supervision agency. Our ratio was 125:1. Here at the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, its routinely less than 50:1. Here you have an opportunity to do something with the people under our supervision, to do something meaningful. All of the probation agents throughout the country who are listening to this program are going to stare at us through their radios in disbelief because they’re saying, “What? You only have 50:1?” I mean, most states don’t have that opportunity so I’m not going to ask you what state you came from, but is it a big difference from wherever you came from here to the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency?
Kaitlin: Yes it is. And I know this sounds cliched, but I really feel like being here I can kind of live up to that idea of being an agent of change because I do have more time to meet with individuals, reach out to their families, and really get to know what’s going on to be able to help make a difference in their life.
Leonard Sykes: Jasmine, what is your experience? How long have you been with the agency?
Jasmine: I’ve been with the agency since 2011. And currently I’m a minimum supervision level officer. And actually, my case load is a little higher than the 50.
Leonard Sykes: Right. Because you have the lower level people?
Jasmine: Yes. But we do have, like you spoke about, a lot of co-occurrent offenders who have the mental health and substance abuse co-occurrent issues. And so we do, specifically with that population, deal a lot with referring them out to the services they need within the community as well.
Leonard Sykes: Jasmine, I’m going to continue with you. What we do as parole and probation agents, community supervision officers, we have to sit and get into the heart and minds of that individual in many cases who is distrustful of you. He’s been caught up, or she’s been caught up in the criminal justice system. They’re not particularly seeing you as their friend because you have the ability to send them back into the criminal justice system or send them back into prison. The person does have substance abuse issues, does have mental health issues, does have anger management issues. How do you break through those barriers?
Jasmine: Honestly, with a conversation that kind of opens the door to them trusting us with information that may have led to substance abuse issues. Showing that we actually care, showing up and being consistent with the information and the resources. Because a lot of my clients will say, “I’ve never had anybody say this like that before to me” in regards to “I just want to see you do well”, “I want to see you here for your family”, just kind of pulling out those things that motivate them to change within their own lives. Because when supervision is over we want to leave the person whole. And so we break down a lot of the barriers just with conversations with our clients one-on-one. And just trying to figure our exactly how we can help, show that we can help. And then have them own the plan by letting us know: what is it that you want to change in your life; what is the plan, the steps that you’re going to take to take care of that issue. And then we guide them along the way, as their officer.
Leonard Sykes: Okay, but I’m going to keep hammering away at this. Because you all are giving me very correct answers and I appreciate that. But I can’t think of anything more difficult to deal with than a person with a 15 year history of heroin abuse. I mean, breaking through that 15 year history, that’s almost impossible. I’ve had, especially women under supervision, before these microphones, telling me “Wait a minute, Mr. Sykes, you want me to get through my history of sexual abuse, my substance abuse problem, my mental health issues. You want me to go and get a job even though I don’t have any occupational background and you want me to reunite with my kids. That’s impossible. What you’re asking me to do is way too much. I cannot do all of that.” So, to the individual under supervision who tells me that they cannot do all of that, how do you respond to that?
Jamie: I think it’s important when that’s presented to kind of identify with the client, what are their short term goals and start small. Not try to tackle everything at once. Work on stabilization issues. Like I said, the short term goals. To kind of help them see that there is an end in sight when you take baby steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day. When you have a 15 year history, for example that you used, of substance abuse, you’re not going to tackle that in your first meeting.
Leonard Sykes: Right, but can you tackle it in the third or fourth or fifteenth and twenty-third? Kaitlin go ahead.
Kaitlin: Yes, it’s extremely important that we build rapport. And doing so is, as Jasmine said, being consistent and being fair. But we have with the smaller caseloads, we have a lot of opportunities to use motivational interviewing techniques, to use cognitive behavioral intervention …
Leonard Sykes: What are, for the uninitiated, what is cognitive behavioral therapy, what are motivational interviewing techniques?
Kaitlin: Okay, so motivational interviewing. A lot of the times what we’re doing when we’re trying to get to the root of the problems is to ask open-ended questions. And then to help develop rapport we’re going to use reflections and summarize to make sure that the client we’re dealing with understands that we understand what they’re going – maybe not what they’re going through – but we understand what their needs are. And how they feel about a certain subject. So, demonstrating that we’re listening, those active listening skills. I’m trying to get them to open up a little bit about themselves.
Now the cognitive behavioral interventions come in. Specifically, a lot of the reasons that they’re here relate to perhaps a cognitive distortion. Their behaviors are not necessarily the events that they’ve been through but the perceptions of the events that they’ve been through. So we have to try to figure out and understand why they respond a certain way. Why they behave a certain way. And using that information to try to change the way they think about their experiences. And then we have the opportunity with these small caseloads to use these evidence-based practices, the time that we need to really invest in these people.
Like you said, we can’t do everything all at once. So the goal is to address one or two action items at a time. And we determine which ones we’re going to start at first. We know that we need to address stabilization factors primarily but whatever we can get the offender to buy into. They may not be ready to see their kids yet. They may not be ready to go down that path, but they are ready to address substance abuse. So we’re going to go that way with them. We kind of let them them take ownership of their plan and build it around what their needs are.
Leonard Sykes: Do the three of you fully understand that we have a national discussion now about change within the criminal justice system? I can’t tell you how many articles I come across every day from national publications talking about senate bills, talking about house bills, talking about initiative on the part of the Department of Justice, initiatives on the part of individual organizations. And every time they’re talking about the fundamental change within the criminal justice system, the heart and soul of that fundamental change is you. The heart and soul of that … never in my forty years within the criminal justice system have I seen such an emphasis on parole and probation officers.
So what they’re saying is that if we’re not going to be sending that many people to prison or if we’re going to let people out of prison earlier. What they’re counting on is quality supervision on the part of parole and probation agencies throughout the country. I’ve spoken with parole and probation folks throughout the United States and they’re tell me “Leonard, I’m not quite sure with 100:1 or 50:1 to one ratios if we’re ready for that type of responsibility.” In DC are we ready for that?
Jamie: I believe that we are.
Kaitlin: In coming from another agency, I can say that I think that we are ready here. And just from our successful case closures, that speaks for itself.
Leonard Sykes: Yeah, because the great majority of our cases, around two-thirds, are closed out successfully. And that has to be due to the efforts on the part of people like yourselves. Jasmine?
Jasmine: Absolutely. I think this agency does a really good job at providing the training that we need in order to better suit our clients. When we went to the cognitive behavioral intervention and motivational interviewing, adding that more into how we actually manage our caseloads. We were provided with adequate training that really helped us get what it actually is that we need to do with our offenders within the community versus just sanctioning and sending them back and letting that only be our option. It really helped us engage with the offender, get to the core of the issues and the risks that they might have. And the needs. And kind of given us, I would say, like a briefcase of all this information and resources. And told us how exactly to do this. And we’ve seen results, especially with the caseloads that we have at minimum. We’ve seen results of how we’ve had clients not only be successfully be terminated at the end of supervision but also early terminated because they’ve done so well in the community.
Leonard Sykes: We’re one of the very few probation agencies in the United States that control our own resources. I mean, we have half-way back programs. We have our own structure, our own building, this huge … where we process hundreds upon hundreds of individuals every year that are struggling on community supervision. Instead of sending them back to prison we send them back for intensive treatment. So, it’s weird that we, because we’re federally funded, with a local mission. The Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, we are in a better position than many, if not every parole and probation agency in the country, to do the job that people want us to do. To both serve the individual under supervision at the same time protect public safety.
Kaitlin: I just came back from American Association, I’m sorry, the American Probation and Parole Association’s National Training Institute. And networking with other individuals from around the country who do exactly what we do, it’s amazing to me what a wide range of difference that we have between our agency and the way other people are doing things.
Certain things, like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral interventions seem to be standard across the board at this point. But to speak, at C-SOSA we have specialized units. We have a women’s unit, we have a sex offender unit, we have domestic violence, we have many different units so that we can target specific needs in specific populations. And a lot of other agencies don’t have that opportunity. They may have sex offender come in at eight o’clock and then a domestic violence offender come in at nine. And then a general supervision, young adult …
Leonard Sykes: Right
Kaitlin: So the resources we have and the opportunities we have are much greater than some of our counterparts in other jurisdictions.
Leonard Sykes: Yeah, the individual teams – domestic violence, young offenders, women under supervision, I mean it goes on and on – mental health is a big one. Drug court, about forty-five percent of our populations at the highest levels of supervision. So we have an immense amount of contact. In the state that I came from, intensive supervision was two face-to-face contacts a month. At the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency they could have eight contacts a month just with you and that’s leaving out the treatment people and that’s leaving out coming in to be drug tested. So we have an immense amount of contact with the people under supervision.
Jamie: And we’re given that opportunity because of our different focuses with our teams and having that smaller case load.
Leonard Sykes: I find this to be a fascinating conversation. I do want to come back and talk about the stresses and the successes and how you personally feel about what it is that you do.
But ladies and gentlemen, we’re doing a radio show today on parole and probation officers and their contributions to public safety. We are celebrating pre-trial probation and paroles supervision week in conjunction with the American Probation and Parole Association. Their motto “A Force for Positive Change” is something that we embrace.
The three individuals are from my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. It’s Kaitlin Forshay, she is a supervisory community supervision officer; Jamie Thompson, a community supervision office; and Jasmine St. John, again a community supervision officer; what we call parole and probation agents in the District of Columbia, Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency. We are a federal agency, federal independent branch, executive branch agency here in the nation’s capitol.
You know, ladies, this has got to be one of the most challenging things that you have ever done. I mean, I can’t think of anything, including my law enforcement days. Here’s my law enforcement day: I get a call, I go in, I resolve it or arrest the person or deal with it with through non-arrest and I leave. You have got to deal with this individual and their family and their kids for years in some cases. I mean, for me it’s a ten minutes intervention; for you it’s the next two or three years. That’s got to be immensely stressful.
Jasmine: Absolutely. However, weeks like this that we are given the opportunity to kind of relieve some of that stress while at work and then the initiatives of the health and wellness committee to kind of have some opportunity throughout the year to also get out and relieve some stress does help. (Laughs)
Jamie: Helps with the burnout. (Laughter)
Leonard Sykes: Yeah, I mean do you go home and kick the dog and throw the glass up against the wall. You know, it’s a stressful job …
Jasmine: It is.
Leonard Sykes: I mean, you’re dealing with people with drug addictions and mental health issues and you know. We had the women’s conference a couple of years ago where a woman stood up in the middle of the hall, in the middle of our gathering and said “I, and a woman that I live with, last night had a fight and she threatened me and my child. And I had to pull a knife to keep her away from my child and me. And now I’m homeless. I don’t have a place to live and I’ve got these problems. What are you all going to do for me?” And dead silence filled the room for the next ten seconds. I mean, that’s the reality of who it is that you deal with.
Kaitlin: When I first started at C-SOSA, I was on the sex offender unit and I had accidentally left my cell phone on overnight. I got a call at two-thirty in the morning with an offender who was calling from a pay phone saying he was going to jump off a bridge. Two-thirty in the morning, woken up from a sound sleep. The amount of stress that puts on you, knowing that you are responsible. This man was considering ending his life and the person he chose to call was me?
Leonard Sykes: There you go.
Kaitlin: And I had no, hardly any experience, as a probation or parole agent. So it was alarming to me that somebody that I had affected, he at least trusted me with that information. That he didn’t end up … we were able to engage in that conversation, he didn’t end up hurting himself at all. But to know that I was on his mind when he was thinking about making such a serious decision. You know, it is stressful. There’s secondary trauma that comes with it. Every day the decisions that we make affect people’s lives, for good or for bad. I mean that’s a tremendous responsibility that we have.
But then we also have stories. One of my officers recently, I was doing an observation and he was talking to a young adult who was just about ready to graduate from high school. And at one point it didn’t look as if he was going to be able to graduate from high school. Now he has great family support in terms of his grandmother, but one of the things he was struggling with was trying to figure out who was going to get his tickets for his high school graduation. And his father, who hadn’t been in his life at all, all of a sudden wanted to, was recently coming back in his life and wanted a ticket to graduation. And he decided not to give his father a ticket to graduation because he had saved that last ticket for his community supervision officer …
Leonard Sykes: Wow
Kaitlin: … who he felt was more of an asset in his life and more of a motivation in his life to complete his high school education than his own father was.
Leonard Sykes: I spoke to a community supervision officer and the person under his supervision one time jointly. And he told me, the person under supervision said “You know what? This individual is the only person in my life that I can turn to, to talk to and have a decent conversation. This is the only person in my life who cares. And because of that I take my meds. And because of that I don’t screw up. And because of that I do the right things. Because I do not want to violate the trust that I’ve built up with your community supervision officer who was my community supervision officer.” That’s profound.
Jasmine: That is. And it’s again, a huge responsibility. But on the flip side that’s very rewarding to know that in our position we were able to make an impact on a person’s life. Because often times we are the only positive role model that they have. And so it’s very important for us to always make sure that we practice that anti-criminal modelling for them. Since we are a role model.
Leonard Sykes: And in terms of talking. I mean, Jasmine, the whole idea is to give that individual an opportunity to talk to somebody who truly does care. And the thing that impresses me about probation agents, community supervision officers, is that, by and large, we do care. By and large, this aren’t throw away human beings. Now I understand that they’re frustrating, and I understand that it’s difficult, and I understand that it drives you crazy at times. Most, if not eighty-five percent, of the people that I have encountered that work for probation agencies genuinely do care about whether that person does well or not.
Jasmine: Absolutely. When you give your offender, your client, the opportunity just to talk. And just ask “how are you doing today” or “what’s going on in your life” or “what’s changed” so many things can come as a response that you never know where that conversation is going to lead. [Background conversation and noise [00:21:47]] And you never know if perhaps just within that conversation. One day they can say that they’re absolutely fine but then you have this deep long conversation about something that might have happened recently and it will open the door for so many things that they were pushing back for years. And that would open the door for that trust to be built. To talk about that.
Because, I feel, at least a lot of my population really don’t have people who just pause to say “How is your day going?”
Leonard Sykes: Right, right.
Jasmine: They’re either back in the community and no one wants to be bothered with them because of one issue or the other or lack of employment or funds. Or they’re being pulled in so many directions they just don’t have time to really pause and get some stuff off of their chests until they get to our office. It’s a huge responsibility to hear that information. The things that we hear, the stories that we hear about the trauma that happens in their day-to-day life, I cannot imagine some of the things that they have gone through. Just getting up, it’s almost one of those things I am surprised that all you are is on supervision because of the things that have happened in their day-to-day life.
Leonard Sykes: Right, we deal with individuals that carry a lot of life trauma.
Jasmine: Absolutely.
Leonard Sykes: I did, years ago, in terms of volunteer counseling, and a person who was going to take their life. And ended up very intimately involved with that person’s life on a professional basis and conversations. And there are certain times the person’s telling me stuff where I am saying to myself “I am not quite sure I want to hear this. I am, this is way too deep. I did not know that we were going there (laughs). And then it becomes more, and then it becomes more.
And there’s a certain point where you as a professional, you have this opportunity to break all of this and help that person. But at the same time it, even though we have low caseloads, it’s still fifty people telling you these stories. And fifty people communicating with you like this. And sometimes, when you go home, I am assuming you feel like the world is riding on your shoulders.
