http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/2012\/01\/research-on-women-offenders-justice-policy-center-the-urban-institute-dc-public-safety-radio\/<\/a><\/p>\n[Audio Begins]<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation\u2019s capital this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 I\u2019m your host, Leonard Sipes.\u00a0 Our guest today is Nancy La Vigne.\u00a0 She is the director of the Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute.\u00a0 www.urban.org, one of the premiere nonpartisan research organizations in the United States.\u00a0 I think everybody at any level of government, federal government, state government, local government, has used research from the Urban Institute in terms of looking at whatever it is they want to look at.\u00a0 They have an extraordinary reputation and one of the things that I want to do is to focus on a program that they did.\u00a0 It\u2019s a piece of research called Returning Home: Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry which represents the only published empirical research with a good sample size looking at the statistical differences between the experiences of women versus men as they come out of the prison system thus the title of the show today is Research in Women Offenders.\u00a0 Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center Urban Institute.\u00a0 Welcome to DC Public Safety.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Thanks.\u00a0 It\u2019s great to be here.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 All right, Nancy, I said that you\u2019re nonpartisan, that you\u2019re extraordinarily well-known.\u00a0 None of that, there\u2019s not an ounce of exaggeration in any of that but from your lips, the Urban Institute does what?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 The Urban Institute was established in 1968 as a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization originally designed to evaluate the Great Society programs of President Johnson but it has since expanded to include both domestic and international work.\u00a0 We have 10 different research centers spanning education policy, health policy, tax policy, and of course I\u2019m the head of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute and within the Justice Policy Center we span a wide array of research from gang and youth violence prevention to courts and of course, prisoner reentry is one of the cornerstones of our research portfolio in the Justice Policy Center.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 You\u2019ve looked at law enforcement practices, correctional practices, heck, you\u2019ve even looked at cameras, speed cameras.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Ah, public surveillance cameras.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Public surveillance cameras.\u00a0 I mean, you\u2019ve looked at just about everything there is to look at within the criminal justice system.\u00a0 I always find it delightful when I have the opportunity to talk to you.\u00a0 But this particular piece of research, Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry, you\u2019re talking about a piece of research, and for the layperson out there, there\u2019s all sorts of research, some good, some bad, some empirically correct, some not empirically correct.\u00a0 What you have is a large piece of research, and you\u2019re talking about several jurisdictions where you take a look at men and women coming out of the prison system to establish the differences between their experiences.\u00a0 And one of the things that is, I think, extraordinarily important from your research is the fact that there is a huge difference in the experiences of women and men coming out of the prison system.\u00a0 Empirically, women have a greater degree of substance abuse, a greater degree of mental health problems, they don\u2019t have the economic training of the job training\u2026<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 You\u2019re stealing my thunder here.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry.\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry.\u00a0 This is profound.\u00a0 There is a profound difference and I\u2019m not quite sure everybody realizes this.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 Well, let me start a little bit by explaining the impetuous behind the larger study called Returning Home because at the time we launched it, which was now several years ago, there weren\u2019t a lot of studies that looked beyond what we call recidivism so there would be researchers who looked at people who were released from prison and determined what percentage of them ended up being returned to prison, and with the available data they had, which was mostly administrative records from the Department of Corrections, they were able to say, \u201cwell people who were sentenced for these types of crimes or for this length of time were more less likely to return to prison.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s what I call recidivism studies, but no one had really done a reentry study, understanding that reentry is not a point in time.\u00a0 It\u2019s a process, right?\u00a0 So no one had conducted the kind of study that looked at all the different aspects associated with reentry success and failure, and the only way to do that is to interview people behind bars and track them in the community after they\u2019re released and interview them in the community as well.\u00a0 So much of the data that helps us explain reentry success or failure has to come from the people who are experiencing reentry.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Sure.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 So that\u2019s why we decided to launch Returning Home.\u00a0 It was a tremendous effort.\u00a0 It involved four different states and, of course, in one of the states, we did look at women exiting prison.\u00a0 Actually two because in Maryland we did a pilot where we did a small sample of women there.