Tag: Offender Reentry

Deprecated: str_replace(): Passing null to parameter #3 ($subject) of type array|string is deprecated in /home/csosamed/public_html/podcast/transcripts/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/functions/image.php on line 116

Women Offenders-CSOSA Reentry Reflections 2013-DC Public Safety Radio

March 7, 2013 by CSOSA

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2013/01/women-offenders-csosa-reentry-reflections-2013-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, the program today is going to be about women offenders, always one of the more popular programs and one of the more interesting programs that we do. We have three guests with us today – Dr. Willa Butler, she is the Clinical Supervisor for Temple of Praise-New Day Transitional Home for Women. She used to run groups and in fact invented groups for my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. We have Patricia Bradley, and she is going to be off of our supervision this September, thank God, and she is doing extraordinarily well. Marcia Austin is another person doing well, off in April, and we are here to talk about women, and women and crime, women and the criminal justice system. There is going to be an event coming up in Washington, D.C., on February 9th from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 in the afternoon discussing the Women’s Reentry Forum, 700 Southern Avenue in Southeast D.C. It’s part of the larger Reentry Reflections events held over the course of January and February. You can find more information about all of the events about Reentry Reflection, www. – my agency – csosa.gov; and to Will and to Patricia and Marcia, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Women: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Len Sipes: That was a very long introduction. Willa Butler, boy, have you been around. You invented practically our women’s program here at the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, even to the point where it is now a priority for us to be sure that gender-specific programs are integral to what it is that we do on a day-to-day basis. You’ve invented groups, you’ve expanded groups, you’ve expanded services to women offenders. Why is the emphasis on women caught up in the criminal justice system so important, Willa?

Willa Butler: Well, I want to say thank you for having me back, Leonard. The most important thing to me, I have such a compassion for our female offenders because so long ago, when you look at the history, women have gone unnoticed or forgotten. As far as men are concerned, women were never intelligent enough to commit crimes therefore the system was not designed for them, and when you look at basic traditional counseling or even the system is designed for men by men. And then over the years, in 1998, when the drug trafficking laws increased and women started going to prison for little petty crimes that listed them in the area of a king pin, then we had an over-flux. We had an over-flux of women to enter the penal system and it was like, well what are we going to with these women? Where are we going to put them? And it just gave us an understanding that as a parole officer during that time, how do we work with women? We knew it was something different but we didn’t know what the difference was, and I just studied it. I studied it and I investigated it, and I found out it’s that women are not needy, it’s just their needs were never met. And through law investigations and studying and having groups, gender-specific groups to address the vulnerabilities of women, we were able to develop the gender-specific programs for CSOSA, and from that came the Temple of Praise-New Day Transitional Home for Women which is a reentry program for women coming home from prison because housing is a very big problem for women coming back home – housing, employment, it’s whole plethora of things that affects the female offender, but I could go on and on. I hope I answered the question.

Len Sipes: I think I just about cried when you retired from the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency and you went over with New Day because I had been dealing with you for the last ten years and it’s like what am I going to do without Willa Butler?

Willa Butler: Oh, thank you.

Len Sipes: So ladies and gentlemen, people listening to this program, I have had literally hundreds of women in the ten years that testify to the fact that Willa Butler has changed their lives, and Willa, I will always be grateful for your involvement in the criminal justice system. Before going on to the ladies who are our guests, I do want to very quickly run over some statistics. Men compared to women, women compared to men caught up in the criminal justice system – women have higher rates of AIDs, higher rates of mental health problems, much higher rates of physical and sexual abuse, much higher rates of physical or sexual violence. Approximately 7 out of every 10 women caught up in the criminal justice system have children, and women have higher rates of substance abuse. So there’s a bit of statistics or a series of statistics that does taught about, Willa, the difference between men and women offenders. Women offenders, they come out of the prison system or they come off probation, they have a wide array of problems that male offenders do not have, in fact they have more problems than male offenders, correct?

Willa Butler: Yes, it is correct. It just that they have more in a sense that although men go through the same things – of course they don’t have children – it’s just that women process it differently. When we start off at an early age, when you look at the criminogenic gender risk factors, when you take mental illness, we’ll look at that first because a lot of times mental illnesses stem from the trauma that the women have experienced as children and it was never addressed, or if it was addressed, it was addressed in a very negative way meaning that we’re not going to talk about it, we’re going to push it under the rug, what part did you play in it, it was your fault, and things off nature. And so what the women do as children, they carry that baggage with them. They carry at a young age the guilt and the shame that I have experienced that was placed on me. I did not cause this. I have no refuge, and the refuge that they find usually will come with the drugs or the substance abuse, somewhere, or in other relationships, somewhere where I can feel this void, where I could be loved, where I could be really taken care of. And a lot of times they get hooked on the drugs and then, like I said, the trauma goes unaddressed, and the trauma which can stem into mental illness, and then that’s not addressed.

Len Sipes: Sexual and physical violence is a common, common occurrence in the life of women offenders, and the vast majority of that takes place before the age of 18. Am I correct or incorrect?

Willa Butler: Yes, that is correct.

Len Sipes: All right. Before getting into the ladies, again, a reminder, our Women’s Reentry Forum, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, is going to be on February 9th from 8:00 to 3:00 at 700 Southern Avenue in Southeast Washington, D.C. You can get additional information about all of the events that we have here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency on Reentry Reflections, a whole series of events dealing with the concept of reentry at www.csosa.gov. Patricia?

Patricia Bradley: Yes.

Len Sipes: How are you doing?

Patricia Bradley: I’m doing great. How are you?

Len Sipes: I’m fine. Now, you’re off supervision, correct?

Patricia Bradley: That is correct.

Len Sipes: And you’re off supervision as of September 2012.

Patricia Bradley: That is correct.

Len Sipes: Congratulations.

Patricia Bradley: Thank you.

Len Sipes: What did it take to come off supervision successfully? All we ever hear are the negatives. All we ever hear from the media is the fact that the person did not do well. You’ve done well. What was the key ingredient in you coming through the criminal justice system, you coming from an incarcerative setting and doing well?

Patricia Bradley: It was easy for me. I can’t speak for a lot of the other women. For me it was real simple – support. A lot of women don’t get just moral, simple support. I had requirements. I had a one-year probation, that was my sentence, and it was simple. I was to report to CSOSA to do weekly [PH 0:08:41] urinals. I was going twice a week, and then I got a once-a week, and then it went to a month, and then it was phased out, and it’s just simple requirements. And sometimes, if you’re a substance abuse user, it can be difficult. First of all, you’ve got to get yourself together and stop using your substances first, you know. That’s step one. For me it was going to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, meeting with my probation office regularly. I was scheduled to meet with him. And it just wasn’t hard. It was just something real simple, you know, and then me being a resident at out New Day too, Temple of Praise Transitional House. They helped also because that was one of my support mechanisms because without support, in some cases with some women like me, with not only just substance abuse issues, I also have mental health issues as well but you have to address all your issues.

Len Sipes: But look, to me the idea of a woman coming out of an incarcerative setting, coming out – she has kids. You have kids, correct?

Patricia Bradley: Yes, I do.

Len Sipes: Seven out of 10 have kids, mental health issues, substance abuse issues, not a lot of money, not a lot of support, that almost seems to be impossible to overcome all those odds, and the fact that you did it to me is courageous.

Patricia Bradley: Very – very courageous because there was a time, like I said, with the issues, because you can run into different issues. Just simple, something basic, is transportation to get to and from these places. I’m not embarrassed to say one of my sons was helping me with transportation. New Day, they helped, they had a transportation van that would take us to our appointments and different things that we had, and I think that’s where women, one of their biggest issues and biggest problems is just having their basic needs met, you know? Without that, you can’t be successful. You need help in a lot of these areas, and a lot of these programs that we do have, I think with the very few that we do have, in order to be successful, a lot of these women, including myself, they need help, you know, just simple resources, and for me, that’s how I became successful.

Len Sipes: How many kids?

Patricia Bradley: All together, six.

Len Sipes: Okay, that’s a lot of kids.

Patricia Bradley: Yes.

Len Sipes: And they’re going to depend upon you either for financial or emotional support.

Patricia Bradley: Yes.

Len Sipes: So it’s just not you, it’s seven human beings – six kids and you.

Patricia Bradley: Yes.

Len Sipes: A lot of people out there listening to this program are going to say, “Hey, Patricia, I’m really sorry. You did the crime, you did the time, you committed a criminal act. I’m not putting a lot of money into you. If there’s money to be put, I’m going to give it to the school. I’m going to give it to the elderly. I’m going to give it to people from Hurricane Sandy. I not going to give it to you because you’ve been in the criminal justice system. You harmed yourself and harmed other human beings in the process. Why should I support programs for you?” So, that’s the question. Why should people support programs for people like you?

Patricia Bradley: I think we should be supported so that we can, you know, I know a lot of people don’t believe in ex-offenders being given a second chance. They think it’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, but I’m here to tell them today that that is not true. Really, that’s kind of a tough question to answer but why not? I mean, one day, you never know, the persons who are saying that, they could be on the other side of the fence too because I never thought I would be an offender. When I had my incident, when I got arrested, I was like 44 years old. I’m now 46, and who would have thought I would commit a crime but I did, you know, so you never know. People really shouldn’t be so, you know, judgment because you never know.

Len Sipes: You never know.

Patricia Bradley: You never know.

Len Sipes: You never know. If you did not have the support either from New Day or from Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency – if you did not have that support, where would you be today?

Patricia Bradley: Being 100% honest you, I probably would have re-offended.

Len Sipes: You probably would have gone back to the criminal justice system?

Patricia Bradley: More than likely, I would say 100% yes.

Len Sipes: All right. Marcia!

Marcia Austin: Hey, Len.

Len Sipes: Hey, how are you doing?

Marcia Austin: I’m good.

Len Sipes: Good, and you were telling me before the program that you’re on supervision now. You’re going to be off supervision in April, and first of all congratulations for that.

Marcia Austin: Thank you, thank you.

Len Sipes: And what was your experience, Marcia? Again, this is a very emotional issue for so many of the women that I’ve talked to throughout the actually 20 years of sitting down and interviewing women caught up in the criminal justice system. They tell me often times very emotional stories, and you basically did the same thing before we hit the record button. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Marcia Austin: My background is coming up, you know, I was abused. I was told I was dumb and I’d never amount to nothing. I grew up with that, you know. I started using drugs to fit in, to have somebody to love me. I started going to jail. I started going to jail early in life because I thought being bad was the way I needed to be because that’s what I was told. I got locked up in 2008 for a stolen car and violation of probation. I got out in 2010. When I got out, I was homeless. I had nowhere to go. I was broke and lonely. I was sad. I was depressed. It wasn’t until that I met my probation officer, Miss Hunnigan, who introduced me to New Day 2. When I got to New Day 2, my emotions was going crazy because I felt caged in. I felt like I couldn’t get no help from them but I was wrong. I had a 30-day black-out period; a 30-day black-out period helped me to be able to map out my long-term and short-term goals. The 30 days allowed me to seek mental health and it helped me with anger management. We took parenting classes in New Day 2 and we prayed often. We had Bible study and we had church, and it helped me with my spiritual side of life. The love that I got from New Day 2, they encouraged me to go to school. They encouraged me to connect with my family, and that’s what I did. I went to school. I went to school for construction and I never thought that I would complete it because I was told I was dumb all my life. I did complete that class and I graduated, and the New Day team, Dr. Anderson and some of her workers, they came to my graduation. They gave me flower and candy, they gave me love and hugs, and I said, “If it feels this good being in love just by doing something good, if I can get this kind of attention, I’m going to keep going,” and that’s what I did. I’m in GED classes now and then I’m in SRO. SRO helps me save money, teaching me how to manage my money, and it’s the next step to getting my own apartment.

Len Sipes: I have two very quick questions for you and then we’re going to go for a break. So before you got involved in CSOSA and in New Day, you felt like what? Give me a quick answer.

Marcia Austin: I felt broken, lonely, on my own.

Len Sipes: And now you feel?

Marcia Austin: I have hope, you know. I feel smarter. I think that I can do anything. My probation officer – I have a probation officer, her name is Farmer, and she shows me much love. She encouraged me and let me know that I can do it, and that’s what I’m doing.

Len Sipes: Let’s go for the break. Ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to DC Public Safety. We are doing a program on women offenders. What we’re trying to do is support the Women’s Reentry Forum that we have every year in the District of Columbia. It is going to be on February 9th from 8 o’clock in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon at 700 Southern Avenue Southeast in Washington, D.C. Again, it’s part of our larger Reentry Reflections, a wide variety of activities taking a look at reentry in the District of Columbia and throughout the nation. www.csosa.gov is the website to get additional information. Dr. Willa Butler, she is a Clinical Supervisor for Temple of Praise-New Day Transitional Home for Women, and she used to run groups and invent groups and invent the women’s program here at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Patricia Bradley and Marcia Austin are our guests who have been caught up in the criminal justice system. Marcia, let me quickly get back to you. Many of the women that I’ve talked to over the decades felt as bad as bad could possibly be, as hopeless as hopeless could possibly be because of the abuse, of the sexual violence, of people calling them names, of people not lifting them up, and I see hundreds of women at this stage of their involvement real human beings. They go from not being human at all to being fully functioning human beings. Is that where you are? Is that where you’re headed?

Marcia Austin: Well, right now I’m right where God want me to be, you know. I’m peaceful, you know. I’m going through some changes but I can deal with it. I can deal with it because I talk about it. I have a psychiatrist. I can always call the staff at New Day 2 and get any kind of information and encouragement that I need. Like I said, I have a probation officer who just smiles when I come in, you know, that makes me want to continue me to good, who encourages me, who hugs me, something I have never had out of a probation officer before. I just want to give a shout-out to Ms. Farmer because she’s an awesome probation officer first, and Ms. Ishiman. But my biggest challenge this year was kind of like leaving New Day 2. I felt like when I leave there, that there was no more love and support but that’s a lie. I call them all the time and they still support me in everything I do, and I’m just going to keep on and letting the women know who’s in the criminal justice system that we need help and we can get it, you know. We just got to keep pushing on. We got to keep the hope.

