Podcast appearances and mentions of David Kirk

Dr. David Kirk, Chief Medical Officer at Regard, discusses the role and benefits of real-time clinical AI to help clinicians navigate patient charts and find critical information to prevent medication management errors and misdiagnoses. The Regard platform can also generate proactive documentation, allowing physicians to complete their documentation more accurately and efficiently, reducing note-bloat and the need for after-hours charting. One key goal of using AI is to free physicians to spend more time on the art of medicine, directly working with patients.   David explains, "So, Regard with real-time clinical artificial intelligence software, is helping clinicians propose the right diagnosis and information while they're working in the chart. Our mission is to make patient care as clear as possible. At the same time, we make sure that the doctors are getting the support they need so they can better support the patient. The charts of patients are getting bigger and bigger every year because more and more data is going into the charts. And as that happens, the really important thing that we as physicians need to find is diluted." "Some research even suggests that maybe doctors are going to see 3% of the data that comes in in the chart when a patient comes into the hospital. As the physician, I'm trying to understand a patient's clinical story with only having access to three pages. Our goal is for artificial intelligence to find important information in that deep sea of data so the treatment team can make better decisions. Maybe you can correct the documentation. What that means is the physician is doing all the work in their natural workflow. We're not having to do prep work during downtime at home, and we're not trying to wrap up notes at night. We need the documentation to be done proactively in a way that is as accurate as possible for the patient at the time of care." #Regard #HealthcareAI #DigitalHealth #MedicalTechnology #PatientCare #HealthTech #AIinMedicine #ClinicalDocumentation #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalAI #PhysicianSupport Regard.com Download the transcript here

Dr. David Kirk, Chief Medical Officer at Regard, discusses the role and benefits of real-time clinical AI to help clinicians navigate patient charts and find critical information to prevent medication management errors and misdiagnoses. The Regard platform can also generate proactive documentation, allowing physicians to complete their documentation more accurately and efficiently, reducing note-bloat and the need for after-hours charting. One key goal of using AI is to free physicians to spend more time on the art of medicine, directly working with patients.   David explains, "So, Regard with real-time clinical artificial intelligence software, is helping clinicians propose the right diagnosis and information while they're working in the chart. Our mission is to make patient care as clear as possible. At the same time, we make sure that the doctors are getting the support they need so they can better support the patient. The charts of patients are getting bigger and bigger every year because more and more data is going into the charts. And as that happens, the really important thing that we as physicians need to find is diluted." "Some research even suggests that maybe doctors are going to see 3% of the data that comes in in the chart when a patient comes into the hospital. As the physician, I'm trying to understand a patient's clinical story with only having access to three pages. Our goal is for artificial intelligence to find important information in that deep sea of data so the treatment team can make better decisions. Maybe you can correct the documentation. What that means is the physician is doing all the work in their natural workflow. We're not having to do prep work during downtime at home, and we're not trying to wrap up notes at night. We need the documentation to be done proactively in a way that is as accurate as possible for the patient at the time of care." #Regard #HealthcareAI #DigitalHealth #MedicalTechnology #PatientCare #HealthTech #AIinMedicine #ClinicalDocumentation #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalAI #PhysicianSupport Regard.com Listen to the podcast here

Former All Black Dane Coles will sit on the panel charged with finding the coach to replace Scott Robertson. New Zealand Rugby has confirmed the 90-test veteran will join a five-man panel which also includes fellow former All Blacks hooker Keven Mealamu and NZR chair David Kirk. Sportstalk host D'Arcy Waldegrave explained further. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm a bit exercised about Scott Robertson, because I like him and I thought he was a good coach. His record at Canterbury spoke for itself. The trouble in this country is that we can't have a sensible conversation about All Blacks coaches, because so many of us come to it with myopic, emotional views driven by idiocy like geography and personality expectations that have nothing to do with the actual job. Hansen had pro and anti camps, as did Foster, and now Robertson. It all wastes too much energy. Also, we might just be a bit too energised because we're a small country with not a lot else to think about. In the NFL at the moment, there are nine head coach vacancies — after eight sackings and one resignation. Over a quarter of all jobs in the NFL are up for grabs, and that isn't unusual. As for the EPL, there's a sacking every second day. What I can't quite work out is this: when David Kirk says we aren't where we need to be at this point in the cycle, what does that even mean? Where specifically do we need to be? Once upon a time, when the All Blacks won every test as of right, we still didn't win the World Cup. So presumably, when we won everything, we must have felt in a good place. Also, how is it that Robertson is banned from going elsewhere? Not good enough to coach us, but too dangerous to ply his trade offshore? Apart from paying him to not work… I wouldn't have taken that deal. I also can't quite work out how much of this is player driven — and of that player feedback, how much is personal versus professional. How much responsibility does a player have for what happens on the field, as opposed to the coach? Back to the NFL — a bloke called Vrabel was sacked from Tennessee because they weren't winning. After he left, they still aren't winning. But the team he went to, New England, were hopeless until this year… they might be in the Super Bowl. So was that him? Luck? Or other factors? Someone always seems to have to pay the price whenever someone decides things aren't right. Which is the other weird bit: the All Blacks' winning record, in an increasingly competitive world, wasn't that bad. So why the panic? Loyalty, consistency, and longevity are all traits of value. But you have to recognise them. If you don't, you tend to make mistakes by going around sacking people with no real, obvious next step in place. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on the Sunday Panel, editor and journalist Jo McCarroll and resident economist at Opes Partners, Ed McKnight, joined in on a discussion about the following issues of the day - and more! The CTU is looking to ensure New Zealand establishes its own 'right to disconnect' laws. Do we think a change is needed? Shock among sports fans last week after All Blacks coach Scott Robertson was sacked. Are we in a crisis or is this the start of NZR getting back on track under David Kirk? Socks and jandals - fashion or just wrong? LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scott Robertson... gone as All Blacks coach. The “nuclear option” taken. The slate cleaned. The last two years consigned to history. Was it the right call to make a change? Yes. Board chair David Kirk talked about “trajectory” on Thursday. The All Blacks were not heading upwards, they had, at best, plateaued, and were in fact trending dangerously downwards. We were not more confident about the All Blacks at the end of 2025 than we were at the start of 2024. The signs of improvement were sporadic at best, overshadowed by doubt and confusion around tactics, around selection, around progress, around potential World Cup success. That's the sole filter through which David Kirk and Co. examined things and made their decision. Were the All Blacks on track? No, they were not. Has Scott Robertson suddenly become a bad rugby coach? No. But he clearly underestimated the enormity of the job and those who put him into the role overestimated his ability to do it. Razor's super-power is team culture, which he built superbly at the Crusaders, but consider how different that environment is. You have your players with you every day for six months. If you lose, you go again next week. And the scrutiny, while certainly robust, pales in comparison to the white-hot spotlight of the All Blacks, which has paralyzed many before him. It's unforgiving in its intensity, demanding in its 24/7 nature, and relentless in its scrutiny. Many believe they have what it takes. They go in full of bullishness, bright ideas, bravado, and boldness, only to come to the realisation, either quickly, or over time, that their feet aren't quite big enough for the enormous boots they've been assigned to wear. And they realise in hindsight, they displayed an obvious naivety about exactly what it is they'd walked into. There's a reason this team is talked about in the manner in which it is. This is the All Blacks – there's a legacy to uphold. A reputation to protect. A history to defend. A responsibility to carry. Not everyone can do that job – in fact, very few can. Scott Robertson took it on with every intention of enhancing the All Blacks' story. Of taking this team to new heights, of winning World Cups. But not everything you try on is going to fit, and sometimes it's better to find that out quickly so that you and your employer can move on. And that is now the question for the All Blacks. Move on... to what? Or more correctly, to who? Who has the tools, the knowledge, the fortitude and the resilience to take the job on and make a success of it? Not just a few years down the track, but almost immediately? There's no settling-in period, no gentle launch, no soft landing. There's a World Cup next year and the most gruelling All Blacks schedule ever in the next 10 months. Being able to coach scrums, line outs and back line moves is no longer enough, nowhere near enough for the enormous scope and complexity of this modern-day role. Among other things, you need international experience, the ability to assemble an effective support staff, the man management skills to keep the best players in the country happy even when they're not playing every game. And the charisma and communication skills to front the players, Super Rugby coaches, your bosses at New Zealand Rugby, the board, sponsors, the media and rugby fans. Who will come forward with the same bravery, the same courage in their convictions, the same confidence in their CV, and do what their predecessor could not? As the All Blacks often say, who will walk towards the pressure? And shine in its spotlight, rather than shrinking into the shadows? Who will accept this poisoned chalice and attempt to make it their holy grail? After what we've seen this week, who would want to? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I've done my best to avoid the headlines over the last few weeks, but Scott Robertson being booted from the All Blacks snapped me back. I feel for him. Just as I did for Ian Foster, last time around. These guys are in high profile jobs, coaching high performance athletes. All top coaches know it's a perilous business. But to be cut after just two years in the job, and after a period of inconsistent and occasionally poor but not absolutely catastrophic results, will leave Razor and his keenest supporters forever wondering what might have been. I don't have any inside running on the review or the process that led David Kirk and NZ Rugby to swing the axe. But it occurs to me that one of Scott Robertson's biggest errors was one of his first major decisions in the role, and I've been wondering to what extent it set the tone for his tenure. June 24, 2024. The All Blacks were preparing for their mid-year tests against England and Fiji, and Scott Robertson named the man who would captain the All Blacks. I was stunned when he made that announcement. I said as much on this show. Not because I don't think Scott Barrett is an incredible rugby player. Not because I don't think he's an outstanding leader and he isn't deserving of the All Blacks captaincy. But because for anyone with even a passing interest in the game and the team, there was a much more obvious candidate hiding in plain sight. Robertson said he had an established relationship with Barrett from their time at the Crusaders. Very well, but surely coaching the national team meant other factors should be prioritised? Surely getting the best was more important than sticking with what you know?! And surely winning the trust of the playing group begins with empowering their obvious leader? Captaincy carries different responsibilities in different sports. In cricket, it's a significant tactical burden. Every ball your team bowls, you're theoretically making a decision. In football, netball, and rugby, a little less. You're not setting fields or choosing bowlers. You have a game plan or a formation, but apart from the odd decision on penalties and a well-timed word to the ref, most of the game more or less happens in the moment. It puts a different kind of demand on leadership. One that is less overtly tactical, and focuses on the sort of person whose play, and behaviour will unite his teammates, inspire their play, and set a standard for the team. And come on, I say this as a lifelong Canterbury fan, does anyone in this country think Ardie Savea isn't that man? If you were picking 15 starting players for the All Blacks, in order of value to the team, there is surely not a single rugby fan who wouldn't pick Ardie first, almost every time. If you were picking a World XV, he's maybe the only current All Black who'd be a shoo-in. The man is an incredible physical force. He has a cool head. He's tactically as good as anyone else. And above all, he oozes mana. And the frustrating thing is, we can all see it. You can see it in the haka, or when he's charging with those high knees or winning a turnover. You can see it in the way opposition plays like Siya Kolisi embrace him. You can see it when a side like Moana Pasifika goes from averaging 12th place in its first three seasons to finishing seventh under his leadership, with more points than the previous two season combined. I think if we were to go back ten years, to the Whitelock-McCaw-Smith-Smith-Carter era, you could argue that our talent was so much better than in most other rugby playing nations, the captaincy perhaps didn't matter as much. But now that the World has caught up, it beggars belief that Razor didn't make Ardie Savea captain. That he didn't see the leadership and esteem that was jumping out of the television. And what message did that send to the team? I don't know what happened. But maybe Scott Robertson's mistake was that he thought by emulating his Crusaders setup as much as possible, he would replicate the success. But he needed to go further. He needed to take greater risks and forge new relationships. And I think that one decision had a huge, outsized impact. And now, having worked for so many years to win the job, just like that, Razor's opportunity is gone. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Driving back from the glory of Otamure campsite on Thursday and my phone started squawking and honking and whistling and buzzing like a fridge. Being on holiday still, kind of, I ignored it. I eventually acquiesced to its frantic whirring and beeping and pulled over to check out what the electronic cacophony was signalling. Bloody hell! Scott Razor Robertson had been given the Spanish archer. The El-bow. Stunned? Taken aback? Incredulous? D) All of the above. I'd rather this story broke on Tuesday before my first talkback shift of 2026, but I think this story has more legs than The Grand Old Duke of York's men, that's the old army, not the modern version, so we have plenty to talk about in the coming days, weeks, or months even on Sportstalk. My number one thought was this: is David Kirk the new Steve Tew? This sudden ejection of the All Blacks coach was decisive, without warning, and is a sign of where the power really lies at NZR, and it's not with the coaching staff or players. The buck stops at the top. It's their game, it's been poorly handled and that will not be tolerated. BOOM. DCM. Whether you agree with the guillotine drop or not, there's no coming back. The head is in the basket; no amount of glue or duct tape is reattaching it. That's leadership right there. That's Steve Tew. Love him or hate him, he was definitely the boss, and that's the path David Kirk has taken as the Chair of the board. No fannying about. No swathes of grey. No yeah nah maybe, which had become a hallmark of NZR in recent times. Firm, decisive. It starts at the top, and it's wonderful to see iron fist leadership returning to our national game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NZ Rugby Chair David Kirk joins Kathryn to discuss the state of the national game and the business that runs it. 

The company behind outdoor brands Kathmandu, Rip Curl, and Oboz is closing doors on 21 of its more than 300 global stores. KMD Brands chairperson David Kirk spoke to Corin Dann.

Another tough week for brick and mortar retail. Outdoor goods retailer KMD Brands, who owns the likes of Kathmandu and Rip Curl, has announced the closure of 21 stores across its network. It's making the move in an effort to turn around struggling sales and find $25 million in cost savings. Chairman David Kirk told Mike Hosking that it's a tough environment for all businesses, but discretionary retail is being hit hard. He says people have to buy food, and if a kitchen appliance breaks you have to replace it, but people don't have to go out and buy an insulation jacket, or a raincoat, or a wetsuit. “In difficult times, people hang onto their money.” LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealand Rugby has committed to Sky for another five years. Nearly every All Blacks match, including the 2029 Lions Tour, the new Nations Cup, and all matches in the Sanzaar countries will broadcast on Sky Sport. TVNZ has also secured NPC rights, along with a few Farah Palmer Cup games, which will be broadcast free-to-air on TVNZ+. However, the deal doesn't include five future All Blacks tests, yet to be named, which will be open to bidding when they are announced. Chair of New Zealand Rugby David Kirk joined the show to discuss the ins and outs of the deal. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the Weekend Sport with Jason Pine Full Show Podcast for 23rd August 2025, NZ Rugby has committed to Sky for another five years. NZR Chair David Kirk and Sky TV's Head of Sport Gary Burchett joined the show to go over the deal. Codie Taylor with become the 14th All Blacks centurion when he takes the field against Argentina this weekend. Two former teammates Wyatt Crockett and Matt Todd reflect on his journey. And Lisa Alexander offers an Australian perspective on the wave of Kiwi Netballers heading to Australia. Get the Weekend Sport with Jason Pine Full Show Podcast every Saturday and Sunday afternoon on iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive Full Show Podcast for Friday, 22 August 2025, Fonterra's agreed to one of the biggest ever deals in NZ business history. Chief Executive Miles Hurrell tells Heather why he's selling Anchor, Mainland and co for almost $4 billion. Police Minister Mark Mitchell explains how a big tech upgrade will allow first responders to find your location if they have concerns for your NZ Rugby chair David Kirk explains where you'll be able to watch the rugby next year after signing a new five year deal. Plus, the Sports Huddle debates whether the player exodus from the ANZ Championship will hurt NZ's netball futures. Get the Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive Full Show Podcast every weekday evening on iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SkyTV is set to broadcast every All Blacks' game for the next 5 years, and TVNZ will broadcast all 93 of the National Provincial Championship (NPC) matches. Chair of NZ Rugby David Kirk told Heather duPlessis-Allan that reaching this deal has been a ‘long, long journey.' ‘Both parties have worked hard, and I think we've got to a place which works for both of us.' LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anyone who thinks that Mark Robinson resigning from New Zealand Rugby today is a shock clearly doesn't follow rugby's dramas with their brain fully turned on. This was not a shock at all. Anyone could see this coming. This was coming the minute that David Kirk took over as the chair. Now, I don't want to be seen to be saying that David Kirk forced him out. It is, in fact, quite possible that Mark Robinson just read the room and left of his own accord first - but it was always going to happen, wasn't it? Because David Kirk is the new broom, and the new broom generally gets rid of things that aren't working. And unfortunately for Mark Robinson, that wasn't working. Now, I've got no hard feelings towards the guy. He seemed like a really easy bloke, but he has not had the most glorious 10 years, has he? When he brought in the Silver Lake deal, which has yet to bear any fruit despite all of the drama it caused - and boy, did it cause drama. He totally stuffed up the Fozzy situation when he tried to fire Fozzy and then didn't fire Fozzy, and then eventually did manage to get rid of Fozzy - but by then, we all felt really bad for Fozzy. And he persisted with the Super Rugby competition that isn't working. All he's really managed to do with it is tinker, and it still isn't really working. The finances are terrible. The game has maybe managed to arrest the decline, but nothing much else - and the rugby community is bruised after that Silver Lake altercation. If there is a lesson here, I reckon it may be that New Zealand rugby might want to replace Mark Robinson with someone who isn't a rugby man, or a rugby woman, whatever. Someone who isn't sentimental about the game, who can look at all of this business with fresh eyes and say: why is that happening? That shouldn't necessarily be happening - and have the courage to change it, because they don't actually care about rugby that much. Someone who can drive the change that rugby needs, because if there's one thing we all agree on, it's that rugby needs change. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Former All Blacks captain and newly appointed New Zealand Rugby chair David Kirk says maintaining player numbers remains the sports biggest challenge.

