http:\/\/twitter.com\/lensipes<\/a>.<\/p>\n[Audio Begins]<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 I’m your host Leonard Sipes back after a three-month hiatus due to flipping a motorcycle and being injured, and finally back to doing weekly radio programs.\u00a0 For those of you who have been kind enough to inquire, \u201cWhere you been, Len?\u201d\u00a0 Well, that’s where I’ve been.\u00a0 I’ve been laid up telecommuting and away from the microphones, but we do have a really interesting show today, ladies and gentlemen, on pretrial.\u00a0 The whole concept is measuring what pretrial does, and so pretrial agencies, both in Washington DC and throughout the country can do a better job of pretrial supervision.\u00a0 We have two experts with us today.\u00a0 Spurgeon Kennedy, he is the director of research analysis and development of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia.\u00a0 WWW.DCPSA.GOV .\u00a0 I’ll be giving those website addresses throughout the program.\u00a0 Lori Eville, the correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections, and the National Institute of Corrections is part of the Bureau of Prisons, US Department of Justice, WWW.NICIC.GOV , and to Spurgeon and to Lori, welcome to DC Public Safety.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Thank you Len.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville: Yes, thanks for having us.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 And welcome back.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Thank very much.\u00a0 Spurgeon, the first question is going to go to you.\u00a0 There’s a lot of people out there in the criminal justice system who listen to this program on a regular basis, and they’re going to know exactly what pretrial is, and they’re going to know exactly what jails are, but there are people from mayors offices or citizens or community organizations that listen to this program and they’re not quite sure what we mean by pretrial.\u00a0 What is pretrial supervision?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well, simple answer is that pretrial services agencies help their local jurisdictions meet the requirements their state bail laws.\u00a0 Most bail laws across the country have a presumption of release for most defendants except those charged with capital offenses or very serious crimes.\u00a0 Pretrial agencies across the country help assess the various levels of risk that these defendants present and offer appropriate releases supervisions conditions that meet those risk levels.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Now you do know because I’ve been to community meetings.\u00a0 You’ve been to community meetings throughout our career.\u00a0 You go into community meetings and somebody says, \u201cHe got arrested, and he was back on the street in six hours, and that’s wrong.\u00a0 You know, he did a crime, and he’s back in the community.\u00a0 What gives with that?\u201d\u00a0 And the point in all of this is it not that people who are arrested are considered innocent until proven guilty.\u00a0 Until a judge or a jury finds them guilty and sentence has been pronounced, so up until that point, technically, that person is a “innocent” person, and somebody’s got to make an assessment based upon two things, whether or not he or she is going to return to trial on their own with supervision or with bail or with some other arrangement, or B, they’re a risk to public safety.\u00a0 So do I have – is that summation correct?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Yeah, you’re absolutely right.\u00a0 There’s a huge difference between a convicted defendant and a pretrial defendant, and what we deal with on the pretrial level are those persons who are still considered to be innocent or presumed innocent until that point of disposition.\u00a0 What we’ve found over the last decade, especially when you look at the risk of defendants who are released back into the community, and certainly that’s a legitimate concern.\u00a0 Public safety is always a concern for anybody in the criminal justice business, but what we have found is that defendants by and large who are released pretrial present a low to medium level of risk of failure to appear or to commit another offense while on supervision, so by identifying this risk and offering supervision levels.\u00a0 Pretrial agencies across the country actually help their jurisdictions manage that risk, and to make sure that defendants who are released are not presenting an overly concern to public safety.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And the last question before going over to Lori is the sense that people need to understand, I think, that it is literally mathematically impossible.\u00a0 There are tens of millions of arrests in the United States every year.\u00a0 There aren’t tens of millions of jail beds, so it is, even if we didn’t have the presumption of innocence.\u00a0 Even if we didn’t have a presumption of release on a pretrial basis, it’s mathematically impossible to keep all people arrested behind bars until trial, correct.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 You’re absolutely right.\u00a0 In 2010, the National Center for State Courts estimated there were 21 million filings of felony and misdemeanor cases across the country at local courts.\u00a0 Our jail population cannot support that.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 No, no.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 And the risk, again that most pretrial defendants present, and the laws that we live under really don’t allow us to consider jail first.