Jamie: That’s why it’s very important to find balance in your life.
Jasmine: I was going to say I can’t even watch the news because half the time …
Leonard Sykes: (Laughs)
Jasmine: … I am so inundated at work with stories that if I watched the news or Law and Order, anything for recreation I am thinking about work. Because it’s like, oh that reminds me of so-and-so or …
Leonard Sykes: Yes.
Jasmine: I saw …
Leonard Sykes: Yes.
Jasmine: … them come through my email today …
Leonard Sykes: Yes.
Jasmine: … or something reminds you of work.
Leonard Sykes: Yes
Kaitlin: If I have to watch one more episode of Intervention …
Jamie: And then on the flip side …
Kaitlin: … No, thank you.
Jamie: But then on the flip side, you’re watching and you’re like “Please don’t be one that belongs to me. Please don’t be one that belongs to me.” (Laughter)
Leonard Sykes: But in sitting before these microphones in terms of talking to women in supervision, and I’ve done that probably six or seven times. And I’ve been to a couple of group interventions. And I have three women tell me similar stories about being sexually abused before they were thirteen years old. And talk about who did it, and how it affected them for the rest of their lives. And how it created a spiral that got them involved in drugs and mental health.
And I’m sitting there and I’m saying “This is the most intense conversation I’ve ever had in my life.” That’s the sort of conversation you go through every single day.
Jasmine: Absolutely. And one client comes to mind, who is a female and who also has a mental health issue and a substance abuse issue that started from sexual abuse. And when you start to factor in okay, well, you’re still using. And these are things that we have to address as far as public safety. At the end of the day, though, you have to ask those questions “what is going on that you’re currently using” and things of that nature. And out comes this story of “I’m taking care of my grandkids, and I shouldn’t and it’s overbearing” and things of that nature. And it all leading, then you start to wrestle with now if I take you off the street, who’s going to watch the grandkids?
Leonard Sykes: Yes.
Jasmine: And if I take you off the street what are your daughters going to do because they’re depending on the little bit of money that you get for disability or whatever else they may be getting money for.
So, a lot of their life stories factors into pretty much how we supervise their case. Because those are the things you have to consider all the time at the same time before or, in addition to, writing a violation report.
Leonard Sykes: What is the most important ingredient in terms of being a good parole and probation agent, a good community supervision officer? What must you have?
Jamie: Patience.
Jasmine: That’s exactly what I was going to say first.
Leonard Sykes: Patience?
Kaitlin: Because it is difficult. In addition to hearing all of these stories and having to find that work/life balance, there are some times that phone rings and I look over and I see who’s calling. I don’t want to answer it. I don’t. There are so many, some of these clients where they call non-stop or they call. And every time, or they only call when they really need something. But when they really need something, it’s a lot of time out of your day. And one of the things I love about this field, is that no two days are alike. It’s also what I hate about this field. (Laughter)[crosstalk 00:26:49]
You can’t plan a day. Things come up. And you’re constantly, it’s crisis management every single day. So even if so-and-so is now skating, you know, and they’re moving on their way, you have another offender where you’re just at the start.
Leonard Sykes: You have to be on every single day, is that correct?
Kaitlin: Absolutely
Leonard Sykes: I mean there’s no such thing as having that bad day, we all have them. I have them, you have them. But you get to the office, and I want to remind the public, that these individuals are out in the community. They’re just not just sitting, riding a desk. They’re out constantly doing home visits, interviewing this individual on a surprise basis. Sometimes going to their place of employment. So you guys are always out in the community, so you’re always interacting with people. Are you ever afraid by the way? Good question, do you think?
Jasmine: Good question, and not so much.
Leonard Sykes: Okay
Jasmine: Because of the rapport we build with our offenders, at least the ones that I have, I’ve never been in a situation where I was afraid of my client. Just to be honest.
Jamie: I am in agreement with Jasmine.
Leonard Sykes: All right. You’ve got to travel some pretty rough neighborhoods by yourself.
Jasmine: Or with a partner. But you have the support of MPD here …
Leonard Sykes: The Metropolitan Police Department, yes
Jasmine: Absolutely. So we know the officers who also patrol the area. And at the same time because you are so much in their lives and see them so much, if it comes to a situation where we’re about to walk into a dangerous situation you’ll have offenders who call you and say “Not today, because it’s not safe over here” and things of that nature.
Kaitlin: Or they’ll walk you to your car. [crosstalk 00:28:20]
Jasmine: I actually had one walk me to my car one day. [crosstalk 00:28:22]
Leonard Sykes: All right, so everybody is working with each other, everybody is exchanging information, everybody is cooperating. They’re looking out for you, you’re looking out for them.
Jasmine: I would say for the most part. [crosstalk 00:28:29]
Jamie: For the most part
Kaitlin: There are some that don’t want you to come to their house, period. They don’t care to see you there. They don’t want to have a conversation with you. You say goodbye and they hope they never have to see you again. But for the most part being able to develop a rapport really aids in that feeling of safety.
Leonard Sykes: I think this has been a fascinating conversation. I think that the people of Washington, DC, and throughout the United States, owe a debt of respect to parole and probation agents, community supervision officers. You guys really are on the front lines. You really are the people who we depend upon to protect our safety. And who, at the same time, do the fair administration of justice in terms of the people that we supervise.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been an honor for me today. Kaitlin Forshay, she is the supervisory community supervision officer. Jamie Thompson, community supervision officer and Jasmine St. John, again, community supervision officer. The program today was focusing on parole and probation agents and their contributions to public safety. We’re celebrating pretrial probation and parole supervision week here in the District of Columbia in conjunction with the American Probation and Parole Association and their motto “A Force for Positive Change”.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms. And we want everybody to have themselves a very pleasant day.
How did Danelle do?
If you rate this transcript 3 or below, Danelle L will not work on your future orders
The post Parole and Probation Officers and their Contributions to Public Safety first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
Listen to the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/social-media-during-emergencies-craig-silverman-buzzfeed/
Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s topic: social media during emergencies. Does government have the ability to correct bad information?
I am honored today to have Craig Silverman. He is the founding editor of Buzzfeed Canada. He is at Twitter, @Craigsilverman. To say that this is an extraordinarily important topic is an understatement. Craig wrote a document; Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content. It was funded by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Knight Foundation. Throughout this radio show of great importance, and immense complexity, I want us to focus on 3 things: A. How do we address misinformation? B. What can we do about misinformation, and C. If we had a dirty bomb that went off in your area, we practiced this all the time when I was with the Maryland emergency management, what are the implications for public safety and the surrounding area? Craig, welcome to DC Public Safety.
Craig: Thank you so much for having me.
Leonard: I am honored to have you. With the world economic forum in 2014 according to your report, top trends, viral misinformation. The world economic forum is saying viral misinformation is one of the top trends in the world, correct?
Craig: Yes, that’s right. It made their list of the people that they had asked to fill out a survey. People from around the world put that in the top 10.
Leonard: That’s amazing. Misinformation regardless as to it’s an emergency or not, is standard practice in today’s media world. Is that correct?
Craig: Absolutely. When you have a world of decentralized media, where people can easily publish instantly from a smart phone, can easily start to make something gather attention and vitality through social networks, we end up getting a lot of stuff that circulates that simply isn’t true. There have always been rumors. People have always traded information that had a questionable level of voracity, or was in that early emerging stage where you don’t know if it’s true or not. What happens today is these natural human tendencies that we have to pass along information, to share information, it can really go like wildfire because we live in a network society. There’s a huge amount of misinformation that gets out there. It can very easily be seen as true by a lot of people, and once it starts fooling influential folks, such as people in the press, or people in influential positions and government or other places, then it really starts to be seen as true. It’s a big priority, I think, in newsrooms to do a better job of understanding the dynamics of rumor and misinformation, and I think for the folks that you talk to, and in the roles that you’re in, it’s also critically important.
Leonard: It’s compounded during an emergency if we have a hard time correcting bad information on Facebook and Twitter, and the other social media platforms. If it gets into newsrooms, newsrooms end up repeating it. On a day to day basis, that’s a tough nut to crack. When there’s an emergency, if I’m driving in my car, when I was with Maryland Emergency Management, equipped lights and sirens. They say there’s a problem, I have to drive to the problem where we’re setting up a media briefing center, and while driving, and it’s going to take me an hour and a half to get there under the best of circumstances, the rumor goes off that there’s a dirty bomb. I don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of putting out that rumor. I mean, I’m driving to the scene. During an emergency, this stuff flows fast and furious.
Craig: Absolutely, it does. Obviously my area of expertise is not in emergency management, but the first thing that comes to mind to me as you’re describing that scenario is there are certainly some physical responsibilities, in person communication, going to scenes, evaluating what’s going on. There’s that piece of it, and I would hope that people involved in this world also think about setting up social media command centers to a certain point, to monitor the information that’s coming out of that specific area where a disaster might have happened, or there are reports of a disaster. Also looking at the larger networks and monitoring key words and other things to see what people are talking about. There’s a two-fold purpose in it. This has some overlap with newsrooms. On the one hand, there were people who are just simply closer to the problem, closer to what’s going on than you are, if you’re in your car driving over, what have you. They may have access to a smart phone, they may be on Twitter, they may be on Instagram. There’s a hug amount of information that could be coming out in real time, from the critical area, or from people who have a certain level of expertise and knowledge. They may be going to social networks to put that out there.
The other side of it, aside from gathering information, you want to use these channels to push out quality information. I think that through both of those things, the monitoring of information, you should be looking at rumors and claims that are out there, and trying to triangulate the information, and compare it to the information that you have coming in from your other sources. On the other side in terms of communicating information, you want to think about, we know this rumor is circulating. We know that it’s true, we know that it’s false, or maybe we don’t know whether it’s true, what can we put out to give some context and to help in the process of people understanding and making sense of the situation. I think in the scenario you described, you’re in the car driving as fast as you can to get there, I would hope that there are colleagues who are really monitoring social media. Not only to gather additional information to provide to you as you give you’re briefings, or what have you, but also to really see if there are things that are starting to take flight that may not be true, or that you really need to look more into to see whether they’re true or not.
Leonard: Even when it’s not during an emergency, I would contend that most of us in emergency management throughout the United States, most of us within the criminal justice system throughout the United States, we do not have these special I-teams to do that analysis. The question becomes whether or not we are all sophisticated enough and do we have our own personal social media accounts, and do we have enough of them? It may be Twitter, it may be Facebook, but it could be an endless number of others that are putting out this misinformation. It would take somebody savvy, it would take somebody who already has social media accounts, and it would take an almost instantaneous network to begin to compare notes, before we could put out these fires.
Craig: Yeah. This is one of the things that it goes to a point that’s really, really important. I worked on a project with the European Journalism Center, something called the verification handbook, where it was a document oriented towards newsrooms, but also humanitarian workers, helping them verify information in real time in emergency scenarios. One of the things that became very clear is as we talked to journalists with the Australian broadcasting Corporation, she talked about their experience with wildfires in Australia. I’m sure that this probably isn’t news to you, but one of the things that became very clear from talking to her is what you do before the emergency happens dictates how well you’re going to handle it and cover it in the moment.
In these scenarios, rather than trying to figure out who on the team has got social media accounts or what have you, obviously it has to become part of the planning process. What are the channels we’re going to use? What are the ones that are most important to use in terms of getting news out in real time? I would say that Twitter is a very important one, because that’s where people tend to look for real time information.
Leonard: Yeah.
Craig: Facebook is obviously where the most amount of people are. Facebook is doing a lot of work to be seen as more real time, and more hospitable to real time, so a Facebook page is also really important. I think setting this stuff up ahead of time of, where are we going to communicate this information, who is going to own these channels, and what are we going to use these channels for? Those are really, really important things to think about much sooner than before you get the reports that a dirty bomb has gone off. Figuring out who on the team has expertise in this area, figuring out what accounts exist or need to be set up, and then how you’re going to use those. Those are just as important as all the other pieces of preparation that are going to be done, because not only is it important for, again, getting the information out, but if people know this is a trusted source, and a place where good information is coming from, then they may actually bring intelligence and information to you, and it becomes a place where people can start to contribute. It again gets that kind of two-way thing going, which is really, really important and useful.
Leonard: I think you would agree that there’s no piece of technology out there that that’s going to solve this. I’ve been also looking at magazines and different companies are offering emergency social media analysis hardware/software. I don’t think this is a matter of hardware/software. I think this is a matter of, as you said before, preparation, having trained people in place, and the ability to instantaneously sit at a computer and analyze social media and instantaneously contact each other. This is something that’s not going to involve one or two or three people, this is something that’s going to involve in some cases, up to 20 or 30 people who can instantaneously drop what they’re doing, go to the computer, start searching hash tags, start sharing information with each other. That involves a pretty high degree of sophistication and preparation and technology that they have to have with them practically at all times.
Craig: Yeah. You need an internet connection, and things like say Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite, or things like that in terms of the tools, but there is a lot of it that goes down to training and expertise. Just a lot of it that is the human factor. You need to have access and basic knowledge of the tools, but you also need to have people who are well trained. I think actually a small group of people can achieve a lot. The larger you get, once you get beyond say five people, it becomes very hard to coordinate those folks. You might have people duplicating effort in the scenario of monitoring social media and analyzing it. Ideally, you have some specialists in this area who can get on that wan watch for it. I think there’s the technology piece, but what you bring up is kind of the human piece of it, and that’s really, really important when we’re talking about rumors and misinformation.
There are some really basic human needs that are filled by rumors. That’s why we have so many of them, particularly in emergency and disaster scenarios. When humans lack a certain amount of information, when it’s a very confusing scenario, and there’s lots of conflicting information, what we try to do, is we try to make sense of the world. It makes us very uncomfortable to not have information, especially in a critical scenario. It’s very tough for our brains to process conflicting information. What we naturally try to do is to make sense of this scenario, and that often causes us as we talk with other people to come up with, “well, maybe it’s because of this, or maybe it’s because of that.” We all put our pieces of information together, and that’s where we start to create and propagate rumors. It’s important for everyone to understand that there is this human need that rumors can often fill, especially in emergency scenarios, where there’s a real, imminent threat there. Understand that rumors aren’t necessarily people who are trying to put out false information, it’s people who mean well who are engaging in this process of sense-making, trying to figure it out.
Especially when it’s hurricanes or things like that, and there’s high anxiety. It actually is a coping mechanism in a lot of ways for us to fill in the gaps, the things that we don’t have, the information we don’t have, to put that out there. You’ll see this happening on Twitter and on social media, is people asking questions, interacting with each other, latching on to little scraps of information that come out that seem to make sense to them that they then propagate. I think that everyone should have a basic understanding of why rumor is such a basic human element, particularly in these scenarios. Whenever you have things like bombings, or hurricanes, natural disasters, they’re going to be there. It’s the human engine, emotions and brains and those kinds of things that are driving these rumors. Tools and technologies are important, but understanding human behavior is always really, really big in this kind of scenario.
Leonard: There’s also sources of purposeful misinformation. One of the things when I was learning how to do green screen television, is that I realized that I could buy readily available footage from elsewhere, I can do a green screen television shoot, and it will look exactly like any other news program. It will look and feel and smell and taste like a real news program, and I can purposely put out misinformation, and sites purposefully putting out misinformation. I refer to the photos of sharks swimming in the streets of Sandy Hook after Hurricane Sandy. We have that level of a complexity to deal with as well.