Len Sipes: And if these programs were not there, where would you be?

Marcia Austin: I would be homeless right now. Without New Day 2, I would have been homeless. I was homeless before I got there. I was broken and depressed. I mean, I was going from house to house to house, you know, and I just thank God for Bishop Staples and Dr. Anderson and Dr. Butler for New Day 2 because I would be in the streets. By now I would be locked up, you know, because when I’m homeless, I steal, I have no food to eat, so when they accepted me into the program, I was the first female there, I mean, I just was shown incredible love.

Len Sipes: Well, I want to go back to you. Okay. So how many times have we done this sort of radio show? This is what, our tenth, eleventh, twelfth time we’ve done this sort of radio and television show, and every time you bring me women who were broken human beings and you’re now at the end of their supervision, at the end of their treatment programs. You bring me women who are repaired human beings. They’re taking care of their kids. They’re taxpayers. They’re not tax burdens. They’re not committing crimes. How in the name of heavens do we convince people that these are programs worthy of support?

Willa Butler: First of all, just listening to the stories here, it’s very rewarding for myself and to have the understanding, and I want people to have the understanding that a second chance is what it is. It is a second chance. We talk about keeping the community safe and reducing recidivism, and the only way you’re going to do that is to ensure that our women, they have jobs, that they’re able to sustain themselves, they can take care of themselves and their families. Just like both Patricia and Marcia were saying earlier, if they didn’t have a place to go, if they didn’t have income, they would go back to committing crimes again because that’s the way they know how to survive and that’s the only way that they have learned how to survive, and if we keep pushing them down and stereotyping them and saying that we’re not going to help you, all we’re doing is what, we’re throwing fuel into the fire, and we can’t do that. When a person is productive, you build self-esteem, they’re building their residual strengths, and like Marcia said and Patricia, “I can do all things,” you know, and that’s what we are promoting here, letting people know that we need their support. And while they’re at New Day 2, we have a lot of wrap-around services that they are getting involved in, they get their needs met, and then they come out and they’re working and they’re productive citizens again.

Len Sipes: The question becomes do we want a more dangerous society or do we want a safer society?

Willa Butler: Right.

Len Sipes: Do we want people paying taxes or do we want people taking our tax money?

Willa Butler: Right. Right. That’s right. We want what? – We want more people paying taxes. We want a drug-free and crime-free environment especially here in the District of Columbia.

Len Sipes: And we want kids to be taken care of.

Willa Butler: We want our kids to be taken care, and not only that, once we do that, we break that cycle of pain because it’s only going to continue to the next generation, you know, and that’s what we’re trying to stop. We stop here, as they say, the buck stop here, right now and here, and this is beautiful for me to hear these women and to know that not only have I played a part working with CSOSA but also at the Temple, at the Transitional Home, because we brought the same I guess techniques that I’ve used before over there, the Wicker Program, empowering women, and building them up, and letting them know, hey, I can do it. I can really do this thing this time. And like I always say – I know I talk a lot, forgive me – I always say that women are not needy. We always look at women as being needy. No, they are not needy. Their needs have never been met, and if you are constantly in a position where nobody is hearing you, nobody is giving me what I need to survive in this world; of course I’m going to appear to be needy. Of course I’m going to appear to be less vulnerable. Of course I’m going to seem like no, I can’t do it, but I can. I can.

Len Sipes: But the astounding thing to me is that it takes the criminal justice system to intervene in the lives of women? What about everything that happened beforehand? – And Patricia, I’m going to go – I keep giving you the touch questions, Patricia, so get closer to that microphone. I mean, you know, what is it? I mean, we’re the criminal justice system. I mean, it takes us to save you guys and get the programs together to allow you people to cross that bridge to being productive human beings?

Patricia Bradley: Unfortunately, it does, and that’s not really to me a good or bad thing because without it, somebody has to – we have to start somewhere and unfortunately it’s with the criminal justice system. The problem is in society, again, nobody wants to take responsibility for how everything is with the criminal justice system, the criminals themselves, but at some point we have to draw the line, you know.

Len Sipes: And at some point you have to either have the programs or it just continues and continues and continues, and then it affects the kids, your own kids, and then it continues with them. Somewhere along the line it’s got to stop.

Patricia Bradley: It has to stop. We could stop it now before it gets to the kids. The kids are our future, you know. If we don’t stop it now and if society try to get a grip on this, then the kids will be doing the same thing as the parents are doing.

Len Sipes: And this is something that we in the criminal justice system and in criminology have seen decade after decade after decade – women ignored, their problems ignored, and it just continues unabated.

Patricia Bradley: That’s right.

Len Sipes: So, okay, so I’m going to Marcia. We’re in the last couple minutes of the program, so speedy answers. I’m going to give you the same terribly rough question that I gave to Patricia, and that is so people are going to say, “Look, we’ve got all these fiscal difficulties. We’ve got all these budgets cuts. People are asking more of my tax money. Damn, I’ve got to give money to you all? Why? I’ve got schools it should go to. I’ve got my grandmother; she’s getting old, give the money to her. Why give it to ‘criminals’?” So answer that for me, Marcia?

Marcia Austin: Well for me, I am a criminal, I was a criminal, and I changed my life around through help. I mean —

Len Sipes: But you’re not a criminal now.

Marcia Austin: No, I’m not a criminal now but I’m a work in progress every day, first of all. I’m enjoying my life today but what I’m saying, without the support of the United States, we we’d be lost. Without the support of transition homes, without shelters and churches, we’d be lost. We need support, you know, because it goes deeper than just being a criminal. It comes from how we was being raised and what we was taught and the things that happened to us, and we just need support.

Len Sipes: Do you understand how much courage it took for you to do what you did in terms of your background and in terms of all the things that you suffered through. Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I am full of courage” because it does take immense courage to overcome what you’ve overcome.

Marcia Austin: Only by the grace of God. Only by the grace of God, only by the programs and the help of the probation officers that encourage you. That makes a difference, it really does.

Len Sipes: The final couple minutes of the program, and either one of you can jump in – so we are going to be doing the Women’s Reentry Forum at 700 Southern Avenue Southeast on February 9th from 8:00 to 3:00, and we’re going to be bringing together hundreds of women caught up in the criminal justice system, and those hundreds of women, they need to hear what, for them to do the same thing, to have the same accomplishments that you two have had. What do they need?

Marcia Austin: They need hope. They need transition homes to be open. They need shelter. They need mental health help. They need clothes and the ways to get around to look for jobs. They need education whether they’ll be able to get it online, to put resumes online. Education is very important because a lot of us don’t have education, and we just need somebody to love us and to guide us and to take a chance with us, you know?

Patricia Bradley: I attended the Forum last year, I was there, and it was very nice. When the women come, what they need, they need information, and that’s what the forum has there. They had a lot of information because a lot of women don’t know, you know. You’re not going to get your answers until you get the information so when they come out; the information is there available for them. That’s what they really need is the information, and then they can pretty much take it from there once they’ve received the information.

Len Sipes: You’ve got the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. The program today has been on women offenders. We have been talking to Dr. Willa Butler, the Clinical Supervisor, Temple of Praise-New Day Transitional Home for Women, Patricia Bradley, off of supervision, and Marcia Austin, soon to be off of supervision. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much for the extraordinarily powerful stories that you tell, and it’s always the most enlightening and heart-warming of all the other interviews that I do, Willa, these programs on women offenders. We thank everybody for listening, we really do.

Willa Butler: Yes, thank you.

Len Sipes: We appreciate your comments. We appreciate your criticisms. We appreciate whatever information that you have to give to us in terms of new programs or suggestions for how we can do this better, and I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Housing and Offender Reentry-The Urban Institute-DC Public Safety Radio

November 20, 2012 by CSOSA

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/10/housing-and-offender-reentry-the-urban-institute-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. We’re talking today about housing and offender reentry. Back at our microphones, the Urban Institute, always, always, always happy to have them by our microphone. Jocelyn Fontaine is a Senior Research Associate. www.urban.org. She has a piece of research, supportive housing for returning offenders, that is an evaluation from the State of Ohio state prison system. It was done in conjunction with The Corporation for Supportive Housing and the results are really gonna surprise you. I really am pleased to welcome to our microphones Jocelyn Fontaine, Senior Research Associate, Urban Institute. Jocelyn, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Thank you for having me.

Len Sipes: I really am happy to have you because this is a very important topic. We talk about offender reentry a lot and we talk about substance abuse and we talk about mental health and we talk about jobs, but rarely do we ever talk about housing and you have some really interesting findings. So give me a background, some background on the project and the research.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Absolutely. So a few years ago, around 2006 and 2007, the state prison system in Ohio partnered with the Corporation for Supportive Housing on a Supportive Housing pilot. They were looking for a way to get folks who are leaving their system into housing and wanted to partner with The Corporation for Supportive Housing who does this work, to help them to figure out how can we get folks into housing in the community, based on the assumption that if we get people into housing, they can get linked up to the services that they need –

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: They’re better able to find and maintain jobs and we can also reduce recidivism, which is costly for the state and of course, is a public safety concern. So they partnered on this Supportive Housing pilot which was focused on those who would benefit the most from supportive housing. So that is individuals with histories of residential instability, as well as behavioral health challenges, and they started out with wanting to house about 84 people coming out of the state prison system, this was state wide. It was first implemented in 10 correctional institutions and then they expanded it to three more, so it was 13 total. And they housed far more than the 84 that they initially intended to.

Len Sipes: Oh, how many did they house?

Jocelyn Fontaine: They housed, in our pilot, or the evaluation that we did, there were more than 118 or so folks.

Len Sipes: Wow.

Jocelyn Fontaine: But they housed far more than that, and it’s in fact still going on today, so they’re still housing folks.

Len Sipes: That’s great.

Jocelyn Fontaine: But they housed far more than 100 folks into supportive housing in five of the larger cities in the State of Ohio, so that was Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton.

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: And in fact like I said, people are still housed in the program and it’s got some pretty good findings.

Len Sipes: Well, the findings are astounding, I’ve spent a career looking at recidivism research and we at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency like to think that we are a research based agency, we all read the research and discuss the research. These are some of the most significant findings I’ve ever heard in terms of recidivism. So you were able to find a certain percentage reduction in rearrest and a certain percentage reduction in reincarcerations. Tell me about them please.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Sure. So we’re pretty proud of the evaluation that we were able to do. It was a quasi-experimental design, which essentially meant that we expected the interest in the housing pilot to exceed their ability to house people, especially since it was implemented in 13 institutions, so what we wanted to do was a natural comparison group and that is get folks who looked similar but weren’t able to be housed by the pilot due to the limitations that they had in only having 84 housing beds. So that was our comparison group, so individuals who looked like those who got the housing, but weren’t able to because of the capacity of the program. We tracked those folks for a year following their release and we found that the RHO participants, and that stands for the Returning Home Ohio, that’s the pilot project, that the RHO participants were significantly less likely to be rearrested within one year. We found that the participants were 40% in fact, less likely to be rearrested than the comparison group subjects. And we also found that the participants in the RHO program were significantly less likely to be reincarcerated, which is one of the more interesting findings for the state prison system, since of course they want to reduce rearrest, but they’re mostly interested in people coming back into the prison system.

Len Sipes: Sure. Well, then that was a 60% reduction in reincarcerations right?

Jocelyn Fontaine: They were 60% less likely to be reincarcerated within one year, yeah.

Len Sipes: Right. Now that’s amazing, Jocelyn, because you take a look at offender reentry research across the board and just last week we had Nancy La Vigne, the Urban Institute, the famous Nancy La Vigne at these microphones and we were talking about the fact that most of the research projects that measure offender reentry probably go in the 10 to 20% range when they are successful, not all are successful. It’s, would be naïve to believe that every piece of research out there, every effort out there is going to reduce recidivism. Some research studies show that they don’t. The ones that do seem to run in that 10% to 20% range. Having a 40% reduction in rearrest and having a 60% reduction in reincarcerations is astounding.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah, well, we’re talking, just to make sure that we’re clear, so we’re talking about the likelihood that they’re going to be rearrested and reincarcerated –

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: But we are very proud of the outcomes, very proud of the findings, especially since we only had a one year window to look at outcomes.

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: And that is important to mention because not all of the folks who were in the treatment group or that got the housing, got the housing for a full year that we looked at their outcomes.

Len Sipes: Right, right?

Jocelyn Fontaine: So we’d expect actually the benefits of the program to be even greater, once we’re able to look at a longer outcome period and I’m currently working with the state prison system and the Corporation for Supportive Housing to continue to track folks, because we found, and something that I think is also interesting to talk about is, even though we had interested participants and interested providers and making the seamless link from release from prison to supportive housing in the community, we found that it wasn’t that seamless, that it took some time to get people into the housing upon release, so all that’s to say that once we feel that people are actually having the housing itself for one full year or longer, that we’d find even greater reductions in the recidivism rate and even greater benefits.

Len Sipes: There are endless questions that are running through my mind in terms of process and how it began and how you were able to convince landlords to bring people from the state prison system into homes that they rent. But this gets to the larger issue of recidivism across the board, we need to mention, I think we talked about before the show, the fact that they’ve received other services as well. So they were just not housing, there were a variety of stabilization services that I think dealt with substance abuse and mental health?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: Tell me about those.

Jocelyn Fontaine: So this was a group that ranged from, I guess relatively low need to high need. So what this program was able to do, and I’m quite proud of them for doing that, was house a range of folks with different needs. Now, supportive housing is supposed to be target for those individuals at the higher need level, but there were some people in the housing who had lower needs and lower or less significant histories of substance abuse and mental illness so all that’s to say is that what the program did was working with providers so they would assess individual need once they came into the program and determine what services do they need as part of their supportive housing suite of services.