In this episode of the Urban Roots podcast, host Deqah Hussein-Wetzel sits down with two accomplished Cincinnati-based Black architects—David Kirk, President and CEO of DNK Architects, and Michael Burson, a longtime (now retired) architect who has worked extensively with Cincinnati Public Schools, and now serves as an owners representative for local architectural projects ---including the Robert O'Neal Multicultural Arts Center's (ROMAC) rehabilitation of the Regal Theatre in Cincinnati's West End neighborhood. Guests David and Michael expand on how and why they fell in love with the profession and what the road to licensing looked like for both of them. In a field where only 2.8% of licensed architects are African American, Michael and David are the definition of architects who opened doors. Being that Deqah worked closely with David and Michael to preserve the Regal Theatre and help Toilynn O'Neal Turner's vision of the ROMAC take shape, this episode also celebrates our shared success in securing BOTH Federal & State Historic Tax Credits, which supports monetary funding for the project! If you don't remember what the Regal Theatre is all about, you can go back to Juneteenth Cincinnati Short to learn more about the building's rich African American history.PS: On Saturday, March 29th, Deqah is moderating a 9 AM panel discussion with panelists Michael, David, and Toilynn at the 2025 Invest in Neighborhoods Summit titled, Rehabbing the Regal: Community-Driven Approaches to Black Cultural Preservation and Neighborhood RedevelopmentAnd a huge thanks to our episode sponsor, Hub+Weber, for helping us continue to promote equity in the built environment. Hub+Weber is a Cincinnati-based architecture firm founded in 1973 that does more than renderings and construction documents — they are creative problem solvers who understand that each project is more than just a building to their clients. Founded in 1973, this architecture firm has has a long legacy in Cincinnati's built environment. Urbanist Media thanks Hub+Weber for their continued support and for sharing our values in promoting equity within the built environment.Thank you to guests David Kirk and Michael Burson, and sponsors, Hub+Weber, who helped make this episode possible. This podcast is brought to you by Urbanist Media and is hosted by Deqah Hussein-Wetzel. Editing by Deqah, Connor Lynch, and Skyler Ficklin. Mixing by Connor Lynch. Our music is by Adaam James Levin-Areddy. Urban Roots is brought to you by Urbanist Media, a non-profit that preserves place through story. You can make a tax-deductible donation to us via Venmo or Paypal. Follow us on IG at urbanrootsculture. Drop us an email urbanrootspodcast@gmail.com

In this episode we speak with David Kirk about the gig economy (Uber; AirBnb) and how it relates to crime.  David Kirk is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and previously served on the faculties at the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Maryland. His research agenda is primarily organized around three interrelated themes: the causes and consequences of cynicism and distrust of the police and the law, solutions to criminal recidivism, and the causes and consequences of gun violence.