\u00a0 We ended up looking in Texas because Texas had such a large volume of all kinds of prisoners leaving that we could get a sufficient sample size of women in a relatively short period of time.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 The second largest correctional system in the country.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 But what we learned in Maryland about women in our pilot study, it was similar to what we found in the Houston sample and rings true when I have conversations both with women who have experienced reentry as well as service providers who are supporting their successful reentry.\u00a0 So I think there\u2019s a lot to be said about the experiences of women that perhaps is understudied because when we think of reentry we look at the numbers and we see that the vast majority of people leaving prison are male.\u00a0 And while this is true, it\u2019s also true that the share of women behind bars has increased at a greater rate than that of men over time so even though they\u2019re a small population, they\u2019re an increasing population and their experiences are different, as we\u2019ll discuss, in ways that I think have relevance for the development of reentry programs that may often be overlooked if you\u2019re only looking at a male population.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Now, in no way shape or form am I going to try to create a sense of sympathy or justification for crimes committed.\u00a0 If you do the crime, you do the time.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s the prevailing wisdom in so many jurisdictions throughout the country.\u00a0 But women offenders are not only different from male offenders in terms of their experiences when they get out.\u00a0 Tell me if I\u2019m right or wrong.\u00a0 Feel free to criticize me if I don\u2019t get it correctly.\u00a0 Most women offenders before they go into the prison system have multiple histories of abuse by somebody.\u00a0 In my mind, so many of the women offenders that I\u2019ve been in touch with throughout my now 30 years in corrections, were tragic figures.\u00a0 I mean, they suffered immense abuse, sexual abuse, rape is not uncommon, not only by people who they know but, in many cases, family members.\u00a0 To me there\u2019s no wonder that the rates of substance abuse are higher, that the rate of mental health problems are higher because they come from such violent backgrounds and there is a huge difference between the violence that they encountered in their younger years versus males.\u00a0 Am I right or wrong?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 I would say that you\u2019re right.\u00a0 I mean, certainly women who end up behind bars have extensive histories of substance addiction and mental illness that are very difficult to disentangle from their personal histories of sexual victimization.\u00a0 And it\u2019s hard to know which came first, but you can understand how they\u2019d all be interrelated.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Most of the women I\u2019ve talked to tell very tragic tales.\u00a0 We\u2019ve had many women offenders before these microphones and they have told for public airing their experiences, and you just feel as if you\u2019ve just gone through a hugely emotional experience after interviewing them.\u00a0 A lot of times after the program I said, \u201cDo you really want this to go out on the air?\u00a0 You have the choice.\u00a0 I won\u2019t even put this out.\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cDo you really want to be that honest and that brutal about your background?\u201d and a lot of them, to a person, they\u2019d say, \u201cYes.\u00a0 I want to this to go out.\u00a0 I want to talk about this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 I imagine in some regards it\u2019s cathartic and also I think that a lot of women want to share their stories to shine a bright light on this issue and help people understand better that, yes, they may have committed crimes but there\u2019s a bigger story to be told.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And that bigger story, generally speaking, is not told, correct?\u00a0 I mean, one of the things that\u2019s astounded me in my years within the criminal justice system is how little this story is told.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if we\u2019re afraid to confront the massive amount of abuse, and in many cases, flat out child abuse in terms of the families that these individuals come from.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s right.\u00a0 I\u2019m certainly no expert on child abuse specific to women who end up being in the criminal justice system but I expect that\u2019s right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But before we get into the points of your research I just wanted to sort of set a stage in terms of the fact that if people are wondering why there\u2019s such a difference in between men and women coming out of prison, it\u2019s my contention, you don\u2019t have to respond to this, it\u2019s my contention that it has much to do with the environments that they came from before they went into the prison system.\u00a0 I was reading in your report where there were two responses from men and women in terms of getting out.\u00a0 One was, \u2018I want to control my own life.\u2019\u00a0 That was men.\u00a0 And women, \u2018I want to reunite with my children.\u2019<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Oh, it\u2019s actually a little bit more colorful than that.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Oh, go ahead.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 So we, in the interviews that we had with people prior to their release, we had a question at the end which survey designers would call an open-ended question so we didn\u2019t give them the answers.\u00a0 We invited them to come up with their own answers and it was, \u2018What are you most looking forward to after your release?