\u00a0 So again, we need a system that identifies those defendants appropriate for release according to the law and those that should be detained pretrial, and that really is the basis of what pretrial programs –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And the final thing I did want to mention in terms of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, one of the things that I noticed years ago, is that you have an 88 percent return rate.\u00a0 The overwhelming majority of people on your case loads show up for trial.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 True.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And it’s a much higher return rate than the national average as measured by The Bureau of Justice Statistics, so first of all congratulations, on doing a very good job.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well, thank you.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Lori Eville, correctional program specialist for the National Institute of Corrections.\u00a0 What is the National Institute of Corrections, Lori?<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Well, the National Institute of Corrections, as you said, is within the Department of Justice, and it’s primary function is to the provide support to federal, state, and local correctional agencies throughout the United States.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Uh-huh.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 We do that through technical assistance, through education, an information center in which people can go to a vast library to get information that is particular to issues that they’re dealing with, and NIC is also a leader in developing policy and practices, and looking sort of a step ahead.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Uh-huh.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Of where corrections agencies and criminal justice agencies need to move or are moving, and give them support, and it’s really one of the primary purposes why NIC is interested in pretrial services because it is a distinct function within a criminal justice system, but it’s an essential contributor to the efficiency of a criminal justice system, as you said.\u00a0 Not a fiscal efficiency, but as well as a case processing efficiency.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well, we do have to talk about the fiscal part of it because the principle subject of my reading criminal justice literature newspaper articles and radio reports, television reports over the last two years is the fiscals, dire fiscal shape that states and localities find themselves in, so, you know, you just can’t lock up everybody.\u00a0 It is just mathematically impossible.\u00a0 It is fiscally impossible to lock up everybody, so one of the things that you did in terms of this report, and the report is measuring what matters from the National Institute of Corrections Outcomes and Performance Measures for the Pretrial Services Field.\u00a0 What you’re trying to do is to frame this whole concept of pretrial, to get everybody to measure what it is they’re doing so they can figure out how they’re doing and how they can improve.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 That’s correct, and it’s also distinguishing pretrial outcomes and measures from other criminal justices functions such as probation, jails, and we don’t have a document like this.\u00a0 We have these established measures for other criminal justice functions, but we don’t in pretrial and as front end of the system, functions are becoming more evident in their need.\u00a0 That’s why we sought to develop a consistent set of recommended outcomes and measures along with the definitions so we can get to comparing different jurisdictional functioning.\u00a0 Looking at nation averages, and then also focusing on those things that pretrial services should produce and that is appearance rates.\u00a0 That’s what a primary function was, a pretrial services should be, is that they have good appearance rates to court, and that they have good public safety records.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 Getting them to court.\u00a0 That’s the bottom line in protecting public safety.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 That’s the bottom line in pretrial.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Before you go on, I do want to mention, the National Institute of Corrections is the place where the rest of us go to get information.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 I mean that’s the, you know, I’ve been involved in the criminal justice system for 42 years.\u00a0 I’ve been doing public relations for 30.\u00a0 I’ve been doing corrections for 20, and it was interesting that when I first became a public affairs officer for a large agency in the State of Maryland that had corrections he as well as laws enforcement, as well as the fire Marshall’s office, as well as lots of other agencies, I realized that I didn’t have any formal training as a public affairs director, and the first thing NIC did was to put me in Boulder, Colorado for a couple weeks of training.\u00a0 All throughout my career, when we said we needed research, or we needed funding, or we needed to look at this issue, we picked up the phone and called the National Institute of Corrections, so I want to thank you in terms of my own experience, and my own criminal justice career.\u00a0 I’m not quite sure how, if a lot of people know the National Institute of Corrections.\u00a0 WWW.NICIC.GOV, but a certainly thank you to NIC for all the help that you’ve given me, and the agencies that I’ve represented throughout my career.