"The tax industry is a gift for people who want to learn and grow and be challenged. There's never going to come a day where you close volume two of the code and say, 'I figured it all out, I know what it all means now.'” Tony Nitti, Partner — EY National Tax   In this final episode of 2024, Tony Nitti shares his journey within the tax industry, emphasizing the importance of finding one's passion, investing in oneself and overcoming personal challenges. Listen as Tony shares his personal experience and practical advice for career growth and fulfillment in the tax profession.   What you'll learn from this episode:   ·       Finding Your Passion: The importance of identifying and nurturing your specific passion within the tax industry, whether it's the law itself, client relationships, or running a firm. ·       Invest in Yourself: The value of investing in your knowledge and skills by learning, writing, and teaching the tax law. ·       Overcome Challenges: Strategies for attracting and retaining talent in the tax industry by providing intellectual challenges and growth opportunities. ·       Try hard things: The benefits of overcoming fears of public speaking and using writing as a tool to communicate complex concepts and share your passion.   Resources S Corporation Shareholder Compensation: How much is Enough?, The Tax Adviser, August 2011 Note: This was the article referenced in the podcast written by Tony. In August 2012, it was the winner of The Tax Adviser's 2011 Best Article Award.   Transcript April Walker: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Tax Section Odyssey podcast where we offer thought leadership on all things tax facing the profession. Today, I'm excited to be here with Tony Nitti. Tony is a partner at EY National Tax and he's a frequent guest on the show. We were just chatting about we think this is maybe the sixth time he's been with us. We appreciate you being with us. Our topic today is not a techie topic. It is a soft topic, but I think an important one. Tony, you did a session at National Tax which was just a couple of weeks ago, on finding your passion in tax and it incorporated some technical topics. But today, we're just going to lean right into the finding your passion. I think we, as listeners, we just want to hear your story, tell us more about how you started and got where you are today at National Tax at EY, which is pretty impressive, I must say. Tell us more, Tony. Tony Nitti: It's good to be here with you, April. I will also say I admire your bravery, because like you said, we just did this National Tax a couple weeks ago, or at least a shorter version of it you just went charging full speed ahead and said, let's do a podcast before we get our hands on those evaluations. We might just be doubling down on a disastrous decision. April Walker: Never know. Tony Nitti: Nobody wants to hear, but that's not the hope. Obviously, the hope is that something here will resonate with people who are listening who maybe are just struggling to find their center and find their passion within their careers. But if it's all right with you, I always want to address what I consider the elephant in the room of the conversation like this before we get started. When we talk about this passion for tax, when we did it at National Tax, when we're doing it today, we're talking about a specific type of passion for this industry. What I mean by that is this idea that people are lured to the tax industry as I certainly was by a desire to live in and learn the law. Because we take one look at that tax law and we realize that it's something that's not solvable, and we want to spend our careers being challenged and being forced to grow and learning that law and apply it to our clients. But that's not the only passion you can have in a tax industry. This passion for law, you probably need to learn the law regardless of your passion, but I've met many people in my career who have a very different passion than me. People whose passion is client relationships, building a relationship that lasts for decades, other people whose passion would be to run a firm someday because they want to prove that accounting can be done differently. Those are extremely valid passions and we don't mean to discount them, but we're focusing today on a passion for the law. Learning and applying the law, and we're doing it for two reasons, I think. Number 1, at the AICPA, we're keenly aware of the challenges we have attracting and retaining talent. And specific to retaining talent, we just see all these good people at all levels of experience, leave the industry and as they're on their way out the door, they say, You know what, I got into this industry because I wanted to work in the law. I wanted to solve complicated problems for sophisticated clients and be forced to think on my feet. Instead, for the first four years of my career, all I've done is prepare the same 30 tax returns every year. I haven't seen anything new in 18 months, I'm bored out of my mind, I'm going to go try something completely different. That should never happen. It should never happen in this industry because the tax industry, it is a gift for people who want to learn and grow and be challenged. I think we've all been around long enough to know that there's never going to come a day where you close volume two of the code and say, I figured it all out, I know what it all means now. That day is not coming and so we should never lose people because they're bored, because they're not being challenged. But we do, I assume for two reasons. One is the reason we want to tell ourselves when things aren't going well. It's not to say it's not appropriate sometimes. But this is the reason we want it to be and we want it to be because we're not getting a fair shake. We're getting a raw deal. We work for the wrong firm or the wrong people, and we're not getting the type of work that we enjoy. That may be possible. If you're in a situation like that, the beautiful thing about the industry today is there's more change available to you than ever before. We're not tied into geographic regions. There are purely remote firms. You can change your situation in a heartbeat. But there's also a second possibility. That's a possibility that people don't want to embrace as much. But there's a possibility that we're not in a terrible situation, we just haven't let it be known to the people we work for, the people we work with, what we're passionate about. We haven't shown what's meaningful to us and proven to people that this is the type of work that I want to do. That leads to the second reason we're focusing on this specific type of passion for the law. That reason, April is I'm not Tony Robbins, I'm not a paid motivational speaker. The only thing I have to offer your listeners is my experience, and my passion for this industry, there's no two ways about it is rooted in the law. I'm not someone who has a passion necessarily for forging client relationships that last 40 years. I'm not someone who ever thought I would run my own firm. My passion is constant intellectual stimulation, growth, learning that law. The only thing I have to offer people until I become a paid motivational speaker someday and go through the five step training program is my life experience, what I've learned in this career. That's why I just want to address that because I feel bad. I can't tell someone with other types of passions how to reconnect with their passion in tax,  because I only know my experience at this point. But the hope would be that my experience can help some people because I am a good example of someone who got into this industry for a specific reason, like I said, this desire to learn and build expertise in the law. And then quickly went down the wrong path that so many of us do, and I arrived at a crossroads where I was ready to leave this industry four or five years in because I wasn't growing. I wasn't the person I wanted to be. I wasn't doing the type of work that lured me to this industry and I had to make a conscious decision at that point to say, if I'm going to stick it out in this industry, I am going to make what I'm passionate about the centerpiece of my career and hope that it pays off. That was, again, a proactive conscious decision, and it paid off in ways that I would have never seen coming because what I found is the more I showed people what I was passionate about, the more I made my passion the centerpiece of my career, the more the industry rewarded me with more of the type of work I was passionate about. We can talk about that process. But that decision being something that I decided to do proactively, I also ended up learning lessons later in my career that were taught to me that I didn't decide to do. That I learned the hard way, that had made all the difference as far as understanding, that in life, in our careers, it's probably best to leave no stone unturned. To try different things, to find out what you're capable of, what you might be passionate about, and just say yes to new opportunities. It's been a mix of making a proactive decision to invest in myself and we can talk about that. And then being taught through just the harsh reality of life that you're probably best served to say yes to as many opportunities as you can to just constantly move the goal posts on what you love and what you need out of your career to be happy. With that long rambling introduction.... April Walker: I think it's good. You don't have to convince me because I think some of the themes in your story will apply to a lot of people, even if, like you said, their passion is not necessarily your direction or whatever. Let's get into it. Tony Nitti: That would be the hope. Like I said, it's always uncomfortable because I only have my own experience to talk about, you end up talking about your own experience the whole time and you just sit there and go, why does anybody want to listen to my path? But listen, I didn't grow up dreaming of being a CPA, and I don't know that many people do. I didn't really have many dreams growing up as far as a career. The one thing I thought I would want to be was a writer. Because I love to read as a kid and I wanted to be a sports writer, but it's never something I took seriously. Because I decided at a very young age that I did not have anywhere near the talent necessary to be a writer, and so it's just something I never even pursued. But I went to college undecided as far as a major goes. The only reason I ended up an accounting major is because I told one of my college soccer teammates I was going to go to law school. And he said if you want to get into a good law school, be an accounting major. I'd never even considered accounting, and I don't even know if there's any truth to what he said. But I didn't want to go to law school because I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to go law school because I had no idea what I wanted to be. And I just thought I'd put off that decision as long as I could. I end up this accounting major by accident. But after I get through the cost accounting class and the microeconomics class and those types of things, I eventually land in my first tax class. I'm guessing that other people had a similar experience where I get introduced to the tax law and I say, now this might work for me. Because even though I didn't know specifically what I wanted my career to be, I knew that I wanted a career that provided an opportunity for constant challenge, constant growth. I wanted that feeling of going to bed every night a little bit smarter than when I woke up in the morning. To me, the idea of a death sentence was any career where after three months or three years or even 30 years, you've seen everything there is to see and you're just going through the motions. There's nothing wrong with a career like that, it just wasn't going to work for me. The first thing you see when you get introduced to the tax law, this stuff is hard. Hard is good, hard is what I want. We know that in common culture, the tax law is held up as this point of reference for something that's incomprehensible. Einstein once famously said that the hardest thing for him to figure out was the income tax. Sitting there as a 21-year-old kid, you're like, All right, if this was a challenge for Einstein, it's certainly going to kick my butt for the entirety of my career, and that's what I'm looking for. That's how I ended up choosing a career in tax and taking a job with Arthur Andersen. As I said before, this industry should certainly provide all the opportunities someone like me craves, that wants to grow and learn. You could even argue that if you are making your career in the tax industry, it's almost hard to not be passionate about your career if you're passionate about learning and growth. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. I am living proof of that April because pretty much as soon as I started my career, I fell into a very familiar trap. You take a guy who was lured to this industry by this desire to learn the law, and then you put him as a new hire at what was at that time, the largest firm in the world, Arthur Andersen. And pairing up with 25 other new hires. What happens. You get in that competitive environment and you say, forget that learning the law stuff. I have one singular focus and it is to move up the ranks as quickly as possible. To climb the ladder as fast as I can, because I will be damned if I am to let Sally make it to senior before me or Johnny make it to manager before me. That became the focus. That became the priority. How do I get promoted? That is largely based sometimes on just playing the game. Shaking hands with the right clients and being close with the right partners. And just making sure everyone knows what you want, when you want to get promoted, being the squeaky wheel. When you get promoted as senior, pushing your staff as hard as you can to meet deadlines. That's what I valued. That's what was important to me was moving up those ranks, and the thing is it worked. Now four and a half years into my career, I get promoted to manager at what is now PWC, not Arthur Andersen anymore because in the interim there, Andersen collapsed on itself like a dying star after the Enron scandal. Now I'm at PWC, and they promote me to tax manager, and it's supposed to be this cause for celebration. Because they say, you make manager in public accounting. It opens doors that aren't open at any previous level. You want to go make an extra 20, 30 grand and work at another accounting firm, you can do it. You want to go work in a tax department of private company and make some more money while working fewer hours, you can do that, too. Everybody's patting me on the back and they're telling me, this is an impactful day for you. It's a big day in your career. You can go anywhere and do anything now. The thing is, it wasn't just the biggest day to that point in my career. Looking back at it now a full 20 years later, the day I made manager at PWC was and is the single biggest day of my entire career. Now that I could leave you now on a cliffhanger like Dukes of Hazard. Remember, like, they would be launching off some jump, and they go to commercial and you don't know are they going to be okay? This was the biggest day in my career, April, and you probably wondering why? What was so big about? April Walker: Yeah, I'm wondering. Tony Nitti: I went home that night, and all, like, the pats on the back had ended. I'm sitting there, and it hit me like a brick wall. It was this realization that I was a fraud. I know that may sound harsh. I know there are people who are listening that may think you're just being unduly hard on yourself, but I also know there's people listening who are going to say, “I know exactly the feeling he's talking about.” What I mean when I say I was a fraud, April, is it dawned on me that I had just been promoted to tax manager at the second biggest tax firm in the world, and I didn't know a damn thing about the tax law. I didn't. April Walker: I'm sure you knew some stuff. Tony Nitti: Well, that's what everyone says, because they say, “How could you get promoted to manager if you didn't know.” I never have read a court case at that point in my life. I didn't know how the code was strung together. You know what I was good at? Do you know why I got promoted? Because I was good at following processes. April Walker: And competitive, a little bit competitive. Tony Nitti: But I could take the last year's work papers for the return I was doing and turn them into the current year's workpapers. I knew how to do that, but when I was doing that current year return. When I was adding back 50% of M&E, I wasn't doing it because 274(n) told me to. I was doing it because they did it last year. When I was asking the client, how much of your accrued liability was paid within eight and a half months? I had no idea it's because I was trying to apply the recurring item exception of 1.461-5. I was doing it because that's what they had done last year. April Walker: SALY, man. Tony Nitti: SALY. And I know people have shared this experience, but what hit me was that I had been so focused on those processes to get promoted that I had never actually bothered to learn much of anything about the law in which I lived every day. What was terrifying was the realization that I couldn't go anywhere and do anything. It was the exact opposite, April. I was a prisoner at PWC because they knew my limitations. They knew what I could do and couldn't do, and they were content to respond to my constant complaints about promotion by promoting me. But if I wanted to go somewhere else or think about what I had already learned four years into my career. I had learned the lesson that the largest firm in the world can disappear overnight. What if that happened again? And I had to go somewhere else. Could my resume get my foot in the door? Yeah, of course, I could. Would my undeniable charm possibly land me that job? I'd like to think it would, April, but then what after that? Because how long would it take my new employer to realize, Oh, we just hired a tax manager who can't think critically, can't research and solve problems in the code, can't provide planning advice for clients. You know what he can do? He can take last year's workpapers and turn them into this year's workpapers, and that's about the extent of it. I realized when I say I was a fraud, I realized that I had fallen into a trap of pushing so hard for promotion that I had gotten promoted to a level that I was not capable of delivering on. I hated that feeling. The reason it was the most important day of my entire career is because two things changed that day. Number 1, I said, no more am I going to measure my success in this industry by my pace of promotion or my pay rate. I'm done with that. Look what it's gotten me. I've gotten everything I've asked for and it's now made me miserable and terrified. From now on, I am going to reprioritize what attracted me to this industry, which was the law, the substance. I'm going to make that the centerpiece of my career. Whatever happens good or bad, I'm going to live with the results. But if I'm going to call myself a tax person, then I'm going to be the best version of a tax person that I can imagine being. To me that meant building technical expertise. The second thing that happened, and this is a part people aren't going to want to hear quite as much about. I realized that it was nobody's fault but my own. Of course, I wanted to blame PwC, but for what? They gave me everything I asked for. I showed them what I cared about. What I cared about was getting promoted. They promoted. It was not their job to feed me every piece of law I ever wanted to know when I hadn't prioritized that to them. They were trying to run a business and I helped them run a business. The fact that I hadn't learned what I needed or wanted to learn, that was on me. That's when I made the conscious decision to invest in myself. And April, it really was as dramatic a switch as I'm making it sound here. Four and a half years of my career, zero priority on my passion, learning the law. That day everything changed. The way it changed is, first things first, desperate times call for desperate measures. And I had a big gap between what I could do and what my resume said I could do. To solve that gap, I applied that day to the graduate tax program at University of Denver. Because I needed to be spoon fed tax law as quickly as I could. But as soon as I showed up in that program, what happened is I realized I had made the right choice in making this the focus of my career. Because I forgot how passionate I was about the law about learning and growing. Because now I'm sitting there in this class and they're feeding me the law and every day I am going to bed, a little bit smarter than when I woke up in the morning. And I'm saying to myself, this is what attracted me here, this needs to be the focus. Then the second thing is, I'm listening to these professors and I finally know what I want to be in my career. I don't mean a professor, even though that's a great gig as well. I just wanted that substance. I'm listening to them cite case law from 50 years ago, off the top of their head and reference private letter rulings down to the final digit. And I'm saying, I want to be able to do that, because one, that's where my passion lies, but two, I'm guessing if I can have that substance, I will never have to have this horrible feeling again of feeling like I can't deliver what I should be able to deliver. That just set me on the right track, but it didn't solve all the problems, obviously. This decision to invest in yourself, it's got to become a career-long process. I graduate from the program. I felt like the program really helped me bridge that gap, but I knew the process was just starting. Coming out of the program, the one thing I know for sure is that, yes, my one true passion in this industry is to live in the law. Let's be honest, we can argue about it, but you said in your intro. If you truly love working in the law all day and solving complicated problems for sophisticated clients, one could argue there's nowhere you can do that at a more regular level than National Tax group for a big Four firm. That was my dream job back in 2005, when I came out of DU, but it was never possible for me. The reason I say possible is because, look, if we had all the time in the world, we'd be talking about not just pursuing your passions professionally, but also personally. I am a guy that has a lot of passions from a personal perspective. From the time I was 16-years-old, I knew that I was not going to be a happy adult unless I lived in a mountain town where I could be on skis, 70 days a year and riding my mountain bike another 250 days a year. It had to be that way. When I graduated in 2005, I was already laying the groundwork to move up to the mountains of Colorado in 2006. At that time, if you were going to work in Big Four National Tax, you had to physically sit in DC. It's something I never even sent a resume, never even applied for. Because I knew that even if I were happy professionally, if I were miserable personally, it wasn't going to be a winning formula. What I did instead was I took a job at a wonderful regional firm called Withum. And they were so wonderful, in fact, that they let me work remotely at a time where remote work was not really prevalent within our industry. But they let me work from Aspen, even though they were an East Coast firm. But we finally get now to the lesson, how? How do you connect with your passion for your industry? Knowing that my passion was learning the law, now starting at a brand new firm. I don't have anybody spoon feeding me tax law every day. How do I unlock the secret to a happy career? That secret is not really a secret. You want a happy career, do more of the work you love and less of the work you don't. How do I get my hands on this type of work I love and the decision that I made. There are people listening who are at that crossroads right now who may have to say, it sounds like a lot of work, but I get it. Maybe it's time for me to make that decision as well to invest in myself. Was that if I can't bring myself to Big Four National Tax and do the type of work I love, I am going to find a way to bring the type of work I love to me. I realized that the responsibility is mine to show this new firm that I'm passionate about working in the law and that I'm capable of working in the law. Part of that happens obviously on the job. Part of it happens by doing diligent research and coming up with good answers and thinking outside the box. But I knew that I needed to really prove to everybody where my passion lies so I could get more of that work. What I did, and this was the thrust of our AICPA class, is I instituted this three-step process that I had been using for the last 20 years and just repeating over and over again, and it has served me better than I ever could have dreamed. But what I did was Step 1, I'd say, I am going to learn everything I can about some narrow area of the law. I would pick an area of the law, usually one that I found that the industry was struggling with. What I mean by that is we all know there's certain things we do in the tax world that all of us do, and we apply it all the time for our tax returns. We never truly understand why we're doing what we're doing. That was back to what we said earlier, the same as last year's stuff. Perfect example would be allocation of partnership liabilities under Section 752. We all fill out a K-1 on a 1065 and allocate recourse and non-recourse liabilities. But how many people truly understand what makes a liability recourse and non-recourse or how those liabilities should be allocated? I would say, Sec. 752. I am going to learn everything I could about 752. This is a part people don't want to hear, but it would happen outside work hours. I would read the code, I would read the regs, I would read the editorial content, I would read the key cases and the rulings and things like that. And I would read and re-read and make notes and do outlines until I felt like I understood what it was I was reading. Then I would move on to Step 2. Step 2 is, how do I cement this knowledge? I would sit down and say, if I truly understand all that stuff I just read, I should be able to explain it to other people. I would sit down and I would write up everything I just read. Try to re-package and re-purpose the law in a way that would make someone who read what I was writing understand. Maybe some of your listeners know that later and we'll get into this, I would go on to write for more national publications. That's not what I'm talking about here in 2006, April. I didn't have a platform. When I say I'm writing about the law, I was quite literally putting together an email for my firm's tax department that absolutely nobody asked for. I would summarize 752. I would put together a PDF decision tree and flow chart and show how we should be allocating things. I was doing it for two reasons. The reason I like to tell people is I wanted to help my firm understand 752. But the true selfish reason I was doing it is because I wanted to understand that law, and I wanted to show everyone else that I understood that law and that I was passionate about that law. I would send out this email to my firm's tax department explaining 752. Going through that process of writing it up really did cement that knowledge for me because I had to think about the law in a different way from reading it to say, how do I now explain it? April Walker: How did they react to those emails? Tony Nitti: You could almost hear the eyerolls in the system. You can almost hear, who is this kid? What is he doing? I wasn't even a kid at that point, I was near 30. Here's the thing. We're going to talk some life lessons here, but I was talking to somebody after the presentation at AICPA. Sometimes the key to success in any career is just being willing to do the thing other people won't. What I mean by that is those books, the code, the regs, we all have access to them. What I was doing is I was diving in and saying, I'm going to figure out what they say and what they mean. Other people probably rolled their eyes when I would summarize law that nobody asked for. But you know what those same people would do when they had a 752 issue? Who were they coming to? April Walker: For sure. Tony Nitti: Well, the only other option was to open the books themselves. That's what I mean about doing what other people won't. That's not everyone's priority and I'm not here to say it's right or wrong, but the reality is when I showed people that I'm willing to open the books, I started to get that work because other people aren't. Not everybody, but there are just people who say, I'd rather just push it to someone who enjoys that stuff and that became a common theme of my career where people come to me and