\u2019\u00a0 And literally, and I\u2019m not exaggerating, the most common answer among men was, \u2018Pizza.\u2019\u00a0 And second to that, \u2018Calling my own shots.\u2019\u00a0 And the single greatest, by a long shot answer among women was, \u2018Reuniting with my kids.\u00a0 Seeing my baby again.\u2019\u00a0 And it really speaks to different priorities as well as potentially different support systems.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 The majority of women getting out of the prison system have children.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen stats up to 80 percent.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So when they come out, not only do they have to deal with a higher rate of substance abuse, not only do they have to deal with a higher rate of mental health problems, they\u2019ve got to figure out some way to find work.\u00a0 Then they have less of a work background than men and they have to reunite with their children and somehow support their children.\u00a0 That stacks the odds against women offenders to a degree that it almost seems impossible that they can accomplish all that.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 It definitely makes it more difficult for women.\u00a0 When we compared women to men in our Texas study, we found that they were twice as likely to end up back behind bars than their male counterparts and clearly these challenges that are great for anybody leaving prison but to know that they\u2019re even more extreme for women.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 They were twice as likely to return to Texas?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That\u2019s amazing.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That\u2019s truly amazing.\u00a0 And do you think that the stats that you came up with in terms of your own research provides a bit of that explanation?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yes, for certain.\u00a0 Particularly when it comes to substance abuse.\u00a0 Women were more likely to engage in substance abuse following their release and we knew already that they had more extensive histories of addiction.\u00a0 It\u2019s very hard to address addiction behind bars.\u00a0 Especially if you have a treatment program that doesn\u2019t continue in the community.\u00a0 The research is very clear in that regard and so even if you have the best intentions and you do get access to treatment behind bars, if you don\u2019t get in the community and you\u2019re susceptible to all these temptations you\u2019re more likely to use and those who are more likely to use are more likely to end up back behind bars.\u00a0 The things of it is, though, what we found in Texas and it\u2019s hard to know how much this rings true in other locations, but in Texas we found that women were less likely to have access to substance abuse treatment even though they had much greater histories in addiction levels.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 It seems as if, again I don\u2019t want to go overboard with this, I talked about what happened before prison.\u00a0 Now we\u2019re talking about what\u2019s going on inside a prison and the research focuses on leaving prison.\u00a0 They have greater histories of substance abuse, mental health issues, but they do not have the same opportunities that many male offenders have.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 To have treatment behind bars.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Again, it just seems that the deck is continuously stacked against women offenders.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 But it has real implications for a policy in practice just to know that you can make a difference by giving these women more access to services and treatment behind bars.\u00a0 It\u2019s huge.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Absolutely it\u2019s huge.\u00a0 The research does indicate that not many people get any of these services at all within the custodial setting throughout the country.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Yeah, and we\u2019ve actually found that there\u2019s a high degree of mismatch between those who get it and those who really need it as well.\u00a0 It\u2019s a scarce resource that\u2019s not even well allocated.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And it should be allocated towards who?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Those in most need.\u00a0 The women.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 But the higher risk offender as well the women offender?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 I mean, if we\u2019re looking at you have a reentry program you want to look to medium and high risk because that\u2019s where you can make the biggest difference.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 In terms of going over your stats in Maryland, half the women we interviewed reported daily heroin use.\u00a0 Daily heroin use in the six months leading up to the most recent incarceration compared with slightly more than a third of men and half of women also reported daily cocaine use during that period compared with 22 percent of men.\u00a0 So we\u2019re not just saying that there is a disparity between use.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking about huge disparity with use.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 It\u2019s a huge disparity.\u00a0 Now, the heroin use statistics may be unique to Baltimore, which historically had a heroin \u2013 again, that doesn\u2019t seem to show any signs of subsiding but still you see the differential between the men and women and it\u2019s tremendous.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 From a policy point of view, where do we go with all of this?\u00a0 I mean, it\u2019s pretty abundantly clear that we are ignoring women offenders.