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 So we’re going to get back to larger issues in terms of measuring what matters.\u00a0 The average person is going to sit back, and he’s going to listen to this program, or she’s going to listen to this program, and they’re going to say, what are we talking about?\u00a0 This is 2011 we’re, you know, I thought you guys were doing this for decades.\u00a0 We in the criminal justice system, Spurgeon, don’t do a very good job of measuring things, do we?\u00a0 I mean most of the criminal justice agencies have a hard time coming to grips with measurement, correct?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 It is, unless you’re a nerd like me, talking about numbers and measures will put you to sleep as quickly as anything.\u00a0 Here’s the thing though, and you’re right, we’ve been very slow to come to the table.\u00a0 Businesses across the world have used outcome and performance measures almost since the mid 50s.\u00a0 This is something that just became popular within criminal justice in the mid 1990’s.\u00a0 1995, in fact, the American Probation and Parole Association along with the National Institute of Justice put out what I think was the first article about outcome and performance measures or if the probation field.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Uh-huh.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 That was followed by a larger publications looking at outcome and performance measures for the entire criminal justice system that NIJ did.\u00a0 So it’s really been since the mid 90s that this whole ideas of measuring what you do, especially measuring against what you have out there is as your mission and your goal has become popular within criminal justice agencies.\u00a0 Pretrial programs, as Lori mentioned, are just getting into the idea across the country, of measuring their performance and knowing what that performance ought to be.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Before the program, we sort of set the stage for this.\u00a0 When the state of Maryland took over the Baltimore City Jail was my first real exposure.\u00a0 I mean as a former police officer, I’d been in and out of jails.\u00a0 I’d been in and out of booking situations.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Professionally maybe.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Professionally, yes.\u00a0 Thank you for clarifying that.\u00a0 But I mean spending a lot of time within a jail, wow, what a chaotic setting.\u00a0 You’ve got thousands of people being arrested.\u00a0 They’re moving in the institutions.\u00a0 They’re moving out of the institution.\u00a0 It’s chaotic.\u00a0 It’s dangerous.\u00a0 You’ve got people who are high on some sort of substance.\u00a0 You’re processing them.\u00a0 You’re booking them.\u00a0 You’re making decisions in terms of who to keep and who not to keep.\u00a0 It’s a very chaotic, loud, noisy situation, and I sat there as people made decisions based upon instruments as to who they’re going to let go on bail.\u00a0 Who they’re going to let go on pretrial supervision, who they’re going to let go on their GPS or home monitoring, and, you know, we’re not talking about a business offices where it’s nice and quiet and sedate.\u00a0 We’re talking about a very loud noisy chaotic place, and in that very loud noisy and chaotic place, we’re making decisions that could have an impact not just on public safety, but as to whether or not that person returns for trial.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Uh-huh.\u00a0 That’s a wonderful point that you bring up because when we put this document together, and now the folks who helped us draft it, or the people who actually did draft it are the Pretrial Directors Network of NIC.\u00a0 One of the questions that came us is can you measure performance if you don’t have the things in place to make that performance happen?<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 For example, if you are screening defendants for release consideration, if you aren’t using a validated risk assessment…\u00a0 Something that takes into account factors that have been shown my research to be related.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Uh-huh.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 The failure to appear and re-arrest.\u00a0 Can you really make this measure?\u00a0 And so part of what we’re trying to do with the measuring what matters document is to say to pretrial programs out there, you have to adopt good business practices.\u00a0 It’s not just putting a number and a target out there.\u00a0 It’s also sayings, we need to have in place the things that will make us meet these targets and do a job, and so that validated risk scale that helps you identify who the good risks are, who the bad defendants who need to be incarcerated pretrial are.\u00a0 You have to have those things in place so that that was something that was very much a part of this document.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Lori, we’re going to go over to you for a second in terms of talking about that risk assessment instrument, but amazingly, we’re halfway through the program.\u00a0 These programs go by awfully quickly.\u00a0 Spurgeon Kennedy, director of research, analysis and development for the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, is our guest, WWW.DCPSA.GOV, an 88 percent return rate here in the District of Columbia, one of the highest in the United States.\u00a0 Lori Eville, correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections of the US Department of Justice is our other guest, WWW.NICIC.GOV.