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: So supportive housing can range from just having a case manager, to more wrap around services. Linkage to employment to the extent that that’s you know, feasible and appropriate, as well as, you know, recovery services, a whole range of things that go into supportive housing on top of the provision of affordable housing. And we also looked at, as you mentioned, whether people were getting linked up to services and we found that those individuals who were part of the program were significantly more likely to use state billable mental health and substance abuse services and more quickly, so that is a great finding of this project is that especially if we’re thinking about the folks who were in the program as being previously under, unserved, that they are getting linked up to the mental health and substance abuse services that they need, more likely to get linked up to those services and receiving more of those services.

Len Sipes: Was there a way of measuring the various services to see if housing was the key variable, or whether it was substance abuse or job assistance or mental health evaluation, was there a way of ferreting out discreet variables to the degree of saying, “Hey, it was 10% substance abuse and 10% housing and 5% mental health.” I would imagine that would take a tremendous piece of research to do that, but were you able to do that?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah, we weren’t’ and that’s actually an excellent question. So this story, it’s a great one, but it’s also a story I guess, like other research, a variation. So we had various types of offenders come through this program and then we also had various providers providing the service, so the providers were across the five cities, as I mentioned. They were a mix of both scatter site and single site housing agencies, so that is, they either managed or maintained a large building of affordable housing, of which the former offenders were part of that housing building, to agencies that worked with landlords and said, “Hey, we’re providing the housing, or we’ll pay for the housing, will you allow this person, Jocelyn Fontaine, to live in your housing building?”

Len Sipes: Right, right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: The agencies also ranged in the type of services that they offered. Some, it was primarily just case management services and referrals to other agencies for things, all the way to one agency that really provided a range of services, it was a requirement of participation in their program that they participate in a lot of services. So putting all of that into one regression, one statistical model, we’re not able to tease out the relative benefits of the type of services that folks got, but that just calls for more research and we’re happy to do that and it’s a good thing too to see that even with all of this variation, that you know, the program still stuck. That meant that the providers got it right, that the program itself was able to match individuals to the housing services pretty well, or else we probably wouldn’t have had the findings that we had.

Len Sipes: Jocelyn, I’m going to, want you to take off your methodological hat and put on your opinion hat now.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Okay.

Len Sipes: What do you think is the impact of having stable housing? Parole and probation agencies throughout this country routinely report that a third of the people who they supervise are in unstable housing. It may be a shelter, it may be on the street, it may be you know, you’re at your Mom’s house, but your Mom said, “Hey, two months, and you’re out.” Then they shift over to their brother, he and the brother get into an argument, then they shift over to his sister, you know, brother in law’s not terribly happy about this, then he shifts over to a girlfriend, they break up. I mean, housing seems to be a key issue for an awful lot of offenders, and so what this research suggests is that it may be more important than we originally thought.

Jocelyn Fontaine: I think that’s right. As a housing person, I think it’s very important. You know, if you get an employment reentry person, they’re gonna say the jobs, but I like to think of housing as both the figurative and literal foundation that successful reentry can be launched. So it is my opinion that if someone doesn’t have stable housing, it’s difficult for them to find and maintain employment. If a person is worried about where they’re gonna sleep that night, it’s difficult for them to maintain their sobriety or continue on their regimen for mental health services for example. So I think it is extremely important and if you know, someone doesn’t have a place to sleep, if they’re worried about their housing, I think it’s difficult for them to think also about, you know, finding a job, being able to go to that job every single day, maintain good hours, having the clothing that they need in order to be successful in that job, having the rest that they need if they’re, you know, worrying about where they’re gonna lay their heads. So I think we need to think of housing as a platform for successful reentry, not only is it you know, a good thing to get people into housing, but thinking of housing, again, as that platform. So once people are into stable housing and it doesn’t necessarily have to be supportive housing, right? Its affordable housing, and appropriate housing placement, then folks can begin to be more successful on these other outcomes like job, reducing their substance use, getting medications for physical or mental health, reunifying with their family and friends.

Len Sipes: Several offenders have told me throughout my career that the housing component to them was one of the most important parts of coming out. That and supportive friends, supportive family and this is why I think the faith based program that we run and volunteer programs that try to mentor to people coming out of the prison system become so important, that it was quiet place to go and be by themselves and to provide a, it provides a certain sense of stabilization in the psychological well being of their lives. I mean, they just said, “My God, I mean, after being in prison and being around people all the time and then you go over to my brother’s house and I was over there with his family and you have no privacy and suddenly you have the ability to sleep when you want to think, when you want to contemplate life, that they found it to be psychologically comforting and a psychological comfort level that will allow them to do the certain things that they had to do. So am I in the ballpark or am I being Pollyannaish about this?

Jocelyn Fontaine: No, I think that sounds about right. That’s how we think of our own housing, right?

Len Sipes: Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. That’s how we –

Jocelyn Fontaine: So we should expect that from other folks as well and it’s just you know, when we release folks without proper housing placements and it makes sense that people rely on their family mostly in the, you know, the initial days of their release, but we need to be honest that sometimes that’s not the best housing placement and we found in some of the work that Nancy La Vigne has done and we’ve continued to do in more recent reentry evaluations is that people would like to be able to have their own place and to not have to rely on their family so much and have acknowledged, you know, which I think is quite honestly, that it’s not the best place, it’s not you know, the best place to go is back with family and heavily relying on them and perhaps not being able to support your family in the way that you should, in order to be able to stay living in their housing. So it makes sense to me that there’s these psychological benefits of housing.

Len Sipes: We’re more than halfway through the program. Our guest today is Jocelyn Fontaine; she is the Senior Research Associate with the Urban Institute. www.urban.org www.urban.org. Housing and offender reentry is the topic of today’s program. She did a piece of research with others called Supportive Housing for Returning Prisoners, a program in Ohio that has astoundingly wonderful results, reduced rearrest by 40%, reduced reincarcerations by 60%. Jocelyn, with 700,000 people coming out of the state and local prison systems, state and federal prison systems every single year. 700,000, that’s just an immense number of human beings that are transitioning from the prison system to the state levels and transitioning to federal parole and probation authorities like mine. You know, the states are screaming bloody murder about their budgets and they’re saying, they’re reducing incarcerations, they’re closing prisons, they’re trying to come to grips with trying different things to reduce the rate of reincarceration, reduce the rate of recidivism because A: it cuts back dramatically on criminal victimization, but B: to them I think more importantly, it cuts a back on how much money they have to spend.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly.

Len Sipes: And that’s a reality for governors throughout this country. I’ve maintained that governors have had this conversation with every state correctional administrator in the country, that you’ve gotta learn to live within your budgets and you’ve gotta learn to find a way to reduce the amount of people coming back. This seems to hold some promise; this seems to hold something that people should consider.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yep, and I want to give credit to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction for you know, very much going out on a limb and funding this program, and funding the research. I don’ t know if we mentioned that, but that’s pretty progressive and innovative to, “Let’s see if this housing sticks” and then waiting it out to see. As I mentioned earlier on, this started in 2006, we just finished the research just a couple of months ago. So their willingness to participate in the research study, to put themselves under scrutiny, to allow us to come in to look at their data and see what happens, is, a credit to them, that they’re you know, a progressive state that’s willing to look at this in a different way.

Len Sipes: And Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has been a progressive entity over the course of the last quarter century. They always seem to be taking a lead in terms of taking a look at how they operate and what the impact is. Jocelyn, what are the policy implications of all of this, the average person sitting here in Washington DC, the average person listening to this program in New York City and Honolulu and San Francisco, they’re gonna take a look at their housing situation in those particular cities, which are some of the most expensive cities in the world, and they’re gonna say, “Wait a minute.” Giving housing to people coming out of the prison system, I can’t even find housing for my kid.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah.

Len Sipes: I desperately want my own kid to get out of my own house, but he or she can’t afford it and here we are providing arrangements, making arrangements and in some cases, paying for them, to find supportive housing upon release from the prison system. So what are the policy implications, what are the practical lessons that governors and mayors and county executives and parole and probation administrators can pull from this?

Jocelyn Fontaine: I think one is that collaboration and partnerships are a good thing and that they work. The state prison system didn’t go it alone here, they worked with an agency that has a history of doing this, that has helped jurisdictions across the country and in fact they’re doing this work in other places beyond Ohio, so working with the Corporation for Supportive Housing to say, “Look, we’re releasing these guys. Some of them are appropriate for supportive housing. Help us figure out how to make it work.” The Corporation for Supportive Housing is you know, knows hey there’s these community based providers that are providing this service to people in the community, right?

Len Sipes: Right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: And that there’s a percentage of them that have these criminal justice histories. They’re there, right? 700,000 people you just mentioned the number –

Len Sipes: Yes, every year.

Jocelyn Fontaine: That means that’s a lot of people who are in the community that are receiving supportive housing with these criminal justice histories. So what they’ve tried to do is just say, “Let’s extend this.” So these agencies are already doing this work, the prison system is releasing people, so let’s just make that linkage a little bit more seamless so that they can extend or reach into the prisons to get these guys and then therefore we’d have better reentry outcomes. So I think that’s a lesson that you already have agencies in your communities doing this work, they’re already providing supportive housing.

Len Sipes: They’re already doing it.

Jocelyn Fontaine: They’re already doing it, so why don’t we just toward better outcomes, so that these guys aren’t hitting the community with no housing placements, nowhere to go, see if it works, you know? See if we can create this linkage and you know, if the Department of Corrections they’re willing to spend this money, Ohio was willing to do it knowing that if we spend it now, that’s savings that we’ll get later because they’re not coming back –

Len Sipes: Right!

Jocelyn Fontaine: Then it’s a worthwhile investment. And of course, that’s for jurisdictions to decide on their own, but it was beneficial in Ohio.

Len Sipes: And also the savings in terms of criminal victimizations.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly.

Len Sipes: I mean, you have a situation where if you could produce 40% fewer arrests, 60% fewer reincarcerations, I mean, that would save tens of billions of dollars over the long run in terms of every state in the country, but you can see how difficult it is because the average person is gonna say to themselves, “Wait a minute, I can’t afford housing, why are you giving it to people coming out of the prison system?” The flip side of that is that it saves people from being victimized and it saves taxpayers a tremendous amount of money.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly. And there are other small things that can be done, right? So here, in this program, the state prison system was actually funding the housing, but there are other things that can be done just by a prison system creating more information for returning prisoners, about available housing placement, right? And it doesn’t have to be a situation which the correctional department is paying for all of someone’s rent; it could be a percentage, right?

Len Sipes: Right, right.

Jocelyn Fontaine: That get’s phased out over time as person gets linked up to more gainful employment.

Len Sipes: And the percentage may be just enough to tip the scale.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly, exactly.

Len Sipes: It may be just enough to get that person in a supportive housing in to dramatically increase the chances of the person –

Jocelyn Fontaine: Getting a job. . .

Len Sipes: . . . Doing well, getting a job, becoming a taxpayer, not a tax burden, and especially if they’re linked to other supportive services like mental health and substance abuse treatment and job services, but the, you know, so the other part of it is that they come back into these same communities and people sit there and go, “Well, you know, I’m not close to those communities, that doesn’t mean anything to me.” But one of out of every 42 people in the United States are under the auspices of or actually being supervised by a parole and probation agency.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah.

Len Sipes: So my, what I say to people is that you come into contact every single day with people on supervision by a parole and probation agency, you just don’t know it. If you’ve, some criminologists, I’ve heard the figure, one in 20 and I have no documentation to one in 20, they just gave their opinion in terms of people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system in the past, but everybody, every single day, comes into contact with people who have been caught up, currently, or in the past, with the criminal justice system. So I guess my question is that do you want them coming out with support so they won’t reoffend and so you won’t have to pay for them again, or not? What’s your comfort level?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly.

Len Sipes: The person comes out of the prison system with mental health problems; don’t you want that person to receive mental health treatment?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly.

Len Sipes: And doesn’t that protect you and your family and your kids and your neighbors and your friends?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yep, and we’ve heard that from landlords, as part of this housing study, or even employers, as part of other reentry evaluations that we’ve done, who’ve said, you know, these guys or these gals in this program are better than the other folks that you know, that I’m employing because they have a case manager, because they’re part of a program, because someone’s watching, not over them, but helping them out, that they have somebody, some support system, someone that’s focused on their reentry goals. And so you know, just like you said, you know, without a doubt, these folks are coming back and so if, you know, we can provide them with some supports, you know, I think that that goes a long way towards better reentry outcomes so that people aren’t coming back into the system.

Len Sipes: It’s my guess that an employer is going to be far more prone to hire somebody if they have stable housing. It’s my guess that in a discretionary world, where people go in and get drug treatment, you know, it is discretionary. I mean, people do chose who gets drug treatment and who doesn’t and I would guess that people would be more prone, or more apt to say, “Yes, let’s provide this person with drug treatment. He has stable housing, we’re not gonna have to worry about him wandering the streets, we’re not gonna have to worry about him deteriorating because he has no place to go.” It just seems to be a platform for other good things to happen in that person’s life which is why I’m guessing, and I think you’re guessing the same thing, that we have a 40% reduction in rearrest and a 60% reduction in reincarcerations.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: And that, you know, that platform, that just absolutely intrigues me. Final words, we’re in the final three minutes of the program, Jocelyn. So we talked about policy implications, we talked about landlords, we talked about mayors considering this sort of a program, they need to get beyond, do they not, the fear that they may be criticized, for providing housing for people coming out of the prison system? Again, considering that there’s a lot of people who can’t afford housing to begin with?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah, I think you know, here’s the public campaigning that mayors and other public officials need to do is what you said earlier, realizing that it may not be your brother or your sister or someone in your family member, but it is likely to be someone in your community, and so realizing that these folks are coming back, that we’re paying for them in one way or another, that we do well to be paying for them in a strategic and a smart way and known to be effective way, other than you know, thinking, “It’s not my problem and I don’t have to deal with this, I don’t have to pay for it.” And the fact is that you do, and so when people are rearrested and reincarcerated, we are certainly paying for it, so we do well to think more strategically about what’s more effective use of our taxpayer dollars.