say, I know you love this research stuff, so I'm going to give it to you. You probably give it to me because you don't want to do the research stuff. That's fine by me because I do want to do it. I do want to do this work. To your point, there are eye rolls, but those eye rolls, I'm sure, were the same people who'd say, I got this question. I know this dude seems to care about this stuff. I'm going to go to him and let him answer it for me, which is exactly what I was hoping for. After that writing step, I would go to Step 3. Step 3 was the uncomfortable step. Because as much as I enjoy writing, and I know this sounds strange because we're doing a podcast about a presentation I gave, but speaking in public, not for me. We're going to talk more about this later, but terrifies me. And I would go into my partner's office, and I'd say, you see that email that I sent around about 752? I need to teach it. I need to teach here at the firm - some lunch and learn local office or the firm's annual update, but I need to teach it. Why would I ask to teach if I was terrified of it? It's because I was terrified of it. Because if I want to know that law, there is no greater motivator than fear. If I'm going to stand in front of a room full of my peers or some people who've been practicing 20 years longer than me, I was really going to make sure I understood that law really well. To this day, I don't give a presentation that I don't walk around my house and rehearse to air, just to time it out, to make sure I'm comfortable with the transitions, to make sure I know the law. Because that fear still exists from a public speaking perspective. I would go through that process, and by the time it was done, by the time I was done handling that fear and speaking in front of -  these are tiny rooms. These are my firm. These are not strangers to me, but by the time I was done, I would say, that area of the law, that is in my back pocket. I feel like I know that well, and more importantly, my firm now knows that I know that well. All those questions are going to come to me. I would just repeat that process, every year, not every year. I'm just repeat it over and over again with deducting accrued liabilities or 263(A) or prepaid expenses. I would just repeat the process if the firm. Read about it, write about it, teach about it. The more I'm doing it, the more they can see where my passion lies and that I'm capable. To the point where 2008ish, the firm decides to launch its version of a National Tax Group and in addition to our mutual friend Brian Lovett, who's still at Withum, and I get to be one of the founding members of that National Tax Group. Now all of a sudden, I have brought national tax to me and my passion is much more of the focus of my career. As I said, that's the recipe, right? Do more of what you like and less of what you don't and that's what I'm getting now as a return on my investment. That's where the proactive decisions I made to help improve my career, that's pretty much the end of them. From there, it's just life has taught me because now you get to 2008, April and my career is going really well. I'm doing the type of work I love to do. Personally, I am living in Aspen and like I said, I'm on skis 70 days a year. I'm living on my mountain bike all spring. Life is good. April Walker: That's when life smacks you in the face. Tony Nitti: Exactly. That's when the headache started, and I'm your audience with the entire story, obviously. But after one particularly brutal race in Aspen, I was rushed to the emergency room with a terrible migraine-type headache. But I imagine more intense than most migraines because eventually, what they would figure out, it took a little bit of time, was that I had an aneurysm in my brain. Most people know somebody impacted by brain aneurysm and those stories typically do not have happy endings. The reality is once an aneurysm leaks blood into the brain cavity, 70% of people are dead by the next morning. As my surgeon so eloquently put it, of the other 30%, half of them will wish they were by the next morning because they're permanently disabled. This is something where I went from thinking I was invincible at 33 years old to absolutely certain that I was going to die. The only reason we bring this up here is because I had to face my mortality, and I had to go in for 8 hours of surgery to save my life. I had that morning to lay on that metal table before they wheeled me in for the surgery. They were very clear about the risks. There's a 5% chance I go into vasospasm and I never wake up. There's a 15% chance if I wake up, I've got memory problems, right side of the body problems, cognitive deficit, and that's terrifying. Laying there that morning, I know it sounds cliche, but looking back at 33 years I'd spent on the planet, I wasn't spending any of that morning regretting the things I had done that maybe didn't go the way I wanted him to do. I was spending the time regretting the things I had said I was going to try, but I hadn't tried yet. It was eating away. Like, I thought I had so much more time, and now the prospect that either I don't wake up or I wake up a different person and I never get to find out some of those things about myself. It was not something you ever want to have to face. That the tomorrow you thought you had may never arrive. Now, obviously, I had a good surgeon. April Walker: Given that that was in 2008? Tony Nitti: Yeah. Doctor Jefferson. He fixed me right up. I knew within 48 hours that all the Simpsons references, all the code sections, they were all still in there. But I did come out of it a changed person. Not cognitively, necessarily, but I came out of it saying, I'm going to live the rest of my life slightly different than I did before, starting with the fact that I'm leaving no stone unturned. This is what we were talking about earlier. Anything I've been curious about - personal, professional, could I be good at it? Would I enjoy it? I am going to find out. I'm going to say yes, because I just want to know. It started simply enough. I wasn't even in my professional capacity, like silly little thing. I spent my whole childhood saying I wanted to learn how to play guitar. I never bothered to learn guitar. I had a year, basically year it took me to recover from that surgery before I could get back to my normal life, and I spent that year playing ten years worth of guitar. But what happens is you realize, I love this. I thought I would enjoy it. Tony Nitti: I do enjoy it. I shouldn't let other things slip past me like this. I should try everything. Within my career, it's now 2009, and I've made partner at Withum. There's no impetus to try new things in my career. I've gotten the last promotion I'm never going to get. But that's not what's driving me at that point. What's driving me is this primal realization that, life is fleeting and so I'm going to go find out whatever I want to find out about. We go back to how we started this conversation. Growing up, the only thing I ever thought I would enjoy was being a writer. I had been doing those emails to my firm, but I never tried anything bigger than that because I just assumed I didn't have the ability. What bothered me after the surgery is I never even risked it enough for someone to tell me I wasn't any good. I just decided it for myself. I said, look, I'm never going to write the Great American novel. I'm not that talented, but they say write what you know and I know some things about the tax law. April Walker: Sure. Tony Nitti: I said, I just want to find out. I want to find out what I'm capable of. The next time I went through that three step process, it was about a court case that came out on S corp reasonable comp. I said, well, this time, even though no one's pushing for it, no one at my firm cares, it's not anything anyone else values, I'm going to find out if I can get this thing published externally. I wrote up the entire case history of S-Corp Reasonable comp for The Tax Adviser. I wrote and rewrote and I edited, I reedited and I eventually submitted it for publishing and they published it as a feature article. What I had learned in that process was not that I was a talented writer, but that I was as passionate about it as I thought I would be. I loved it. I love the process of trying to explain the law to somebody else in the hopes that the light bulb goes off and they go, I never understood that before, now I understand. Of course, I looked from a selfish perspective having to learn the law that well, to read all of the cases that had ever been settled. It was just a really gratifying process, but the problem is, my firm's not paying me to sit around and write articles all day, so it's a bit of a bummer. Because I had done it, I loved it. But how do I get to do more of it? This is where the worlds collide between leaving no stone unturned, but also investing in yourself. Where the article, it went well. Tony Nitti: It went well to the point where The Tax Adviser asked me to write a couple more articles, and I did. Then what happened is just if you invest in yourself, I firmly believe good things happen. You get a return on that investment. CCH reaches out to my firm and they're like. Hey, we see this writing this kid's doing, it's pretty darn good and we need someone to co author a treatise on consolidated returns and we'll pay your firm for six months of his time if he can contribute a bunch of chapters to this treatise. Tony Nitti: My firm comes to me and says, CCH wants you to write a treatise on consolidated returns, you want to do it? Like any rational human being, every instinct in my body said, absolutely not. Why would I want to write a consolidated returns treatise, it's terrible. It's the worst area of the law. But the point is, who am I to say no? I'm passionate about writing. I want to be challenged, and it's just this idea of leave no stone unturned. I'm going to write it just to see if I can write it and to see if good things come of it. Now my firm is getting paid for me to write, so they allow me to do more of the type of work I'm passionate about. I got to write that treatise, which is probably the last time I thought about a consolidated return. But it just things snowballed. From there, April and now the editor at Forbes, Janet Novack, she's reading my writing. She reaches out to me more than day. I'd never met her, or heard her. She reaches out to me and says. Hi, I like your style of writing. Would you move your platform over to Forbes? For a regional firm like Withum at that time, the exposure was tremendous. Of course, we'll do it and so that's how I land at Forbes, where now anyone who ever read anything I wrote on Forbes, I'm not making up this three step process. Because the entirety of my writing on Forbes, for the most part, was this, like trying to explain complicated areas of the law. There was that whole Tax Geek Tuesday. That's all it was. Breaking down things that no one was insane enough to want to write about because it's so dry and so complicated, like opportunity zones or 263 A or whatever it may be. Now all your listeners know my deep dark secret, which is it may have looked like I was doing all that writing because I wanted to help the industry, which obviously I'm joking. Obviously, I did. But why else was I doing it? Because I wanted to learn that stuff. I wanted to build that expertise and hope that it would pay off. One of the things we'll finish with in a couple of minutes is how that ended up paying off with my dream job. But even at that point, even with the writing, and this comes full circle to how this class came to be for us because of what happened in Engage this summer. But at that point, we're talking 2011. I've never done public speaking. Outside of my firm, outside of a lunch and learn, I've never stood in front of a room full of strangers and taught. What happened was you do enough writing, eventually, someone's going to come to you and say, you're decent at explaining a tax law, wouldn't you like to try it, like in person. So you don't have to trust that someone's going to read your writing and understand it all, first try, things like that? My friend Mark Friedlich at CCH approached me and said, "We do this conference every year. Come speak at the conference.". Again, every fiber of my being said, Mark, absolutely not. Because I am someone who has got more than my share of social anxiety. I just do, I'm an introvert. There's a reason I love having my nose in the books. The idea of standing in front of a room full of strangers, it terrifies me to this day. I just learned to deal with it a little bit better. Then, of course, there's the impostor syndrome that comes with it. I'm like, why would anybody want to listen to me? There's so many people who know this stuff better than I do. I said, "Mark, it is not for me." Because as much as I always knew I would enjoy writing, I knew I would hate public speaking. He just said, "Look, just give it a try. What's the worst that could happen?" Eventually he's right. Who am I to say no to this? The whole point of this second act I'm getting in life, is say yes, find out what you're capable of, find out what you might enjoy. I flew to Arizona, April and I did 90 minutes on the tax consequences of foreclosures and short sales. That tells you. April Walker: That's very specific. Tony Nitti: It's 2011. This is where it's getting real for the crash and so everybody's dealing with foreclosures and short sales. I went in there and I talked for 90 minutes, and let me tell you, it was every bit as awful as I thought it was going to be. But when I walked out of that room, I knew my goals in my career. I knew my passion in my career had changed, had evolved. Because I walked out of that room saying, I need to do more of this. But why? If it was so terrifying, why? Because it was so gratifying, Just to have even one person come up to you afterwards and say, "I struggled to understand that now. The light bulb went off. I get it." This desire to communicate and help other people and explain the law in a way that people can understand. It's fun to do it in writing. Maybe not that efficient. You have to trust that they're going to read the whole thing, not have any follow up question. But with speaking, I could read their faces. Are they following along? Do they look lost or are they tilting their head to the side like my pup Maggie does in some futile attempt to understand what I'm saying to her? I'm like, I'm not built for this, but I need to do it. For me to be the best version of myself, the happiest version of myself in my career, I need to do this thing regularly that terrifies me because the reward is so great. That ability to repackage and repurpose the law in a way that connects with other people in the industry. Of course, the byproduct of learning it so well. If I'm going to stand in front of the room and talk about foreclosures and short sales, that's another thing I'm going to get to add to my quiver as far as areas of expertise. It's funny, because like I said, growing up, I knew I'd be passionate about writing, and I was. Knew I'd be terrified to speak publicly, and I am. But I'm just as passionate about it now as I am the writing. One final story to just tie everything together and just show you how. Look, I don't know. Maybe my experience is unique. Maybe we need one of those things to run on the bottom of the podcast that says. What is it? Past performances are not  indicative of future performances? April Walker: Future yeah? Tony Nitti: I don't know. Maybe it's just unique, but this right place, right time. The rewards I've gotten on the decision to invest in myself from Withum's willingness to create a national tax group, to Forbes noticing my writing and bringing me on. Just the little things that have impacted the course of my career. It's remarkable because listeners out there, especially the younger variety, they're going to think it's these big decisions that I stress out about that are going to impact the course of my career. Which job do I take or what area of the law do I focus on? But my goodness, it's sometimes the smallest things. What changed the course of my career was a decision in 2013 to waste my Thanksgiving weekend. Because 2013, right around this time, the IRS issues regulations under 1411, the net investment income tax regs. I didn't want to necessarily spend my Thanksgiving weekend learning about those regs and writing about them, but it was new. I love writing about new stuff. I love trying to explain to people how to read [how the] law works and so I said. I'm going to sit down and go through the three step process, at least the first two. For now, I'm going to learn about it, I'm going to write about it. I wrote about the net investment income tax regs. It was no different than any other article. There's nothing special about it. The only thing that was special is a couple of days later, I get an email from the attorney at the IRS who wrote those regulations. April Walker: Spoiler. Tony Nitti: Felt encouraging. He just reached out to me to say, here's what you got right. Here's what you got wrong. I want to send a unified message out to the people. You know [David] Kirk, so there's probably some expletives thrown in there. April Walker: Absolutely. Tony Nitti: I just thought, that's so admirable that this guy would take that level of ownership over his work. Dave and I would become what I would loosely call friends. I think we met in person once at National Tax, but other than that, we maybe connected once a year for the next decade. But the point is, this return on investment, that decision to write that article would change everything. Because 10 years later, Kirk is not at the IRS anymore. Now he's at EY running one of the National Tax groups, and one of his partners is retiring and unbeknownst to me, he's been keeping track of my career the entire time and he's seeing this investment I'm making in myself. He's seeing my passion for learning the law and whatever small ability I might have to explain that law to other people. He's saying. That's the guy I want. He's going to his bosses and saying. This is the person I want to come in as the new partner in EY National Tax. In 2021, he reaches out to me. And I was working for an amazing firm at the time, Rubin Brown, and I loved my job.  But he reaches out to me and he says. Come work with me and work in this National Tax group. The opportunity, obviously, to work with Dave Kirk is pretty much all you need to hear. But of course, me being a pain, the first thing I say is, do I have to move to DC? Now, this is the benefit of the post pandemic world. We can do this remotely from Aspen and so he's offering me my dream job, April. What's amazing about that is I spent a couple months agonizing over that decision. I very nearly turned it down. Why? Because, honestly, I was scared. I couldn't do it. It was back to almost that feeling of being a fraud again, but just feeling, I don't know. This guy has forgotten more about the law than most people know. And I had that impostor syndrome kick in again. Can I do it? Am I capable? Who knows? Maybe I'm not and the firm has just been lying to me for the last three years. The point is, I almost didn't take it and then I sat down and said, hold on a second. What is it that makes you not want to take this job? I'm scared because I think I might have to learn a lot to be able to hang. Then I'm like, wait a minute. What is it you're most passionate about in your career?  Where you're forced to learn a lot so that you can hang? Finally, it just became obvious to me that I had to take the opportunity because this was my dream. My dream to just live in the law all day, every day, and it came about in the most bizarre fashion. April, I didn't submit a resume because it didn't mesh with my personal goals. But then this decision to invest in myself, which eventually led to Forbes, which got me in front of Kirk. It's just crazy. Crazy to think how it all unfolded. The message for someone listening out there, is I was no kid when Dave Kirk called me. I was 45 years old. 45, to land my dream job in this industry and patience is certainly a virtue. The bigger virtue is just understanding some of the things we talked about here today. Which is, look, no one wants to hear this. The easy way out is to say, I'm in a bad situation, no one's treating me fairly. I'm not learning what I want to learn. Look, there are bad situations out there. Like I said, if you're in one, it's pretty easy to move. Problems are going to follow you even to good situations, if you don't take ownership over your own career and if you don't say at a certain point, it's no one's job to make me the professional that I want to be other than myself. That's not easy. It comes with a lot of extra work. You think I wanted to be reading Bittker & Eustis on the beach on a weekend back when I was fielding materials a lot? Of course, I didn't. The BNA portfolio at night? No, but I was making an investment in the hope that it would pay off. The way it paid off, like I said, was doing more of the type of work I love, which is all you can possibly ask for. It's not an easy thing to communicate to people - as much as we work in this job, sometimes you have to you go above and beyond to show people what you're passionate about and that you're capable of handling it. If you don't show, no one knows and you can just get lost in the shuffle and end up being that person we talked about that's doing the same tax returns five years in a row and not growing and not learning. If you haven't shown people that you're not content with that. If you haven't shown people where your passions lie, human nature is such that firms of any size are just going to say, April just keeps doing what we ask for every year. We're just going to keep asking her to do it. April Walker: I think that's great. It's funny when you were starting to tell your story about that you hadn't learned anything. I had a question in my mind, like, don't you think that's partially the firm's responsibility that they hadn't invested in you to send you enough trainings or things? Then you answered the question. That's a personal responsibility thing. Tony Nitti: Perfect example of that. They did send me to trainings. I can remember most of those trainings, and everyone knows someone like this. Being the guy who spent half of the trainings outside the room, doing work for my senior or my manager back in the office because I didn't value the training. What I valued was getting promoted. If my senior manager said, I need you to do something right now, even though I was at a training at St. Charles for Andersen, I was going to walk out of that room and get that work done for them.   Everybody wants a villain. Life is always easier with a villain. PWC was no villain. Because it's not like I asked them to teach me and they refused to. I showed them what I valued and they rewarded that. If I only valued promotion, they gave me promotion. Since that point in my career, when I showed my employers that I valued the type of work I love, I valued being challenged, I valued living in the law, I have gotten rewarded with more of that type of work. I refuse to believe my experience is a one-off, that it's completely unique. I definitely got some very lucky breaks at some key points in time. Then I got dealt a harsh lesson that I wouldn't wish upon anybody. I don't want anyone at 33 years old to have to face their mortality. But that was an impetus to say, I got to find out more of what I'm capable of. And that opened up doors that I never dreamed, April, that I would spend as much of my career doing. When I say passionate about my love for writing, I just never thought it would even be an option in a career in tax. Then it ended up being a huge part of what I did for so long. I refuse to believe that that's unique to me. I think that anybody who says, I'm willing to do what the other person isn't. I'm willing to get into these books, learn what they say, show people that I care about what they say, and that I can communicate them to other people, that really good things are going to follow. April Walker: Writing might not be your passion, but I think the message today, as we're wrapping up, figure out what that passion is. It doesn't matter how old you are. You can try to figure it out and do more. I just read this book that was talking about -  do the next right thing. The big picture might feel huge and scary, but just whatever the next step is, just do the next right thing. Tony Nitti: The way I've always described that too, April, is you shouldn't at any point in your life be finished finding out what your passions are. That's the whole point, is you should be a fundamentally different person at 35, that you're at 25 and 45 that you're at 35. You should be saying yes to opportunities that help you unearth new passions and new things that you are capable of doing. Because like I said, there is no scenario, and people who know me well know what I mean, where I should be making career out of public speaking, doing as much public speaking as I do. It is so foreign and uncomfortable to me. But I look past that, because I'm passionate about it and so I find a way to make it work through truly ridiculous levels of preparation. April Walker: Some might say you're good at it. I'll give you a little spoiler. Your two sessions were the top rated at National Tax, so there you go. Tony Nitti: Now, you have to edit out earlier today when I said, we're doing this without the safety net of the evaluation. April Walker: I didn't want to tell you in advance. Tony Nitti: See that. Again, but that is proof that anybody, if I can make any career out of public speaking, anybody can. That's why you got to try. That was the thing at ENGAGE that started all this, is when we were just talking about say yes to opportunities because you know what, if you are as bad as you think you're going to be and you hate it as much as you think you will, you haven't lost anything. You just go back to not doing it anymore, but you might unearth new passions that move the goalposts on what you need out of your career. That's a goal in life to keep growing and keep finding things that really drive you. Hopefully, April, something we said resonates with the listeners, but I guess we'll find out. April Walker: I hope so too. This is our last podcast episode of the year. You can listen to it at the end of the year. I used to love your resolution articles. I think that was a Forbes thing. I love these articles. I miss those articles and people come up to you still all the time and are like, I really miss those articles. Tony Nitti: What's funny is the last thing I ever wrote for Forbes was one of those resolution articles and I don't know. Maybe I wrote 200, 300 articles for Forbes over the 10 years, but the last thing is my favorite thing I ever wrote because it had absolutely nothing to do with tax. I had to do with my pup Macy. April Walker: I know. Tony Nitti: You knew well and Macy was on her way out of the world at the time and just to be able to even have a platform to write about my pup, that is still the one thing I've ever written that I go back and read. I don't hate this. I don't want to change anything. April Walker: That's good. Thank you so much, Tony. This was so fun. I know our listeners will enjoy it. Also, again, thanks a bunch. This is April Walker from the AICPA Tax section. This community is your go to source for technical guidance and resources designed, especially for CPA tax practitioners like you in mind. This is a podcast from AICPA and CIMA together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts and we encourage you to follow us so you don't miss an episode. If you already follow us, thank you so much.  Please feel free to share with a like-minded friend. You can also find us at aicpa-cima.com/tax and find our other episodes. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful holiday season and come back and 2025 is going to be an exciting tax year. I just feel it. Thanks for listening. Keep your finger on the pulse of the dynamic and evolving tax landscape with insights from tax thought leaders in the AICPA Tax Section. The Tax Section Odyssey podcast includes a digest of tax developments, trending issues and practice management tips that you need to be aware of to elevate your professional development and your firm practices. This resource is part of the robust tax resource library available from the AICPA Tax Section. The Tax Section is your go-to home base for staying up to date on the latest tax developments and providing the edge you need for upskilling your professional development. If you're not already a member, consider joining this prestigious community of your tax peers. You'll get free CPE, access to rich technical content such as our Annual Tax Compliance Kit, a weekly member newsletter and a digital subscription to The Tax Adviser.