\u00a0 Okay Lori, so we’re going to go over to you in terms of talking about instruments.\u00a0 I’ve been in the system for 42 years.\u00a0 This whole concept of an objective series of measurement has always confused me.\u00a0 It’s not my background.\u00a0 It’s not my forte, but it’s bottom line seems to be from the criminological community, from NIC, is that we really can, through objective instruments, objective questions, figure out who\u2019s a danger to society.\u00a0 Who\u2019s not.\u00a0 Who\u2019s a danger as to whether or not that person is going to return for trial?\u00a0 Who\u2019s not going to return for trial.\u00a0 These instruments give us a lot of information about that individual, correct?<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 That’s correct, and it gives us objective information that has a body of research or tested, so that we can make statistical probabilities of whether this person will appear in court or they\u2019re a public safety threat, if you will.\u00a0 You know, I liked your, what you said about jail being this chaotic place in which you’re having to make these very difficult decisions around release, and I think one thing that objective validated risk, assessment tools do for people working in jails and pretrial programs is that they serve to provide some objectiveness to sort of coral this chaos so that people are not left to think own subjective thoughts around a person’s risk.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right, right.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 And one of the things that often I think are misunderstood around validated assessments is that we’ve given all of our discretion to this piece of paper.\u00a0 That this piece of paper, these measures are telling us who’s safe and who’s not, and I think that what we need to understand is that it is a tool within the overall tool box to help make good sound release decisions that are in the public’s interest, and again to make the connection to the document.\u00a0 If we then have local measures and systems set up, we can then see if in fact we are making good decisions on release.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Just a point of clarification, either one of you can come in on this.\u00a0 We create these instruments and we do this analysis in this noisy chaotic overcrowded place, and then that information is presented to a Commissioner, an Officer of the Court, and he or she uses that recommendation based upon that instrument to decide whether or not that person is released or kept.\u00a0 If the person is kept, generally speaking, in most states, you have twenty-four hours to present yourself before a judge, and the judge reviews the evidence, reviews the case, and then makes another decision as to whether or not you’re kept or released or the conditions of the release.\u00a0 Do I have that correct?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 So it’s not just us within the criminological community or us as correctional professionals, so it’s not us making the decisions.\u00a0 Basically what we’re doing is preparing the paperwork for the courts.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 We’re helping the court make a more informed decision about release and detention.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And in essence, to go back to what we did before measuring what matters in the National Institute of Corrections, WWW.NICIC.GOV.\u00a0 You can get the document there, is to basically guess.\u00a0 Is that fair or unfair?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 There has always been criteria that courts have used.\u00a0 There have always been criteria that pretrial programs have used.\u00a0 Up until recently, I think you can make the argument, and I would, that those criteria, may not have been related to failure to appear and re-arrest as much as we tended to believe.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But unless, Lori would say, that unless it’s a validated risk assessment instrument, a validated instrument uses the board, it’s still guessing.\u00a0 Now guessing may be an unfair term, but in essence, you know, without a validated instrument to guide us, it really is a matter of presumption, again.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well like to call that clinical assessments, but that’s still guessing.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Correct, yes.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 And with a we’ve found and there’s about 60 years of research on this, is that a good validated risk assessment beats clinical judgment about these decisions every time.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 It’s beyond a debate now.\u00a0 One of the things that I’ll put out there, and there’s an organization that would really be helpful for your listeners to know is the Pretrial Justice Institute.\u00a0 They have put out a couple of publications on the state of science in pretrial programming.\u00a0 One of them looks at risk assessments and recommendations, and it’s really a summary of risk assessment of research that has been done over the last ten, perhaps 15 years, and it shows you the common factors that have been coming out of these risk evaluations and shows you that the risk levels that have been coming out, and the factors that predict failure really are becoming common among a lot of jurisdictions, and it’s a good read for people who are really interested in what we’re finding out about risk.