Len Sipes: They’re a five to ten minute drive from 70%, 80% of any metropolitan, anybody living in any metropolitan area.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Definitely.

Len Sipes: When I was with the Maryland Department of Public Safety, I was well known because I did a lot of television work and you wouldn’t believe all the different people caught up under supervision, who would greet me and say, “Mr. Sipes, how are you doing? I saw you on television. Yeah, I’m in from this pre-release system and I’m working here.” And it’s like, “Wow.” You don’t know how many people who are delivering your pizza, filling your gas tank –

Jocelyn Fontaine: Exactly.

Len Sipes: Handling your order, helping you out, doing your lawn care, doing your maintenance work, who are caught up in the criminal justice system? You just don’t know.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah, and that’s the sad part, but. . .

Len Sipes: Yeah, and having them having supportive housing and having them have supportive services does seem to make a difference.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yep.

Len Sipes: Not necessarily as high as your difference, but it does, nevertheless, make a difference.

Jocelyn Fontaine: Yeah, absolutely.

Len Sipes: All right Jocelyn, you’ve got the final word. Our guest today ladies and gentlemen, Jocelyn Fontaine, Senior Research Associate with the Urban Institute, www.urban.org We’ll have a link to the document that she references: Supportive Housing for Returning Prisoners. Ladies and gentleman, this is DC Public Safety, we really do appreciate all the comments, we appreciate your criticisms, we appreciate your suggestions for new shows, and we want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Parole and Probation, Reentry, What Works Tagged With: Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, CSOSA, housing, Offender Reentry, Reentry, Urban Institute

What Works in Offender Reentry-The Urban Institute-DC Public Safety Radio

November 20, 2012 by CSOSA

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

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

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/10/what-works-in-offender-reentry-the-urban-institute-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety, I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Back at our microphones is Nancy la Vigne, she is the Director of the Justice Policy Center for the Urban Institute. www.urban.org We’re here today to talk about what works in reentry and the fact that there are now, for the first time, actual websites, databases, that really do summarize the state of the art in terms of research in a variety of areas, what we have is crimesolutions.gov from the Office of Justice Programs, which gives research on a wide variety of criminal justice topics, including reentry but now we have another website that’s focusing specifically on reentry. It was launched by the Urban Institute and a Council of State Governments. The website is the “what works” clearinghouse for reentry. It’s at www. nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/whatworks .Nancy La Vigne, welcome back to DC Public Safety.

Nancy La Vigne: Thanks, it’s great to be here.

Len Sipes: Wonderful website. Is it in competition with crimesolutions.gov?

Nancy La Vigne: Not at all, in fact it’s very complimentary and bear in mind, both websites are funded by the Office of Justice Programs.

Len Sipes: There you go.

Nancy La Vigne: So we worked very closely with the developers of Crime Solutions to talk about methodology and the ways in which the sites will be different and not duplicative and in fact, they’re not, Crime Solutions, as you said, covers a wide array of crime and justice topics.

Len Sipes: Law enforcement, corrections, juvenile justice courts –

Nancy La Vigne: Right, right, exactly.

Len Sipes: You focus on reentry.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah, we take more of a deep dive approach and whereas Crime Solutions only looks at what they’re calling brand name programs, we’re looking at all evaluations across a wide array of programs related to reentry. And as you know, reentry is a very broad topic in and of itself, so we’re looking at a wide array of different types of reentry interventions and summarizing the research findings across those types. So: employment, mental health, housing, juvenile justice.

Len Sipes: Nancy, you’ve been around for quite some time. I mean, you are the Director of the one of the most prestigious research organizations in the country, if not the world. Why did it take us so long? I remember talking to the former Assistant Attorney General, Laurie Robinson, who said that we are going to do this, we are going to start summarizing the research, we’re gonna start making it easy for practitioners. Why did it take us decades to do this?

Nancy La Vigne: Well, I think in the case of the reentry topic, it took a real awareness and sense of urgency by members of Congress to fully fund reentry in all its aspects and that came with the Second Chance Act. And the Second Chance Act funded the National Reentry Resource Center, which of course, is run by the Council of State Governments and when we partnered with the Council of State Governments, we knew that CSG, as they’re called, was very well equipped to provide technical assistance and that we could provide some research value and the way we saw the best way to add value was to cull all the research on reentry and make it accessible to practitioners. So that’s what we set out to do.

Len Sipes: I just want to state, for the record, that I think that it’s been very frustrating for those of us in the practitioner community because we’ve been waiting decades for this and it’s here. In terms of crimesolutions.gov and in terms of your website, I mean, it’s taken a long time to make it easy for practitioners and policy makers to follow the research.

Nancy La Vigne: I think that’s right and you know, when you look back, even a decade ago, there were two statements that were made as fact. One is: we don’t know what works. And the other was: well, we might know what works but the “we that know it” are a bunch of academics that do nothing more than talk to each other and publish for each other.

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: I was of that second school of thought, which is that, you know, being an academic myself, I was aware of what was out there, I knew that there were evaluation studies that showed that certain types of reentry programs worked, but they were largely inaccessible. Sometimes inaccessible to me. You know, the methodology’s extremely complicated, the way the studies are presented are really more to show off the methodology off and rather than to illustrate the findings and the implications of the findings for policy and practice.

Len Sipes: My heavens, that’s a bias I’ve had for years. I’m glad you expressed it. Here’s the example that I give to everybody else. I remember being the Director of Public Information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and the Secretary of Public Safety comes in with a sour look on his face and he’s got a document from the Department of Justice, and he plops it on my desk. And he goes, “Sipes, I want a one page summation.” And then he goes to the doorway and turns around and points his finger at me and goes, “Now did you hear me? A one page summation. I don’t care about the methodology, I don’t care about the literature review, I don’t have time to wade through this. I simply want to know, did this work, what are the policy implications and how we can implement it here. One page.” And he reminds me, again, “One page.” So simplicity is next to Godliness in terms of the transfer of information.

Nancy La Vigne: Yes, exactly. And you know, and one page is often, for a busy decision maker, too much. They want the bottom line, and that’s what we need to give them.

Len Sipes: And I think that’s what the both organizations, both websites do, is provide that summation. www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/whatworks So, did we cover the website enough or are there more points that you want to make before getting into what the research says?

Nancy La Vigne: Well, sure, no, I would like to talk a little bit about the website and the methodology because I don’t want to overpromise on what this is.

Len Sipes: Please, okay.

Nancy La Vigne: And the reason I can’t overpromise is because I think that the research community has largely failed us and I say that because of the work that we had to do to winnow through all the evaluative research out there to get this much, much smaller subset of studies that we felt met methodological rigor enough that we could include them. And so, just to give you a few statistics, we identified roughly 2500 individual publications –

Len Sipes: Oh my heavens! 2500?

Nancy La Vigne: That called themselves evaluations and were on various topics of reentry which is to you know, prepare people for release from prison or jail, and tracks reentry outcomes. So it doesn’t just track infractions behind bars, for example. Of those, we screened out almost 1500 as irrelevant for a variety of purposes.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Nancy La Vigne: They weren’t really serving a reentry population; they weren’t really relevant outcomes for a reentry topic.

Len Sipes: Right, right.

Nancy La Vigne: Some other reasons, so we have around 1000 that were potentially relevant. Of those, only 276 met our standards for rigor.

Len Sipes: 15000 to 276?

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah.

Len Sipes: That’s amazing.

Nancy La Vigne: Now, there’s more that we’re still in the process of reviewing, but I would say that for every, easily every 10 we review, eight get winnowed out because they’re just not strong enough as studies.

Len Sipes: Okay, and without getting into a methodological review or discussion, it’s just that, that the findings and the way that they went about getting their findings just wasn’t strong enough to hold the confidence of their findings.

Nancy La Vigne: Right, but how do you know this if you’re a practitioner trying to figure out what works?

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: You just go to you know, you find a study online, you find a series of studies, they say that they have positive outcomes and then they take it at face value, and why wouldn’t they?

Len Sipes: Sure, of course.

Nancy La Vigne: So I feel like that’s one way we’re really adding tremendous value is to winnow through all of this supposed knowledge –

Len Sipes: Amazing.

Nancy La Vigne: Down to really what we can say with confidence, seems to be the findings. Now, not all of those studies, once you winnow them down, show that reentry interventions work.

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: Many are inconclusive and a lot of our findings suggest that more research is necessary.

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: But, so I want to be clear. It’s a lot of work that boils down to you know really just, you know, tens of studies that end up on the website. The ones that you see will be relevant, will have met these methodological standards and you can have faith in that they’re saying something meaningful. So I think that that’s really important and I wanted to make sure that your audience understood both the value of the website but also the limitations because of the lack of good quality research that’s out there.

Len Sipes: So the bottom line in terms of what’s there, it can be trusted.

Nancy La Vigne: It can be trusted.

Len Sipes: Okay, the larger issue, I talked to a couple reporters a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about the state of research in terms of offender reentry and one of them said that, “You know Leonard; there are a lot of failed research programs out there.” And I said, “Well, you know, there’s a lot of hope and there’s enough evidence, there’s enough good evidence that we believe that we’re moving in the right direction, that we believe that if you take a look at drug courts in particular and you take a look at GPS in particular, you take a look at substance abuse, if you take a look at preparation in prison, that, that you’re getting fairly consistent, good findings that are methodologically correct, well done evaluations.” So I think there’s enough promise that leads us to believe that we can cut recidivism rates and I’m not saying 30% or 40% but at the moment, somewhere between 10 and 20%. But I point out that out of 700,000 people coming out of the prison system every year, if you cut that down from 15 to 20%, you’re saving billions of dollars and you’re saving victims from hundreds of thousands of victimizations.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right, and I would agree with you. There’s certainly enough evidence out there to suggest that these programs are worth continuing to fund and support.

Len Sipes: But what do we say to practitioners when they go to your website, because they go to crimesolutions.gov, they go to your website and what it does seem to say is that promising, promising, promising, promising and you’ve got three or four at the top with the green indicators saying that they did reduce recidivism and you have some down at the bottom with the red – you have a color coded system, which makes it real easy, and some fairly prestigious evaluations didn’t seem to have that much of an impact.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right.

Len Sipes: The Serious and Violent Offender research comes to mind. So the person takes a look at this and again, the word promising comes to mind.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah, I mean I think that’s right. And I think that much depends on the population and the nature of the intervention and the fidelity with which it was implemented, which was something that we’re having a very difficult time assessing based on the studies. The studies rarely look at issues of the design and implementation of the program. So if you don’t do that, and you say a program doesn’t work, you don’t know if it doesn’t work because the concept was flawed, or because it wasn’t implemented properly.

Len Sipes: Right, right.

Nancy La Vigne: And so we’re saying it doesn’t work, which is really an unfair indictment on a concept that could be very theoretically sound and could work under better circumstances.

Len Sipes: So we’re going to repeat what Joan Petersilia of Stanford said that what we do too much of at a National Institute of Justice conference, was that we overpromise and deliver too little in community corrections. That seems to be true to some degree, but people need to understand that this Rome was not built in a day. I mean, these are thousands of pieces of research, cumulatively speaking, seem to be saying that we’re moving in the right direction. So for those out there who are saying, hey, we can dramatically cut recidivism, that doesn’t seem to be supported by the literature but I’m talking about 30% and above. That’s not supported by the literature.

Nancy La Vigne: No, it’s not.

Len Sipes: And we shouldn’t be, as advocates –

Nancy La Vigne: It’s an unrealistic goal, and if we have goals like that, we’re setting ourselves up for failure and that’s just no way to go.

Len Sipes: And that was her point. I think her point was was that don’t overpromise because there’s a certain point where the States are going to be well funded again and then they’re going to have to make a decision as to whether or not to continue to build more prisons and if we overpromise, we inevitably invite our own demise.

Nancy La Vigne: Well put.

Len Sipes: But I mean, that’s serious stuff, but at the same time, you know, I travel throughout the country, I work with principally public affairs people, they’re enthused about this. They’re enthused. Most of the people representing parole and probation agencies, most of the people representing correctional agencies, I was doing some training for the National Institute of Corrections and had a chance to talk to directors of public affairs for various states who not only do mainstream prisons, but they also do parole and probation. They’re very happy to be exploring opportunities of doing something else besides putting the person away for 20 years. They’re not saying, you know, “Let’s let’em out.” They’re not saying, “Let’s not incarcerate them.” But what they are saying is is that we certainly can really have an impact in terms of them coming back. So there’s an enthusiasm and and optimism out there nevertheless.

Nancy La Vigne: Oh, I would say so, and it’s interesting. You referenced how long I’ve been in the field. Thanks for showing off my age to your audience.

Len Sipes: I thought you were 25.

Nancy La Vigne: But you know, we’ve both been around for a while, and when you think about it, if you look back, even, you know, a decade or you know, 15 years ago, I would say the large majority of directors of departments of corrections across the country did not view it as their responsibility to do anything to prevent people from returning to their prisons.

Len Sipes: We were told, when I was with the Maryland Department of Public Safety, we had three correctional systems, we were told our mission was to constitutionally incarcerate. The parole and probation side of it, we were told that our mission was to enforce the provisions set by the courts and to enforce the provisions set by the Parole Commission. That was it. There was no mention of recidivism, there was no mention of best practice and there was no mention of intervention. None.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah, we’ve come a very long way.

Len Sipes: Where the average correctional administrator wants to do these things, for a variety of different reasons. So the whole idea is to supply programs that are meaningful and evidence based within the correctional setting and to continue that when they come out.

Nancy La Vigne: Yep.

Len Sipes: And there is evidence that shows in some cases, you get some fairly decent reductions and I’m saying again, to be on the safe side, somewhere between 10 and 20%.

Nancy La Vigne: I think that’s safe to say.