Craig: Yes, absolutely. One of the things in the research that I focused on were what I called fake news websites. These are websites where somebody’s taken a basic WordPress template or web template and it looks like a real news website. The articles are written with a newsy voice and tone to them, but everything on the website is fake. What I saw in my research was that they could have articles that could get hundreds of thousands of shares, driving a significant amount of traffic. What their strategy basically is, they’re trying to monetize on gullibility. They come up with fake articles about celebrities, or about what I saw when Ebola was a real threat in the United States, they did a lot of fake articles. One of them reported that an entire Texas town had been quarrantined because a family had contracted Ebola. Completely fake, of course. It got a huge amount of shares. Of course, that sends people to their website, they have ads on their pages, and they earn money that way.
There are certainly people who are conscientiously trying to spread misinformation, whether it’s fake news websites doing it to earn money, or perhaps there are people who have a malicious intent and other ways. That’s certainly something that’s going to emerge and come out there. Sometimes though, people are spreading fake information, but it’s not necessarily with malicious intent. This is a really hard thing particularly for journalists to understand, because why would somebody put out something that was fake? The answer that a lot of these hoaxers give, is that again, it’s a stress relief for them to just put a joking image. Unintentionally they put it out thinking everyone will know it’s a joke and have a laugh, but people start to take it and treat it as real.
Again, there’s this release valve that people need in these very anxiety inducing scenarios where they’ll often put something out like that. It is something to be aware of. It’s important to be aware that rumors are absolutely going to emerge in these scenarios. A hundred percent guaranteed, in an emergency response scenario, natural disaster scenario, what have you, rumors will abound. No question about it. There will also be people who intentionally or otherwise put out misinformation.
One is the monitoring aspect of this. The second piece where journalists also really need to raise their skill level, is the verification piece of it. You see a tweet, and somebody’s made a claim, how do you figure out if that’s true or not? This is a skill area where the more people who can know how to use some tools and some basic approaches to figure out whether it’s true or false, the better off we’re all going to be as a society.
Leonard: There’s a fascinating part of your report where basically you’re saying that there’s an economic model for anything that delivers clicks to a website and that the incentives are all wrong, which is one of the reasons why we’re having this problem to begin with.
We’re more than halfway through an extraordinarily entertaining and informative program. Ladies and gentlemen, Craig Silverman is by our microphones. Founding editor of Buzzffed Canada. You can reach him a Twitter @craigsilverman. The report itself, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, again funded by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Knight Foundation. Extraordinarily fascinating read. Find it on the internet if you are interested in rumor control, if you’re interested in emergency management, you must go to the website and get Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, and read it.
Craig, we have a 30% reduction in reporters over the last 10 years. Where we’ve relied upon media in the past to assess rumors and correct information internally, their ranks have been depleted tremendously. The reporters who I work with are doing more than ever before with less than ever before. The media that we counted on in the past to verify and to figure out what is correct information and what is incorrect information with our help from people who are directly at the scene. Because of their fewer numbers, it’s very hard for them to complete this task. It’s very hard for them to be the gatekeeper.
Craig: It is. The reason I do things like the verification handbook and the Lies, Damn Lies report, is because I see that there’s a lack of these skills in the newsroom. Of the journalists that are left, they absolutely are overloaded with different things, and they haven’t been given training in verification of social media content and things like that. I think you do have to in these scenarios, look at newsrooms as an important channel and partner in these things. I also do think that you have to look at the reality that you just articulated, and say we are going to be a source as well. We’re not just going to feed things through the media. We have to be able to be a credible, reliable, consistent source ourselves. I think that’s a really important thing to realize and to think about what that’s going to take in terms of resources and training on your own.
All that being said, a piece of advice we give to newsrooms in terms of preparing for disaster coverage is you need to think about all of the critically important government agencies, first responders, experts in your area and you need to create a line of communication with them ahead of time. I think it goes both ways in that, absolutely you should be thinking about who are the newsrooms, AP being one that’s all over the country, so how do we get a direct line into AP to make sure we’re communicating with them well. Thinking about locally, who are the critical local sources as well, and setting up those lines of communication to say when we have something important, we’re going to get it to you in this form. For the journalists, to tell them and say when you have an important question, when you know something, here is how you get that to us. I think when we’re talking about these kinds of scenarios of emergency situations, some of the mutual suspicion or distrust that tends to be there, it recedes a little bit because everybody’s in it together just trying to get the best possible information out to the public as possible. To tell the people who need to evacuate that they need to evacuate, and to make sure that it’s not a false order. And so on.
I think that you’ll find in these scenarios, newsrooms do want to be a very good partner. Figuring out the method of communication, helping them understand what kind of information they can rely on from your particular office, and which other places they might need to go for other information is very important. Then of course thinking about how you are going to get your information, not just out through the media, but through like we talked about; a Twitter account, a Facebook page, other means to make sure that it’s getting out there as much as possible.
Leonard: Bottom line is that we have to have a core of digital specialists who are extremely sophisticated about social media. Extremely sophisticated in terms of following the media, who already have these accounts set up, who are ready to go at a moment’s notice. What you’re saying is, is that we can do it with a small number. Let’s just say 1-10, we have to be digital specialists. We have to really know social media. We have to know its implications, we have to know who’s out there, and we have to be on the various platforms. I agree with you with Facebook and Twitter, but Instagram is rising in popularity more than anybody ever anticipated, and others. Periscope. There’s all sorts of things out there that are just exploding and we have to be knowledgeable of them all. We in the media, and we within government, and we within emergency management must become digital media experts.
Craig: Absolutely. You have to think like a newsroom in some ways, particularly when there’s an active scenario going on. You have to think about how you’re communicating the information. One of the other pieces that’s really important and this is talked about in the report, is deciding at what point you’re ready to communicate a piece of information.
Newsrooms, what I was talking about in the sense of there’s so much information that’s circulating online and circulating on social networks, and it may have news value and it may be of interest, and it may get them clicks, but what newsrooms have to figure out is, what’s your bar for when you’ll actually cover something? Do you need to have it 100% nailed down? Or will you just take anything that’s circulating and put some [hedging 00:21:58] language in, and saying, “Well, this is popular on Reddit, we don’t know if it’s true, but have a look at this photo.” I think it’s important for government agencies and communicators as well to think about that. Okay, so if we’re going to be a source of information in this scenario, what level of voracity, what level of conformation do we need to put something out? Are we only going to put out stuff that is 100% nailed down, or are we actually going to engage and say, “There’s a rumor circulating that this is happening in this area of the city, as of right now we have no information to confirm that.”
Thinking about how you’re going to engage on that level is I think a really important thing. Overall, yeah. I think that there’s no way to do this kind of work today without having people on your team who are social media savvy, who are good at monitoring, who are good at assessing, who are good at verifying, and who are good at communicating. These are absolutely core skills. There are definitely tools and things that can help you, but a lot of it comes down to human decision making and figuring out what you’re processes are and what you’re standards are, just like newsrooms have to do.
Leonard: Even in your report, when you mentioned Larry King, he criticized CNN his own network in terms of Flight 370, the Indonesian airliner that went down. He criticized their coverage of that as absurd. We say in the report that there is an economic model, that anything that drives clicks to a website, the incentives, fiscal incentives, financial incentives are all wrong. This is a challenge. This is a challenge for media, it’s a challenge for us to put it together, and guess what you’re saying is, is that not only must we train amongst ourselves, we’ve got to get together with media and figure all this out ahead of time, and have a protocols in place so bad information doesn’t get out information that’s going to harm literally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people.
Craig: Absolutely. Yeah. That preparation piece. We keep coming back to it because it’s so essential. For the folks that this particular conversation is targeted at, I don’t know that their incentives are as misaligned as they are in a lot of newsrooms in the sense that a lot of digital newsrooms value the number of views and clicks you get, and if you take the extra time to nail something down and find out that it’s not real, then you get no clicks for that, because you haven’t gotten the story. Other people may get it first. In newsrooms, what they have to re-calibrate is what do we value? Do we value getting the most clicks on a story, or do we value being the ones who’ve said, “No, no, no. This story is fake,” and putting that out there and showing that we’re trusted and building that up over time.
I work at BuzzFeed now. I Joined BuzzFeed after I did the fellowship that led to the report we’re talking about. For me. BuzzFeed obviously is a huge organization, drives a huge amount of traffic, covers a huge amount of stuff that’s viral. What I saw before I joined, is a shift that had been happening culturally internally at BuzzFeed over the last couple of years, whereby rather than just finding anything and being first to it and getting it up first, the culture had shifted towards asking questions, reaching out, doing verification, and not having fake stuff on the site. A more journalistic culture has taken hold, and BuzzFeed as they’ve been hiring people and news.
I don’t know exactly what the incentives are in the world of the folks who are here, but I assume that there’s probably not as much pressure around clicks, and far more to be lost in terms of reputation if a government agency or a specialized company doing emergency response is putting out fake information. That is a game changer for them, whereas a single journalist, if they make 1 mistake they can move on. For a government agency putting out false information in an emergency, that’s almost game over, because of the amount of credibility it has.
Leonard: In the final minutes of the program, and there’s so much I wanted to get to but I’m not going to be able to get to it today. The more we care about a rumor, the more we have a stake, the more we participate in that rumor, the more we care about a topic, the more like we are to spread rumors, and the more likely we are to believe it’s true. We cherry pick information that we hear, that we come into contact with, and if it fits our preconceived notion of the world, there’s a good possibility that we will spread that rumor. We will believe it and spread it. Part of this is the psychology of the people who are reading and assessing this for themselves, and what you’re warning is that you’ve got to be very careful in debunking the rumor. You cant go after the person, you have to to go after the facts. There is a strong set of psychological principles that apply.
Craig: Yes. There’s a lot going on here in terms of why somebody would choose to propagate a rumor. If it aligns with existing knowledge and existing beliefs that they have, they are more likely to believe it and to propagate it. If it fits with suspicions they have, if it fits with their worldview, again they’re more likely to put it out there. They’re more likely to believe it. Another thing that people should note also about rumors, there is often a connection between repetition and believability. The more that someone is exposed to rumor, the more that any skepticism they might have about it starts to erode.
There have been studies about the number of times somebody was exposed to a rumor they start to believe it even more.
Leonard: That’s amazing.
Craig: It is. It just shows how important it is that so many of us news organizations, government communicators and other communicators, how we understand that we have to get out there early. When we see things, we have to talk about it and engage and warn people off of this stuff.
Then that gets us into the realm of debunking that you brought up. Which is, how do you do this effectively without in effect, repeating the rumor so much that people still ignore your debunking. One, as you mentioned, is people who pushed out a false rumor, you don’t want to attack them, you don’t want to personalize it. You want to debunk the idea and not the person is what people often say. That’s very important. Don’t go around shaming people. Make it easy for them to let go of this thing that they put out there and that they believed. It’s also really important to try to minimize the amount of times you’re repeating the false information. You want to express the truth in a more positive way.
A small example of this, rather than saying Barack Obama is not a Muslim, you would want to say Barack Obama is a Christian. That’s the more positive reinforcement of the correct information. It’s also important of course to get out there early. It’s important to do it in a positive way, to not attack people. It’s important to think about how you can connect with other trusted sources to get this information out there. What I mean by that is, if somebody is propagating a rumor because it aligns with say a political belief, a personal belief, some kind of orientation. If you can get other organizations that person might be perceived to be as aligned with their beliefs, and have that organization help you with pushing out the debunking, then you’ve got a much better chance of getting it out there. If they have suspicion about the government, then you should talk to other local organizations that aren’t seen as government organizations to get them to push it out there as well, whether that’s a red cross, or a local chamber of commerce. Think about all these different channels, how people who might be skeptical of government, might actually listen to one of these other channels.
Leonard: All right. Craig, you’ve got the final word. There’s so much here to discuss. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re interested in emergency management, if you’re interested in relations with the media, if you’re interested in rumor control, please go to Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, easily found on the internet. It is one of the most fascinating reads that I’ve had within my 40 years within the criminal justice system. We’ve talked to Craig Silverman today. Twitter @craigsilverman, founding editor at BuzzFeed Canada. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a very pleasant day.
The post Correcting Bad Information on Social Media-Craig Silvermen first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>
Dc Public Safety Radio
See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/crime-victims-funding-disability-and-police-cameras-nova/
Leonard Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Back on our microphones, ladies and gentlemen Will Marling, the executive director of the National Organization for victim assistance. www.trynova.org. We’re going to be talking about three items. The dramatic increase in federal funds for victims of crimes. The second, the new report from the department of justice stating that the disabled have more than double the rate of violent crime in the third issue are cameras for police and what does it mean for victims. Will Marlin welcome back to DC Public Safety?
Will Marling: Leonard thank you it’s always a privilege to be with you.
Leonard Sipes: Alright, we have a new report out that basically says the federal crime victim funds are expected to nearly quadruple in the next fiscal year. States have begun to plan as to how to spend what amounts to an unexpected windfall that was good news for advocates who have been fighting for years to get the full amount of available funds under the victims of crime compensation act. Explain all this to me Will. Where are … where is the federal government suddenly finding quadruple the money they give the victims of crimes?
Will Marling: Well, that’s a great question. A question that many people aren’t aware that shouldn’t even be asked. In 1984, President Reagan established the task force for victims of crime. Out of that very significant task force came the office for victims of crime and the victims of crime at fund. The Congress said we’re going to set up a fund that takes last year’s four features fines and seizures at the federal level. Then we’re going to use that for victim … crime victim compensation and Crime Victim Services like funding victim advocate roles and vocations.
Since 1984, that has been in play. The fund has grown and, of course, advocates those who work in this particular area were certainly very aware of the victims of crime that fund because many times it was … it’s funding these vocations out in the justice process and state and local jurisdictions and as well the federal … at a federal level. Trying to see that balanced was importance. Congress set a cap on that as the fund grew and got to be very significant well into the billions of dollars. Congress said okay we’re going to set a cap that was most recently established at about $750 – $754 million dollars.
We’ve been discussing this issue and seeing that cap raise with the congressional action many times things can get a little behind. As long as it’s working nobody is messing with it but we’ve been arguing for many years did that cap needs to be raised to meet the needs not only of victims of crime but also to understand that hey the money is there. Things are cool as it appears at this point where congressional leadership really took hold of this to say okay yes it’s time to truly raise this cap and as well to hear from victim assistance organization and agencies who would say yes it’s time and what would our dreams be. Well while the money is there and they really went to you know great lengths to expand it to nearly quadruple.
What is represented in what looks to be the fiscal year 2016 appropriation for this would move it to about 2.6 billion. It also represents some other editions of funding designation. We call them earmarks. We’re watching this carefully because we want to make sure that as it was originally intended the victims of crime fund is directly trying to meet the needs of victims of crime to compensation … victim compensation and victim services specifically.
Leonard Sipes: Well, crime has returned to a national or as a national discussion point Will. It’s sort of like a rising tide lifts all boats because … my question is this is principally a fund to deal with financial compensation for victims of crime if there injured due to a violent crime or for instance if a loved one is murdered and they don’t have the money to pay for funeral costs. This is how … this is the reason for the act for the funds specifically, and it’s administered by all the 50 states. The whole idea is to reimburse victims of crime for their experiences correct?