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well, let’s talk about those because the audience is going to want to know, well what are the findings?\u00a0 First of all there are a certain category of people who in all probability are going to be kept.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 You commit murder.\u00a0 You commit rape.\u00a0 You commit domestic violence.\u00a0 You’re going to stay in all probability.\u00a0 You’re not going to be released in pretrial.\u00a0 You’re going to be held in the jail setting.\u00a0 You’re going to be held in the jail setting, by the way, let me clarify jails.\u00a0 Jails are also places to hold people on a pretrial basis.\u00a0 They also are places where people serve short sentences.\u00a0 Prison is where they ordinarily serve sentences of a year or more, so within that jail, it’s just not pretrial people, it’s people serving short sentences so that limits the amount of beds that you have.\u00a0 I wanted to make that clarification.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 You also have people, excuse me.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 No, please.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Who are also waiting transfer to prisons.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: To prisons.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 In jails and that’s becoming a much larger population as state prisons becoming over crowded.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well, thank you for bringing that up because in a lot of states, it’s a very serious issue.\u00a0 I mean, 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent of your population could be people waiting transfers to state prisons because state prisons are crowded.\u00a0 Okay, so having said that, what are the other factors?\u00a0 Okay, so they’re predictive and after years of looking at this, we know that they’re predictive.\u00a0 What predicts a person returning for trial and not posing a risk to public safety, and I would imagine if he or she has family in the community, owns a home in the community, has a job in the community, that person, more than likely, is going to return for trial.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well, community information is not as correlated to failure as we believed.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Really?<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 In the early beginnings, that’s correct.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 In the early beginnings of pretrial programs, in the early 1960s, the risk classifications tools that were used relied very heavily on what were very middle class values.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 If you looked like me, and if I was middle class, and you wouldn’t be a risk to be released.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 What we’re finding is that a lot of the factors associated with risk are things such as prior failures to appear, substance abuse usage, mental health issues.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Okay, if you haven’t appeared, if you skipped your trial in the past, that indicates that you’re going to do it again.\u00a0 If you’re on drugs when you were arrested and have a drug history.\u00a0 That’s then a greater chance of not complying.\u00a0 I think I saw a statistic from Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia that there’s a huge difference in the success between those on drugs and those not on drugs.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Those who are nondrug users have much better failure – I’m sorry, appearance rates, and also safety rates.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 than those who are drug users.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 What are some of the others, either one of you?<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Well, actually your criminal history is one of them.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 So if you have convictions in the past, is that on one of them?\u00a0 The interesting thing you had mentioned about a home.\u00a0 That is another one that is not necessarily a predictor.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That’s interesting.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 And in fact some of the local validated assessments have actually taken that out.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That’s interesting.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Because they have not shown that they have a predictive quality to appearing.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That’s interesting.\u00a0 What else has a predictive quality?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well those are the big ones.\u00a0 I think there are about seven or eight that you sees in most of these validated studies, but the question for the local jurisdictions are, A, how do you define these factors.\u00a0 In Washington DC, for example, a prior failure to appear might be defined a little differently than other jurisdictions depending on how you get data from your court.\u00a0 The other is whether or not you weight these criteria the same.\u00a0 A prior failure to appear might be one of the main factors in my jurisdiction.\u00a0 It might be a lesser factor at other jurisdictions.\u00a0 So while we see these factors in most risk validation studies, how they’re defined, and how they’re weighted in the final assessment –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So one size is not going to fit all in terms of a measurement instrument.