Len Sipes: I wanted to give the resource center, the address one more time. We’re halfway through the program. www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org My guest today is Nancy la Vigne. She’s the Director of the Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute, www.urban.org. www.urban.org, and I do also want to talk at the same time about the Crime Solutions data base, funded by the Office of Justice Programs of the US Department of Justice. They are at crimesolutions.gov, and again, Office of Justice programs supports this particular reentry resource center endeavor as well. Where do we go to from here in terms of the research? I mean, part of it is the frustration that the research hasn’t been good enough, hasn’t been rigorous enough and so the message needs to go out to the research community to do better?

Nancy La Vigne: Absolutely. And they need to be incentivized to do better and I’m not sure how to do that, because you know, as I said earlier, you know, researchers spend a lot of time publishing to communicate with each other and not with the world outside of academia. So I think that there is a share of academics out there that really care about making a difference and that we need to get to them and explain that you know, while you’re publishing and trying to get tenure, also think about ways that you can do good work that’s of a high quality, that also is accessible.

Len Sipes: That withstands scrutiny. That, that people can depend upon.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah.

Len Sipes: But the practitioner community, unto themselves, I mean, the only thing that they want, is again, a la the Secretary of Public Safety who I used to work for, they just want it simple.

Nancy La Vigne: The bottom line, yeah.

Len Sipes: They just want the bottom line, they just want, you know, want to know the policy, they want to know the results and they wanna know what the policy states and they want to know if they can implement that policy within their jurisdictions, that’s pretty much it.

Nancy La Vigne: Right. Yeah, now let me tell you a little bit more about how the website is set up. I mean, unfortunately, this is a radio show so we can’t do a webinar and have visuals, but it’s tiered in such a way that for those very busy decision makers, it is indeed just the bottom line. But then you can click down and get more and more information.

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: And so what it starts out is a description of each category of type of intervention. So under employment it might be a literacy program. Or a vocational training behind bars. And then it has a summary of the finding across all studies that address that intervention. So that’s the bottom line, right?

Len Sipes: And it’s a fairly quick description.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah. But, if you click, it unscrolls a long, detailed, not as detailed as anything you’ll see in a journal article, but detailed description of the population that participated in the program, the geographic location, the nature of the program, and all those other nuances that I think are really critical. Because you have the busy decision maker, right? And he or she just wants to know the bottom line, but ultimately, if they’re going to use that bottom line to develop or alter a program, there’s gonna be someone who is tasked with doing that, and that person is going to need to know these details so that they don’t take, God forbid, the cookie cutter approach of just saying, “Okay, so we’re gonna do vocational programming.” Without thinking through who it works best with, why it works with this population, some of the details behind the program that might have made it more likely to achieve it’s intended results –

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: Those types of details we felt, really had to be somewhere on the website and easily accessible, but the average viewer that goes there is not confronted with all that detail; they can chose to unveil it at their will.

Len Sipes: Do we have in this country any sense of training for the practitioner community that they understand everything that we, you and I just talked about? I mean, isn’t the natural inclination to say that if they did substance abuse treatment, if they did mental health treatment and if they did job placement, it worked in Milwaukee, it reduced recidivism by 17%, so it will work Baltimore, so we’re going to do the exact same thing. But it’s not the exact same thing. It all depends upon the population, it all depends upon high risk, low risk, it all depends upon what you mean by treatment.

Nancy La Vigne: Exactly.

Len Sipes: I mean, and I think a lot of people in the practitioner community don’t quite understand that it’s not a cookie cutter approach; it depends upon your particular set of circumstances.

Nancy La Vigne: Right, I think that’s right. And we try to communicate that in the website, but that’s not our primary goal. However, bear in mind, this is just one part of the larger, National Reentry Resource Center website, which does I think, a very good job at that, where they talk about best practice and you know, how to tailor a program to your local jurisdictions and needs and population so there’s a lot of complimentary guidance and information that should be used in concert with the stuff that’s on the reentry website.

Len Sipes: And nationalreentryresourcecenter.org, people should go to there and explore the entire website –

Nancy La Vigne: Absolutely.

Len Sipes: As well as crimesolutions.gov. But the, in terms of reentry specifically, pretty much everything you need to know is at the National Reentry Resource Center.

Nancy La Vigne: I would say so.

Len Sipes: I mean in terms of guidance, in terms of what to do –

Nancy La Vigne: its one stop shopping.

Len Sipes: Right, right, right, because different people come to me and they say, “Oh, my Congressman–he’s now interested in this reentry issue. Where do I go? What do I do?” And they search the internet and they come to one of my television shows or one of my radio shows and they think I know the answers and I don’t. I say, go to the National Reentry Resource Center, go to OJP, go to NIJ.

Nancy La Vigne: Right. So the Resource Center has been up and running for what – five years, four years? Something like that.

Len Sipes: About.

Nancy La Vigne: So we, you and I, used to field those inquiries all the time. I still am to some extent, but I can’t tell you how much more time I have in my life, now that people are referred to this website. It’s got an added bonus of freeing me up to do more research.

Len Sipes: You don’t have to go through the endless explanations. Before ending the show, I do want to talk about what, in your opinion, seems to be the principle findings and we haven’t really talked about that. So we know about the website, we know about the National Reentry Resource Center, we know about the Office of Justice programs, we know about how you got to where you are in terms of going from 15000 studies to 276 studies, so people are sitting back and going, “Well, shut up Leonard, and tell ‘em what works.”

Nancy La Vigne: Well, you know, we did not set out to synthesize across all of the research that we presented. We present it by topical areas so that people can look and make their own decisions about what seems to work, based on different intervention categories. But I can say that just based on the content we have up right now, which is not fully up there, we have covered just a handful of the topics, housing and employment –

Len Sipes: A work in progress.

Nancy La Vigne: And so forth. . . There are some findings that perhaps won’t surprise you at all. Chief among them is the importance of aftercare, or what’s called the continuum of care. So across all the topics that we’ve explored all ready, the ones, the programs that seem to have an impact are surprise, surprise, the ones that start in an institutional setting –

Len Sipes: Right, within prison.

Nancy La Vigne: And continue out into the community and this I’m sure is a no-brainer for many in your audience but it’s nice that sometimes research can confirm what we know to be true, so. . . that’s a big one.

Len Sipes: Well, we have a captive audience, no pun intended, so there is an opportunity for them to get their GED, there is an opportunity for them to get their welding certificate, there is an opportunity to go to, I don’t think there’s a lot of drug treatment or mental health treatment within prison systems, so the research that I’ve looked at somewhere in the ballpark of 10 to 15% but there are groups in there. So they come out, whatever they get, they come out and it’s supposed to continue seamlessly in the community.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right. We’ve also found rather mixed results on the topic of employment, even though I know in my heart that employment can work, we found it in our own research at the Urban Institute, but if you look across the studies that we felt met the threshold of rigor, we found very mixed results. Some, some work programs or employment readiness programs worked and others did not. Again, this gets back to the missing piece of data for us, which is how well were those programs implemented?

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: And we largely don’t know that. So if I were to conjecture, I’d say that the ones that worked were implemented well, and those that didn’t weren’t, or were not focused on the right population who could best benefit from. . .

Len Sipes: A good history of research in terms of substance abuse, SAMHSA, has had decades to look at what works and how it should be implemented so what do we have in terms of the correctional literature?

Nancy La Vigne: We are still in the process of coding and assessing all the substance abuse studies so. . .

Len Sipes: Ah, okay.

Nancy La Vigne: Which is actually the largest body of research of any category that we have.

Len Sipes: Right, and it’s been around for decades, but I mean, what we have now is again, promising. I mean, there does seem to be some fairly decent findings, because substance abuse research or programs do seem to be coupled with cognitive behavioral therapy and for the average person listening to this program, getting a person to rethink how they live their lives and how they make decisions, so those seem to be coupled, but most of the drug treatment that I’ve been exposed to was cookie cutter. It’s not designed for that individual; it’s designed for anybody with any drug history, with any drug of choice.

Nancy La Vigne: Yeah, there’s often a mismatch on who gets access to the substance abuse treatment behind bars and in some of our own research we found that often it’s just based on your crime of conviction. So if you’re convicted of a drug related crime, you automatically go into some kind of substance abuse treatment program you know, regardless if you’re a trafficker and you might be very successful as a trafficker because you don’t engage in any substance use at all. So, I know that departments of corrections are a lot more savvy about that now but you know, even a decade ago we saw a lot of examples of that. So. . .

Len Sipes: Mental health is an issue that’s just emerging. I saw a piece from the Bureau of Justice Statistics about five or six years ago talking about self reports and the self reports were somewhere in the 55% range of people who self reported a problem with substance, I mean, a mental health problem. I’ve seen more and more literature in terms of self reports and assessments that indicate that very large numbers of offenders have histories of substance, I’m sorry, mental health problems but treatment is far and few and in-between and it’s really tough to deal with schizophrenia within a correctional setting. It’s really tough to deal with depression within a correctional setting.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right, and disentangling studies that look at certain types of mental health treatment programs that are more about counseling and you know, clinical counseling, separate and apart from medication, is very difficult. It makes it very challenging for research studies, because you can’t withhold that type of treatment so finding a good comparison group is very. . .

Len Sipes: No, you cannot do random assignment when it comes to health related issues.

Nancy La Vigne: Right, right, right.

Len Sipes: Right, right.

Nancy La Vigne: Which is why we found so many or so few examples of rigorous studies in health – just physical health. We had none to include at all which is kind of disappointing, but in part, some of those end up in a larger category of what we’re calling holistic reentry programs.

Len Sipes: Right.

Nancy La Vigne: So it’s very rare to only address physical issues in a study on reentry.

Len Sipes: And we’re talking about holistic, it seems to be for, it seems to be substance abuse, it seems to be mental health, it seems to be job related, and it seems to be cognitive behavioral therapy, which is again, how to think your way through situations. Those seem to be the four key, core areas of the research that I read.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right.

Len Sipes: And those, then the comprehensive programs are designed to deal with all four of those issues.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right, and if they’re good, they’ll bring in the family component you know, that’s a favorite topic of mine.

Len Sipes: Yes it is a favorite topic and a very important topic at the same time. So in the final analysis, what we have is an understanding as to the key components. I mean, I think housing is certainly an extraordinarily important component and I read about different, you know, projects around the country that are providing housing, but in Washington DC, which is one of the United States and world’s most expensive housing markets, we’re not gonna be able to provide a lot of housing regardless to how much money we get. I mean, I would imagine a housing program in the middle of the country in a rural area, they can probably stretch their dollars, so that’s, that’s really problematic.

Nancy La Vigne: And that’s right, and really there were very few studies on housing that met our criteria and they were entirely about halfway houses, so. . .

Len Sipes: Yes, right. So in the final analysis it seems those are the four key areas and that people can now have places, a place to go to that will be populated to a much larger degree than it is now, a place to go to in terms of offender reentry and to get all those research summations in one place.

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right.

Len Sipes: And for the future, you’re going to be putting more and more and more in?

Nancy La Vigne: That’s right, right now we have housing and employment and a few other topics and then we’ll be adding substance abuse, cognitive behavioral therapy, sex offender treatment, some special populations topics, like juveniles and so forth.

Len Sipes: Nancy, I really appreciate you being here. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today is Nancy La Vigne, Director of the Justice Policy Center for the Urban Institute – www.urban.org The National Reentry Resource Center, boy that’s a mouthful. The National Reentry Resource Center, their website, in terms of what works, is exactly that – www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/whatworks and don’t forget crimesolutions.gov. for all the criminal justice topics. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We really appreciate all the interaction, all the emails, all the comments, all the criticism and I want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Drug Treatment, Education and Vocational Assistance, Mental Health, Reentry, What Works Tagged With: Offender Reentry, Reentry, research, Urban Institute, what works

Film and Video Artists and Offender Reentry

September 21, 2012 by CSOSA

Http://media.csosa.gov

Radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/07/film-video-artists-and-offender-reentry/

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Today’s topic, ladies and gentlemen, is film and video on offender reentry. We have three people in the studio today, three experts, in terms of doing videos on the topic of offender reentry. We have Gabriela Bulisova. We have Greg Upwall, and Yavar Moghimi. Gabriela is an independent photographer and instructor in Corcoran College of Art and Design. Her website is gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com. And Greg and Yavar, they’re graduates of the George Washington University Institute of Documentary Filmmaking. They produced a film called Released to Life that’s gotten a lot of acclaim. It’s currently under snagfilms.com and you can also go to releasedtolifemovie.com. And to Gabriela, Greg and Yavar, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Greg Upwall: All right. Thanks for having us.

Gabriela Bulisova: Thank you. Pleasure.

Len Sipes: All Gabriele, how badly did I screw up the name?

Gabriela Bulisova: You did great.

Len Sipes: Did I get it? Was I in the ballpark even?

Gabriela Bulisova: Absolutely right.

Len Sipes: All three of you … I’ve had a lot of fun with talking with all three of you over the course of the last couple months. And Greg and Yavar, we put together Released a Life. I had a small part in terms of advising you. That video won a slew of awards. It won number one in the first place award in the Washington, DC Film Festival. It’s won first place awards for a lot of film festivals. That’s an interesting concept, Released to Life. Tell me a little bit about the film.

Greg Upwall: Well the film is basically a short documentary that we produced as students in the Documentary Filmmaking Center. And it’s a composite character of different folks, basically, going through the reentry process in different stages and having served a different amount of time. And kind of looking at the challenges that they’re facing coming back into society. And having some experts kind of also weighing in on what the challenges that they see are.

Len Sipes: Gabriela, you’ve done video, you’ve done still photography, you’ve worked this concept in a variety of mediums. Why did you chose offender reentries? I can think of puppies, I can think of children, I can think of older people, I can think of veterans coming home from war, I can think of a lot of other topics that are probably easier to do than people coming out of the prison system. Why did you choose that topic?

Gabriela Bulisova: I actually was introduced to the topic indirectly. I was in process seeking to work on incarceration and reentry. I was invited to speak at a [PH] colloquium at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. And the topic was Women and War. And I worked with refugees, primarily Iraqi refugees for quite some time. I worked with them in Syria, in Middle East, and in Washington, DC. So my first thought was I have to go to Iraq and document women in the war zone. And then because I teach, my schedule, especially travel schedule, is quite limited. I thought I might look the word war through a deeper or wider prism. And I looked at war as conflict, as injustice, as violence. And connected then conflict and women. And did some research locally and found an organization called Our Place DC.