Will Marlin: That’s exactly right. There are a lot of significant expenses just financially. We’re taking out the emotional dimension but that the financial impact of ending up in the hospital of having medical treatment of having to conduct a funeral pay for a funeral having to get counseling and loss of wages for instance. A number of the states have those kind of categories for reimbursement of compensation to support victims of crimes. It is the last pay of funds because sometimes people are insured. They have say medical care that would cover that kind of thing.
Of course, many people aren’t expecting to be a victim, and they’re not expecting to suffer a profound physical loss or financial loss. That’s yes you’re exactly right. That’s what it’s designed to do. Each state has the VOCA administrator that takes their formulas appropriation and sometimes applies it to the state itself and the money they raise for Victim Compensation. Which can also come from four features fines and seizures and penalties and this kind of thing. It really was a brilliant concept in my view. I think others would agree with me for Congress to say hey! wait a minute this is a great way to deal with this very profound need that represents the losses the victims suffer after having been harmed by crime.
Leonard Sipes: It’s not that i disagree with anything that I’m about to read. Some of the examples that were … that was given by the one article that I’m reading in terms of where the money is going. Crime victim organizations such as domestic violence shelters child abuse centers as well as court-appointed sexual advocates and organization that assist homeless youth … that sort of takes it away from the arena of reimbursing somebody for the injuries that they sustained in a violent crime.
Will Marlin: Well, It’s a … it’s a good observation and an interesting one because we consider these earmarks and the risk that you run for earmarks even with very appropriate and understandable concerns of trying to fund the needs of victims in other sectors. For instance, you know there’s the 2016 fiscal year appropriation for … the Senator appropriation bill for VOCA would give 50 million to victims … towards victims of trafficking. The challenge that we face when you start having earmarks is it really restrict and complicates how the fund then is applied.
What we need ultimately is a fund but understandably holds the users accountable to address Victim Compensation victim services. When you start having a create percentages that go towards this and that it can become very complicated to the point that maybe you have certain needs in a certain jurisdiction, and they’re far less needy and another one. This is always our concern where you don’t simply have a good fund … a strong, healthy robust fund that is as you say … towards these specific needs of victims. Not special needs of victim or special populations of victims because they all should represent that.
Another concern just quite frankly in terms of some of the potential preparations is toward prevention issues. Those are extremely important, but we don’t want to fund prevention training and initiatives, for instance, a community-based violence prevention initiative is part of what could be considered the next … the 16 appropriations. Important work yes but we don’t want to put that on the backs of people who are actually trying to recover from the losses they’ve suffered at the hands of the perpetrator.
Leonard Sipes: It’s either an and act on the part of Congress expressing concern regarding victims of crime or recognition of the criminal justice system needs more money. I don’t know what that is I mean they’ve quadrupled the amount of funding in fiscal year 2016 under the victims of crime act. Is it a concern for victims or is it just a funding mechanism for the larger criminal justice system?
Will Marlin: Well, certainly from the standpoint of those who provide victim assistance victim services and also manage victim compensation funding we all considered it a very positive step in and a very good directions to first of all raise the cap that was established because the fund is quite robust and the needs are there clear. I think the simple concerned to express it is for Congress to let the people that know how to do this work do the work to make the funds available to victims of crime and to those who should manage the funding. and then to serve victim of crime in that regard.
There’s concern about non-VOCA authorize funding as we consider it that that looks to be a roughly 441 million in this fiscal 16 … fiscal year 16 appropriation. The concern there becomes … others looking at that’s fund and saying well I can get some money for my particular program as good and viable, and that might be. That program might not represent the needs specifically of victims recovering from the criminal incident. That’s what we want to make sure happens. This fund the VOCA … the victims of crime act fund is for victim compensation and specifically for victim services and we’d like to see it protected that way.
Leonard Sipes: Not just a larger general fund where everybody can dip into under any justification that the program or the effort serves victims of crimes. Specifically making sure that victims are compensated, and victims receive the services that they need, and the only way to do that is through the victims of crime act?
Will Marlin: That’s right. If the victims of crime act fund were to disappear the federal level we know that hopefully the states would continue their level of funding. Obviously, it would be a significant reduction if you’re talking about what currently is the appropriation of 2.361 billion for the current cap …
Leonard Sipes: That’s a lot of money going from 745 million to 2.36 billion. It’s almost an inevitable opportunity to say how else can we use these funds. From the standpoint of the national organization for victim assistance what you guys are saying is wait a minute. Be sure that the great majority of people … the victims of crime are taken care of before you start talking about siphoning it for other purposes.
Will Marlin: yeah exactly. I mean its always this kind of fine line you walk because you … we do not want to sound in any way I like all of these other initiatives that at least we see the listed as a potential appropriations or earmarks under such a bill for the VOCA fund. They’re not meaningful they’re not good. The concern though is it becomes Murky and we … we’re just strongly joining with others to suggest or request that the expanded use of those fund be limited for purpose that are authorized under the original VOCA statute. That’s what we’re arguing for because when it was established, that’s exactly what was delineated. This is for victims of crime to help compensate the program losses to help them in the recovery process to get them access to services that are specific and important for those who have suffered harm at the hands of you criminal activity.
Leonard Sipes: All right, we’re going to shift gears a bit Will and talk about the fact that in 2013 … this was a report released by the Department of Justice on May 21st, 2015, but the data goes back to 2013. In 2013 the rate of crime … the rate of violent crime against persons with disabilities was more than double the rate for people without disabilities. I found a bit disturbing … talking about 1.3 million nonfatal victimization’s which accounted for 21% of all valid victimization in 2013. This isn’t the first time to my knowledge … my years within the criminal justice system that the disabled have been looked at from the standpoint of violent crime. I was shocked to come to find out if they had double the rate of the non-disabled community. Do you have any comments?
Will Marlin: Well, yeah it’s an important understanding of the needs of persons with disabilities and the impact of crime on them. One thing I want to point out here and this is a bit of a personal commentary. What I appreciate about you as we have these interactions is that you want to talk about the things. I didn’t pitch the idea of talking about crimes against persons with disabilities or the VOCA fund.
Leonard Sipes: True.
Will Marlin: You’re pointing out something that encourages me, and that is the work that is done to talk about that the public level. You took note of, and that’s what we need to do too. It’s why I love the radio show because of how many people you reach. This particular statistic we all inherently new who do this work … that people with disabilities are significantly more vulnerable. We have a toll-free victim assistance line here with the National Organization for victim assistance. We have an added approach this, but we recognize when people are calling, and their declaring I am a person with a disability of this is what I’m experiencing.
That there is a greater vulnerability that they have because of their situation and the preponderance of people who know them and work with them are the one that many times are the people they’re taking advantage of them. I’m … It’s troubling on one hand to hear the higher rate events, and that’s for folks with disability but it’s also an important piece of awareness that we pay attention to these need, and we take advantage of what we know to help them out.
Leonard Sipes: I want to talk about serious violent crime directed towards individuals with disabilities, but we got a break and get right back to that. Ladies and gentlemen were talking to Will Marlin, the executive director for the National Organization for victims assistance www.trinova.org. Nova’s been around for about 40-50 years. I mean it’s one of the most respected organizations within the criminal justice system. One of … certainly the most respected organizations in terms of fighting for victims of crime. We always appreciate Will coming in to talk about topics that are pertinent to victims of crime.
Let me go back to that stat Will Marlin. Serious violent crimes rape or sexual assault robbery and aggravated assault accounted for a greater percentage of all violent crimes against people with disabilities 39% and then compared to people without disabilities 29%. Not only is there a rate of violent crime double those people without disabilities. Serious violent crime seems to be a significant issue. What do we say about a society that allows crime against the disabled to occur without a larger public policy discussions?
Will Marlin: It’s … It truly is an important public policy discussion as well as a specifically practical need. What we recognize is that people with disabilities, first of all, are more vulnerable because of their situation. Their ability to be empowered to make choices to in a sense … protect themselves and so on. They can be under the care of somebody who would take advantage of that. Also the awareness that many times they are not either understood or heard when trying to respond and report that they have been a victim. If a person is in a context where the ability to communicate is limited or there … the needs that they have emotionally or whatever they might be are judged by a person listening to them.
That can profoundly impact the caregiver or the first responders’ willingness or perception of responding to that need. That makes them doubly vulnerable. We as a society we can grow in this. We can grow in our awareness we can grow in our sensitivity, and we can also grow in our commitment to say okay wait a minute. If somebody is attempting to communicate with us there, particular need something that has happened with them. We should start by saying okay this has happened to the best of our knowledge. How are we then going to respond to it.
Leonard Sipes: The response I think is startling because half do not even report the crimes to law enforcement. Nearly half of violent crimes against persons with disabilities what’s reported to police in 2013. The reasons people with disabilities did not report crime to police … because they felt they could deal with it another way. They believe that was 44% they believe that was not important enough 21% they believe that police wouldn’t help 19% and other reasons 38%. They’re not reporting the crimes to law enforcement in the majority of cases, and that’s startling. Not only do they have to face this victimization they don’t even appeal to the larger criminal justice system to assist them.
Will Marlin: Quite honestly that’s not far off the mark from people without disabilities or trying to report. Of course, then you could move into the category of children who are not themselves going to be able to report even at all. It demonstrates limitations that people have to declaring that somebody else has harmed them and in the position of an … from the perspective of a person with a disability. If it’s a primary caregiver how are they going to get even around that person or they believe because it’s somebody they know, or they have trusted that they can manage that situation on their own.
Many times, of course, it’s not the case. It affirms really a need to make sure that we make the vehicles for reporting as available and effective as possible so that if they want to take advantage of them they know that they’re as robust and trustworthy as they can be so that they will. Otherwise, we do empower people to make their own choices about how they want to handle their victimization, and sometimes they believe that the best way to approach this is not to report it to law enforcement for some reason.
Leonard Sipes: Thank God there are victims organizations and community organizations and organizations like the National Organization for victim assistance that does provide a lifeline to these individuals. If they’re confused and if they didn’t report it and they’ve been victimized at least they can call you up and find out what the alternatives are. Again WWW.trynova.org. Give the 800 number for the organization Will.
Will Marlin: Yeah it’s 800-879-6682 or 800-t-r-y-N-o-v-a.
Leonard Sipes: Without organizations like yours and organizations at the state level at local level where they going to pick up the phone and have these conversations they would be completely lost.
Will Marlin: I appreciate your KUDOS. I have to say also, there are many good people and good works good agencies on the field in direct contact with people with disabilities or available at very local levels serving that. We celebrate that important work that is being done there and were trying to connect people many times when they call us. We’re trying to connect them to local resources. We consider even our victim assistance line a resource referral line. We don’t want people calling because there … it’s an emergency I mean that they either 911 or a local emergency service provider call.
We do definitely try to connect them to the expertise they need, and there’s just also limits. We just got done talking about the victims of crime act fund and it would be great again for that funding to do be open to helping victims in that situation. To be able to fund the needs that they have and for states who have to allocate that funding to feel like they can expand even the services they want to provide because there’s more funding for that. We are excited about the VOCA fund expanding no question. The states and the appropriation the VOCA administrators are certainly talking with excitement about the possibilities which is great. We just, of course, want to see it continue and especially want to see its continue for the people most vulnerable in our society. The very young many times and folks with disabilities.
Leonard Sipes: I think I’m going to go back to my original point, and that is after spending 10 years as a spokesperson for the crime prevention field. I was shocked because I knew and speculated and believed that people with disabilities had a higher rate of violent crime but not twice the rate. I’m very glad that the Bureau of Justice Statistics came out with this report and made a problem … I think that may have been not on the radar of individuals to make it a prominent thought when you’re discussing criminal justice policy in the country.
let’s move on to issue a number three: cameras for law enforcement. There has been a huge debate as you well know Will Marlin. All throughout the United States in terms of police use of force appropriate use of force … inappropriate use of force. One of the solutions to all of this has been to put body cameras on police officers. Many people feel that this is a wonderful idea. Data seems to indicate a dramatic reduction in complaints against law enforcement when the process is taped or videotaped digitally. What does this mean however in terms of victims of crime because non-law enforcement organizations are going to follow freedom of Information Act request and they’re going to want all of that digital tape, and there are victims of crimes who are going to appear in these cameras? What are the implications in terms of body cameras for law enforcement in victims of crime?
Will Marlin: It’s a superb question. Setting aside philosophical considerations policy legislative decision surrounding this kind of an issue and what’s driving it. Practically speaking a body worn camera is going to be able to access very private context. Potentially private conversation that would revolve around victims and their needs. In contrast, to say cruiser cameras that have been in play for a long time and seemingly have found a meaningful place in our society for … to help justify the force used or to hold somebody accountable for excessive use of force.
The body worn cameras are on an officer who’s now walking into what potentially is a private household and should be considered private. The concerns … many concerns revolve around the impact of that on victims … the context of them being recorded for instance in a profound moments trauma of grief of struggle and how that information might be disseminated might … it might be used. it might be used to critique and judge them. We’re already strangling our society in many ways when it comes to the judicial process. You take a victim who suffered loss you put him on the stand they get cross-examined to the point of … sometimes just painful accusation of them self-trying to impact the testimony of that witness who is a victim.
Then you take the context of that immediate aftermath moment when they’re going through a traumatic reaction, and that’s being recorded and then how that might be portrayed in a court of law where it’s calm it’s sterile it’s very much moved from the threat and from the trauma that victim has experienced. These are the kinds of things were very concerned about. Even to the point of a policy that could say well the officer is going to go in the house and they’re going to ask somebody well may I record you. Well, I can tell you from having been in the situation that person might not even hear what you say because of the traumatic impact the shock the disbelief the denial that they are going through. There are truly profound real concerns that we have about how a body worn cameras might do what we call secondary injury secondary harm secondary traumatization to victims of crime …
Leonard Sipes: When the local television station files a freedom of information act request to get the footage they could have someone … they could uncover some very sensitive moments in the lives of victims of crimes. What’s to stop them from putting that up on the evening news. I’m not suggesting that would necessarily happen but it could happen. I’m going to go over 3 quick scenarios my husband beat me that’s the number one number two my neighbor broke into my house number three John Doe robbed me. All three place the victim in a certain amount of jeopardy and all three could possibly get that victim … create a scenario where that victim becomes re-victimized by saying any one of those phrases. If this is publicized … if it gets out if it’s allowed to go out under a freedom of information act request it could have profound implications for victims and their willingness to give of law enforcement the information they need to do their jobs.
Will Marlin: You’re absolutely right. I mean those are our primary concerns their others. There just … they’re not answering as such, but there’s tangential to what we’re discussing here. For instance, what if you have a person with a disability, and it’s a mental health need, and you are responding to the situation, and they see a camera on you. They suddenly … it creates and provokes reactions with them that are secondary or separate from even traumatic reactions from what they’ve experienced, or maybe they’re being accused of something, and they see that camera.
It’s a separate issue on one hand, but these are the kinds of things that we need to think through very carefully regarding the knock on effect of what seems to be a very simple thing for the average person. We put a camera on a person we put a camera on a police officer we see what they do we hold them accountable. We’ve got that picture in front of us. Well, that picture still doesn’t tell everything there is to tell. There’s the time before that camera started and there’s a time after that camera stopped. These are the kinds of things that will continue to impact victims because of what might be recorded. What their privacy that might be in violated or invaded …
Leonard Sipes: Will we only have about a minute left. Has any victim contacted the hotline at the National Organization for victim assistance bringing this issue up or have … has Nova had an opportunity to formulate some faults and some policy direction for the rest of us?