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read somewhere along the line that women do better in treatment programs than male offenders.\u00a0 Considering the fact that they\u2019re 80 percent, I think, this is the figure that I\u2019ve read, so just say somewhere between 60 and 80 percent, have children.\u00a0 This means a lot to society to provide these programs because we can take them out of circulation, out of the criminal justice system, if they do better in treatment programs than men and all those kids suddenly have a source of income, they have their mom, they\u2019re being taken of.\u00a0 There are huge ramifications from a societal point of view in terms of your research.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 I would agree with that.\u00a0 I\u2019d also clarify a point that sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around because we talk about children, we think that they\u2019re minors.\u00a0 They\u2019re children, right?\u00a0 But actually when we dove deeper into the issue of support systems for both men and women when they were leaving prison we looked at family support.\u00a0 And we asked people, \u201cDo you have someone in your life who is there for you, who supports you, who will provide housing for you, support you financially, etc.?\u201d\u00a0 And we were heartened to learn that women did almost as much as men.\u00a0 They reported roughly the same degree of family support.\u00a0 But the sources of support are very different.\u00a0 For men, it was usually either a senior, maternal figure in their lives: a grandmother, an aunt, or a significant other, a partner, sometimes a sister.\u00a0 For the women it was typically their adult children.\u00a0 So when you talk about children, actually a lot of these women have adult children.\u00a0 If you look at the average age of release, it\u2019s something like 34, 35 years.\u00a0 Maybe a little bit older for women than men.\u00a0 And they have adult children of their own who they are relying on to support them.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Good point.\u00a0 Good point.\u00a0 Thanks for the clarification.\u00a0 I do want to get onto the issue of family support and I do want to get on to the issue of the difference between men and women when they come out dealing with that level of family support.\u00a0 But let me reintroduce you to, ladies and gentlemen, Nancy La Vigne.\u00a0 She\u2019s the director of the Policy Justice Center, the Justice Policy Center, I\u2019m sorry, for the Urban Institute here at Washington DC, www.urban.org.\u00a0 So as family support is crucial for all offenders coming out of the prison system, your research shows that the greater the degree of family support while their incarcerated the better they do when they get out, correct?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Well, actually the greater the support post-release the better they do.\u00a0 However, that is predicted by more contact with family behind bars.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 If there\u2019s a continuous line of communication while they\u2019re behind bars, that paves the way for more communication, more interaction, more support, more cooperation when they get out.\u00a0 Most prisons are located literally hundreds of miles from the areas where these offenders came from.\u00a0 In the District of Columbia they all go to federal prison.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 That\u2019s right.\u00a0 Most of the women are housed in, I think it\u2019s in Pennsylvania, and some of them as far as Texas.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Texas, but they are spread out all over the place.\u00a0 But even in the 14 years when I worked for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, Hagerstown, Cumberland, the lower eastern shore, they were within the state but they might as well have been on the other side of the moon.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 In terms of transportation.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Cumberland is not easy to get to.\u00a0 From the Baltimore, Prince George\u2019s County areas where most of Maryland\u2019s crime occurs, I mean, it\u2019s quite a hike to get to some of these prisons.\u00a0 So they\u2019re isolated and they\u2019re far away, how do you maintain that level of contact when you\u2019re isolated and far away?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 It\u2019s very difficult.\u00a0 We did have a family component of our Returning Home study where we interviewed family members and discussed both the challenges of staying in contact with their incarcerated loved ones as well as the challenges associated with welcoming them back into their homes and communities.\u00a0 And by far, the single greatest reason for not having contact with their incarcerated family members was the distance of the prison from home.\u00a0 Texas was unique at the time.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t allow phone contact for prisoners at all.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Really?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Which is stunning.\u00a0 So it was mostly letters.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 That\u2019s amazing!<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 I believe that has since changed, although in other states, other jurisdictions, you will hear complaints about the high cost of toll calls and it\u2019s actually attacks on the inmates and their families which I\u2019ve heard some correctional administrators justify as the only means that they can have to raise funds to provide programs and services, but it seems a little bit wrongheaded to create barriers to contact with prisoners and their family members just to generate resources to serve them.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost like you\u2019re doing \u2013 they go against each other, those two efforts.