There are a few wrinkles in the possible appointment of the next New Zealand Rugby Chairperson. David Kirk is rumoured to be up for the position, the businessman synonymous with New Zealand rugby. Although being based in Sydney might be a small issue, the larger wrinkle is the Silver Lake deal – a deal that saw the relationship between NZR and the Players' Association fall to an all-time low. As Chairperson, Kirk would be in charge of implementing the deal his faction fought against. Former NZ Rugby CEO David Moffett told Heather du Plessis-Allan he has no issues with this. He says Kirk is a smart guy, and what's more, he's been very successful in business and very successful on the rugby field. Moffett believes he'd do a great job as Chairperson. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Wen-Mei Hwu, Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was recognized for pioneering and foundational contributions to the design and adoption of multiple generations of processor architectures. His fundamental and pioneering contributions have had a broad impact on three generations of processor architectures: superscalar, VLIW, and throughput-oriented manycore processors (GPUs). Other honors and recognitions include the 1999 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 2006 ISCA Most Influential Paper Award, 2014 MICRO Test-of-Time Award, and 2018 CGO Test-of-Time Award. He is the co-author, with David Kirk, of the popular textbook Programming Massively Parallel Processors.Wen-Mei discusses the evolution of Moore's Law and the significance of Dennard Scaling, which allowed for faster, more efficient processors without increasing chip size or power consumption. He explains how his research group's approach to microarchitecture at the University of California, Berkeley in the 80s led to advancements such as Intel's P6 processor. Wen-Mei and Scott discuss the early days of processors and the rise of specialized processors and new computational units. They also share their predictions about the future of computing and advancements that will be required to handle vast data sets in real time, and potential devices that would extend human capabilities.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Wen-Mei Hwu, Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was recognized for pioneering and foundational contributions to the design and adoption of multiple generations of processor architectures. His fundamental and pioneering contributions have had a broad impact on three generations of processor architectures: superscalar, VLIW, and throughput-oriented manycore processors (GPUs). Other honors and recognitions include the 1999 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 2006 ISCA Most Influential Paper Award, 2014 MICRO Test-of-Time Award, and 2018 CGO Test-of-Time Award. He is the co-author, with David Kirk, of the popular textbook Programming Massively Parallel Processors. Wen-Mei discusses the evolution of Moore's Law and the significance of Dennard Scaling, which allowed for faster, more efficient processors without increasing chip size or power consumption. He explains how his research group's approach to microarchitecture at the University of California, Berkeley in the 80s led to advancements such as Intel's P6 processor.  Wen-Mei and Scott discuss the early days of processors and the rise of specialized processors and new computational units. They also share their predictions about the future of computing and advancements that will be required to handle vast data sets in real time, and potential devices that would extend human capabilities.