Will Marlin: To my knowledge we haven’t had anybody contact us in that regard. I sat on a local panel in my local county here. I was asked to sit on a panel about a discussion on body worn cameras and …which I appreciated. law enforcement was asking me as well as others who were part of the victim assistance movement to discuss this issue. We tried to make it very clear as to our concerns, and we felt heard. Of course, the policy has to be drafted and implemented, but it’s a fairly profound issue, and as well it’s a fairly expensive one …
Leonard Sipes: Will we’ve got to wrap a wrap up all three of these issues. The dramatic increase in federal funds for victims of crime and the fact that the individuals with disabilities have twice the rate of violent crime and body cameras and what it means to victims of crimes. These are all unfolding events that we’re going to have to pay close attention too over the course of the next year as we wratch up our discussions on crime and criminal justice.
Ladies and gentlemen our guest today has been Will Marlin, the executive director for the national organization for victims assistance www.trynova.Org. Always a pleasure to have Will Marlin by our microphones. ladies and gentlemen this is DC Public Safety we appreciate your comments we even appreciate your criticism. We want everybody to have themselves of very pleasant day.
How did Yaseena do?
If you rate this transcript 3 or below, Yaseena A will not work on your future orders
The post Victim Assistance-Will Marling first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/06/pretrial-probation-and-parole-supervision-week-in-d-c/
Leonard : From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We are here, ladies and gentlemen of recognized free trial probation and parole supervision week by interviewing three people from the District of Columbia’s Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency and Pretrial Services. As to the contributions of pretrial and parole and probation agents link in the nation’s capital and other contributions towards our public safety, to do that we have three guests at our microphones: Tom Williams, Associate Director of Community Supervision Services, again Court Services at Offender Supervision Agency, Yolanda Buffet, a associate director, again Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Katherine Terry Coufer, she’s the Associate Director of Operations of the Pretrial Services Agency. At the District of Columbia or in the District of Columbia enter Tom, and to Yolanda, and to Katherine. Welcome to D.C. Public Safety.
Tom: Pleasure to be here Len.
Leonard : All right, we’re here to recognize the contributions of our employees, recognizing the Pretrial and Probation and Parole Supervision week sponsored by the American Probation and Parole Association. It’s celebrated during the month of July. There are over five million adults on community supervision. Most of these individuals are monitored by pretrial probation and parole officers. Community corrections professionals must be creative in finding solutions to making sure that the supervised and have the support to find jobs, housing, and treatment by collaborating with community leaders and volunteers.
They make a huge difference in the lives of the individuals they have currently under supervision; but the bottom line in all that, that’s reading from the American Probation and Parole Association’s new press release. The bottom line behind all of this is that, our people that we call not parole and probation agents but community supervision officers, the bottom line is that our people, when people involved in a community supervision throughout the District of Columbia and throughout the country make a meaningful contribution to public safety. Correct Tom Williams?
Tom: Exactly right Len, and certainly one of the things we wanted to highlight were regards to this important week, is the great work that our staff does on a day to day basis. A lot of people just don’t realize in the District of Columbia, we are a federal agency, and we’re responsible for supervising those partisans that the subpoena court for the District of Columbia would rant probation on those partisans who enter the correctional system, as most of you have guessed, will not be aware of that the district does not have a local prison system. Anyone that’s sentenced to a term of incarceration in the District of Columbia is sent to the bureau prisons, and that could be anywhere within the continental United States. There is an effort with regards to re-entry for those persons coming back, and when they do come back to the District of Columbia then our staff is the one that are responsible for supervising them; these cases, which is different from U.S. district court.
Leonard : Katherine what you do on the pretrial side is unique, because I’ve taken a look at your stats over the course of years. You got an extraordinary return rate of people who actually show up for their court dates without committing new crimes between the arrest and their court date. Pretrial has been phenomenally successful.
Katherine: Yes Len, we are very proud of the national reputation we have and the rate of return we have for defendants who are released to pretrial services. Similar to CSOSA, so many individuals do not know the services that we provide here in the District of Columbia, for both D.C. Superier Court as well as U.S. District Court, where we’re responsible for gathering information on newly arrested defendants and preparing recommendations for the court’s consideration to make decisions in terms of their release options. PSA is known nationally for making recommendations for the least restrictive conditions to promote public safety and the return to court. As a result of our work, virtually no defendant is currently in the District of Columbia, are unreleased on a surety bond.
Leonard : You know, I am very proud of our agency, Yolanda. Court services and offender supervision agency and our partnership with pretrial services here in the nation’s capital. We are recognized, I believe fairly, as one of the best if not in my opinion, the best parole and probation agency in the United States. Probably the best pretrial services agency in the United States, much of which is due to the person sitting to your left, Tom Williams, but that’s my opinion. Is it yours?
Yolanda: Absolutely, I am very proud to work for the court services and offender supervision agency, and the thing for the Pretrial Parole and Probation week is a world wide force for change. And since my time of being here with CSOSA I can definitely say we are an agency committed to change and to helping offenders become productive citizens. I’m very proud to a part of the organization.
Leonard : You know our people. Let’s get down to what our people do on a day to day basis. It is phenomenally difficult. All of us have been involved in the criminal justice system through years, throughout the decades. Working with people caught up in the criminal justice system is extraordinarily difficult. The great majority, history of substance abuse if you count self-assessments, fifty percent have histories of mental health problems. Women caught up in the criminal justice system often have history of sexual violence. We deal with individuals either in probation or come out of the prison system, and they are challenging human beings. It’s just not a matter of will. You have to be creative. You have to be really innovative in terms of breaking down barriers to try to help that individual become a productive member of society.
Tom: Len, you are exactly right. You described a population that many of the public or your listeners are probably not aware of. We have basically the whole gander from low level cases that come to us through the subpoena court of the District of Columbia, to what we consider to be high level cases with regards to their criminal offences. For those persons who are coming out of the institution, at least ten percent have housing issues. That is a real challenge for us with regards to what we can actually do with them, because they need a place to stay for stability sake.
The other thing that you’re probably not aware of is the number of reports that we do to the court, just to help the judge with regards to the sentencing structure in terms of what they’re going to imply, with regards to those persons that come before them. We produce over three thousand pre-sentence investigations a year and on the back-end of the system, as folks are coming back in for re-entry, our tips officers will also develop plans with regards to an investigation that will really help the supervision.
The staff with regarding to the developing our plans for supervision, so it really ranges the whole gander from low level cases to more severe cases for which our staff are engaged in. Yolanda will talk a little bit about what she sees in terms of our recruitment, because its very important in regards to the type of persons that we are trying to bring in to the organization to help us to manage this population.
Leonard : Yolanda, how easy is it to recruit for what we call community supervision-al officers, what the rest of the country refers to as parole and probation agents?
Yolanda: So this agency is very progressive when it comes to evidence based practices. Our recruitment efforts are very competitive. We typically could have anywhere from seven to eight hundred applicants and fill about twenty to twenty-five vacancies at a time.
Leonard : They’re all people with bachelors’ degrees at a minimum, right?
Yolanda: Yes sir. They’re all people with bachelors’ degrees at a minimum, and we’re also looking for strong skills in motivational interviewing, cogni-behavioral interventions, and also being able to match or identify needs or match services towards those needs. These are skills that are quite progressive. Many members throughout the country will not have these skills, so it makes employment with CSOSA very competitive.
Tom: I’d like to chime in. A lot of people think that all I have to do is sit down with somebody, read and write. They’ll go straight, and we’ll never have to hear from them again. As Yolanda just explained, this is a highly trained profession, and I just want to reinforce that the skills we are imparting or have trained to the staff are really looking at the thinking patterns that individuals have that may not be in their best interest. Also, a lot of the persons we have at the high end of the assessment process are really involved with folks who are not really in their best interest with regards to their peers.
So how do we now get a person who is thinking distortely about life and have that pattern change and, or, also have a tendency to associate with people that eventually get them in trouble. To work that thought, pretrial does on the front end, certain can help us on the back-end if the judge is so inclined to grant the improvisation. Kathy.
Katherine: Absolutely, Tom speaks to that because it’s also as critical at pretrial Len, to ensure that we recruit and retain highly skilled staff who support our strategic goal of maximizing pre-proud justice by keeping the maximum number of defendants in the community. We offer a variety of supervision services for a population, who coming in at the front of the system are often not stable particularly when looking at our mental health population. The skills those staff need to ensure that in a short period of time were able to quickly assess and look at the needs and the risks to ensure safety rates remain high for our agency, and make the best recommendations to the judge to consider for releasing those defendants. We provide one of the, what I think, best pretrial service drug court programs in the country that are focused on dealing with the high risk defendants who come through with high needs for substance abuse treatment.
Tom: With a national reputation, I might add.
Katherine: Absolutely, with a national reputation. We are leading in that area, and we also partner very closely with D.C. Superior Court for the mental health community courts to work with them and identifying the appropriate services on the front end for those defendants with the hope of those who transition to probation and those who go into institution to serve a period of time, have some information that can be utilized by the case managers to continue to provide services, and are connected if they remain here in the community to services here in the city that can be utilized for the supervision purposes or the transition over to CSOSA. Its critical that we get high-skilled staff and recruit and retain those at pretrial as well.
Leonard : One of the things that amazes me is that we supervise parole and probation pretrial in this country. We’ve got five million people under our supervision on any given day. Only two million are behind bars, so when you talk about the correctional population in the United States, the great majority of individuals caught up in the criminal justice system are under the supervision of parole and probation agencies. Yet, law enforcement gets ten times the attention. Corrections, main stream corrections prisons gets ten times of attention. Why is it that parole and probation agencies get so little attention and recognition throughout the United States, considering the fact that on any given day five out of every seven people caught up in the criminal justice system are under our auspices.
Tom: Well, as you started off the program talking about the purpose of this program which is pre-trial probation and parole offices. That’s exactly why the American Probation and Parole Association, APPA, had its twenty-first anniversary. One of the recognized work that’s done in both pretrial parole and probation services, the folks that are getting the most recognition as you indicated, were law enforcement, anyone that carries weapons, the correctional officers who actually do a great job. We’re not diminishing the work that’s done by our law enforcement partners; however, when we look at the work that’s being done by the staff and the community, where the bulk of the population is, where the bulk of the work is done, and I might add where the success that we’re having is really instrumental in folks not returning to prison. For example this agency has seventy percent rate of satisfactory completion. When you look at some of the high-end folks that we have under supervision, whether or not we be sex-offenders, folks with behavioral health, issues that people are bringing to us because of lack of housing. In a sense, given that the institutions that are in society that are really there to help folks to stay on the right track, those systems have failed, education system has failed in some respect of faith.
Leonard : Families have failed; communities have failed.
Tom: It’s left to us in community supervision just to try to put some under paintings under those persons that come to us. Just so that we can give a different direction and then give a different avenue for these individuals to be a little more successful.
Leonard : But the people that come to us, the people that work for us, they got to be top notch. They got to be on top of their game every day. You know, we’re lucky. I mean court services and offenders supervision agency we average fifty to one ratios. Other parole and probation agencies throughout the country, my heavens, they’re two hundred to one. I’ve seen two-fifty-three hundred to one parole and probation agent. We have an extraordinary opportunity, our people our personnel, have an extraordinary opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the lives of people under supervision. Yolanda?
Yolanda: Yes, Len I can attest to that. I was supervision officer outside of the district in another state and I can definitely tell you I’ve had over two hundred cases to just poor little me, having to make contact to thirty days. Usually agencies with the numbers that carry those numbers are mainly doing surveillance. What’s really required if you’re going to impact offender change will have to be accountability on the surveillance side as well as the interventions in programming in cogni-behavioral restructuring.
Leonard : Right.
Yolanda: Without those resources, it’s very difficult or the evidence has shown. The rate of residerism will be higher without those services.
Leonard : Right, but we’re lucky to the point where we even control some of our services, but the bottom line, I’m just going to make this final point. Our employees whether they be pretrial or whether they be community supervision officers, known parole and probation officers, again, we don’t have any problems recruiting people from my understanding. We get lots of people coming in. Law enforcement’s struggling to find people. Corrections is really struggling to find people. We don’t struggle to find people; people want to come to work for this agency because: A. we’re a federal agency, B. we pay fairly well, C. we train fairly well. People feel they can do something different within this agency that they can’t do elsewhere. That’s my guess.
Tom: [crosstalk 00:15:24] I want to say that we don’t necessarily have trouble finding people, its finding the right person. As Yolanda alluded to, the work of the parole and probation officer traditionally has really changed. There’s no more, we’re just passed those days where I can come in with a BA degree with something in behavioral sciences and pretty much work your magic. You really have to understand the literature with regards to cognitive restructuring, cognitive behavioral intervention, motivational interviewing. Those skills that a lot of folks who come to the door really don’t have, so we’re not bringing in individuals just because, quote on quote they have the degree. You have to demonstrate your skill level either in an academic setting or prior employment setting before we actually bring you in.
Leonard : You’ve got to be good is the bottom line. I’m going to take a break and reintroduce all three of my guests, and then we will pick back up on that question: Tom Williams, Associate Director of Community Supervision Services, court services, and offender supervision agencies; Yolanda Buffet, again, she is Deputy Associate Director again working with Tom; and we have Katherine Terry Coufer, she is the Associate Director of Operations of the Pretrial Services Agency of the District of Columbia.
We are doing this in celebration of the American Probation and Parole Association’s celebration of Pretrial Probation and Parole Supervision week, ordinarily doing the month of July. The theme the American Parole and Probation Association is, “A force for positive change,” and that’s how we see ourselves. Katherine do you want to pick up on that, that we are a force for positive change in the lives of the people that we deal with?
Katherine: Absolutely, and I’d like to echo Tom’s sentiments in terms of while we do face challenges sometimes recruiting because we want the best staff, and those who do have strong clinical skills as well as case management skills to come in and impact, change, and make a difference in individual lives. Its no longer the day: sit at the desk, checking at the door, leave, but to actually to meaningful work with the defendants at pretrial services. We invest a great deal into our staff and I think that’s why we have a history of retaining strong staff because we push and encourage staff to engage in training. We bring a lot of the training in to ensure that they maintain the skills so that we can implement the best practices and community supervision consistent to those of CSOSA. It is different in community corrections now. It’s a different game, as the city has changed and the demographics those coming in. Our strategic direction has changed to work with them and to look at that. Recently, as I am sure you are all aware that we are dealing now with a new issue. Relatively the spike and use of synthetic drugs are the new challenges. So both agencies when they’re gearing up to look at how we best develop strategies to intervene in those and continue to integrate the best practices in that. And we’re very proud of that activity.
Leonard : But could you imagine the policy implication of the five million people that are under community supervision throughout the United States? What it means, if they fail, because they go out and commit additional crimes, they go out and do somebody else an immense amount of harm. The financial considerations are also immense. I mean if they all go back to prison, we could shut down the prison systems in the United States tomorrow. If we revoked everybody back to the prison system. So the states they’re saying, “My heavens, parole and probation save us. Save us from this huge correctional population. Save us from creating more prisons. Protect us; protect our public safety, and by the way at the same time the person who has the history of substance abuse, mental health problems, not a good job history. With a female often times, they’re the ones who are principally responsible for kids. By the way take care of all those social problems that accompany the individuals that we have.” That’s almost impossible to do, but we do it in terms of community supervision in this country every day.