\u00a0 The measurement instrument could be looking at the same variables in Kansas City and San Diego and Washington DC, but yet be interpreted and applied differently.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Much differently.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Based on local culture, differences in jurisdictions, absolutely.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That’s interesting.\u00a0 So everybody – it’s not just one size fits all.\u00a0 Everybody gets to take a look at this and measure.\u00a0 But even with that measurement, there’s still a human being that says, I don’t like this outcome.\u00a0 I think the person should stay.\u00a0 I think the person is a flight risk, or a public safety risk.\u00a0 The person can override the instrument, correct?<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Absolutely.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 One of the performance measures in our measuring with [PH] Matters Peace, in fact, how often the pretrial program actually complies with their own wrist assessment.\u00a0 We suggest anywhere between a 12 to 15 percent override rate.\u00a0 If you find yourself in that range of overrides of risk assessment, we think you’re okay.\u00a0 Because you’re right, risk assessments tools, as great as they are, do not put all defendants in think proper risk places.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well I imagine it’s also going to be concerns regarding race, gender, income, and objective instruments sort of evens everybody out.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So if you’re suddenly making exceptions for, you know, 30 percent range for income, you get to ask the question, why?\u00a0 So the whole idea behind all of this is to generate data and ask questions of yourself as to why you’re getting the results you’re getting, and are people showing up for trial, and are we protecting public safety.\u00a0 It allows the individual jurisdictions to take a good hard long look at themselves and to improve.<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Exactly.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Absolutely.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And that’s the bottom line behind what NIC is trying to do across the board in materials of correctional tracking, is to take a good hard long look at yourself and improve.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 Correct, and you know, this actually – the document, one of the purposes, I mean there are many as we’ve talked about today, but NIC provides a training, as you said, in Colorado for new pretrial directors, and we’ve found that we had new pretrial directors that were being put into these departments and didn’t know really what should they be measuring.\u00a0 What were their guiding principles, and so it’s part of what NIC is also doing to help bring on new directors and shaping really how pretrial is functioning across the United States.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well, we’re just about at the two minute warning level.\u00a0 Any final thoughts?\u00a0 Any quick final thoughts?\u00a0 Spurgeon?<\/p>\n
Spurgeon Kennedy:\u00a0 Well, only that I really encourage not only pretrial programs, but also any policy maker, or any criminal justice practitioner to take a look at this document.\u00a0 It should show you how your pretrial programming should work in your local jurisdictions.\u00a0 It should help you determine what your goals and missions are and how to make sure that you’re doing the best job that you can in order to ensure public safety, and to help the court operate as efficiently as it can.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Lori, 15 seconds.<\/p>\n
Lori Eville:\u00a0 I would say go find the document, at the NIC website.\u00a0 Contact me.\u00a0 NIC is here to answer any of your questions or help assist your jurisdiction in getting the outcomes that they want.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Thank you to the both of you.\u00a0 Spurgeon Kennedy, director of research, analysis and development at the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia.\u00a0 WWW.DCPSA.GOV.\u00a0 Lori Eville, correctional programs specialist for the National Institute of Corrections for the US Department of Justice, WWW.NICIC.GOV, WWW.NICIC.GOV.\u00a0 The document we’ve been talking about today is called Measuring What Matters:\u00a0 Outcome and Performance Measures for the Pretrial Services Field.\u00a0 Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 We appreciate all of the comments that you give us.\u00a0 The letters, the phone calls, the emails.\u00a0 Please contact us, feel free to contact us with suggestions, programs, program suggestions, criticisms, comments, and if you please, everybody, have yourselves a very, very, pleasant day.<\/p>\n
[Audio Ends]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
See http:\/\/media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts. Radio Program available at http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/2011\/09\/national-institute-of-corrections-and-dc-pretrial-measuring-what-matters-dc-public-safety\/ We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http:\/\/twitter.com\/lensipes. [Audio Begins] Len Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 I’m your host Leonard Sipes back after a three-month hiatus due to flipping a motorcycle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audiopodcast","category-criminaljustice","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBoKk-bx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}