Len Sipes: Oh yes. A fabulous, fabulous place.

Gabriela Bulisova: Absolutely. Wonderful, small, underfunded organization –

Len Sipes: Yes.

Gabriela Bulisova: – that deals with gender-specific issues and does tremendous work helping women who are coming out of prison to readjust to society.

Len Sipes: Okay. So you like the easy topics of life.

Gabriela Bulisova: Yes.

Len Sipes: War in Iraq, women returning from the prison system. Greg, let me go over to you. You were involved; you and I have been talking more than anybody within this room about this concept of offenders coming out of the prison system. Look, you guys are filmmakers, I’m part of government. I’m stodgy, I’ve been around for a long time, I’m jaded, the system gets on my nerves. You’re filmmakers, you’re artists, you have a fresh perspective, you have that artist soul. You’re taking a look at the concept of people coming out of the prison system, why? Greg, I’m going to start with you.

Greg Upwall: Well it’s a good question, Len. The group that made the film at GW, none of us really had a strong, personal history with the subject except for one student who was a DC native. The others of us had a lot to learn. We chose the topic because we felt that it was an important one, clearly. But I don’t think any of us really understood what we were getting into. We quickly realized that the situation is quite bleak when you look at the numbers coming out and the statistics of recidivism, and the lack of funding that exists. And so as we began to conceptualize what this salient message of our film should be, we realized that our interest was to make a personal story out of the film. And we realized that many people can quickly get desensitized when you look at statistics and numbers, but sort of reflecting our own personal discovery was that these are human beings. And I remember coming to this realization. And a lot of the listeners out there might think well of course that’s the case, but we really connected with people. We met people with real lives that clearly we could empathize with, that clearly had gotten on the wrong side of a situation. And that was really where our passion and our interests kind of grounded itself.

Len Sipes: And that was apparent in the film. If you look at Released to Life and SnagFilms, or if you go to Releasedtolifemovie.com, you see that. You can see the power of the filmmaking. You can see the power of the stories. But Gabriela, I’ve seen your photography. The question is more this, you’re bringing a fresh perspective to it. You’re bringing the artist soul to it. What you’ve just said all of us within the correctional or criminological community we know. What is it that the artist sees that we’re not seeing, in terms of telling that story, anybody. Gabriela, go ahead.

Gabriela Bulisova: Exactly right. As I said, I was new to the issue of incarceration and reentry. And working with the women, I produced a combination of audio and still images. I produced a project called Convictions where the women directly tell their own stories in their own voices. And then I moved on to … then I started doing more research and I learned, as Greg said, the overwhelming statistics of the number of people just in DC, ten percent of DC population being incarcerated or having a criminal record and so on. But still those are numbers, statistics.

Len Sipes: What did you feel in your heart?

Gabriela Bulisova: Right.

Len Sipes: What was going through your heart, your mind, your soul when you were dealing with this topic? That’s what I’m interested in.

Gabriela Bulisova: Right. As a documentary photographer, as a photo journalist, you want to learn more. You ask questions why. And when I … I moved from working with women to working with men. And when I started working on a new project called Inside Outside, I was reminded of what an Iraqi friend of mine told me when the War on Iraq began. He said, “I wish I can tattoo faces onto Iraqi people.” And what he really meant was I wish that people here can see the real people, the real faces of the Iraqis, and thus we can connect with real people, so we can turn them from mass numbers or from news headlines into real people.

Len Sipes: So you felt that the people that you were dealing with were rather anonymous, they lived anonymous lives. And somehow, some way through your artistry you would try to capture who they are as human beings.

Gabriela Bulisova: Absolutely right.

Len Sipes: Yavar, you have to weigh in on this subject.

Yavar Moghimi: Yeah. I think the whole process of documentary filmmaking is about storytelling in the end. And so especially making social documentaries, you want to tell the story that most people don’t know. Or if they know, they don’t know why they should care about it. So that’s … it doesn’t take much to listen to these people’s stories and realize the struggles that they’re facing and the limitations in a lot of the services that are out there to really help people transition back into society. And then when you sort of look at it from even a financial perspective, too, you kind of wonder what are we doing in terms of all the money that’s being poured into this, and people are being sent back. So it’s not only affecting the people themselves, but the tax payers as well. And so we try to craft the message that was geared towards this is an issue that you should care about whether you know somebody who’s gone through the criminal system or not.

Len Sipes: So why … and from a filmmaker’s perspective, from a creative perspective … what are we doing, what are we not doing to spread that message? Because when I sit and talk … in the past with my dearly departed mother about the subject of reentry, she said, “Leonard, for the love of heavens we’ve got the elderly to take care of, we’ve got … ” I’ve told this story a dozen times. The listeners of this radio program have heard this story a dozen times. “We’ve got the elderly to take care of, we’ve got school kids to take care of.” My wife who was Vice President of PTA said, “Leonard, the money needs to go to the kids not to the people who have done harm to other human beings. We’ve got to start with the kids, that’s where the great bulk of the money needs to go.” We have a society that basically goes, “Ah, they’re not my favorite people. I’m not quite sure I’m interested in this topic.” And I’ll throw out a statistic just to consider. That 80% of people caught up in the criminal justice system have substance abuse histories. Approximately ten percent when they’re in the prison system get treatment. So basically what we’re doing is not helping them transform, to cross that bridge from a tax burden to a tax payer. We’re not doing that. Why, is the question. And I want to ask you guys. Not as criminologists, but as artists. Why are we not doing that?

Greg Upwall: Maybe I can jump in there, Len.

Len Sipes: Yeah, Greg.

Greg Upwall: I think what we sort of … like I said before … what we really recognized is that a lot of people see the issue as an us and them situation. It doesn’t affect them. It’s a situation you can read about in the news; you hear statistics and so forth. But quickly we were sort of impacted emotionally by the idea that it’s certainly not us and them. And that families are involved. And our whole justice system, we’re all … we take our civics classes growing up and we’re led to believe that our constitution provides fair justice and that once you’ve paid the due for your crime that you’re able to move on with your life. And we realize it’s just not that easy. Our goal quickly became … as I know myself and several others in our crew … we’re not the type to quickly give the benefit of the doubt to a criminal. I came at it with my own biases. But we realized that our goal ought to be to show that you can’t treat it as a black and white situation. And it’s also become an issue that’s being done a disservice by reality TV programs have tend to portray prisons as violent places, and all criminals as violent people, and it just wasn’t the case. We couldn’t avoid that fact.

Len Sipes: Right. I talked to an employer who watched Hard Time on one of the cable stations. And basically said, “You want me to hire somebody from there?” And I said, “Look, I’ve been in and out of prisons hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It’s not like that.” I said, “You have that that goes on in prisons on a periodic basis, but the overwhelming majority of prisons you go into, they’re some of the safest places on the face of the earth, believe it or not. I’ve walked through dozens and dozens of prisons totally unescorted, totally without an ounce of fear.” But that’s what they see. So if that’s what they see on the six o’clock news, if that’s what they see in Hard Time, if that’s what they read about in the morning paper, that doesn’t create a lot of sympathy for what they call “ex-cons”.

Greg Upwall: Yeah.

Len Sipes: Gabriela, you want to … the question becomes how do you reach an audience? How do you … these are extraordinarily powerful stories that all three of you have documented. How do you convince people to take those very powerful stories seriously?

Gabriela Bulisova: These are really good questions. And I think their answers are very … questions are complex and the answers would be complex as well. So I think you can dissect it to so many different aspects. But if I may, I agree with what your mother was saying. I think money should be put towards kids. I think money should be put towards ward seven and ward eight and should be put towards education and treatment and prevention. Because I think that’s how we can eliminate the later large rates of incarceration. And unfortunately majority of the people in Washington, DC who are incarcerated, come from the poorest socially, economically deprived wards. So I certainly agree that that’s –

Len Sipes: But remember this show goes out all throughout the country and all throughout the world. And that applies to any city not only in the United States, but any city in the world.

Gabriela Bulisova: Absolutely right. But also again, just to use some numbers, we now … we’re so lucky to live in this country, we have so many advantages. But then you look around the world, and this is the country that has the highest incarceration in the world.

Len Sipes: Yes, it is.

Gabriela Bulisova: Why do we incarcerate, what is it, 740 people per 100,000 people? In Finland, I believe it’s 60 people per 100,000.

Len Sipes: Huge difference.

Gabriela Bulisova: So I think we have some homework to do here.

Len Sipes: Want to reintroduce our guests, ladies and gentlemen. We’re doing a, as you well know, a piece on film and video on the subject of offender reentry. We have three experts in the studio with us today. Gabriela Bulisova, Greg Upwall, and Yavar Moghimi. Gabriela is an independent photographer instructor with the Corcoran College of Art and Design. The website is gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com. Greg and Yavar are graduates of the George Washington University, the Institute of Documentary Filmmaking. They did an extraordinary film called Released to Life. It’s won three first place awards. You can see it on snagfilms.com, go to the website and search Released to Life. Or you can go directly to their website, releasedtolifeamovie.com. Gabriela, so we have the energy behind audio. We have the energy behind video. We have the energy behind stills. These are very powerful stories. Are they reaching the larger population, or are they just reaching the already converted to the topic?

Gabriela Bulisova: We are independent filmmakers, photographers, so we can certainly use some help in terms of promoting our work. But that is my hope. If we … as you mentioned before, why should a population care about somebody who just came out of prison and is unemployed or homeless and so on? And to me feel like if I can just engage, even if it’s a small number of people into a dialogue about that people need second chance, that it’s going to actually … that if we give somebody a job or ability to go to school and better their life, we’re going to improve public safety, community safety, create stronger families and so on. So is it reaching all the people? I would like it, not yet. I’m hopeful that it’s going to communicate to more people. But for example just this past Friday an exhibition opened in Anacostia at the Gallery at Vivid Solutions called Inside Outside, where people can come and see photographs, see the video, and hear the stories of the people that I worked with.

Len Sipes: Greg and Yavar, you and I have sat and talked on a couple different occasions about reaching this mass audience. It is the contention of some people that unless we reach that mass audience, unless we move way beyond the already converted, the already convinced, unless we reach that audience we’re not going to make much difference. Again, the idea that 80% of offenders caught up in the prison system have histories of substance abuse, ten percent are getting drug treatment. There’s a gap that needs to be addressed. The only way that that’s going to be addressed is through political will and money. These sort of things cost money. To do that you’ve got to convince the larger audience. We’ve talked about public service announcements in terms of reaching a larger audience. Is that possible, is that doable? Do you think that we can appeal through art to the unconverted, to the general public, and convince them that this is a topic that they want to take on?

Greg Upwall: Well I’ll jump in there. I think that again, the answer would be yes. And I think it is it in the way that that message, as Yavar said, it’s a question of storytelling. The real message is not, “Hey, you should care about criminals, and that should be something you think about when you wake up in the morning.” The message is more that I experienced individuals that were some of the most inspirational and driven individuals I’ve ever met in my life, that I’ve never met just in the general population. That told me something about the power of rehabilitation and truly … one of the guys in our film says, “I was in the news once for doing something wrong. I intend to be in the news again for doing something great.”

Len Sipes: And that’s powerful.

Greg Upwall: It’s powerful.

Len Sipes: These stories are powerful, powerful stories. When you sit … I’ve sat in prisons amongst 20, 30 offenders and we’ve had hour-long conversations about their lives, about their hopes, their dreams and what it is they want to do. Now statistically speaking, 50% are back in prison within three years. That’s a real problem. There’s not enough being done. So again, the outreach to the average person to convince them that this is something that is in their best interest. Is it from a standpoint of morality, Yavar? Is it from the standpoint of political correctness? Is it the standpoint of religion? Or is it from the standpoint of just it’s in your self-interest, it’s in your best interest from the standpoint of tax-paid dollars and your own safety, to support these sort of programs? What’s the message?

Yavar Moghimi: Right. Each audience is going to have a different way that you can target them. But I do think to get the broadest appeal in terms of the message, I think a big part of it does have to come down to you feeling safe in your community. In one of our … Dwayne Betts, who’s one of the folks in our movie and he’s a Soros Justice Fellow, a previous ex-con who then is a poet and writer now. In our movie he talks about we know that we lock people away, but we don’t know what the product is that’s coming out of that. And I think that’s an important piece. We’re putting people away for crimes that they committed, and the assumption is that somehow they are being rehabilitated in the process. And if they’re coming out and they’re coming out safe for our communities.

Len Sipes: Does anybody really believe they’re being rehabilitated in prison? The surveys that I’ve seen is that most people don’t know and most people don’t care. That’s part of the problem in terms of communicating. And we have three communicators who specialize in this topic. So tell me, is it that the public doesn’t care? Not that they’re callous human beings, but they have so many other things on their plates. Greg.

Greg Upwall: I was going to say I think most people will sort of respond to the issue of their own safety and their family’s safety within their communities. And also the issue that this is something that their tax-payer dollars are paying for, the prison system. And we, time and time again, found individuals who had had access to educational training programs, books in prison. This isn’t to say they were on some sort of a holiday, or being served at luxuries. But the basic, you’re there, you’re serving time, what are you going to do while you’re there. And it became for us pretty clear that those who had had access to those things, certainly did better by them. And so it became a question of how do you use those incarceration dollars most effectively.

Yavar Moghimi: Or even those that … and one of the centerpieces of our movie is the DC Central Kitchen which is a culinary job training program in the DC area. A lot of the folks they work with are ex-offenders. And to just see what they do, not only in terms of job training skills, but life skills, group therapy, substance abuse, they tackle a lot of the issues. And they have a very high success rate in terms of getting folks employed, keeping folks out of jail, keeping folks out of drug treatments.