Katherine: And we do it well in the nation’s capital Len.
Leonard : I think we do it better than anywhere else, but that’s my own bias.
Katherine: Absolutely, we do but I think wise supporting that we must work to make sure that we identity the levels of risk in those factors with the work we do. While for us here at pretrial, performance of legal precitives, around the least restrictive recommendations to continue to keep poking the community, but to safe guard public safety which is one our primary responsibilities and showing individuals get back to court.
Leonard : Pretrial has a higher return rate than the vast majority of pretrial service agencies in the Untied States without committing new crimes. The great majority of the people under our supervision do complete it successfully at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. We put together some data that indicates we’re moving in the right direction by moving in a evidence based direction by looking at the research, by being honest as to what the research has to say, and embracing that new direction. Yolanda?
Yolanda: You’re absolutely correct, and one of the factors that helps us be successful for our graduated sanctions as well. We want to have offenders to remain in the community supporting their families as much as possible. Now, with that said, we still want to hold them accountable for their behavior. So we do practice here, swift and certain sanctions. We do also recognize positive behavior as well, and we have award ceremonies and recognition ceremonies for those that have completed particular programs, educational programs, obtained employment, and so, we really do pour a lot into the defenders that we supervise. All of it, with the programming, the risk assessments that we do, as well as the recognition, help us to be successful with our population.
Leonard : We did a show a while ago on correctional officers stress with the national institute of corrections, and my question to the National Institute of Corrections is where is the course on parole and probation agent stress. The law enforcement is huge in the news. Law enforcement stress is also huge in the news, and I see that’s just it in the program on correctional officer stress. Again, we who handle the great bulk of the people caught up in the criminal justice system we seem to be ignored. This is a very stressful, tough job, where that individual community supervision officer that parole and probation agent really needs to be on his or her game every single day. They can’t let up. They can’t be bamboozled. They can’t be fooled. At the same time, they have to break through the barriers, that that offender poses to help that individual and to work with the family, work with the community. By heavens that’s an awful lot that we ask our people to do.
Yolanda: Absolutely, which brings us back to the whole recognition of pretrial parole and probation officers week anyway. The whole purpose of the week is to recognize the work that we do. We have a week’s worth of activities to increase moral to just engage our colleagues, and some competitive competition to have just a little bit of fun. It all helps. We also have additional training that we have; we just had a training a week ago on trauma informed care. Another topic in another area of training that we do is secondary trauma, for we know our staff, reading the PSI’s and hearing the stories, and working with the offenders, that it also has an impact on us as well. Which is why we take the opportunity to have as much recognition for the staff as possible.
Leonard : But how to we get the public to understand us Katherine? How do we get the public to understand what it is that we do. I don’t see ten tons of parole and probation agent shows on television, but I could spend the rest of the day talking about the titles of the shows focusing on police officers. How do we get the public to understand what it is that we do in the real contributions that we make?
Katherine: Well you know that is a challenge Len; particularly for agencies small as ours here as pretrial services as well as CSOSA. One of the strategies, well a few of them I should say is that, we are starting to work closer with our partners in the community and increase our presence in engaging with our community. Whether its attending community group meetings and those going out informs to share with them, information as well as at the schools, the universities, to try to increase our presence in the public, as well as working with the national organizations like the National Socio-pretrial services agencies, APPA you’ve heard Tom. To get out there, many of our staff at both agencies go to these conferences and provide workshops on the great work that we do that’s targeted on showing how we’re implementing best practices successfully. We continue to partner in the community and work with our partners in law enforcement as well as community based agencies to increase our presence to share with them the outstanding work that we do.
Yolanda also hit on something that is extremely important that I think our agencies do well in. That’s doing the work-life balance and all, because that’s important because the work is very stressful for them. Some of them that are in pretrial services, we shut down for a day or two when the courts are doing their training to provide full days of training to kind of focus on a target. Those things as well as partners at agency to do things like walk or run activities and stuff to ensure that the agents see staff on both sides have an opportunity to get out, interact together, and work through some of the things that stress so they can come back and put their energies into impacting the lives of the defendants, offenders, and their families.
Leonard : I’m still confused. If the public depends upon us for as much as they do, five million people in a given day. We are the front line of public safety in their lives. Whether or not they’re victimized, whether or not their children are victimized, whether or not their house is broken in to, whether or not the person goes back to prison and we have to spend the thirty or forty thousand dollars a year to maintain that person, the billions to build new prisons, I mean that all depends upon us. Yet, the average person, Tom Williams. The average person out there doesn’t fully understand what it is we do to protect them, and to save their tax paid dollars.
Tom: Well one of the ways we can educate the public is certainly from award winning shows like yours Len. [crosstalk 00:25:48] Certainly with the electronics that we have available to us right now, we have the internet. Certainly this program is on the internet. This program certainly is a podcast, certainly is out there for the public to understand. Also, your award winning T.V. show [crosstalk 00:26:06] is another one.
Leonard : Seriously now, [crosstalk 00:26:09] do we not have a perception problem in parole and probation? Not in the district of Columbia, but throughout the country? Again, the American Probation and Parole Association, they put out a campaign,”A force for positive change.” They do this every year, and we celebrate the work of parole and probation agents. It drives me crazy considering the work that I see our people do on a day to day basis, and what they do to protect the society that they don’t get more recognition for that.
Tom: Well, that’s true. One of the reasons is certainly we don’t have a real marketing campaign like profit industry or the non-profit industry does. That’s one of the areas for which we actually could do a better job. When you really look at government servers and that’s basically what we’re involved in. We’re involved in government servers, and providing the service to the citizens of a particular jurisdiction. That’s something that local jurisdictions don’t necessarily publicize, because who gets the headlines; whether its in education where most of the dollars go, or whether its in policing where a large percentage of the dollar goes. But when it comes to issues like whose on the street and what not the person that committed an offense, should be on the street.
I think the public attitude is shifting a little bit from, “lock them up and throw away the key.” Look at what California did several years ago when they did the, “three strikes and you’re out.” Now look what’s happened with California; they’re in a position right now would have to let out convicted felons. We don’t want to have to be down that road. I think we’ve learned from the nineteen-eighties, the late nineties of determinate sentencing. That structure that was put in place that won’t allow an individual to have early release based on either programmatic issues in the prison or based on a good candidate for release. I think that is all changing right now. I think that as the, we see greatest statistics federal bureau Justice of Assistance. With regards to whose being successful and the slow rate of return.
Yolanda mentioned in terms of graduated responses, don’t [inaudible 00:28:12] back in the late eighties, early nineties, did her study on it, intensive supervision programs. Everybody thought that was going to be the panacea. The issue with Jones, what she found in her studying, was because I’m going to watch them or I’m going to send them back more. So all that’s being changed and we can certainly owe it to our friends the Canadians who actually really was in the forefront of evidence based practices. We’ve taken a lot of the principles from those studies, those meg-analysis they showed that you can have greater success with supervising and providing some level of programming and treatment versus just supervising alone. That’s the good news about community corrections
Leonard : Tom, you’re going have to have a final word, but I do want to emphasize with what’s going on throughout the country, more than ever parole and probation agencies are being asked to save the criminal justice system, to provide the innovation that’s necessary and I think that all three of you were able to agree with me.
Ladies and gentlemen the three people that have been at our microphones today: Thomas Williams, Associate Director, Yolanda Buffet, Deputy Associate Director, and Katherine Coufer, Associate Director of Pretrial Services here in in the District of Columbia. We’ve been focusing on our employees as well as American Parole and Probation Association’s pretrial parole and probation week in July, “A force for positive change.” Ladies and gentlemen this is D.C. Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms. We want everybody to have yourselves a very pleasant day.
How did Nuly do?
If you rate this transcript 3 or below, Nuly K will not work on your future orders
The post Parole and Probation Supervision Week first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2016/04/reducing-violence-america/
Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, we are honored to have Thomas Abt discussing violence reduction in America. Thomas Abt is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he teaches, studies, and consults on the use of evidence-based approaches to violence reduction among other topics. Previously he served as deputy secretary for public safety to Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, as well as chief of staff to the office of justice programs U.S. Department of Justice where I first met Thomas. Thomas, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.
Thomas: It’s a pleasure to be on.
Leonard: Thomas, I’m really happy to have you. You bring hard experience. You were one of the founders of the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention for the Department of Justice and you’ve been instrumental in guiding the entire State of New York in terms of an innovative program. Violence is part of your forte, correct?
Thomas: Yes. It’s something that I’ve had the privilege to work on in a number of different settings.
Leonard: Okay. First of all, I want to talk about addressing violence across the board and how to address because the country has been involved in, I guess you could say, a discussion over the course of the last six, seven, to eight months we’ve had violence in Ferguson, we’ve had violence in Chicago, we’ve had violence in Baltimore. We’ve had this national discussion on violence prevention. As you well know, I call people before the program. I ask them and I’ve called four people from the law enforcement community, and they express confusion over what the public now wants us to do. Can you put all of these in terms of the focus on addressing violence in communities in the country?
Thomas: Sure. I can try. I think it is a very difficult conversation to have and we’re trying to have it as best we can, but the way the conversation about violence in the United States is currently being framed may be a barrier to making more progress. The current conversation that we’re having is very much and either/or conversation. Either you’re taking about police reform and the issues of police use of force, police lethality, those types of issues, or you’re talking about “black on black crime”, which I actually think is a problematic way of discussing it, but you’re talking about the issue of crime and violence in the community.
That’s a difficult framework that really pits anti-establishment voices which have some very valid concerns with more conservative, possibly pro-establishment voices. Instead of an either/or conversation, we need to have a both/and conversation. We can’t separate our concerns about crime control from our concerns about crime itself. The two go together. We need to think about both what the police are doing in terms of how they attempt to control crime and violence in a community in addition to the nature of the crime itself.
I think that if we can reframe this conversation, we can have a much more productive conversation that can give more guidance overtime keep our police professionals in the community who both want to change the way they do business and improve it, but they also have a job to do and they want to make sure that they’re keeping communities safe.
Leonard: You wrote an article called Integrating Evidence to Stop Shootings: New York’s GIVE (Gun-Involved Violence Elimination) Initiative. Discuss that with me briefly and then let’s take the conversation back to the larger national conversation because in your article it was rather straightforward. It was a focus on people. It was a focus on places. It was a focus on hot spot policing. It was a focus on police initiative’s research using evidence-based practices, going in and having conversations with troublesome people in the community, gang members in the community.
On one side of this discussion is a straightforward evidence-based approach and the other side of it is, unfortunately, race, politics, and people’s perception of what could be and should be. Let’s start off with the simple. There are ways of reducing gun violence. There are ways of reducing shootings. You were part of that platform and still are in the State of New York. Give me an overview of the Gun-Involved Violence Elimination Initiative.
Thomas: Sure. I helped establish GIVE, which is the Gun-Involved Violence Elimination, while I was working for Governor Cuomo, but just to clarify, I am now with the Harvard Kennedy School and I’m no longer working in New York, but I am still very much familiar with the program that we started.
GIVE is really, I think, an unusual effort in that it tried very directly to incorporate the best information that we had about how to reduce violence both gathering evidence and research, and looking at data, and then trying to translate that for the law enforcement community and others to make that information really accessible and easy to implement.
We did a six-month policy development process where we reviewed statistics, data, research from all around the country and identified some core practices that we felt showed what was most effective in reducing violence and crime, particularly as related to gun violence. We translated these down into three core principles. The first principle was in order to be effective, you need to focus on specific people and specific places.
All the research shows that crime is not evenly distributed. Crime is sticky. It concentrates in places and it concentrates among people. In any give community, when we think of a community as unsafe, that’s really an over simplification. In any given community that we think of as having a problem with violence, there are often two, or three, or maybe more spots, we call them hot spots, where crime and violence are highly concentrated, but they’re not concentrated throughout the entire community.
The same is true with people. A very small percentage of people, even in a neighborhood that we think of is an unsafe, are responsible for a significant majority of the crime and violence in those places. It’s very important when you’re working in an “unsafe” or high crime neighborhood to remember that the problem, even in that neighborhood, is not everywhere, and it’s not involving everyone. That’s the first principle. You have to focus on specific people and specific places.
Leonard: It’s not a community but specific places within that community.
Thomas: Exactly, and specific people. For instance, you have a very small perentage of your young people in a community. It is true that young men are much more likely to offend and be violent than young women, and it’s true that age range of maybe 14 to 24 is a particularly difficult and risky age range. It’s very important for members of the law enforcement and the community generally to understand that that doesn’t mean that every young man in a particular community that’s regarded as unsafe is going to be a public safety problem. In fact, it is going to be a very, very small number of young men. That really [counsels 00:09:01] against over broad mass arrest, zero tolerance approaches to law enforcement. It means you need to get much more targeted and you need to be much more specific.
Leonard: That addresses the larger issue that’s been going on throughout the country, but I take a look at your article and there’s been an 88% reduction in homicides and shootings in New York City. Everybody is taking their cue from the New York City Miracle. An 88% reduction in homicide, an 88% reduction in shootings where it rose 8% in the rest of the State of New York. People are saying to themselves, “Aggressive law enforcement in New York City is what created those reductions. Isn’t that a good thing for everybody?” That’s why law enforcement they’re saying, “Fine. It’s places, it’s people. We should be focused on specific areas, specific people,” but look what happened to New York City.
Thomas: Right. New York City is a very interesting example of how various kinds of legitimacy work together and how one type of legitimacy is not enough to have a successful crime reduction effort. There were, at least, three strands when we think about legitimacy that we need to break it down.
There’s legitimacy of effectiveness. Meaning do you do your fundamental job of driving crime down and violence down, and protecting the community? There is legitimacy as to lawfulness. Meaning when you’re doing that job, are you obeying the law and not placing yourself above the law or violating the law? Then there’s legitimacy of fairness and this is really a concept that’s been championed by Tracy Meares and Tom Tyler, they call it procedural justice. Does the community, even if you’re being effective and even if you’re being lawful, do they view you as being fair, and benevolent, and working in collaboration with them?
What we are seeing from the research is that you really need all three. In New York, you have the police being highly legitimate as a matter of effectiveness. They are arguably legitimate as a matter of lawfulness, although this has been disputed in the courts, but let’s assume for the purposes of this argument that they are.
That last strain of legitimacy, legitimacy as a matter of fairness, the perception is is that NYPD has not been acting in a fair and neutral manner. That’s a critical omission and that’s one of the real challenges that NYPD and, I think, that police are looking at. The NYPD is, I assume, I think, very surprised by this. They’re saying, “We’re doing a good job in terms of reducing crime and we’re doing it within the law,” as they perceive it, “What is the problem?”
The problem is is that they really haven’t listened to the community and really engaged on that fairness component of legitimacy and part of the issue is going back to people and places. The New York Police Department is very good about focusing resources in specific places. If there’s a lot of shootings in a particular area before this new era with Bratton coming in, so it was Ray Kelly era of a few years ago, they would flood those areas with police officers and do lots of what’s called stop and frisks, and people are probably very familiar with that term.