Marina Castro-García joins us to discuss the article deportigualízate: enacting critical intersectional feminist pedagogy in Spanish PESTE published with Dillon Landi and David Kirk. We discuss the experiences of university students from a Physical Education-Sport Tertiary Education program engaging with a critical intersectional feminist pedagogy unit in Spain. Marina has an Instagram page for this project: @deportigualizate Full Cite: Castro-García, M., Landi, D., & Kirk, D. (2023). deportigualízate: enacting critical intersectional feminist pedagogy in Spanish PESTE. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2023.2284927 Links to episodes on theories: Theory Breakdown 8: Intersectionality with Dr. Justin Haegele 14: Dr. Justin Haegele Adapted PE podcast on intersectionality of visual impairment & gender 124: PETE Collaborative APE Take-over --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pwrhpe/support

As the public and policy makers at various levels of government are pressured to double down on punitive status quo approaches, we hope everyone listens to this re-air of Crystal's robust conversation with criminologist Damon Petrich about the ineffectiveness of incarceration.  As lead author of the seminal work “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Damon performed an extensive analysis of 116 research studies looking at the effect of incarceration on reoffending. The review's finding that the oft-used policy of imprisonment does not reduce the likelihood of recidivism sparks a discussion about how the United States ended up as the world leader in mass incarceration and the disconnect between conventional assumptions about what prisons provide versus reality. Noting that the carceral system does a poor job of rehabilitation - while eating up budgets across the country and exacting significant societal costs - Damon and Crystal talk about how to design and evaluate programs that do work to deliver greater public safety for everyone. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal, on Twitter at @finchfrii and reach Damon for more information about his research at dpetrich@luc.edu   Dr. Damon Petrich Dr. Damon M. Petrich is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati, and his Bachelor of Arts (Honors) and Master of Arts degrees in Criminology from Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on two interrelated areas. The first is the development of antisocial behavior across the life-course, specifically focusing on desistance from crime and the mechanisms by which exposure to community violence impacts self-regulation and behavior. Dr. Petrich's second area of research surrounds the effectiveness of sanctions and programs in the criminal justice system. Throughout these projects, Dr. Petrich uses a wide range of methodological approaches, including qualitative techniques, meta-analysis, machine learning, and marginal structural modeling.   Resources  “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Damon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Francis T. Cullen for Crime and Justice   Scott Hechinger Twitter thread   “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022” by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner from the Prison Policy Initiative   “Risk-need-responsivity model for offender assessment and rehabilitation” by James Bonta and D. A. Andrews for Public Safety Canada   “Let's Take a Hard Look at Who Is in Jail and Why We Put Them There” by Alea Carr for the ACLU-WA blog   Book - “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect” by Robert J. Sampson   Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program - “Police Legitimacy and Legal Cynicism: Why They Matter and How to Measure in Your Community”   “Polls Show People Favor Rehabilitation over Incarceration” by Matt Clarke for Prison Legal News   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, I am excited to welcome Damon Petrich, who's a doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at University of Cincinnati and incoming assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. He was the lead author of a recent article, "Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review," along with Travis Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, Francis T. Cullen. Damon's research focuses on the effectiveness of corrections and rehabilitation programs, desistance from crime, and the impact of community violence on youth development. Thank you so much for joining us, Damon. [00:01:13] Damon Petrich: Thank you very much for having me on, Crystal. I'm excited to talk a little bit about my work and the implications of that and all that, so thanks again. [00:01:20] Crystal Fincher: I'm very excited to talk about this and it's extremely timely - has been for a while. We have conversations almost every day in the public sphere having to do with public safety - this is such a major component of it. And so I'm hoping as we have this conversation, it'll help us to better assess what the costs and benefits are of custodial sanctions and incarceration, and alternatives to that - to have a conversation that kind of orients us more towards public safety. Sometimes we're so concerned with metrics around police and how many they are, and what the length of a sentence should be. And sometimes we focus on things that take us off of the overall goal of keeping us all safer and reducing the likelihood that each of us are victimized and to hopefully prevent people from becoming victims of crime. And just to have accurate conversations about how we invest our public resources - what we're actually getting from them, and then how to evaluate as we go along - what we should be tracking and measuring and incentivizing. As so many people talk about taking data-driven approaches and create all these dashboards - that we're really doing it from an informed perspective. So just to start out - what actually were you studying and what were you seeking to find out? [00:02:47] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so the main purpose of our meta-analysis, which I can explain exactly what that is later on if you have questions, but the main purpose was to understand what happens when you take one group of offenders and you sentence them to something custodial like prison or jail, and then you sentence another group of similar offenders to something non-custodial like probation. How do those two groups differ in terms of whether they reoffend? So does prison actually deter recidivism, or does it make people more likely to commit crime afterwards? So that's sort of what we were looking at and so we considered all of the available research on that, in this review. [00:03:29] Crystal Fincher: Got it. So right now we have gone down the path of mass incarceration - that is the default punishment that we, as society, have looked to for crime. Hey - sentence them and many times it's, Hey, they're going to jail. Sometimes they get out of jail and they have supervision that continues, but jail is really focused, where we focus a lot of our effort and where we put people and hope that that'll straighten them out and they come out and everything is fine. How did we get here and where are we in terms of how we're approaching incarceration in our society, in our country? [00:04:11] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so there is a lot of public uproar around a lot of issues, like race issues, and there was crime spikes and concerns over social welfare - and there's all this confluence of issues in the '60s and early '70s. And we decided to - as a country, not everyone, but politicians decided that we should tackle the crime problem by A) incarcerating more people, and then B) once they get there, keep them there for longer. So we enacted things like mandatory minimum sentences, where the judge really has no discretion over what happens - the person gets automatically a sentence of incarceration if they've committed a certain type of crime. You had habitual offender laws where if you're - like California's three strikes policy - where if you have two prior felonies and you get a third, no matter what it is, you're going to jail for life. Michigan had the "650 Lifer Law," where if you get caught with 650 grams of heroin or cocaine, you're automatically going to prison for life. And then we got rid of parole and stuff like that in a lot of states. So all these things lead to more people going to jail and then for longer, and those laws came to be in the '70s and '80s. And over that time, our incarceration rate ballooned up by about 700%, so by the early 2000s, we were at over 2 million people incarcerated and another 7-8 million people on probation or parole. So it's a pretty big expansion - the United States has 5% of the world's population and a quarter, or 25%, of the prisoners, so it's a little ridiculous. The crime rate here isn't nearly as high, or nearly high enough to justify that huge disparity. So yeah, it's a whole confluence of factors led us to be the world leader in incarceration. [00:06:14] Crystal Fincher: And what attitudes or what justifications are the people who have the power to enact these policies and continue these policies - how are they justifying them? [00:06:25] Damon Petrich: So there's a few reasons why you might want to incarcerate somebody. One is just because you want to punish them or get revenge on them, so that's more of a moral reason. But the main focus of politicians were twofold - one was incapacitation, so that one means that because you're keeping somebody locked up in a cage, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So the thought is that you're going to reduce crime that way. The research on that is a little squishy even now, and I can talk a little bit more about that later if you want. But the other reason, and the one that we focused on in our review, was that prison deters people from going back to crime after they get out. So the idea there is that prison sucks - you go in there, you're cut off from your job, from your family, from your friends, or from just having hobbies or things to do. And you're not going to want to go back, so when you get out of prison - you think real hard, and you think how much prison sucks, and you decide not to go back to crime. That's the thinking behind that deterrence hypothesis anyway. So those two - incapacitation and deterrence - were the main drivers of those increase in laws and stuff during the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there really wasn't any evidence for either of them - in the '70s and '80s in particular. So most of the research evaluating whether prison actually does deter recidivism has popped up over the last 25 years or so. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: And as you took a look at it - all of the studies that have popped up over the past 25 years had varying degrees of rigor and scientific validity. But as that body of research grew, people began to get a better idea of whether incarceration actually does reduce someone's likelihood of reoffending. How big was that body of work, in terms of studies, and what were you able to look at? [00:08:40] Damon Petrich: So in our particular review, we looked at 116 studies, which is a pretty sizable number. Most people - when you read through an article and a literature review might have 10 studies or something that they just narratively go through, but we looked at 116. And then within those 116 studies, there were 981 statistical models. So 901 different comparisons - or 981 different comparisons - of what happens to custodial versus non-custodial groups. So we looked at a pretty big chunk of literature. [00:09:20] Crystal Fincher: And in that, in the reliance of - that's a really big number - and I think, people now are maybe more familiar, just from a layperson's perspective, of just how big that number is. As we've seen throughout this pandemic that we're in the middle of, studies come out - people are looking at one study, and wow - study number two comes out and we're feeling really good about it. And man, we get to five studies and people are like, okay, we know what's going on. To get beyond a hundred is just a real comprehensive body of study and analysis. What were you able to determine from that? [00:10:05] Damon Petrich: So I should probably explain upfront what a meta-analysis is and why it's useful. So like you were just saying - like in the COVID pandemic, for example - one study will come out and it'll say, oh, Ivermectin reduces symptomatic COVID cases by X percent. And then the next study will come out and say, Ivermectin makes people way worse. So any individual study can be kind of misleading. A good analogy for what a meta-analysis does would be to look at baseball, for example. So let's say you're interested in some rookie player that's just come out, he's just joined Major League Baseball and you go to his - you want to know how good this player actually is? You've never seen him play, you've only heard rumors. So you go out to his first game, he gets up to bat four times and he gets no hits. So you walk away from that game thinking, wow, this player is terrible, the team wasted all their money recruiting and paying this guy's salary. But that could have just been an off game for many reasons - it's his debut game so maybe there's just first-game nerves, maybe the weather was bad, maybe he was having personal problems in his life, or he had a little bit of an injury. So there's a number of reasons why looking at his performance from that one game is not going to be representative of who he is as a player. Ideally, you'd want to look at all the games over a season where he might go up to bat 250 times. And over those 250 times, he gets 80 hits, which is a pretty good batting average - it's over .300. So with that amount of data, you could come to a more solid conclusion of whether he's actually a good player or not. And with that amount of data, you could also look at what we call moderating characteristics. So you could look at, for example, whether he plays better when it's an away game or in a home game, whether it's early or late season - you could look at all these sorts of things. So this is essentially what we're doing with research as well, in a meta-analysis. So if you look at studies on incarceration - one might show increases in recidivism after people go to prison, the next might show decreases, and the next might show that probationers and prisoners reoffend at about the same rates. So just like in the baseball analogy, in a meta-analysis, we're looking at all of the available research. We're combining it together and determining A) what the sort of overall or average effect of incarceration is, and then B) whether these moderating characteristics actually matter. So in other words, is the effect of incarceration pretty much the same for males as it is for females, or for juveniles as adults, or when the research design is really good versus when it's not so great. So that's basically what we did in this meta-analysis is again - looked at 116 studies and from those 981 statistical estimates. [00:13:13] Crystal Fincher: Very helpful. Totally makes sense with the baseball analogy, and I especially appreciate breaking down with all the statistical models and not just kind of thumbs up, thumbs down - the binary - it either increases or reduces the likelihood of recidivism. But under what conditions are - might it be more likely, less likely that someone does? What are some of those influencing effects on what happens? And so you were just talking about the justification that people used going into this, and now that we have data coming out - does it turn out that people go into prison or are incarcerated in jail, they think - wow, this is horrible. Some in society are like the more uncomfortable we make it in jail, the better we want to make sure it's a place that they never would want to come back to - that it's so scary and such a bad experience that they are just scared straight for the rest of their lives. Does it actually turn out to be that way? Do they take a rational look at - this was my experience, I don't want to go back again, therefore I will not do any of the things that I did going in. [00:14:28] Damon Petrich: I would not say that's the conclusion - no. So again, based on the 116 studies that we looked at, which is again a lot, people who are sentenced to incarceration - so jail, prison - they commit crime, they reoffend at about the same rates as if you'd sentence those same people to probation. So in other words, they're not being deterred by being sent to prison. These effects are the same for both males and females. So in other words, prison doesn't reduce reoffending for one group versus the other. It's the same whether we look at adults versus juveniles, it's the same regardless of what type of recidivism we're interested in - rearrests or convictions. It's pretty much the same across the board. There's some slight variations in research designs, but even within those, prison either has no effect or it slightly increases recidivism. We don't find any conditions under which prison is reducing reoffending or deterring these people from going back to those lives. [00:15:35] Crystal Fincher: So from a societal perspective, a lot of people kind of make the assumption that, Hey, we arrest and we incarcerate someone - whew, our streets are safer. They get out, and now they can choose to reintegrate themselves into society hopefully - they do and we're all safer because of it. But it looks like impressions that some people may have that, Hey, we're letting someone off easy. And suggestions - there's so much media coverage around this - and suggestions that because we're letting people off easy, that we're making it easier for them to reoffend, or they don't feel sufficiently punished enough and so that becomes an incentive to reoffend. Does that seem like it tracks with what the studies have shown? [00:16:33] Damon Petrich: Not really - so there's some studies that actually ask prisoners and offenders whether they'd prefer going to prison or probation. And a lot of them will say, oh, I'd rather do a year in prison than spend two or three years on probation. So it's not like they view probation as just being super easy. And they're not saying this because they received time off their sentence for being in the study or anything like that. Probation's not easy either - and you have to also think that while these people are on probation, they're able to stay in close touch with their family, they're able to maintain connections with work or find work, they're able to participate in the community, they can pay taxes - that I know a lot of people who are pro-prison love. So there's all sorts of reasons why - beyond just them reoffending at the same rates as if they'd gone to prison - there's a lot of reasons why we might want to keep these people in the community. And it's not like we're saying, let everybody out of prison - so the nature of this research - you want to compare apples to apples. So in this research, comparing prisoners to probationers - these have to be people who are getting - they could either legitimately get a sentence of jail or probation, or prison or probation. So these are going to be first-time offenders, people who are relatively low-level - they've committed low-level crimes and all that. So we're not saying - there's not going to be a situation where a murderer just gets probation - that sort of thing. So I know that might be a concern of some people - they think that's a natural argument of this analysis, but it's really not. [00:18:24] Crystal Fincher: Well, and to your point, we're really talking - if we're looking at all of the crime that gets people sentenced to prison time, a very small percentage of that is murder. A very small percentage of it is on that kind of scale - you can wind up in jail or prison for a wide variety of offenses - many of them, people perceive as relatively minor or that people might be surprised can land you in prison. Or if someone has committed a number of minor offenses, that can stack up - to your point in other situations - and increase the length of detention or the severity of the consequences. As we're looking through this and the conversation of, okay, so, we sentence them, we let them out - it's not looking like there's a difference between jail or community supervisions, things like probation - what is it about jail that is harmful or that is not helpful? What is it about the structure of our current system that doesn't improve recidivism outcomes for people? [00:19:42] Damon Petrich: Probably the main one is the rehabilitation is not the greatest. So just as an example, substance abuse is a very strong predictor whether people are going to reoffend, unsurprisingly. About 50% of prisoners at the state and federal level in The States meet the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria for having a substance use abuse disorder - so they meet the clinical criteria for substance abuse disorder. So half of them, and then more than that just use substances, but they don't meet the criteria for a disorder. But of that 50% who has a substance abuse disorder, only about 20% of those actually receives treatment for it while they're incarcerated. So, you're not dealing with a root cause of reoffending while they're in prison - so you're not deterring them, but you're also not rehabilitating them - so you're really not doing anything. And then in the rare cases where these people are provided with rehabilitation or reentry programming, it's often not based on any sort of evidence-based model of how you actually change people. So there's a lot of psychological and criminology theory and research on how you actually elicit behavioral change, and these programs really aren't in line with any of that. And I could give examples if you wanted, but - [00:21:17] Crystal Fincher: Sure. I think that's helpful, 'cause I think a lot of people do assume, and sometimes it's been controversial - wow, look at how much they're coddling these prisoners - they have these educational programs, and they get all this drug treatment for free, and if they don't come out fixed then it's their own fault because they have access to all of these treatment resources in prison. Is that the case? [00:21:43] Damon Petrich: No, I wouldn't say so - first of all, they don't have access, a lot of them, to any programs. And then, like I said, the programs that they do get really aren't that effective. So the big one that everybody loves to argue for is providing former inmates with jobs. If you look at any federal funding for program development, like the Second Chance Act or the First Step Act - I think that was one under Trump - and then under Bush, there was a Serious [and] Violent Offenders Reentry Initiative - pretty much all of these federal bills will be heavily focused on just providing offenders with jobs. And almost all of the evaluations of these programs show that they don't reduce reoffending. And it's not really that hard - again, if you go back to the literature on behavioral change and, criminology literature - it's not really that hard to understand why just providing a job isn't going to reduce or lead somebody away from a life of crime. A lot of these people have spotty work histories where they've never had a job at all, they believe and know that it's easier to gain money by doing illicit work than it is legal work, they have things like low self-control so they're very impulsive, they don't know how to take criticism or being told what to do by a boss. They live in neighborhoods with very poor opportunities for good jobs and education, and maybe there's a mindset around there that illegal work or whatever is just a better way to go - that's sort of ingrained. So there's a lot of different reasons why just handing somebody a job isn't going to lead them away from crime, 'cause they have all these other things that need to be dealt with first. So ideally, a rehabilitation program that's comprehensive would deal with all of those other background factors and then provide them with a job. Because if you make them less impulsive, better able to resist the influence of their antisocial friends, and get this thought out of their head that other people are being hostile towards them when they're really not - all these sorts of cognitive and behavioral biases that they have - if you deal with all of those things and then you give them a job, they're more likely to actually latch onto that job as something worthwhile doing. And then they're going to go on to get out of a life of crime. But if you just give them a job and you haven't dealt with any of those issues, you can't really expect that to work. And that is the model that we currently do - is something that we don't really expect to work that well. [00:24:28] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, that's - it's really interesting and I don't know that a lot of people actually know that, Hey, giving someone a job isn't sufficient - which is why I think it's so important to talk about studies like this, because some of what has become conventional wisdom, really is not accurate or reflects what has been studied and discovered. And I guess in that vein, what are the factors - you just talked about a few - but what does increase someone's likelihood of reoffending or recidivism, and what reduces it? [00:25:08] Damon Petrich: So those are probably two ends of the same, or two sides of the same coin, but this is pretty well known in criminology - a model called the risk-need-responsivity [RNR] model was developed by a couple of fellow Canadians, named James Bonta and Don Andrews, along with some of their colleagues in the '80s and '90s. And they, through again, other meta-analyses just like we did, found certain categories of characteristics of people who are more likely to reoffend. So you have things like having antisocial peers - so that one's pretty obvious - if you have a bunch of friends that are involved in crime, it's going to be pretty hard for you to get out of that life because you're surrounded by those people. Same with family members. If you have what are called criminal thinking patterns - so again, you might have what's called a hostile attribution bias, things like that, where somebody says something a little bit negative to you and you take that as a huge insult and you retaliate with anger and aggression - things like that. Or being impulsive - so you're again quick to anger, you're swayed by small little enticements in the environment and that sort of thing - so you're easily swayed one way or the other. Things like that are strong predictors of reoffending. Substance abuse - it's what I mentioned earlier. If you don't really have any sort of proactive leisure activities, like hobbies and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of well-known things that we know are strongly associated with recidivism, and a rehabilitation program should ideally deal with them. Now this model that Andrews and Bonta and all these other people came up with - this RNR risk-need-responsivity model - the risk part says that we should give people a risk assessment when they're entering prison or leaving prison and determine what level of risk are they from reoffending. And we assess these different criteria, like criminal thinking patterns and antisocial friends and substance abuse. So we determine what those factors are and then we design them a treatment program that actually deals with those factors at the individual level. So we're not just giving a blanket rehabilitation program to everybody, and you're providing the most amount of care to the people who most need it or who are the most likely to re-offend. And then once we've done all that, we need to make sure that we're addressing these problems in some sort of a format that we know actually works. The most well-known one, but not as often used, the most well-known within the sort of psychologist and criminological literature is cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT]. So this is pretty popular for dealing with depression and all sorts of eating disorders and substance abuse problems in non-offender populations. Well, those programs also work in offender populations and they work pretty well. So the research shows - again meta-analyses - that when you deal with all these three factors - risk, need, and responsivity - you can reduce reoffending rates by about 26%. So it's a pretty sizeable amount - it's much greater than you're getting by just sentencing people to prison without doing anything. [00:28:42] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and I think you cover in your paper - those things are absolutely true. And you just talked about several administrations' attempts to implement programming and resources to try and help people get jobs, potentially - hey, there's even a CBT treatment, but if that treatment has twice as many people as are recommended being in a session and occurs over half the time that it's supposed to, you really are sabotaging the entire process or really setting it up for failure. And it just seems to be an expensive exercise that we aren't really getting anything out of. Does that seem to be consistent with how you've seen the attempts at introducing this programming within prisons and jails? [00:29:40] Damon Petrich: Yeah, for sure - this is a pretty common finding too - so it's not just about preaching that you're going to do these things. You actually have to implement them well. So just like you said, there's a number of studies that show this - so you've designed some really great program that deals with all of these risk factors that lead people back into reoffending, you give it to them in a cognitive behavioral setting. So all seems good on paper, but in practice, like you said - one of the famous studies there - can't remember the names of the authors offhand right now - but one of the famous studies there showed that they're providing it to people in groups of 30, as opposed to 15, and they're delivering it in a really short amount of time. And they're not maybe giving it to the highest-risk people - so they're just mixing random people in there at varying levels of risk. So when you do all these sorts of things - you implement the program poorly - you can't really expect it to work. And this is often the case - is the government pays people to come up with these great programs, and then not enough funding is provided to actually make sure that they're implemented and evaluated well. So the amount of funding that actually goes into that - developing the programs to begin with - is small, but when you do do that, you're not making sure that you're actually implementing things well. So it's just sort of shooting yourself in the foot, and probably making people come to the conclusion that these things don't work - when they do work, if you just implement them well. [00:31:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and there's also a lot of rhetoric - and you discuss this - there's a lot of rhetoric coming from the government, even coming from leadership within the Bureau of Prisons or leadership in our carceral system, saying we do want to rehabilitate people. We are trying to implement programming that does this. You see - we have these educational opportunities and we are doing evaluations of people. And it may be happening while they're understaffed or other challenges, but one of the biggest, I guess, red flags is that none of the evaluation of their programs and none of the incentives that arise are in any way tied to what is the actual result of what happens. Are you actually succeeding on reducing someone's likelihood for reoffense? It does not seem like any compensation is tied to that, any kind of evaluation of positions or regular reporting - to say, is this program having its intended effect? And if not, what do we need to do to correct for that? Is that what you found? [00:32:33] Damon Petrich: I would say that's probably a pretty fair assessment. A lot of the programs that are implemented are never evaluated at all. And then the ones that are - it's usually once - there's one evaluation of those programs. And then, like you said, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of self-reflection - I don't know what other word you would use - but these programs don't really change on the basis of these evaluations. So, it's kind of disheartening to hear about, I guess. [00:33:14] Crystal Fincher: It feels very disheartening to live in the middle of - and one of the big things about this is that this - we have these conversations and we talk about these studies and we're saying, yeah, it actually - we're not doing anyone any favors right now when it comes to reducing recidivism. And having these conversations oftentimes detached from the cost associated with what we're paying for these. And my goodness are we paying to incarcerate people? It's not just, well, we do lock them up and we keep them away. Or we do a good job of keeping them in - they reoffend, they go back to jail. And lots of people are like, we did our job, they went back to jail - boom, everything is fine. But we are paying through the nose and out the ear for this - just here, we're in the state of Washington, and right now the state spends about $112 per day, or over $40,000 annually, to incarcerate one individual - that's the cost per inmate. In King County - the county that we're in - they spend $192 a day, or $70,000 annually, to incarcerate an individual. That is a huge amount of the tax dollars that we spend - these come out of our general fund, meaning that these are dollars that every service, everything that is not a dedicated source of revenue, is competing for. So when we talk about things and have conversations like, well, we don't have the budget for that and we don't have the money - that is related to how much of that money we're spending on other things. And my goodness, I would think that we want to get our money's worth for that level of expenditure. And it really appears that if we're saying the goal of jail is to get people on the straight and narrow path and becoming contributing members of society and all of the implications of that, it doesn't seem like we're getting our money's worth. And so, if those aren't the goals and if we just want to punish people, it's not like we're punishing people for free. We're punishing people at the cost of $70,000 per day [year], and at the cost of all the other services and infrastructure needs that we have. So it really seems like we're punishing ourselves as much, or more, as others - particularly if we're bringing people back into society that are likely to reoffend in one way or another. And so if our goal is to keep our community safe and that is the North Star, it looks like we need to realign our processes and our expenditure of resources. I guess my question to you, after all that, is - how should we be moving forward? What should we be looking to do? What is shown to work? [00:36:24] Damon Petrich: Well, I would say - yeah, $70,000 a year as just a revenge cost per person seems like a lot. $80 billion in the country as a whole, for a revenge cost, seems like a pretty high price to pay, given we're not reducing reoffending. You could make the argument that these people aren't offending while they're in prison, but that's - there's other reasons why that might not be completely accurate, which I could talk about too, but - [00:36:59] Crystal Fincher: Well, I'm interested in that. Why might that not be accurate? [00:37:03] Damon Petrich: So, obviously the person - if you incarcerate a particular individual, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So that's obvious, but there's a number of reasons why that might not, en masse, actually reduce crime a whole lot. The research on it - this is a little bit squishy - in terms of whether incarcerating more people leads to lower crime rates, because one influences the other. But for example, if you look at illegal drug markets - a lot of the homicides in the United States and other violent crime that people are really concerned about, and it's plastered all over the media is - homicides, gang-related stuff. So if you take key gang members out and you put them in prison, what ends up happening is that there's competition in that market to take over that person's place, either within the gang or other gangs coming in. So what ends up happening oftentimes is a spike in violence. So that's one reason why just incapacitating, particularly high-crime individuals, might not actually lead to lower crime rates overall. Again, you're lowering crime for that one person, but you might be increasing crime on a more systemic level. Beyond that, these things have broader societal and community level impacts - incarcerating a lot of people. Again, research shows that when you're incarcerating a lot of people in a particular community - so there's a bunch of really good work by Robert Sampson - he has a book that came out a few years ago called Great American City. And he looked at these individual neighborhoods in Chicago over time, and what he finds is that in communities where there's a higher number of people incarcerated in a particular community, this ends up increasing what's called "legal cynicism." And this is done in some other work as well with David Kirk and Andrew Papachristos - but they show that this increases legal cynicism, which means people are skeptical of police helping them out, the police doing a good job. And what ends up happening after that - when people are more cynical of the legal system, they're less likely to report crimes to the police, they're less likely to cooperate with the police. So what ends up happening? You incarcerate more people and people in that community end up being less willing to cooperate with law enforcement. And this leads to sort of an endless cycle where things sort of get out of hand. So there's all these unintended and nonfinancial consequences of incarcerating a lot of people that could potentially end up leading to more crime. [00:40:03] Crystal Fincher: Well, and - speaking as a Black woman - obviously, looking at the impacts of mass incarceration in the Black community and in neighborhoods around the country - where it is almost like the community is responding to the actual outcome and that, Hey, this actually isn't making my community any better. I'm experiencing traumatic impacts from this - whether it's my relative went to prison or a sole breadwinner in the family and now we're thrown into poverty, or I'm in a situation where I don't have a parent who used to be there - who now is no longer there. Or causing instability and impacting the education that people get and the kind of job opportunity, watching someone who's come out have to struggle and be ostracized. And it looks like, Hey, this is just the first step on a long cycle of traumatic and undesirable events - and I don't want to participate in a system that is doing that. With that, as we look forward, and I think this is also related to conversations about just fundamental trust in our criminal legal system and relations with police and throughout the system. It's - if we think about how to turn that around - to me, seems related to thinking about the question of how do we get better outcomes for everyone? 'Cause it seems like right now where we're investing a lot in poor outcomes for people who were already, usually, in pretty poor spots leading to themselves being incarcerated, coming out and not necessarily improving, definitely not improving. And if anything, a chance that it gets a little bit worse. How do we change that entire outcome? And I know you're looking specifically in the incarceration space, but what should be, what could be done differently? Or do we just need a fundamental restructuring of the way we do this? [00:42:17] Damon Petrich: I don't know about a fundamental restructuring - I don't, I'm not great at that high-level thinking stuff, but what I do know is that - we're probably going to continue to incarcerate people. That's something that's done in every country and people seem to love here. So if we actually want to use prison for public safety - because 95% of inmates eventually get out - if we actually want to use it for public safety, then let's actually try wholeheartedly to rehabilitate them while they're in there. And again, there's a lot of theory and evidence-based principles on how we can do this, like the risk-need-responsivity model that I talked about earlier, cognitive behavioral therapy more broadly. If you use these types of things and continue to work on them and develop them over time, then yeah - prison might actually be helpful if people are going there and getting the help that they need. But that's not what's happening currently. So that's one level in incarceration terms - that's the area that I know best. So that's one way you could potentially alleviate some of this stuff is - if people are actually getting resources and stuff when they're in prison, and then when once they're reintegrating, they're not only going to reoffend less, but maybe they're going to contribute to their community more. They're going to be better able to connect with their family and stuff like that. So rather than being a hindrance, it could potentially be a help. Obviously, again, it's not ideal to remove people from their communities and their family and friends. And like I said earlier, if you have the option to sentence them to something community-based instead, I think that's the better route to go. But if you are going to send people to prison, which I think we're going to continue to do a lot of the time, then let's rehabilitate them while they're in there is the main point. And do so based on what actually works to do that. [00:44:23] Crystal Fincher: It's really the investment in the people who are there, and we're - I think up against a lot of societal attitudes and resistance where it just feels wrong to a number of people to be providing services and shifting that investment to things that are seemingly helpful for the inmate, because everything about how we've been conditioned to understand our prison system has been - the punishment is kind of the key, and they'll make rational decisions afterwards to avoid prison based on how bad the punishment is. When it comes to community supervision, things like probation, what are the differences there? If there are better outcomes from that, what accounts for the better outcomes when it comes to probation versus incarceration? [00:45:23] Damon Petrich: I wouldn't say the outcomes are better - they're just pretty much the same as they would be if they're sentenced to prison. So, probation costs less and then it also enables the people to be out in the community doing community things, like being with their friends and families and all that. I mean, you can't quantify, based on a recidivism percentage, what their family members and friends and employers are getting out of it. So that's something we can't really look at - or I guess you could, but something we don't often do - but so there's intangible things that you would get by keeping people in the community. Plus it doesn't lead to all that other stuff I talked about where people become cynical of the legal system and it leads to this cycle of whatever. [00:46:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and so if we're were doing this programming in prison and helping people, I think your research shows it's extremely important to do both the structural, Hey, you need a place to live, you need to be able to pay your rent and your bills - so having a job, having housing, having healthcare, getting those very basic needs met is critical. But also addressing a number of the mental or behavioral health issues that are common among the incarcerated population - and dealing with that is as important. And basically those two things both need to happen hand-in-hand. How do we do a better job of that in our current system? [00:46:57] Damon Petrich: Well, first of all, I'd like to say that you're right there - I think maybe when I was talking earlier about employment, it might sound like giving people jobs is just a waste of time, but that's not the case. It needs - the two things need to be paired - you need to deal with the cognitive and behavioral problems in addition to giving them jobs and housing support and all that. In terms of how you actually go about doing that, there are examples in the literature of programs that do this, so there's examples out there. I think if you're a state or local or even federal correctional department and you're interested in doing this - implementing something that's evidence-based - or if you're just a concerned citizen that wants to rally your local officials to do that - go and talk to researchers like me, or people at universities that have criminology departments or criminal justice departments, because this knowledge is out there. It's widely available. You just have to go and seek it out. So at my university, for example, we have the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute and under the guidance of Ed Latessa, he was - now passed - but he was, over the last 30 years, responsible for disseminating a lot of this evidence-based practices to some of the state and local criminal justice agencies. And they helped with implementation and evaluation in a lot of these places, so the help is out there. You just have to look for it a little bit. [00:48:38] Crystal Fincher: And another question I had - your analysis seemed to suggest that when we're talking about low-risk, medium, and high-risk offenders - or people who have done relatively minor crimes versus those who have done more serious crimes - that these interventions are particularly effective the more serious the offense or crime has been. And that perhaps even sometimes treating someone who is a really low-risk as if they're a high-risk, can worsen the outcomes for that person. Is that the case? [00:49:21] Damon Petrich: Yeah, that tends to be a finding in research - we're not exactly sure why, but providing a lot of really intensive services to people deemed to be low-risk can actually be harmful rather than helpful. We don't know based on research why, but there's a lot of pretty good hypotheses about why. So a low-risk offender is going to be somebody who's a first-timer who's committed some not-that-serious crime. So they probably have a job, they probably have pretty strong connections with their family and all that. So if you're taking them and you're putting them in a program where you have to be there 40 hours a week, they're probably going to get fired from their job, it's going to be harder to stay in contact with friends and families that are sort of tying you into a non-criminal life. And then you're probably going to be associating with all kinds of people who are high-risk, and maybe they're going to draw you towards, oh yeah, I could earn four grand going out tonight and stealing some laptops. There's a lot of reasons why just taking low-risk people and putting them in these programs is going to be harmful rather than helpful. [00:50:31] Crystal Fincher: And so with that in mind, and you talk about, Hey, if we're trying to influence local electeds - one of the interesting things about having a podcast and radio show that caters to extremely politically and civically inclined people is that we actually do have a number of policymakers and politicians who listen, and people who are enacting and in control of this policy. If you were to talk to them and give them advice about how to move forward, especially in the current environment that we find ourselves in, where over the past few years has been increasing awareness of some of the defecits of our system and pushes to change those. And also, as we have seen more recently, a real strong pushback from a lot of people who are invested in our current system saying, Hey, let's not change things too much. Maybe we need to jail more and for longer. And maybe we're just not doing enough incarceration, and that's the answer. In that kind of political environment, what would you tell people who are in charge of this policy, who may be facing pressure to keep going forward with the status quo, about how they should evaluate how they should move forward and the kinds of things that they should do? [00:52:07] Damon Petrich: I know a lot of these politicians get lobbied by correctional officer groups or whatever, and that's whatever, but ultimately you get voted in by voters. So, I'm not an expert on public opinion - I have other friends who are more into that kind of stuff, but I do know from talking with them and from reading that literature, that the public actually does support rehabilitation. So they have for a long time and it's shifted more towards being in support of rehabilitation over time. So right now, most Americans support providing rehabilitation programs to prisoners and offenders. So this is something that's going to please your constituency, people want this kind of thing. And it's not like you're going to be losing all kinds of jobs by getting rid of prison - there's going to be a need for skilled people who can provide these programs and probation officers and all these sorts of things. So it's not a net loss when you're getting rid of prisons. There's a lot of reasons to sentence people to community supervision and things like that - provide rehabilitation. There's public support for it, there's jobs involved, there's cost savings - big time, obviously - it's way cheaper to keep somebody out of prison than it is to keep them in prison. So there's a lot of different reasons why you would want to do that as a politician. [00:53:43] Crystal Fincher: I think that makes sense. Certainly it's a lot cheaper to keep someone out of prison versus in prison. I mean, we talked about the annual costs - in the state of Washington over $40,000, King County over $70,000 - comparing that to how much we invest in a student of $11,500 a year. If we focus more on investing in people, both inside and outside the system, it seems like we set ourselves up for a safer community, fewer people being victimized, and more people leading thriving, productive, tax-paying lives. And we're all happier than we are right now, I would think, I would hope - it seems like the research points in that direction. So I certainly appreciate you taking the time to speak with us about this. Is there anything else that you want to leave with us, in thinking about this study and your research? [00:54:55] Damon Petrich: I think we covered it pretty well. Just to circle back to something you just said - I know this might put me out of a job since I focus on what happens when people's lives go awry, but you really are better off to invest in early prevention programs and giving people a good start on life than trying to correct the program or the problem afterwards. So yeah - politicians spend some money on prevention programs. I know the good effects of that are a long way out, but they're actually good on a societal level. So I guess I would add that, even though it's not good for criminologists, maybe, to put themselves out of a job like that. [00:55:40] Crystal Fincher: Well, much appreciated, and thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. [00:55:45] Damon Petrich: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on. I'm glad that there are people out there interested in this stuff, so thanks again. [00:55:51] Crystal Fincher: I thank you all for listening to Hacks & Wonks on KVRU 105.7 FM. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler with assistance from Shannon Cheng. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. Now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Writings by David Kirk Articles Links ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