Len Sipes: So all three of us agree they’re very, very powerful stories. All three of us agree to the ones who are successful, they are very interesting from a human interest point of view. All of us know that there are certain programs out there that can dramatically cut recidivism. I’ve got the three of you here. I’m going to keep hammering away. Gabriela, what’s the theme? Okay, now if we all know this, and we all understand this, and we all think wow, what a great topic from a journalistic point of view, from a human interest point of view, from a public safety point of view, from an effectiveness for your tax paid dollars point of view. What are we missing in terms of communicating that to the larger audience? There’s got to be a way. There’s got to be a way.

Greg Upwall: Yeah. I will say that while we’ve gotten a lot of awards for our films, they tend to be student film festivals. I would quickly say that we haven’t reached a mainstream audience.

Len Sipes: How do you reach the mainstream audience?

Greg Upwall: And I’m not sure we have the answer for that. But I do know that the messages that are being portrayed about the violence of prisons and things, that it is important, I think, to find ways to show the other side of that.

Len Sipes: How do we do that?

Greg Upwall: And so maybe it is a public service announcement. Maybe a series of campaigns. I think it’s finding engaged people, like ourselves, that want to take on these topics in a sensitive manner with … that are looking at more than just the sort of sensationalized way of portraying things.

Len Sipes: But we all get together and talk to the converted. That’s my only problem with this issue. It’s not going out and talking to the person who lives 20 miles outside of the city. Look, this is an issue that has a profound impact on any city in the United States. It’s an issue that has a profound impact on any city in the world. The crime and justice issue. If we can take 50% of these individuals and provide them with the services and they stay out of the prison system, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars saved. You’re talking about tens of thousands of crimes going uncommitted. You’re talking about something that is clearly what all of us want, yet … if I say cancer, people go, “How can I help?” If I say child abuse, people say, “How can I help?”

Gabriela Bulisova: Right.

Len Sipes: If I say offender reentry, they go, “Well, what about the children?”

Yavar Moghimi: This isn’t a problem that’s unique to criminal justice. I feel like there’s a tendency in general to put money in … and you think about healthcare. Spending money when people are already sick. Spending money when people need the emergency room as opposed to putting it up front for their preventative public health visits, you know, those types … this is a common sort of short-sightedness of a lot of bureaucratic processes where the money just isn’t put up front and it’s sort of an out of sight, out of mind mentality until all the people who are coming out of prison from the war on drugs are suddenly all back in society again. And what do we do with all these folks? I think there’s just a common problem of short-sightedness in general with a lot of these issues.

Len Sipes: Well here’s a work assignment for six months from now. Because [Ph] we’re redo this show six months from now by the way. Because you guys are my guinea pigs. What is the theme? What is the central message that we can communicate to citizens in general to really say, “Hey, you know what, it’s probably in my best interest to support these sort of programs for people coming out of the prison system”? That’s going to be your homework assignment. So when we reconvene, you’re going to say, “Hey, I came up with successful themes. This is what we need to say.” Right?

Greg Upwall: Sounds good.

Gabriela Bulisova: Sure.

Yavar Moghimi: Yeah.

Gabriela Bulisova: If I may, I would just say that again the topic is so massive, so abstract. And I think all of us grew up with that notion of incarceration bad, prisoners bad, felons bad. So I think the topic is so stigmatized and the people are so stigmatized that it’s going to take some time to actually remove that stigma of incarceration. And I think that’s where we can come in as filmmakers, as artists. We might not have the answers, but perhaps we can at least start to engage people in a dialogue.

Len Sipes: People ask me why I was doing this radio show today. And I said, “Because we in the bureaucracy aren’t going to convince anybody.” I said, “That’s either going to come from the offenders themselves, or it’s going to come from the artist community.” They’re the ones who are going to figure this out. We’re not. We’re bureaucrats. We’re government bureaucrats. We’re not terribly creative, we’re overly cautious, we’re going to be pressed. And the answers going to come from the offender community itself or from the artist community, because they’re the ones who are going to tell us, “Hey, this is the direction we need to go in.” Am I being patronizing, or does that have a thread of truth to it?

Yavar Moghimi: Well as you were talking about what are ways we can have this message heard, I think TV is so powerful in that way. And whether it is through a public service announcement … or I wonder how we could affect these shows that are sensationalizing being incarcerated. And realize that they’re having a damaging affect in society. Because I … there are –

Len Sipes: But they’re not going to go away.

Yavar Moghimi: They’re not going away, but there’s got to be a way to at least consult or have some sort of role in having a different message being told, too. And part of the internet and social media and things like that are also new, powerful tools to really spread that message too.

Len Sipes: Thirty seconds. Is it powerful to counteract the cable news shows? Is social media powerful enough to counteract the bad news that comes out from the morning newspapers or from television coverage or from the cable shows?

Greg Upwall: Well, whether it is or not, Leonard, my answer would be that that doesn’t mean we don’t keep pushing those messages. And I think that people do like positive messages at the end of the day. And we found some positive stories among these individuals. And those success stories need to be told.

Len Sipes: Well we’re going to bring you all back at a certain point. We’re going to talk about those success stories. Because we’re going to come up with some sort of PSA and it’s going to go national and you’re all going to get awards and it’s going to be powerful and it’s going to be influential. I know that in my heart. In any event, ladies and gentlemen, our show today has been on film and video on offender reentry. We’ve had three guests with us today. And one I’m going to try for … wants to get her name correctly, Gabriela Bulisova. Greg Upwall, Yavar Moghimi. Gabriela is studying portrait photography, journalistic photography the Institute of Documentary … oh, I’m sorry, that’s Greg and Yavar. She’s an instructor to Corcoran College of Art and Design. Gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com, it will be in the show notes. Greg and Yavar, they are graduates of the George Washington University Institute of Documentary Filmmaking. Again, they did the award-winning film Released to Life, which you can see on snagfilm.com. You’d go to SnagFilm and just search Released to Life, or go to Releasedtolifemovie.com. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your interest and comments. And please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

Filed Under: Reentry, Social Media Tagged With: film, Offender Reentry, video

Faith Based Programs for Offender Reentry

September 21, 2012 by CSOSA

Http://media.csosa.gov

Radio program at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/08/faith-based-programs-for-offender-reentry-us-department-of-justice-dc-public-safety-radio/

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen the issue for today’s program is faith-based partnerships. It is amazing as to how many people all throughout this country how many congregations are involved in helping people caught up in the criminal justice system. And the amazing success that they’ve had to talk about this issue. We have today Eugene Schneeberg from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It’s also part of a White House initiative, www.ojp.gov/fbnp. Eugene, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Eugene Schneeberg: Thanks so much for having us back, Len.

Len Sipes: Eugene, it’s really exciting because we just recently did a radio show … and oh, by the way ladies and gentlemen the reason why Eugene is late today is because he had a meeting at the White House. So you don’t get that excuse all that often except in Washington, DC — “Oh, I’m sorry I’ll be late for the radio show today because I have to go to the White House.” Give me a sense as to what faith-based initiatives are as they apply to people caught up in the criminal justice system.

Eugene Schneeberg: Sure. Well I would say that faith-based organizations play a critical role in cities and towns, municipalities all throughout the country as key partners with law enforcement because of their long standing in communities, the sense of credibility that churches, synagogues and mosques have throughout the country. They’re places where people can go when they’re in need of help. And so for decades faith-based organizations have been really involved in helping prisoners transition back successfully from incarceration, helping them with real practical needs, whether it was clothing, food, shelter, counseling. The houses of worship often times function as places where people can go when they need help.

Len Sipes: Moral authority, I think that for me is a key issue here because in the criminal justice system who has the moral authority? Both of us I think would pretty much agree that society polices itself. It’s not necessarily the criminal justice system that works; it is the moral authority of the larger society. To me nobody carries more moral authority in larger society than faith-based institutions. So if anybody’s going to have the authority to say, “Hey, you should be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing that.” It would be the churches, mosques and synagogues.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. I would agree with you. And additionally, Len, I just would add that many religious organizations have spun off parachurch organizations which are essentially the service delivery arms of the houses of worship. So many organizations have their own non-profit organizations that are specifically designed to provide these much needed services.

Len Sipes: Three hundred and fifty thousand congregations throughout the United States. Again churches, mosques, synagogues, 50% … according to your literature … of all volunteers in this country. Now that’s amazing come to think of it, 50% of all volunteers in this country are faith-based. That’s powerful.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. I think most, if not all, major religions have in their tenants the desire to serve, the desire to be there for the least of these. And so it’s definitely a strong motivator, faith is, and the desire to help those who are in need of help.

Len Sipes: Eugene, you have a unique story in terms of this whole faith-based initiative. One of the reasons that you gravitated towards this arena was that of your own background, correct?

Eugene Schneeberg: Absolutely, as a young person … Len, we talked about this on the last broadcast … but grew up not knowing who my father was, grew up in a very high-crime community. And it was really the faith community that was there for me, my local church, my pastor who played the role of the father that I never had. And I was able to grow my own maturity, grow in the faith. And I’ve seen firsthand in my life and also in the lives in the young people that we’ve served over the years, the power of when a community comes around someone who’s in need, it’s incredibly transformative.

Len Sipes: In a system it doesn’t have a lot of good news stories … the criminal justice system at times can be downright depressing … we have high rates of recidivism in this country. About 50% of all offenders say after three years are back in the prison system, two thirds are re-arrested. You take a look at these numbers and those of us that deal directly with people under supervision, there comes a point where you say — well this is something a Public Safety Secretary said to me years ago. He said, “Leonard, are we just spinning our wheels in terms of the high rate of recidivism?” And the faith-based community basically says, “No.” Because they embrace this individual coming out of the prison system. Maybe nobody else wants him; maybe his own mother doesn’t want him. So he either ends up in a gang on the street or he ends up in a gang for good. One of the two.

Eugene Schneeberg: Well, I might need to steal that from you. A gang for good, I think you know, again in many religious traditions, there’s a tenant of forgiveness, of grace, of redemption. And so it makes a lot of sense. I think also in many of our criminal justice institutions, whether it’s parole, probation, the courts or our prisons and jails are just overwhelmed. And as a result of that, oftentimes they just don’t have the resources necessary to provide all of the services that are needed for someone that’s trying to rebuild their life. And so faith-based organizations are in a strategic position where they can come along side and help to catch those who fall between the cracks and not try to replace the criminal justice institutions, but really come along side then partner with them.

Len Sipes: I’m part of the criminal justice system. Why should anybody listen to me? There’s something powerful when a person comes along, he’s not being paid for it … I’m being paid for what I’m doing today … he’s not being paid for it, she’s not being paid for it, comes along and embraces this person … now I do want to emphasis as I always do when I talk about the faith-based program is that they are not allowed to try to convince these individuals coming out of the prison system. They’re not allowed to try to convince them to partake in their religion. They are specifically told not to do that. But if I’m there and if I’m by myself and I’m alone and somebody reaches out their hand to me and says, “You don’t have to come to church but why don’t you come … I mean to a church service … but why don’t you come to our church. Let us find out what it is you need in terms of food, in terms of clothing, in terms of going on a job interview, maybe we’ve got some connections, maybe your child needs some daycare. Come to us and let us discuss your issues. And maybe you want to open up and tell us a little bit about your life and who you are and what you are.” That’s profound. Either they get us, the stodgy old criminal justice system who’s seen everything and there’s a certain point where we lose our enthusiasm. Or you get this genuine human being who’s reaching out their hand to you. That’s such a dramatic difference.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. I think there are some limitations in terms of scope of responsibilities that say a probation officer has. They have a kind of narrow focus. And their job is to monitor and supervise. And often times that person from the faith community, whether it’s a mentor or an advocate of some sort, has a different goal in mind. And has perhaps their goal is to see that person restored or to some sense of wholeness and also to support their families. And so again,faith-based organizations are key partners. I just think about here at DOJ, through our Second Chance grants, there’s a category funding for mentoring. And that’s available for non-profits and faith-based organizations. And in I think it was 2011 I think we got well over 1,000 applicants throughout the country, many of whom were faith-based organizations. And we could only fund a fraction of those. But I think it was just an indication of the outpouring of level of interest and activity that’s going on in faith community. Likewise we held a webinar at the beginning part of this year and it’s available to see and hear on our website on faith and community based approaches to reentry. And we had over 2200 registrants Len. We set a record for the Department of Justice.

Len Sipes: That’s amazing.

Eugene Schneeberg: And so that, I think, sent a message that said faith-based organizations, non-profits … and law enforcements particularly interested in this. I hear from so many police chiefs –

Len Sipes: Oh, sure.

Eugene Schneeberg: – wardens, decision makers within the criminal justice system that say, “Hey we want to work with the faith community”. Maybe we don’t know how, but there’s a desire to do that on both sides of the coin.

Len Sipes: Well this is an old tradition that goes back decades. When I was in law enforcement, if somebody was in a jam but he wasn’t a threat to public safety, but he was a threat to himself, we’d gather up the responsible people in that particular community and always the faith-based part of it … there was always a faith-based component. There was always a priest. There was always a minister. There was always a rabbi. There was always an imam. There was always somebody there that we grabbed in terms of intervening in the lives of that individual. So the law enforcement have been reaching to the faith community. It may not have been known back in the 1970’s as a faith-based initiative, but that’s what it was.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think in law enforcement there’s a recognition … you hear this all the time, it’s almost become cliché … where they say we can’t arrest our way out of the problem. We can’t incarcerate our way out of the problem. And so there’s a recognition that tough on crime oftentimes isn’t the answer. It’s better to be smart on crime. And in being smart on crime, that means that pulling together all the stakeholders in the community, not only the faith community but the non-profit sector, the business community, et cetera. And I think the faith community would be wise to likewise recognize that they can’t do it alone. You can’t pray your way out of this situation. There needs to be these authentic partnerships across the board that cut across silos.