When there was resistance to this strategy and the community said, “Why are you stopping all of these people in our neighborhoods,” the answer from the NYPD was, “Well, this is where the crime is, and so we’re following the data, and so there should be no problem.” The problem was that as to place, but it wasn’t specific as to people. What they didn’t really appreciate is that even in an area that has a lot of crime and a lot of violence, most of the people living in that area are not involved. If you go into a neighborhood and treat everyone the same or, more accurately, every young man of color the same, you catch up in that broad net a lot of people who are not involved in crime and violence.
It’s really important to listen to the community. You have a lot of advocates, basically, pushing back on all types of police activity, but if you listen to communities what they’re saying is, “Look, there’s a small number of people in this community we want you to be very aggressive with, and we don’t care if stop and frisk them every 10 or 15 feet, but you need to understand our community better to know that one young man wearing baggy pants may be an active gang member and someone that law enforcement really needs to focus on. Another young man in baggy pants may be on his way to a job, may be on his way to Catholic school, may be on his way somewhere else. We want you to know our community and stay in your community enough so that you can make those critical distinctions.”
Leonard: Thomas Abt, before we go to the break, let me ask you a series of very quick questions and then we get into the larger conversation of what’s happening throughout the country. In essence, to all the people who are concerned about violence and violence reduction, we pretty much know from the law enforcement, criminal justice, parole and probation side. Correct or incorrect?
Thomas: I think it’s risky to say that we know anything with absolute certainty. All of this work is studied by social science and social science has limitations. I can tell you what we know best, but our information will evolve over time. I’d say there’s five core principles to reducing violence based on the best evidence we have today. In 10 years, this may evolve.
The first thing we know is that in order to reduce violence you need to be comprehensive. The police are a critical component of violence reduction, but they’re not the only people and that you need more than one program, more than one strategy, and you need more than one type of people involved.
The second thing we know is that if you have multiple players working together and multiple programs working together, it’s not surprise, they need to be aligned. The third thing that you need to do is be specific and that is that conversation that we just had about focusing on specific places and specific people.
The fourth thing you need to do is be proactive. You cannot wait until crime and violence occurs and then simply solve it by arresting, and prosecuting, and incarcerating your way out of it. You have to try to get ahead of the problem. Deter the crime before it occurs. Work with kids who are at risk for violence, and try to get them engaging in pro-social activities, and get them away from gangs, away from crews, and away from risky behavior. You need to get ahead of the problem.
Lastly, you need to focus on this concept of legitimacy. Legitimacy is not just about being effective but it’s also about being lawful and about being fair. Explaining why you’re in a particular community, what your strategy is, and really engaging with the community and other stakeholders so they know not just what you’re doing but why you’re doing it.
Leonard: We’re more than halfway through the program. We’re talking today to Thomas Abt. He is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he teaches, studies, and consults on the use of evidence-based approaches to violence reduction. Thomas, I’m going to summarize.
You gave a nice five-step summation of violence prevention. In essence, I hear two words coming out of this. One is fairness, one is quality. It’s not necessarily mass arrest, mass stops, but quality arrest, quality stops, and the perception on the part of the community as to whether or not they’re being treated fairly or not. Is it possible to break your discussion down into those two phrases?
Thomas: I think that’s a good overview. Obviously, if I was working on the ground consulting with a particular anti-violence task force, I might do that. It’s a fair overall summary.
Leonard: Okay. In essence, we have gone through the last 23 years of almost continuous reductions in crime. We have gone through, as we said in the article, an 88% reduction in homicides and shootings in New York City. Again, I go back to the conversations I had with people in law enforcement. They’re saying, “Well, you know, last year we were the heroes because we were sitting on top decades of reduction in crime. Now, we’re not. Now people are challenging the legitimacy of law enforcement and law enforcement tactics.” Is there anything that we can say to law enforcement officers who are terribly confused right now? It seems to me that your two concepts of fairness and equality seem to be the direction that we need to move in today.
Thomas: I think in terms of describing to the law enforcement community what happened, I consider myself a member of that community and I was surprised as well by the fervor that has really taken hold in the country. I think that one way to understand it is that we made a lot of public safety judgment calls in the late ’80s and early ’90s, in an era of high crime and increasing crime, and we thought incorrectly that crime rates were going to go up indefinitely. In the public safety community and in the broader public policy community, lots and lots of decisions and trade-offs were made in that context.
I think one of the things that’s exciting about this year and possibly years moving forward is we’re really starting a massive re-examination of all of those trade-offs, not just in terms of police using force but also incarnation and confinement rates, and lots of other questions. I think that’s a healthy thing because we are in a new era. Crime has been reduced 50%. Violence has been reduced 50% nationally. We talked about the tremendous success in New York City, but it’s happening around the country.
The first thing for us to realize in law enforcement is that times change and we need to change with them. We need to pay more attention not just to the legitimacy of effectiveness, but the legitimacy of lawfulness, and the legitimacy of fairness and realize, and this is very important, and it’s backed up by solid research, that all of these things are interconnected. If you’re perceived as fair, if you’re perceived as lawful, it will make your job catching bad guys easier.
It’s very important that we understand that this is not an either/or conversation as I said before. You don’t either make nice with the community or focus on catching the bad guys. The community is a key crime-fighting partner, and so the closer we work with them and the more effectively we work with them, the better we’ll be at catching bad guys.
Leonard: I had a conversation with a researcher from the Urban INStitute who stated emphatically, and it’s true, “We have never been safer. The United States has never seen such low rates of violent crime in our lifetimes.” In this year, we have never been safer in our lives. Thereby, you have people within the criminologic community, within the law enforcement community saying, “Wait a minute. We’ve given you the safest country in our lifetimes.” Suddenly, things have changed. What changed? What changed from the standpoint of the safest country, the safest decade, the safest year in our country’s last 25 years to this national discussion? What changed?
Thomas: President Obama actually talks, I think, quite well about this when he talks about progress in terms of racial equality. It’s important to recognize two things at the same time. Number one, in terms of public safety, that significant progress has been made; and number two, that we have a long way to go and that we’re not done. The fact that we’ve had significant progress in terms of making the country safer doesn’t mean that we don’t have more to do.
Also, it’s very important to remember that not everybody experiences public safety the same way. While listeners in suburban America may have one experience of public safety, listeners who are from or work in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage have a very different experience. For instance, homicide for young white man and boys is the third leading cause of death, and that’s serious. For Latino young men and boys, it’s the second leading cause of death. For African-American young men and boys, it’s the leading cause of death and it causes more deaths than the nine other leading causes combined.
Leonard: In essence, what we need to do now is to come together for a conversation. We need to have an honest conversation where community members sit across the table with law enforcement officers to hammer out what it is that is susceptible in that community that until that power shift is very strong and very definitive, we’re not going to be able to solve this problem. We have a golden opportunity to solve it if we all agree to sit down at the same table, look each other in the eye, and have very honest maybe long delayed conversations that focus on your two main points, as far as I can tell, as far as I can see, fairness and equality.
Thomas: Yes. I think we also need to recognize that those conversations have been going on and there are lots of great examples of those conversations going well. Boston, in the 1900s, experienced the massive reduction in crime focusing the coming out of the Boston Gun Project with David Kennedy, Anthony Braga, and the Boston Police Department, but it was supported by the Boston TenPoint Coalition. A coalition of African-America community-based clergy, people like Jeff Brown, who were a critical element of that project and the overall effort to reduce violence success.
It’s not just about police, it’s not just about community. It’s about police, community, researchers, businesses, everyone coming together and working on the problem together. Again, it’s always about avoiding these either/or conversations. We can have a conversation that is just about police reform, but it’ll miss something. We can have a conversation that is just about crime in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, but that will also miss something. For our law enforcement partners, we need to reinforce the idea that you will be judged on not just how well you effectively reduce crime, but also how well you engage with the community and explain what you’re doing, and do that in a legitimate and lawful way.
Leonard: You did put it in perspective, and I thought it was powerful, because when you talk to people in law enforcement they will say, “I’ve been to the community meetings and I get yelled at, screamed at. Get them off the corner. They’re bothering people in the community. They are destroying the fabric of life. They are endangering our children.” A lot of folks in law enforcement is saying, “We have been listening to the community and the community has told us to take aggressive action.”
You’re saying that it really is a matter of not everybody in the community. You’re talking about very specific people and places, and that’s where the focus should be. That answers the folks in law enforcement when they express confusion. “Hey, wait a minute. The community told us to be aggressive. You’re saying the community told us to be aggressive towards very specific people and very specific places.”
Thomas: Yes. I think a lot of police forces understand that and those police forces, like the police forces in Boston, the police forces in Los Angeles, like many others, are not having the same problems that we’re having in Baltimore or we’re having in Ferguson. It’s very important to realize that there are lot of successful, highly effective, highly lawful, highly fair police departments that are really already incorporated these lessons. You don’t hear a lot about them because the community is not outraged by them.
Leonard: Because they’ve been doing it well all along.
Thomas: Maybe not all along, but they’ve certainly been doing it well for a number of years.
Leonard: The last 10 years, yes.
Thomas: There’s a responsibility to have a public conversation that goes beyond the police. It’s not just about how the police respond to this. There’s also a responsibility for journalists and a responsibility for advocates. Just as we can’t paint disadvantaged communities with a broad brush, we shouldn’t paint police officers with a broad brush. I think that they have a responsibility as well to understand that while we should keep the pressure on to introduce meaningful reforms to improve policing, the idea is not to attack policing or undermine it all together. I think that we need to understand that police are extremely important, and valuable, and honorable part of our communities, and that doesn’t mean that we don’t hold them to a high standard.
Leonard: Thomas, we’re going to have to close there because we are running out of time, but I do appreciate this conversation and the focus does seem to be on legitimacy, the focus does seem to be in fairness, and the focus does seem to be on equality. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been talking to Thomas Abt today. Thomas Abt is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he teaches, studies, and consults on the use of evidence-based approaches violence reduction. Ladies and gentlemen, this is D.C. Public Safety. We appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a very pleasant day.
The post Violence reduction in America first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>
See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov
See the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/06/correctional-staff-wellness-virtual-nic-conference-on-june-10/
Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Correctional staff wellness, ladies and gentleman, is our topic today. It’s a hot topic in today’s criminal justice system. There’s going to be a virtual conference on the topic offered by the National Institute of Corrections on June 10th from 10 AM to 3 PM eastern standard time. I’m going to give you a couple contact points and I’ll give them to you throughout the course of the program. Go to NICvirtualconference.com, not .gov but .com. NICVirtualconference.com, 800-995-6429. 800-995-6429.
To discuss correctional staff wellness, we have two individuals with us today. We have [Maureen Bule 00:00:51] and Roy McGraff and I want to read a short piece of bibliographic information on both. Maureen has been with the National Institute of Corrections since 2001 and leads in IC’s justice involved women’s initiative and the development of evidence based and gender informed policy. Additionally, she manages a compassion and fatigue and secondary trauma initiative which addresses the impact on stress and fatigue on correctional staff and their families. We have Roy McGraff. Roy began his career in 1984 as a security specialist in the United States Air Force. Upon discharge, he joined the Oregon Department of Corrections where he served as Sargent for 20 years. Roy is proactive in improving correctional worker health and safety. Roy was also selected as a panel member for a National Institute of Justice sponsored conference in 2014.
To Marine and Roy, welcome to DC Public Safety.
Maureen: Thank you, Leonard.
Leonard: This is …
Roy: Good to see you, Leonard.
Leonard: This is a topic that is of extreme importance to all of us in the criminal justice system, and it applies to law enforcement. It applies to parole and probation. That is the topic of staff wellness which is the point of the conference correct, Maureen?
Maureen: That’s correct.
Leonard: Okay, so the whole idea is to recognize that this does exist. The fact that correctional officers, parole and probation agents as well as law enforcement officers stress, trauma, what it is that they experience, and what it is that they go through effects them, affects their jobs, and effects their families. Either one of you.
Maureen: That’s accurate.
Leonard: Okay, that’s why we’re having the conference. Do you ever get the sense that, because I do, law enforcement seems to be 90% of this discussion. Law enforcement officers and stress, especially over the course of the last six months, how it effects them, how it effects their job, how they respond to themselves, how they respond to communities, how they respond to people caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s all law enforcement officer stress, but I would dare say that the balk of the criminal justice system are correctional officers, parole and probation agents and yet nobody talks about that, am I correct?
Maureen: That’s true, Leonard. I think that it’s a little bit different issue within corrections than it is within law enforcement. There’s a lot of similarities, but I think that corrections is a profession that’s just not that well understood by the public, by even the folks that are coming in to do the work. I think that there’s a lot of surprises, how intense and how emotional the work can be.
Leonard: Going into a prison every day, you’re ordinarily there with 50 people who are locked up, 50 inmates. The ratio that I’ve seen is either 50 to 1 or 100 to 1. You’re basically there by yourself and your verbal ability to do the job, your verbal ability to handle situations, I mean it’s not you and a 100 other correctional officers. It’s just you surrounded by a bunch of inmates and whatever goes down, you’ve got to handle it and handle it cognitively, handle it verbally, you’ve got to use your own personal finesse to handle that. That takes a tremendous amount of agility and talent to be able to pull that off, and that’s incredibly taxing. Roy, talk to me about that.
Roy: The ratio is 224 to 1.
Leonard: Thank you for correcting for me.
Roy: It’s okay. That’s half of a shift, and yeah, it is. It’s not just verbal, it’s the presence, it’s the mindset. You get evaluated all day long. These are people, but it’s their thinking, it’s their processing, it’s their criminality and so you’re the lighthouse in this ocean of turmoil, and you have to be on all the time. You don’t get to have a down day or down time or they take advantage of you. It does take high stress, and then there are the things that these are the people that did really, really bad and society said, “We don’t want you out here anymore.” They put them in with us. They put them there and then we go in and try to lead, but they’re still doing bad things while they’re in there. It is hidden. It is out of sight, out of mind.
Law enforcement’s in the public. I’m not saying … We are part of law enforcement. The police officers are in the public eye. If we were in the public eye like they were, I think we would get as much attention, but we don’t. We don’t talk about it. We are the silent majority. It is really sad. Law enforcement, police officers have a lot of funding, where it’s corrections doesn’t if you look on the websites. We hardly get anything that we can get funding for, but Homeland Security gives money like it’s going out of style to police officers. Yeah, there is a huge discrepancy and it needs to change and I’m glad to see this conference and things like it moving forward.
Leonard: Every day in a correctional setting, you are tested, correct, by a lot of inmates? They will try to trick you. They will try to fool you. There are implied threats. There are implied benefits. Everyday is verbal judo in the correctional setting, and as you’ve said, you’re surrounded by hundreds of inmates and it’s just you and your ability to pull it off.
Roy: Yes, absolutely, and you build a reputation from day one. It either gets reinforced or it gets changed. Hopefully it gets improved over time. My reputation hopefully, other inmates help influence the new ones, you don’t want to mess with that guy. Still, even after 20 years of working with guys in my unit that I’ve known for 20 years, I got a lifer unit, and there’s still guys there that will try every single day to have an advantage and try to manipulate me and try to get what they want. Yeah, it’s every single day.