On today's Podcast I talk about the true Church, and how we miss use the word. In the link below, you will find three audio articles on the Church by David Kirk. I recommend you listen too these brief articles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh1G-oUelto&list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMbvqX3_6bSIQSKLBD4wxKG

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Mystery of Divine Chastening, by David Kirk Links https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠ https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page ⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Mystery of Divine Chastening, by David Kirk Links ⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Mystery of Divine Chastening, by David Kirk Links ⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Mystery of Divine Chastening, by David Kirk Links ⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Writings by David Kirk The Church Links ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

On Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded Podcast. The Writings by David Kirk The Church Links ⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/category/writings-by-david-kirk/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/youtube-playlist-index-page⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.hiawathabible.org/matthew-henrys-main-page⁠⁠⁠ You will find the text on my blog at: ⁠⁠⁠https://downtoearthbutheavenlyminded.com/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjMKxQhmT29Bl4UxjGF9Wbu_⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlTAw2GgUjOzePkce1UhpyXF0sCbPtgK⁠

He was the first man to lift the William Webb Ellis trophy above his head. 1987 All Blacks captain David Kirk catches up with Piney to look back on that first RWC, and what to expect from this year's tournament. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello! This week I'm discussing all things gigs and promotion of gigs with David Kirk of Civil War What a promoter is actually for How to make the most of your downtime between songs at a gig How to approach promoters for gigs Find them on Facebook here Join us on our Facebook Group: Music Survival Guide Community Come and follow us on Instagram! We are at: Music Survival Guide Podcast Phil's Page Phil can be found at: www.vortissoundstudios.com Phil can be emailed at: Phil@philthemixengineer.com If you want to get in contact with us at the podcast, email us at: musicsurvivalguide@gmail.com

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), P.L. 115-97, imposed a $10,000 limitation on individual taxpayers for the deduction of state and local taxes (SALT) for tax years 2018 through 2025. In response, many states enacted laws allowing (or mandating) passthrough entities (PTEs) to pay the taxes at the entity level instead. In November of 2020, the IRS issued Notice 2020-75, which clarified that partnerships and S corporations may deduct their SALT payments at the entity level in computing nonseparately stated taxable income or loss. The notice also indicated that the IRS intends to issue proposed regulations to this effect. While electing a PTE tax election can be very beneficial overall, certain aftereffects — while small alone — when stacked together, may reach a materiality level where it should be second-guessed. On this Tax Section Odyssey episode, David Kirk, CPA, CFP, LLM, Private Tax Leader, National Tax — EY, discusses with April Walker, CPA, CGMA, Lead Manager — Tax Practice & Ethics, AICPA & CIMA, several concerns that could lead to reconsideration of making a PTE election. What you'll learn in this episode S corporation issues (3.08) State crediting complications (11.54) State governments sharing in a “piece of the pie” (14.24) Alternative minimum tax (AMT) matters (16.11) Grantor trusts considerations (20.10) Non-grantor trusts concerns (22.48) Thoughts on refunds (25.00) Final thoughts (28.29) Related resources SALT Roadmap — State and Local Tax Guide — Navigate the complex world of state and local taxes with a compilation of information and quick links to additional guidance and references. Use the map to access information on the types of state and local taxes imposed, tax rates, nexus, passthrough entity (PTE) tax elections and mandates, due dates, government websites and CPA society information. Also quickly determine commonly used state and local tax forms and easily locate versions and their instructions. State and Local Tax Advocacy Resources — This page provides information and documents created by the AICPA State and Local Tax Technical Resource Panel (SALT TRP) on state-level tax advocacy issues affecting tax professionals. State implications with the PTE tax | Tax Section Odyssey — States continue to look at the PTE tax to sidestep the federal $10,000 SALT cap deduction limitation following the IRS's Notice 2020-75. Questions to consider before electing into a PTE tax, The Tax Adviser, Sept. 1, 2022. Map of states with adopted or proposed PTE level tax — AICPA downloadable map open to everyone. Links to PTE taxes states' legislation and tax authorities' information and guidance — AICPA downloadable document open to everyone. Taxpayer and practitioner considerations for whether to elect into a state PTE tax — AICPA downloadable document open to everyone. Keep your finger on the pulse of the dynamic and evolving tax landscape with insights from tax thought leaders in the AICPA Tax Section. The Tax Section Odyssey podcast includes a digest of tax developments, trending issues and practice management tips that you need to be aware of to elevate your professional development and your firm practices. This resource is part of the robust tax resource library available from the AICPA Tax Section. The Tax Section is your go-to home base for staying up to date on the latest tax developments and providing the edge you need for upskilling your professional development. If you're not already a member, consider joining this prestigious community of your tax peers. You'll get free CPE, access to rich technical content such as our Annual Tax Compliance Kit, a weekly member newsletter and a digital subscription to The Tax Adviser.