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 I think it\u2019s the state of Washington, and I\u2019ve read this just within the last couple of days, is they\u2019re providing video contact between offenders and family members and that struck me as being the best of all possible worlds.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 That\u2019s right.\u00a0 And they\u2019re looking into that for the DC felons as well and it\u2019s something that I would recommend as a great compromise given the distance.\u00a0 It\u2019s so disruptive to a family to set out to journey to a prison to see their incarcerated family member.\u00a0 Not just the actual distance or cost of gas but the nature of a prison setting is such that you never know when you arrive whether they\u2019re going to be in lockdown and there\u2019s no visitation.\u00a0 It could be either cancelled for the day or more likely what happens is they just say, \u201cWe\u2019re on lockdown.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know when we won\u2019t be on lockdown,\u201d so you\u2019re just waiting and wondering what to do.\u00a0 Often people bring children because they think it\u2019s important for the children to see their incarcerated parent and yet these environments aren\u2019t kid friendly.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 No, they\u2019re not.\u00a0 As somebody who\u2019s been in and out of a lot of prisons it\u2019s downright brutal.\u00a0 It really is for the family members and for the kids.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 So video conferencing is a great way to achieve that family contact that\u2019s so important in shoring up support on the outside.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Now in terms of employment, one of the things that we find is that, per your research, is that they don\u2019t have the same employment opportunities or backgrounds as males and they come out and that lack of employment and the lack of skills really hurts them upon release.\u00a0 I mean, it just keeps going on and on and on in terms of disparities between males and females.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 And that\u2019s right.\u00a0 It\u2019s no surprise when you consider that if women have more extensive histories of substance addiction they\u2019re going to have more spotty employment histories so they\u2019re already going into it at a disadvantage.\u00a0 Certainly after release they\u2019re less likely to find employment.\u00a0 Even those women who do find employment end up earning less than males at about $1.50 less per hour than their male counterparts.\u00a0 And I know I feel like a broken record on the substance addiction issue, but to me I know a lot of people say the key to successful reentry is finding a job.\u00a0 And I always say, \u2018Is it really?\u2019\u00a0 Because what good does it do to find a job if you haven\u2019t dealt with your addiction issues.\u00a0 It\u2019s just giving you resources to go and buy drugs and continue your habit and soon enough you\u2019re not showing up at work, you\u2019ve lost your job, you\u2019re committing crimes to buy drugs and you\u2019re back behind bars.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Or your mental health issues.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Most of us these days, and I say us, you and I, Leonard, are really immersed in this issue of prisoner reentry talk about a holistic approach.\u00a0 You can\u2019t really just tackle prisoner reentry by looking at one thing.\u00a0 Certainly, employment is critical.\u00a0 Especially for women you need to look at it holistically.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well, I mean look, just the differences on employment between males and females where 38 percent of men had jobs lined up.\u00a0 17 percent of women had jobs lined up before leaving.\u00a0 In the prison system 61 percent were employed upon leaving, men.\u00a0 37 percent of women were employed upon leaving the prison system.\u00a0 Obviously, the stats show, and I don\u2019t want to beat this point to death but I don\u2019t want to leave it alone either.\u00a0 The disparities between men and women are huge.\u00a0 I go back to the same thing I said before, they do better in programs than men.\u00a0 They have a better track record.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 I think I know why.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Go.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 I think it\u2019s because, one of the findings we had in comparing men to women is their expressions for need for help.\u00a0 And, now granted, we\u2019ve already given a lot of examples of why women should need more help, but they\u2019re also more willing to say, \u201cI need help.\u201d\u00a0 So that\u2019s a different kind of an attitude entering a treatment program knowing that you need help and admitting it readily and I think that makes you more open to receiving it and benefitting from it.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 I did one year of jail, or job corps, where the younger individuals were given the choice by the court, go to job corps or go to jail.\u00a0 70 percent of the women that I encountered were wonderful compared to maybe 30 percent of the men.\u00a0 Now, that may just be my own internal bias but the women that I encountered said to themselves, \u201cI\u2019m in a jam.\u00a0 Job corps can give me a skill, give me the tools, it can relocate me if necessary.\u00a0 I want to reunite with my kids.\u201d\u00a0 The women were by far my best students.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Well, you just referenced reuniting with children and getting back to that topic, clearly women have a bigger stake in making good on the outside because of their ties to their children, whether they\u2019re grown children or not.\u00a0 Certainly, if they\u2019re minor children they have even more of a vested interest.\u00a0 And we even found that among the men in our research, those who had stronger ties to their minor kids did better on the outside.