Len Sipes: I do want to remind the listeners that we do have at the court services an offender supervision agency, a faith-based program involving some 500 places of worship. You just sit down with these individuals who have been through the faith-based program. And you talk to them about their successes. And you talk to them about their challenges. And to a person … I always ask the same question … what would happen if the faith-based program was not there when they came out of the prison system, to a person. No exceptions, to a person they would say, “I would either be dead or back in the criminal justice system.” That leaves me profoundly moved when you have that level of interaction. I’m not going to suggest that this happens to everybody. I’m not going to suggest that this happens to 50%. I’m going to say that there are significant numbers of people who credit their lives and their wellbeing to the faith community, and if the faith community wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be here.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. Len, and I think that’s what led to the creation of the faith-based office. President Bush felt strongly about that and created the White House Faith-Based initiative. And President Obama feels very strongly as well and that’s why he expanded the responsibilities of the faith-based office in 2009 when he came into office.

Len Sipes: Now what your office does is basically to coordinate with clergy of religious organizations, criminal justice organizations, neighborhood organizations throughout the country to try to really prompt people to consider being involved in faith-based initiatives. It doesn’t necessarily mean criminal justice. It could mean criminal justice, but there’s endless arenas that are quasi-criminal justice where the faith community can reach out to people in need, correct?

Eugene Schneeberg: Sure. And so I get this question a lot, Len. There are 13 satellite offices throughout the Federal Government all coordinated by the central White House Faith-Based office. I head up the faith-based office at the Department of Justice. But there’s one at Agriculture, the VA, SBA, Labor, HUD, HHS, all throughout the Federal Government. Each of which work to strengthen partnerships with faith-based and secular non-profit organizations with the missions of their agency. So at DOJ we do concentrate entirely on criminal justice issues but which includes mentoring, delinquency, prevention, victims, a lot of things that you might not traditionally think of.

Len Sipes: For information about our program by the way www.csosa.gov, www.csosa.gov, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. I’m going to give out the website again for Eugene Schneeberg’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It’s also a White House initiative. www.ojp.gov/fbnp, Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. Eugene, how do we get people involved that may be sitting on the fence? Somebody listening to this program right now either at a church, mosque, synagogue and they say, “Well gee, maybe we should be participating in this effort to help people come out of the prison system. We have individuals who maybe they have a background here. A long time ago they were caught up in the criminal justice system and now they’re doing fine. But, boy, they would make great mentors.” How do we convince them to get off the fence and really consider this?

Eugene Schneeberg: Well, I would say first off thanks for plugging our website. But I would encourage your listeners to go ahead and go to the website and subscribe to our e-blast that goes out. We send out regular updates of activities that we’re doing, partnership opportunities and highlighting best practices all throughout the country. On our website you’ll find a number of different I think very practical, very useful step by step tool kits guides for faith-based organizations along different lines, whether it’s mentoring, whether it’s working with prisoners, whether it’s youth violence prevention, whether it’s responsible fatherhood activities. They’re all on our website. And also feel free to email us at partnerships@usdoj.gov.

Len Sipes: Partnerships@usdoj.gov.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. Also folks can feel free to give us a call at area code 202-305-7462, that’s area code 202-305-7462. Len, we really have a open door policy. We love getting calls from people with questions all throughout the country everyday, people that want to get involved. And so I would say as a first step you could talk with your local police department. Many times there’s Crime Watches. There are city wide steering committees, and I think the law enforcement would love to have more participation on the behalf of the faith community.

Len Sipes: But do you agree … and I’m pretty sure you do, I think this is a softball question, but I’m going to ask it anyway … but do you agree with this sense that we within the criminal justice system, we within government, we’re somewhat limited compared to the average person out there? If somebody’s caught on the fence, if somebody’s involved in crime, if somebody is drifting over towards that side of the equation that’s going to get them into a jam, somebody’s now doing drugs, somebody’s now stealing, somebody is now doing a little hustling on the side, they’re moving in this direction. It strikes me that ‘we’ within the system have limited abilities to persuade this person not to … somebody from the neighborhood, somebody connected to a church, mosque, synagogue that they would have far more power than we would in the criminal justice system. Not just to help a person coming out of prison, but to persuade a person to move in another direction.

Eugene Schneeberg: Well, a couple responses, one I think law enforcement, if we’re talking about police in particular, they have a job to do. They need to keep us safe. And thank god for police officers. I have a brother who’s a police officer. And so nobody wants a community without any police, it’d be chaos. But they’re not social workers. And they’re not equipped to do much of the work that non-profits, social service organizations do. But on the other hand to your point, oftentimes if it’s someone that does have kind of is in the street life or the criminal mentality, often times they’re viewed as having an adversarial relationship with law enforcement. And so the fact that someone from the faith community can come alongside someone particularly like you said as a volunteer, not being paid to do so, and there’s obviously more of an opportunity to create the authentic relationship. And like you mentioned the moral authority. There’s a moral voice to it that says, “You can do better. We’re here to support you. There is hope. There is another way.” And that’s incredibly powerful.

Len Sipes: The other thing about it is that churches will come together as a group to deal with a wide variety of neighborhood ills. So it’s not just a church or a mosque or a synagogue, it’s the group of them. It crosses religious boundaries. That’s the thing … when I see a church, a Baptist church and a mosque and a minister and an Imam standing there side by side with a priest addressing neighborhood ills, there’s just something about that that says okay there’s hope. There’s hope for us within the criminal justice system if we could marshal that sort of power.

Eugene Schneeberg: You’re absolutely right again. You see in cities throughout the country alliances, collaboratives where communities speak as one voice. And it’s incredibly powerful, particularly when you’re talking about advocating for a particular issue like preventing violence or like stopping mass incarceration or banning the box or some of these other issues that we see today. So that idea of folks working together, that there’s power in numbers is incredibly important. And we see that in ministerial alliances in other examples as well.

Len Sipes: Because just last week we had a discussion in this studio with a group of filmmakers. And there were three videophotographers. They were all award-winning individuals. They had won some rather prestigious awards, all three of them. Dealing with films and still photography, dealing with the subject of reentry. And I kept hammering away at them what is the magic formula for reaching out to the larger community? Sometimes I think we in this business speak to the already converted so many times. And that unless we reach out to the larger community beyond the already converted, we’re not going to get that terribly far. The example I gave last time was that 80% of offenders caught up in the criminal justice system have histories of substance abuse according to data, ten percent get drug treatment when they’re in a state prison. So the overwhelming majority of people who need drug treatment aren’t getting drug treatment. Okay if I’m off by five percent or ten percent, the overwhelming majority still aren’t getting drug treatment. The reason for that is that we haven’t convinced the larger society that these are programs in their best interest. But wouldn’t the average person out there see the faith community as in their best interest? Wouldn’t the average person say, “Well I may not care for whatever reason, I may not care about a person coming out of the prison system. But I do care about “the church”, or the faith or the synagogue?” So doesn’t this strike you as being a way of enlargening the pool who are supportive of programs for offenders caught up in the prison system coming out of the prison system by doing it through the faith community?

Eugene Schneeberg: Well, I think you’re right. I think a lot of people get informed as part of their religious expression, whether it’s through weekly announcements or from the pulpit directly. And so it’s incredibly powerful when leaders in the faith community take up this issue, take up issues of justice. And we see that being done in all faith’s traditions. And so you’re right, there’s an opportunity there to reach a population that might not be traditionally tied into some of these criminal justice issues. And so we meet with regularly groups of faith leaders that come together across denominational lines, across religious ideologies but are concerned about similar issues. They’re concerned about reentry, they’re concerned about mass incarceration, they’re concerned about employment barriers. And they come together with a collective voice representing, oftentimes, thousands, if not millions, of congregants in some of these larger denominations. And they speak with a pretty powerful voice.

Len Sipes: I think that I’m just … in terms of this last radio show that I did with filmmakers at a radio show that we’re doing today, it just struck me. They’re talking about doing a national public service announcement. And it just struck me that … and I was pounding away at them in terms of what’s the theme. What would you say to the non-converted? What would you say to the average person? And it just struck me then maybe the PSA should be somebody representing Catholicism, somebody representing the Protestant churches, somebody representing Islam, somebody representing Judaism coming together at the same time within the frame and saying, “This is something that you need to support. It’s not only in your best interest, but it’s what God commands.” I remember from my religious upbringing Jesus didn’t say you have an option about dealing with people in the prison system. I remember Him saying it was a command to go into the prison system. Now I don’t expect anybody to be going in the prison systems. But it really was a command from my religious deity from Christianity that this is something that I had no choice about. It’s something I had to do.

Eugene Schneeberg: Yeah. I think some people feel that it’s more than an occupation, that it’s a calling. And I think there’s large organizations that focus on what we call prison ministry, the work is done behind the walls. And then there are organizations particularly over the past ten years that are becoming more sophisticated and recognizing that not only is there a need to meet the spiritual needs of individuals behind bars through Chaplaincy and other types of prison ministries, but really there’s an overwhelming need to provide those services when people come out to help them find jobs, help them get back into school, housing, supportive services like you mentioned for substance abuse and the like.

Len Sipes: We have about five minutes left. What is the future for the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships? Again, it’s Department of Justice, it’s a White House initiative, it’s within all federal agencies. So where do you go to from here? Is it just a matter of continuing to do exactly what we’re doing now and put out the call?

Eugene Schneeberg: Sure, Len. Well since the last time we were on your show we did roll out our website, which we think is a great tool to reach people throughout the country. Our subscriber list is growing daily. On our website we have three webinars that have been extremely well attended. We had one on faith and community-based approaches to prisoner reentry, faith and community-based approaches to responsible fatherhood, and most recently we had one on faith partnerships with law enforcement. So I encourage folks to go on our site, check out those webinars. We’ve also worked closely with our colleagues at the White House to help put on a Fatherhood Heroes events throughout the country. It’s part of President Obama’s fatherhood and mentoring initiative. Where we’re going around the country catching dads doing the right thing. It’s far too often we hear about all the negatives associated with father absence and dads not being around. We wanted to go around the country and lift up examples of every day dads sticking it out, being there for their children, being there for their families. And so we started off in DC, then we went to Los Angeles and Orlando and most recently we were in Texas. And we hope to continue to take the show on the road so to speak. We’ve also hosted events at the White House called Champions of Change events. We’ve recognized leaders in the fields of youth violence prevention, of fatherhood. We hope to have a reentry Champions of Change at the event at the White House sometime in the fall. We’re rolling out a tool kit for faith-based organizations on how they can get more involved in various criminal justice efforts. Again we continue to work with cities throughout the country on the national forum on youth violence prevention helping cities to set up comprehensive youth violence prevention plans.

Len Sipes: Which a big effort on the part of the Attorney General.

Eugene Schneeberg: Absolutely. His leadership in that space is critical. And additionally we also help to support the Attorney General’s interagency Reentry Council, where he’s called together his colleagues, several cabinet members. And I think at this point we’re up to about 20 federal agencies that are all looking at the issue of reentry through their unique lens. Agencies that you might not ordinarily think of when you think about reentry, but groups like the IRS, the Office of Personnel Management, all trying to identify ways to reduce barriers for formerly incarcerated individuals, increase public safety and save the taxpayer dollars.

Len Sipes: Well I’ll tell you it’s, once again, I keep repeating the same things and that’s one of my favorite topics within the criminal justice system. We did just finish a television show for our audience that will be coming up on our website. Again, www.csosa.gov, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. It’ll be up on the website in about a month or so. And I do want to give time to go over slowly a lot of the numbers that you gave out today. So it’s the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It’s a White House initiative. www.ojp.gov/fbnp. And I’m going to let you give out the telephone number, it’s 202-

Eugene Schneeberg: 202-305-7462.

Len Sipes: 202-305-7462. And that’s partnerships@usdoj.gov, partnerships@usdoj.gov in terms of email. And you’re one of the very few bureaucrats that I’ve ever met in my life who’s basically said, “Contact me.” Getting a federal bureaucrat to give out their email address is pretty rare. They don’t ordinarily like to do it. And you’re saying, “Hey, call me, email me, go to our website, we’re accessible.” That’s the kind of guy you want to be.

Eugene Schneeberg: Well you know I take my lead from my boss at the White House, Joshua Dubois. And really the Faith-Based offices are designed to be kind of open door to the government. Yeah, to the government which can be quite complex and so we just want to be a servant and we want to be of assistance to the community.

Len Sipes: Well and again a lot of people say that. A lot of people — again, I spent 42 years in the criminal justice system, how many times have I heard a bureaucrat say I want to be a servant to the community? But I’ve never heard of anybody giving out their phone number and their website address. So any final things to wrap up? You’ve got about 30 seconds.

Eugene Schneeberg: Sure. Well, I just again appreciate you having us again and please check out our website, email us, call us. We just think that this is a critical issue. It’s a critical time in our country where the numbers of folks coming home from incarceration are unprecedented.

Len Sipes: Seven hundred thousand people ever single year are coming out of federal and state prisons, 700,000.

Eugene Schneeberg: One of the stats that really motivates me is a stat out of the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, which indicates that roughly about 14 young people are victims of homicide every single day in this country. So there’s much work to be done and appreciate you, Len.

Len Sipes: Oh, I appreciate you being here, Eugene. Ladies and gentlemen this is DC Public Safety. Our guest today, Eugene Schneeberg, U.S. Department of Justice Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Again, a White House initiative. Ladies and gentlemen, we really do appreciate all of the contacts, the emails, calls and for suggestions in terms of improving the program and sometimes even criticisms. We’ll take them all. Feel free to contact me directly at Leonard, L-E-O-N-A-R-D .Sipes, S-I-P-E-S at csosa.gov. I am the Senior Public Affairs Specialist for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency here in downtown Washington, DC. And have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

Filed Under: Faith-Based Initiatives, Reentry Tagged With: Faith Based, Offender Reentry

Women Offenders-CSOSA Reentry Reflections 2013-DC Public Safety Radio

Housing and Offender Reentry-The Urban Institute-DC Public Safety Radio

What Works in Offender Reentry-The Urban Institute-DC Public Safety Radio

Faith Based Programs for Offender Reentry

Recent Posts

Bookmarks

Pages

Archives

Categories

Meta