Then you got to go home and you got to try to re-adapt to being home after having that different mentality up for 8 hours, sometimes 16 hours. Depending on what state you work in, you might have worked six days in a row, 14 days in a row, because it’s a right to work state and you’re told when you need to go work and where you’re going to work and how long you’re going to work.
Leonard: Again, the conference, the virtual conference on the topic of correctional staff wellness offered by the National Institute of Corrections on June 10th, 10 AM to 3 PM. Again, NICvirtualconference.com. Maureen, why this topic right now?
Maureen: Well, again, I was saying earlier that corrections is a very, very tough profession and it’s not just the folks that work in the institutions and the prisons and the jails. This is also experienced by folks in the community, probation and parole officers. Roy, you just made a point, and I was interviewing a Sargent out of the Iowa Department of Corrections, and he gave me this great quote. He said, “Corrections and stress is like a game of ping pong. You serve it up to offenders and they serve it back to you, game on. If you’re not careful, you continue this when you get home, you will serve it up to your spouse and kids, game on.”
Leonard: You can’t leave the job. The job doesn’t suddenly disappear when you walk out of those gates. I mean I’ve never walked out of a prison in my life where I did not thank God for my ability to walk out of that prison. You can’t simply leave it behind. It stays with you.
Maureen: It does stay with you, and I think that’s the point that we’re trying to make and I know that Roy will talk more about his own experience in terms of really addressing this within his organization, but I just want to say that one of the things that we know within this profession is that we’re spending a lot of time talking about evidence based research and working with offender populations to improve outcomes. Within that, we’re not talking about how this impacts the staff and I’ve had staff across the country say, “This is great information you’re giving us, but what about us?” This is a very tough job, and if I can just throughout a couple pieces of data which I think are pretty interesting.
Leonard: Please.
Maureen: There’s research that’s emerging on this topic and one of the research reports out there talks about the most extreme manifestation of un-addressed staff, un-addressed stress within correction staff is staff suicide. Researchers in New Jersey found in 2009 when controlling for gender and age, COs had more than twice the suicide rate of police officers. In another study, COs were found to have a 39% higher suicide risk than the rest of the working age population. I mention that because it just shows how intense the work is. There’s a lot of folks that do have the balance in their life and can go home and separate it, but it’s tough.
Leonard: Well, correctional officers and I would imagine falling not terribly far beyond on that, parole and probation agents/police officers, they’ve been described as having the most dangerous and difficult jobs in America. Then we also talk about the institutionalization effect. What happens to inmates that are caught up within prison systems. Roy, the question is going to go to you, you said a little while ago, you guys are serving life. You guys are serving a life sentence, because if it’s difficult for the inmates and it has a psychological impact on them, it has a psychological impact on you and your coworkers as well.
Roy: Yes, for the rest of your life. We don’t look at society the way that the rest of the population does. You’re right, we don’t get to leave it at the door. Our way of thinking, our way of acting, our interaction with our families and our friends and society in general is completely changed. It’s probably closest to PTSD or prisoner of war surviving and coming home, you are changed forever.
Leonard: It doesn’t leave, that’s the bottom line.
Roy: Yes.
Leonard: I do want to talk more and sensitive individuals to the issues that are unique to corrections and the reason why we’re having the conference on June 10th, but once you get everybody there, what are they going to learn? I would imagine that there are techniques to help correctional officers, parole and probation agents deal with the stress that they encounter on a day to day basis correct?
Maureen: Yes, that’s true.
Leonard: Tell me about those.
Maureen: Well, I think that we’re looking a number of different things. We’re certianly making available the research on this topic to just get administrators and leadership onboard with this. I think that there will be a lot of discussion around how you just care for yourself as an individual in terms of how you eat, how you spend your free time, how you interact with your peers and your family. There’ll be discussion around some stress relief techniques, how important it is to engage in interests or hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with criminal justice or corrections. I think one of the things that’s also important to point out is that not only does this issue impact the individual, but it also impacts organizations, it impacts administrations, and there’s a saying that the culture’s in the walls. If you have an organization where this is not attended to and we talk about staff being our most valuable resource, you can anticipate high rates of sick leave, disability, and I think that’s why it’s so important that leadership really become proactive about paying attention to this.
Leonard: Not dealing with it has it’s cost.
Maureen: Sure does.
Leonard: That’s the bottom line behind all of this. It has its costs in terms of, as you just said, sick leave. It has its cost in terms of psychological adjustment. It probably has a cost in terms of lawsuits and accusations of unnecessary use of force or illegal use of force within correctional facilities. All of that is in play unless individuals have a healthy work life balance and unless you deal with the stressors that occur within correctional facilities. Roy, did you want to take a shot at that?
Roy: Yeah, so, the ACOS, the American Correctional Officers Association, the biggest thing for us is we’re not like the rest of the population. We are more aligned with the police officers. We die between the ages of 59 and 62 on average. The last study put out by Florida showed that. So everything is skewed. We have to be proactive in making sure that our life is in balance and that we’re keeping that stuff up front, and Maureen’s absolutely right. It is an organizational thing along with an individual thing that has to be all the way around, because our lives are shorter.
Leonard: The first thing we need …
Roy: We have to do more.
Leonard: The first thing we need to do, Roy, is to get administrations to admit that there’s a problem, correct?
Roy: We have to get them to do more than lip service. We have a lot of lip service across the nation about, “Yeah, we’re aware of the problem. We’re talking about awareness.” We need them to do. We need them to put money and activity and change from what is the regular work style which is if you work for a state or federal agency, you work 8 hours then you go home and you just keep repeating the cycle. If health is so important then we’re going to have to pay people to go work an hour early or get off an hour or give them an hour lunch and let them shower so that they can get to the clinics together instead of putting it back on the individual, individual, individual. It has to be let’s do.
Leonard: Law enforcement agencies across the country are now saying this is an increasingly important issue. Yes, we have talked about it for a long period of time, but it’s clear that in some cases police officers experience the trauma of the street, they experience the trauma of their job and that trauma is taking its toll in terms of how they interact with individuals caught up in the criminal justice system, how they interact with neighborhoods and it’s not pretty. The results have not been pretty. We can see this on the law enforcement side. I would imagine that if we do not address it on the correctional side, the same things are happening or going to happen. If you have a person who is traumatized, how hasn’t dealt with it, who is under an enormous amount of stress, who hasn’t dealt with it, suddenly finds himself in a physical confrontation with an inmate, it could prove to be an ugly … I guess it could prove to be ugly by ignoring the issue of correctional officer stress, right?
Roy: Absolutely.
Leonard: We have to pay money, we have to do things, we have to invest in this topic or it has the possibility of getting out of hand and creating circumstances that we’re not going to be very proud of. Either one of you?
Maureen: Well, yeah, the circumstances can be certianly events that happen within an agency or institution or just a very unhealthy culture. I think the good news is that there are places around the country and, Roy, you can certainly speak to that within your state that have really begun to pay attention to this and have begun to create policy around the importance of correctional staff wellness, have been creating what we call peer support groups, peer to peer support within institutions, doing some of the things that Roy was talking about in terms of funding for little bit more balance in your life in terms of physical exercise, but I think that often times what happens is when this issue pops up, management or leadership may say, “Well, go to talk your EAP.” Your employee assistance personal counselor, and that really is not effective, because those folks are usually contracted to provide services and they really don’t know what goes on within an institution or within working with probation or parole. Roy, you’ve done some pretty interesting work with this Heart Set in Oregon.
Leonard: Okay, I do want to get in on the Heart Set, but we’re more than halfway through the program. Let me re-introduce the both of you and Roy, I’ll come back to you with that question and also talk a little bit more about the particulars of the conference.
Maureen Bule is with us today from the National Institute of Corrections, been there since 2001, a recognized leader in the area of evidence based and gender informed policy; also in terms of compassion fatigue and secondary trauma with people within corrections. Roy McGraff is also by our microphones via Skype. He began his career in 1984, served 20 years with the Oregon Department of Corrections and Roy is also active in this area. We are talking about a virtual conference from the National Institute of Corrections on correctional staff wellness. It is on June 10th from 10 AM to 3 PM eastern standard time. The two points of contact are NICvirtualconference.com. NICvirtualconference.com or 800-995-6429, 800-995-6429. We’ll repeat that at the end of the program.
Roy, what is Heart Set?
Roy: Heart Set is in a nutshell your ability to interpret the signals from your heart. Not just how fast it’s beating or what your blood pressure is, but does what your feeling … Is it in alignment with your thinking? You can simply go am I in harmony with what I’m doing or am I in conflict with what I’m doing? That’s what it comes down to. What your goal is to be in harmony with what is going with you. Correction officers a lot of times, we ignore that. We put a lock box on our hearts and we ignore them and then we get use to having that lock box on and we ignore it when we’re at home. It’s unlocking that thing, looking at it more than just a pump and realizing that we can use it to help make better decisions and work on that so that we improve our lives by realizing it. It’s crazy watching people argue with me and then they come back a couple months later and they go, “I get it. I get it. It’s starting to work.” They’re happier people.
Leonard: But what started the work specifically, Roy? What are they doing? Are they doing transcendental meditation? Are they doing stress analysis? Are they doing deep breathing exercises? Are they balancing their work and home life? What’s going on?
Roy: The ones that get it right away had more of an open mind about it, and they realize that, yeah, my heart is where all of my really good decisions come from. The ones that don’t get it initially argue, say, “You can’t use your heart. You’re going to get manipulated. You’re going to get used by inmates and everybody else.” Then they realize and they leave and they say that deep breathing and trying to align your thinking to get to where you’re at doesn’t work, but then they try it. Eventually it does. There’s always some event in their life where they have an aha moment.
With me, what I’m showing them is look, it starts out simple. All I need you to do is go beyond tactical breathing. Okay? I need you to go to deep breathing exercises using this little piece of equipment and you’re going to have to think at the same time that you want to be in a calm state. That you want to have good feelings and I need your breathing to go at the same time which requires you to focus on your heart rate. Once we get them to put all three of those in line, they realize that that’s what it takes to get there and that they can personally impact how they feel.
Leonard: All right, thank you. You’re talking about …
Roy: … More than just blood pressure.
Leonard: But you’re talking about people understanding, recognizing correctional officer stress, wellness, again applies to parole and probation, applies to law enforcement as well, but the tactic that you’re using is a matter of deep breathing exercises?
Roy: It’s that, it’s biofeedback so you can actually see it.
Leonard: Okay.
Roy: Then it’s the realization of what you’re doing and it’s being explained to you by somebody who’s been there and done that. It’s not by a clinician. It’s by another corrections professional and it doesn’t have to be a corrections officer. I’ve got people who are stressed out working in offices that work in the corrections field that have never been inside of a prison, and they’re stressed out because of the environments that permeate the department. They thank us for these techniques. It’s deep breathing, it’s part of a mediation level, it’s part of biofeedback, but all of those components are just to get a hold of them and get them to realize that this is real and they can use it to impact their lives right now both at work and at home.
Leonard: To either one of you, how many correctional agencies would you guess out there now that are really taking this to heart? Really looking at the stress levels of their officers and really trying to do something about it?
Maureen: You know, I don’t … I can’t put a number on it, Leonard, partly because there’s over … There’s well over a thousand prisons across the country and that 3300 jails, but I can tell you that when I’ve talked to some directors of corrections, they are very, very interested in this emerging topic. It’s been looked at I think for years as burn out. Burn out is when you’re just exhausted by doing the job, but we know that it’s much more than burn out. As Roy said, it’s often times PTSD.
Leonard: When I have walked into prisons, walked through prisons, interacted with correctional officers, sometimes spending shifts with them when I was with the Maryland Department of Public Safety, I was amazed as to how good they have to be. I was amazed. All the stereotypes of “prison guards” went out the window the first time I actually interacted with correctional officers in prisons. They have to be very good. They have to bring their A game every single day. It’s not like a law enforcement officer that you can run and escape it. You can get in your car and drive away from anything if you have a need to. In the correctional setting, you have no place to go. You have to deal with whatever is in front of you at that particular time. To do that intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, you’ve got to be on your … You’ve got to bring your A game every single day and nobody can do that.
The time I’ve spent with correctional officers, I said to myself, “It’s impossible for correctional officers to bring their A game every single day.” I walked away from my experience in corrections saying, “These are unsung heroes, number one, in many instances and number two, these are individuals that are prone to have lives that may not work very well because of the level of stress that they have to deal with.” Roy, am I in the ballpark or am I not?
Roy: Yeah, you’re absolutely in the ballpark. Once I realized this stuff about the Heart Set, and it’s not just it, it clicked on for me. Then I went back and people are saying, “Where’d you go? What’d you do?” I tell them and I’ve got staff that normally won’t ever talk to me and they’re going tell me more. Then all of a sudden, I turn into a counselor, because they’re going, “Look, my family life sucks. I’m looking for something. I’m thinking about quitting. I’m really in depression, do you think this will help me?” It’s like wow, there is a serious need out there for us to focus and give corrections officers and corrections employees as many tools and options to try to improve their lives so that they can be fulfilled like everybody else.
Leonard: Maureen, go ahead.
Maureen: If you can just add to that, Roy, I think one of the things that we don’t think about is that when you walk into the facility, you walk in with your life. You walk in with if you’re going through a divorce, if you’ve got trouble with in an illness with a child, if you’ve got financial problems, you walk in carrying that and it’s really hard to separate that sometimes. Add to that is that the environment particularly in institutions is … Often times when we have offices, we have something familiar to us, we have a picture or something like that, you can’t that bring that kind of thing into the institution. It’s a tough role and there’s a lot of sort of additional things that go along with it.
Leonard: I think it’s almost an impossible role even for parole and probation agents. Again, I keep saying that if you deal with an individual who’s constantly caught up in the criminal justice system, constantly caught up in drugs, not doing the right thing, interacting with that person’s family, trying cognitive behavior therapy to bring that person along and considering the fact that in most states, you have any where from 100 to 150 people on your case load, you’ve got the process a certain amount on any given day, wow. I think it’s a system set up for an enormous amount of stress and resulting dysfunction unless we chose to address to it.
Roy: Yes, for me, absolutely. The things that we don’t know right now and that I think one of the wellness conference goals is not to be reactive, but to be proactive and to address the issues all the way around from educating staff and families from the front and before you get into the career and that continually as you go along throughout your career and starting from the top and working our way down instead of saying, “Hey, go to EAP,” as the solution. Yeah, it has to be all of it, because you can’t be 100% all the time.
Leonard: Correctional officers, parole and probation agents, law enforcement officers, all of us have to believe that there are techniques that … We have to buy into the work life balance. We have to buy into the techniques and by and large, if we’re given that instruction, we’re willing to buy into the different things that we can do to reduce our levels of stress and trauma, right?
Maureen: I think that if you see it makes a difference with your peers who have been exposed to some of this work, I think that’s good advertising for it.
Leonard: Okay, one of the things I want to do before closing the program is also remind everybody that there is a virtual conference on this very important topic, correctional staff wellness. I can’t tell you how important of a topic it is. The National Institute of Corrections is doing a virtual seminar on June 10th from 10 o’clock in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Go to NICvirtualconference.com, NIC, National Institute of Corrections, NICvirtualconference.com or 800-995-6429, 800-995-6429.
Ladies and gentleman, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms and we want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.
The post Correctional Staff Wellness first appeared on DC Public Safety (Transcripts).]]>