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Everybody does better on the outside\u2026<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 More likely to get a job, more likely to stay out of prison.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 They have the motivation.\u00a0 And it\u2019s the kids and family that provides them with that motivation and it\u2019s the contact that they have while in prison that builds that bridge to that motivation.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Make no mistake, just having a child doesn\u2019t give you that stake.\u00a0 What we don\u2019t know well, although we know some from our research, is what those relationships were like before the incarceration.\u00a0 So in some cases, including in the case of women, they had very little if any contact with their kids because they were on the street.\u00a0 Someone else is caring for their kids and had been for some time now.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But the idea of being in prison and having the opportunity to contemplate who they are, where they are, what\u2019s important to them, where they want to go, most of the individuals I\u2019ve met within the correctional system, that is the first thing that they express.\u00a0 That they express a) regret for everything that\u2019s happened, and b) they really have this burning desire to reunite with their kids.\u00a0 I\u2019m not quite sure, quite frankly, that that burning desire is there with the men.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s not.\u00a0 There\u2019s been some more qualitative research in the U.K. looking at fathers and trying to get them more bonding with their children prior to their release that suggest that it\u2019s possible and that there are great benefits from doing so.\u00a0 But we\u2019re starting at a different place, I think, with men than with women.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 I think we\u2019re starting at an incredibly different place between men and women.\u00a0 Final couple minutes, if you\u2019re talking to the Mayor of Milwaukee, if you\u2019re talking to an aide to a governor in California, what do you say?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Well, certainly don\u2019t cut your reentry programs.\u00a0 We understand that financial times are very difficult right now and that it\u2019s easy to think about the things that people don\u2019t see as the easiest to cut.\u00a0 What to put on the chopping block.\u00a0 Are you going to close a prison or are you going to cut a program?\u00a0 I would argue keep the programs in place and look at those programs and think about whether they are truly catered to the people that you\u2019re trying to serve.\u00a0 In the case of women, I\u2019ve heard some people argue that you can develop reentry programs that are same for men and women and I think that there might be some truth to that but it doesn\u2019t acknowledge the different way women approach treatment, approach learning, and approach life.\u00a0 So programs that are more tailored to women who are leaving prison I think could really benefit them greatly.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 About 30 seconds left.\u00a0 Are women the low hanging fruit of the criminal justice system?\u00a0 Women offenders?\u00a0 Are they the ones who if you provided the resources would get you a good bang for your dollar?\u00a0 A good investment for your correctional dollar?<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 I don\u2019t know that I can say that.\u00a0 I think that because of their extensive drug addiction histories they\u2019re a tough population to deal with.\u00a0 Certainly, the benefits can be great but it might take more effort at the outset before you can see those benefits.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But if you have an impact with women offenders or offenders across the board it can save states, literally, tens of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Nancy La Vigne:\u00a0 Absolutely, and of course in the case of women, if you\u2019re supporting their successful reentry, you\u2019re also supporting their families and kids.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Nancy La Vigne, a director of The Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute.\u00a0 Thank you ladies and gentlemen.\u00a0 Thank you for being with us on DC Public Safety.\u00a0 Before we go, www.urban.org.\u00a0 It\u2019s the website for The Justice Policy Center for the Urban Institute.\u00a0 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us.\u00a0 Thank you for your cards, letters, your phone calls, your emails, your suggestions, your criticisms.\u00a0 We appreciate your participation in the show and have yourself a very, very pleasant day.<\/p>\n
[Audio Ends]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to \u201cDC Public Safety\u201d \u2013 Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts\u00a0on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system. We currently average 90,000 page views a month. The portal site for \u201cDC Public Safety\u201d is http:\/\/media.csosa.gov. Radio Program available at http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/2012\/01\/research-on-women-offenders-justice-policy-center-the-urban-institute-dc-public-safety-radio\/ [Audio Begins] Len Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation\u2019s capital this is DC Public […]<\/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":[23,4,21,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audiopodcast","category-criminaljustice","category-whatworks","category-womenoffenders","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBoKk-ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","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=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":760,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions\/760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}