On this Hacks & Wonks midweek show, Crystal has a robust conversation with Damon Petrich about his research at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. As lead author of the seminal work “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Damon performed an extensive analysis of 116 research studies looking at the effect of incarceration on reoffending. The review's finding that the oft-used policy of imprisonment does not reduce the likelihood of recidivism sparks a discussion about how the United States ended up as the world leader in mass incarceration and the disconnect between conventional assumptions about what prisons provide versus reality. Noting that the carceral system does a poor job of rehabilitation - while eating up budgets across the country and exacting significant societal costs - Damon and Crystal talk about how to design and evaluate programs that do work to deliver greater public safety for everyone. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal, on Twitter at @finchfrii and reach Damon for more information about his research at dpetrich@luc.edu   Resources  “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Damon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Francis T. Cullen for Crime and Justice   Scott Hechinger Twitter thread   “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022” by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner from the Prison Policy Initiative   “Risk-need-responsivity model for offender assessment and rehabilitation” by James Bonta and D. A. Andrews for Public Safety Canada   “Let's Take a Hard Look at Who Is in Jail and Why We Put Them There” by Alea Carr for the ACLU-WA blog   Book - “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect” by Robert J. Sampson   Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program - “Police Legitimacy and Legal Cynicism: Why They Matter and How to Measure in Your Community”    “Polls Show People Favor Rehabilitation over Incarceration” by Matt Clarke for Prison Legal News   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, I am excited to welcome Damon Petrich, who's a doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at University of Cincinnati and incoming assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. He was the lead author of a recent article, "Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review," along with Travis Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, Francis T. Cullen. Damon's research focuses on the effectiveness of corrections and rehabilitation programs, desistance from crime, and the impact of community violence on youth development. Thank you so much for joining us, Damon. [00:01:13] Damon Petrich: Thank you very much for having me on, Crystal. I'm excited to talk a little bit about my work and the implications of that and all that, so thanks again. [00:01:20] Crystal Fincher: I'm very excited to talk about this and it's extremely timely - has been for a while. We have conversations almost every day in the public sphere having to do with public safety - this is such a major component of it. And so I'm hoping as we have this conversation, it'll help us to better assess what the costs and benefits are of custodial sanctions and incarceration, and alternatives to that - to have a conversation that kind of orients us more towards public safety. Sometimes we're so concerned with metrics around police and how many they are, and what the length of a sentence should be. And sometimes we focus on things that take us off of the overall goal of keeping us all safer and reducing the likelihood that each of us are victimized and to hopefully prevent people from becoming victims of crime. And just to have accurate conversations about how we invest our public resources - what we're actually getting from them, and then how to evaluate as we go along - what we should be tracking and measuring and incentivizing. As so many people talk about taking data-driven approaches and create all these dashboards - that we're really doing it from an informed perspective. So just to start out - what actually were you studying and what were you seeking to find out? [00:02:47] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so the main purpose of our meta-analysis, which I can explain exactly what that is later on if you have questions, but the main purpose was to understand what happens when you take one group of offenders and you sentence them to something custodial like prison or jail, and then you sentence another group of similar offenders to something non-custodial like probation. How do those two groups differ in terms of whether they reoffend? So does prison actually deter recidivism, or does it make people more likely to commit crime afterwards? So that's sort of what we were looking at and so we considered all of the available research on that, in this review. [00:03:29] Crystal Fincher: Got it. So right now we have gone down the path of mass incarceration - that is the default punishment that we, as society, have looked to for crime. Hey - sentence them and many times it's, Hey, they're going to jail. Sometimes they get out of jail and they have supervision that continues, but jail is really focused, where we focus a lot of our effort and where we put people and hope that that'll straighten them out and they come out and everything is fine. How did we get here and where are we in terms of how we're approaching incarceration in our society, in our country? [00:04:11] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so there is a lot of public uproar around a lot of issues, like race issues, and there was crime spikes and concerns over social welfare - and there's all this confluence of issues in the '60s and early '70s. And we decided to - as a country, not everyone, but politicians decided that we should tackle the crime problem by A) incarcerating more people, and then B) once they get there, keep them there for longer. So we enacted things like mandatory minimum sentences, where the judge really has no discretion over what happens - the person gets automatically a sentence of incarceration if they've committed a certain type of crime. You had habitual offender laws where if you're - like California's three strikes policy - where if you have two prior felonies and you get a third, no matter what it is, you're going to jail for life. Michigan had the "650 Lifer Law," where if you get caught with 650 grams of heroin or cocaine, you're automatically going to prison for life. And then we got rid of parole and stuff like that in a lot of states. So all these things lead to more people going to jail and then for longer, and those laws came to be in the '70s and '80s. And over that time, our incarceration rate ballooned up by about 700%, so by the early 2000s, we were at over 2 million people incarcerated and another 7-8 million people on probation or parole. So it's a pretty big expansion - the United States has 5% of the world's population and a quarter, or 25%, of the prisoners, so it's a little ridiculous. The crime rate here isn't nearly as high, or nearly high enough to justify that huge disparity. So yeah, it's a whole confluence of factors led us to be the world leader in incarceration. [00:06:14] Crystal Fincher: And what attitudes or what justifications are the people who have the power to enact these policies and continue these policies - how are they justifying them? [00:06:25] Damon Petrich: So there's a few reasons why you might want to incarcerate somebody. One is just because you want to punish them or get revenge on them, so that's more of a moral reason. But the main focus of politicians were twofold - one was incapacitation, so that one means that because you're keeping somebody locked up in a cage, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So the thought is that you're going to reduce crime that way. The research on that is a little squishy even now, and I can talk a little bit more about that later if you want. But the other reason, and the one that we focused on in our review, was that prison deters people from going back to crime after they get out. So the idea there is that prison sucks - you go in there, you're cut off from your job, from your family, from your friends, or from just having hobbies or things to do. And you're not going to want to go back, so when you get out of prison - you think real hard, and you think how much prison sucks, and you decide not to go back to crime. That's the thinking behind that deterrence hypothesis anyway. So those two - incapacitation and deterrence - were the main drivers of those increase in laws and stuff during the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there really wasn't any evidence for either of them - in the '70s and '80s in particular. So most of the research evaluating whether prison actually does deter recidivism has popped up over the last 25 years or so. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: And as you took a look at it - all of the studies that have popped up over the past 25 years had varying degrees of rigor and scientific validity. But as that body of research grew, people began to get a better idea of whether incarceration actually does reduce someone's likelihood of reoffending. How big was that body of work, in terms of studies, and what were you able to look at? [00:08:40] Damon Petrich: So in our particular review, we looked at 116 studies, which is a pretty sizable number. Most people - when you read through an article and a literature review might have 10 studies or something that they just narratively go through, but we looked at 116. And then within those 116 studies, there were 981 statistical models. So 901 different comparisons - or 981 different comparisons - of what happens to custodial versus non-custodial groups. So we looked at a pretty big chunk of literature. [00:09:20] Crystal Fincher: And in that, in the reliance of - that's a really big number - and I think, people now are maybe more familiar, just from a layperson's perspective, of just how big that number is. As we've seen throughout this pandemic that we're in the middle of, studies come out - people are looking at one study, and wow - study number two comes out and we're feeling really good about it. And man, we get to five studies and people are like, okay, we know what's going on. To get beyond a hundred is just a real comprehensive body of study and analysis. What were you able to determine from that? [00:10:05] Damon Petrich: So I should probably explain upfront what a meta-analysis is and why it's useful. So like you were just saying - like in the COVID pandemic, for example - one study will come out and it'll say, oh, Ivermectin reduces symptomatic COVID cases by X percent. And then the next study will come out and say, Ivermectin makes people way worse. So any individual study can be kind of misleading. A good analogy for what a meta-analysis does would be to look at baseball, for example. So let's say you're interested in some rookie player that's just come out, he's just joined Major League Baseball and you go to his - you want to know how good this player actually is? You've never seen him play, you've only heard rumors. So you go out to his first game, he gets up to bat four times and he gets no hits. So you walk away from that game thinking, wow, this player is terrible, the team wasted all their money recruiting and paying this guy's salary. But that could have just been an off game for many reasons - it's his debut game so maybe there's just first-game nerves, maybe the weather was bad, maybe he was having personal problems in his life, or he had a little bit of an injury. So there's a number of reasons why looking at his performance from that one game is not going to be representative of who he is as a player. Ideally, you'd want to look at all the games over a season where he might go up to bat 250 times. And over those 250 times, he gets 80 hits, which is a pretty good batting average - it's over .300. So with that amount of data, you could come to a more solid conclusion of whether he's actually a good player or not. And with that amount of data, you could also look at what we call moderating characteristics. So you could look at, for example, whether he plays better when it's an away game or in a home game, whether it's early or late season - you could look at all these sorts of things. So this is essentially what we're doing with research as well, in a meta-analysis. So if you look at studies on incarceration - one might show increases in recidivism after people go to prison, the next might show decreases, and the next might show that probationers and prisoners reoffend at about the same rates. So just like in the baseball analogy, in a meta-analysis, we're looking at all of the available research. We're combining it together and determining A) what the sort of overall or average effect of incarceration is, and then B) whether these moderating characteristics actually matter. So in other words, is the effect of incarceration pretty much the same for males as it is for females, or for juveniles as adults, or when the research design is really good versus when it's not so great. So that's basically what we did in this meta-analysis is again - looked at 116 studies and from those 981 statistical estimates. [00:13:13] Crystal Fincher: Very helpful. Totally makes sense with the baseball analogy, and I especially appreciate breaking down with all the statistical models and not just kind of thumbs up, thumbs down - the binary - it either increases or reduces the likelihood of recidivism. But under what conditions are - might it be more likely, less likely that someone does? What are some of those influencing effects on what happens? And so you were just talking about the justification that people used going into this, and now that we have data coming out - does it turn out that people go into prison or are incarcerated in jail, they think - wow, this is horrible. Some in society are like the more uncomfortable we make it in jail, the better we want to make sure it's a place that they never would want to come back to - that it's so scary and such a bad experience that they are just scared straight for the rest of their lives. Does it actually turn out to be that way? Do they take a rational look at - this was my experience, I don't want to go back again, therefore I will not do any of the things that I did going in. [00:14:28] Damon Petrich: I would not say that's the conclusion - no. So again, based on the 116 studies that we looked at, which is again a lot, people who are sentenced to incarceration - so jail, prison - they commit crime, they reoffend at about the same rates as if you'd sentence those same people to probation. So in other words, they're not being deterred by being sent to prison. These effects are the same for both males and females. So in other words, prison doesn't reduce reoffending for one group versus the other. It's the same whether we look at adults versus juveniles, it's the same regardless of what type of recidivism we're interested in - rearrests or convictions. It's pretty much the same across the board. There's some slight variations in research designs, but even within those, prison either has no effect or it slightly increases recidivism. We don't find any conditions under which prison is reducing reoffending or deterring these people from going back to those lives. [00:15:35] Crystal Fincher: So from a societal perspective, a lot of people kind of make the assumption that, Hey, we arrest and we incarcerate someone - whew, our streets are safer. They get out, and now they can choose to reintegrate themselves into society hopefully - they do and we're all safer because of it. But it looks like impressions that some people may have that, Hey, we're letting someone off easy. And suggestions - there's so much media coverage around this - and suggestions that because we're letting people off easy, that we're making it easier for them to reoffend, or they don't feel sufficiently punished enough and so that becomes an incentive to reoffend. Does that seem like it tracks with what the studies have shown? [00:16:33] Damon Petrich: Not really - so there's some studies that actually ask prisoners and offenders whether they'd prefer going to prison or probation. And a lot of them will say, oh, I'd rather do a year in prison than spend two or three years on probation. So it's not like they view probation as just being super easy. And they're not saying this because they received time off their sentence for being in the study or anything like that. Probation's not easy either - and you have to also think that while these people are on probation, they're able to stay in close touch with their family, they're able to maintain connections with work or find work, they're able to participate in the community, they can pay taxes - that I know a lot of people who are pro-prison love. So there's all sorts of reasons why - beyond just them reoffending at the same rates as if they'd gone to prison - there's a lot of reasons why we might want to keep these people in the community. And it's not like we're saying, let everybody out of prison - so the nature of this research - you want to compare apples to apples. So in this research, comparing prisoners to probationers - these have to be people who are getting - they could either legitimately get a sentence of jail or probation, or prison or probation. So these are going to be first-time offenders, people who are relatively low-level - they've committed low-level crimes and all that. So we're not saying - there's not going to be a situation where a murderer just gets probation - that sort of thing. So I know that might be a concern of some people - they think that's a natural argument of this analysis, but it's really not. [00:18:24] Crystal Fincher: Well, and to your point, we're really talking - if we're looking at all of the crime that gets people sentenced to prison time, a very small percentage of that is murder. A very small percentage of it is on that kind of scale - you can wind up in jail or prison for a wide variety of offenses - many of them, people perceive as relatively minor or that people might be surprised can land you in prison. Or if someone has committed a number of minor offenses, that can stack up - to your point in other situations - and increase the length of detention or the severity of the consequences. As we're looking through this and the conversation of, okay, so, we sentence them, we let them out - it's not looking like there's a difference between jail or community supervisions, things like probation - what is it about jail that is harmful or that is not helpful? What is it about the structure of our current system that doesn't improve recidivism outcomes for people? [00:19:42] Damon Petrich: Probably the main one is the rehabilitation is not the greatest. So just as an example, substance abuse is a very strong predictor whether people are going to reoffend, unsurprisingly. About 50% of prisoners at the state and federal level in The States meet the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria for having a substance use abuse disorder - so they meet the clinical criteria for substance abuse disorder. So half of them, and then more than that just use substances, but they don't meet the criteria for a disorder. But of that 50% who has a substance abuse disorder, only about 20% of those actually receives treatment for it while they're incarcerated. So, you're not dealing with a root cause of reoffending while they're in prison - so you're not deterring them, but you're also not rehabilitating them - so you're really not doing anything. And then in the rare cases where these people are provided with rehabilitation or reentry programming, it's often not based on any sort of evidence-based model of how you actually change people. So there's a lot of psychological and criminology theory and research on how you actually elicit behavioral change, and these programs really aren't in line with any of that. And I could give examples if you wanted, but - [00:21:17] Crystal Fincher: Sure. I think that's helpful, 'cause I think a lot of people do assume, and sometimes it's been controversial - wow, look at how much they're coddling these prisoners - they have these educational programs, and they get all this drug treatment for free, and if they don't come out fixed then it's their own fault because they have access to all of these treatment resources in prison. Is that the case? [00:21:43] Damon Petrich: No, I wouldn't say so - first of all, they don't have access, a lot of them, to any programs. And then, like I said, the programs that they do get really aren't that effective. So the big one that everybody loves to argue for is providing former inmates with jobs. If you look at any federal funding for program development, like the Second Chance Act or the First Step Act - I think that was one under Trump - and then under Bush, there was a Serious [and] Violent Offenders Reentry Initiative - pretty much all of these federal bills will be heavily focused on just providing offenders with jobs. And almost all of the evaluations of these programs show that they don't reduce reoffending. And it's not really that hard - again, if you go back to the literature on behavioral change and, criminology literature - it's not really that hard to understand why just providing a job isn't going to reduce or lead somebody away from a life of crime. A lot of these people have spotty work histories where they've never had a job at all, they believe and know that it's easier to gain money by doing illicit work than it is legal work, they have things like low self-control so they're very impulsive, they don't know how to take criticism or being told what to do by a boss. They live in neighborhoods with very poor opportunities for good jobs and education, and maybe there's a mindset around there that illegal work or whatever is just a better way to go - that's sort of ingrained. So there's a lot of different reasons why just handing somebody a job isn't going to lead them away from crime, 'cause they have all these other things that need to be dealt with first. So ideally, a rehabilitation program that's comprehensive would deal with all of those other background factors and then provide them with a job. Because if you make them less impulsive, better able to resist the influence of their antisocial friends, and get this thought out of their head that other people are being hostile towards them when they're really not - all these sorts of cognitive and behavioral biases that they have - if you deal with all of those things and then you give them a job, they're more likely to actually latch onto that job as something worthwhile doing. And then they're going to go on to get out of a life of crime. But if you just give them a job and you haven't dealt with any of those issues, you can't really expect that to work. And that is the model that we currently do - is something that we don't really expect to work that well. [00:24:28] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, that's - it's really interesting and I don't know that a lot of people actually know that, Hey, giving someone a job isn't sufficient - which is why I think it's so important to talk about studies like this, because some of what has become conventional wisdom, really is not accurate or reflects what has been studied and discovered. And I guess in that vein, what are the factors - you just talked about a few - but what does increase someone's likelihood of reoffending or recidivism, and what reduces it? [00:25:08] Damon Petrich: So those are probably two ends of the same, or two sides of the same coin, but this is pretty well known in criminology - a model called the risk-need-responsivity [RNR] model was developed by a couple of fellow Canadians, named James Bonta and Don Andrews, along with some of their colleagues in the '80s and '90s. And they, through again, other meta-analyses just like we did, found certain categories of characteristics of people who are more likely to reoffend. So you have things like having antisocial peers - so that one's pretty obvious - if you have a bunch of friends that are involved in crime, it's going to be pretty hard for you to get out of that life because you're surrounded by those people. Same with family members. If you have what are called criminal thinking patterns - so again, you might have what's called a hostile attribution bias, things like that, where somebody says something a little bit negative to you and you take that as a huge insult and you retaliate with anger and aggression - things like that. Or being impulsive - so you're again quick to anger, you're swayed by small little enticements in the environment and that sort of thing - so you're easily swayed one way or the other. Things like that are strong predictors of reoffending. Substance abuse - it's what I mentioned earlier. If you don't really have any sort of proactive leisure activities, like hobbies and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of well-known things that we know are strongly associated with recidivism, and a rehabilitation program should ideally deal with them. Now this model that Andrews and Bonta and all these other people came up with - this RNR risk-need-responsivity model - the risk part says that we should give people a risk assessment when they're entering prison or leaving prison and determine what level of risk are they from reoffending. And we assess these different criteria, like criminal thinking patterns and antisocial friends and substance abuse. So we determine what those factors are and then we design them a treatment program that actually deals with those factors at the individual level. So we're not just giving a blanket rehabilitation program to everybody, and you're providing the most amount of care to the people who most need it or who are the most likely to re-offend. And then once we've done all that, we need to make sure that we're addressing these problems in some sort of a format that we know actually works. The most well-known one, but not as often used, the most well-known within the sort of psychologist and criminological literature is cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT]. So this is pretty popular for dealing with depression and all sorts of eating disorders and substance abuse problems in non-offender populations. Well, those programs also work in offender populations and they work pretty well. So the research shows - again meta-analyses - that when you deal with all these three factors - risk, need, and responsivity - you can reduce reoffending rates by about 26%. So it's a pretty sizeable amount - it's much greater than you're getting by just sentencing people to prison without doing anything. [00:28:42] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and I think you cover in your paper - those things are absolutely true. And you just talked about several administrations' attempts to implement programming and resources to try and help people get jobs, potentially - hey, there's even a CBT treatment, but if that treatment has twice as many people as are recommended being in a session and occurs over half the time that it's supposed to, you really are sabotaging the entire process or really setting it up for failure. And it just seems to be an expensive exercise that we aren't really getting anything out of. Does that seem to be consistent with how you've seen the attempts at introducing this programming within prisons and jails? [00:29:40] Damon Petrich: Yeah, for sure - this is a pretty common finding too - so it's not just about preaching that you're going to do these things. You actually have to implement them well. So just like you said, there's a number of studies that show this - so you've designed some really great program that deals with all of these risk factors that lead people back into reoffending, you give it to them in a cognitive behavioral setting. So all seems good on paper, but in practice, like you said - one of the famous studies there - can't remember the names of the authors offhand right now - but one of the famous studies there showed that they're providing it to people in groups of 30, as opposed to 15, and they're delivering it in a really short amount of time. And they're not maybe giving it to the highest-risk people - so they're just mixing random people in there at varying levels of risk. So when you do all these sorts of things - you implement the program poorly - you can't really expect it to work. And this is often the case - is the government pays people to come up with these great programs, and then not enough funding is provided to actually make sure that they're implemented and evaluated well. So the amount of funding that actually goes into that - developing the programs to begin with - is small, but when you do do that, you're not making sure that you're actually implementing things well. So it's just sort of shooting yourself in the foot, and probably making people come to the conclusion that these things don't work - when they do work, if you just implement them well. [00:31:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and there's also a lot of rhetoric - and you discuss this - there's a lot of rhetoric coming from the government, even coming from leadership within the Bureau of Prisons or leadership in our carceral system, saying we do want to rehabilitate people. We are trying to implement programming that does this. You see - we have these educational opportunities and we are doing evaluations of people. And it may be happening while they're understaffed or other challenges, but one of the biggest, I guess, red flags is that none of the evaluation of their programs and none of the incentives that arise are in any way tied to what is the actual result of what happens. Are you actually succeeding on reducing someone's likelihood for reoffense? It does not seem like any compensation is tied to that, any kind of evaluation of positions or regular reporting - to say, is this program having its intended effect? And if not, what do we need to do to correct for that? Is that what you found? [00:32:33] Damon Petrich: I would say that's probably a pretty fair assessment. A lot of the programs that are implemented are never evaluated at all. And then the ones that are - it's usually once - there's one evaluation of those programs. And then, like you said, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of self-reflection - I don't know what other word you would use - but these programs don't really change on the basis of these evaluations. So, it's kind of disheartening to hear about, I guess. [00:33:14] Crystal Fincher: It feels very disheartening to live in the middle of - and one of the big things about this is that this - we have these conversations and we talk about these studies and we're saying, yeah, it actually - we're not doing anyone any favors right now when it comes to reducing recidivism. And having these conversations oftentimes detached from the cost associated with what we're paying for these. And my goodness are we paying to incarcerate people? It's not just, well, we do lock them up and we keep them away. Or we do a good job of keeping them in - they reoffend, they go back to jail. And lots of people are like, we did our job, they went back to jail - boom, everything is fine. But we are paying through the nose and out the ear for this - just here, we're in the state of Washington, and right now the state spends about $112 per day, or over $40,000 annually, to incarcerate one individual - that's the cost per inmate. In King County - the county that we're in - they spend $192 a day, or $70,000 annually, to incarcerate an individual. That is a huge amount of the tax dollars that we spend - these come out of our general fund, meaning that these are dollars that every service, everything that is not a dedicated source of revenue, is competing for. So when we talk about things and have conversations like, well, we don't have the budget for that and we don't have the money - that is related to how much of that money we're spending on other things. And my goodness, I would think that we want to get our money's worth for that level of expenditure. And it really appears that if we're saying the goal of jail is to get people on the straight and narrow path and becoming contributing members of society and all of the implications of that, it doesn't seem like we're getting our money's worth. And so, if those aren't the goals and if we just want to punish people, it's not like we're punishing people for free. We're punishing people at the cost of $70,000 per day [year], and at the cost of all the other services and infrastructure needs that we have. So it really seems like we're punishing ourselves as much, or more, as others - particularly if we're bringing people back into society that are likely to reoffend in one way or another. And so if our goal is to keep our community safe and that is the North Star, it looks like we need to realign our processes and our expenditure of resources. I guess my question to you, after all that, is - how should we be moving forward? What should we be looking to do? What is shown to work? [00:36:24] Damon Petrich: Well, I would say - yeah, $70,000 a year as just a revenge cost per person seems like a lot. $80 billion in the country as a whole, for a revenge cost, seems like a pretty high price to pay, given we're not reducing reoffending. You could make the argument that these people aren't offending while they're in prison, but that's - there's other reasons why that might not be completely accurate, which I could talk about too, but - [00:36:59] Crystal Fincher: Well, I'm interested in that. Why might that not be accurate? [00:37:03] Damon Petrich: So, obviously the person - if you incarcerate a particular individual, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So that's obvious, but there's a number of reasons why that might not, en masse, actually reduce crime a whole lot. The research on it - this is a little bit squishy - in terms of whether incarcerating more people leads to lower crime rates, because one influences the other. But for example, if you look at illegal drug markets - a lot of the homicides in the United States and other violent crime that people are really concerned about, and it's plastered all over the media is - homicides, gang-related stuff. So if you take key gang members out and you put them in prison, what ends up happening is that there's competition in that market to take over that person's place, either within the gang or other gangs coming in. So what ends up happening oftentimes is a spike in violence. So that's one reason why just incapacitating, particularly high-crime individuals, might not actually lead to lower crime rates overall. Again, you're lowering crime for that one person, but you might be increasing crime on a more systemic level. Beyond that, these things have broader societal and community level impacts - incarcerating a lot of people. Again, research shows that when you're incarcerating a lot of people in a particular community - so there's a bunch of really good work by Robert Sampson - he has a book that came out a few years ago called Great American City. And he looked at these individual neighborhoods in Chicago over time, and what he finds is that in communities where there's a higher number of people incarcerated in a particular community, this ends up increasing what's called "legal cynicism." And this is done in some other work as well with David Kirk and Andrew Papachristos - but they show that this increases legal cynicism, which means people are skeptical of police helping them out, the police doing a good job. And what ends up happening after that - when people are more cynical of the legal system, they're less likely to report crimes to the police, they're less likely to cooperate with the police. So what ends up happening? You incarcerate more people and people in that community end up being less willing to cooperate with law enforcement. And this leads to sort of an endless cycle where things sort of get out of hand. So there's all these unintended and nonfinancial consequences of incarcerating a lot of people that could potentially end up leading to more crime. [00:40:03] Crystal Fincher: Well, and - speaking as a Black woman - obviously, looking at the impacts of mass incarceration in the Black community and in neighborhoods around the country - where it is almost like the community is responding to the actual outcome and that, Hey, this actually isn't making my community any better. I'm experiencing traumatic impacts from this - whether it's my relative went to prison or a sole breadwinner in the family and now we're thrown into poverty, or I'm in a situation where I don't have a parent who used to be there - who now is no longer there. Or causing instability and impacting the education that people get and the kind of job opportunity, watching someone who's come out have to struggle and be ostracized. And it looks like, Hey, this is just the first step on a long cycle of traumatic and undesirable events - and I don't want to participate in a system that is doing that. With that, as we look forward, and I think this is also related to conversations about just fundamental trust in our criminal legal system and relations with police and throughout the system. It's - if we think about how to turn that around - to me, seems related to thinking about the question of how do we get better outcomes for everyone? 'Cause it seems like right now where we're investing a lot in poor outcomes for people who were already, usually, in pretty poor spots leading to themselves being incarcerated, coming out and not necessarily improving, definitely not improving. And if anything, a chance that it gets a little bit worse. How do we change that entire outcome? And I know you're looking specifically in the incarceration space, but what should be, what could be done differently? Or do we just need a fundamental restructuring of the way we do this? [00:42:17] Damon Petrich: I don't know about a fundamental restructuring - I don't, I'm not great at that high-level thinking stuff, but what I do know is that - we're probably going to continue to incarcerate people. That's something that's done in every country and people seem to love here. So if we actually want to use prison for public safety - because 95% of inmates eventually get out - if we actually want to use it for public safety, then let's actually try wholeheartedly to rehabilitate them while they're in there. And again, there's a lot of theory and evidence-based principles on how we can do this, like the risk-need-responsivity model that I talked about earlier, cognitive behavioral therapy more broadly. If you use these types of things and continue to work on them and develop them over time, then yeah - prison might actually be helpful if people are going there and getting the help that they need. But that's not what's happening currently. So that's one level in incarceration terms - that's the area that I know best. So that's one way you could potentially alleviate some of this stuff is - if people are actually getting resources and stuff when they're in prison, and then when once they're reintegrating, they're not only going to reoffend less, but maybe they're going to contribute to their community more. They're going to be better able to connect with their family and stuff like that. So rather than being a hindrance, it could potentially be a help. Obviously, again, it's not ideal to remove people from their communities and their family and friends. And like I said earlier, if you have the option to sentence them to something community-based instead, I think that's the better route to go. But if you are going to send people to prison, which I think we're going to continue to do a lot of the time, then let's rehabilitate them while they're in there is the main point. And do so based on what actually works to do that. [00:44:23] Crystal Fincher: It's really the investment in the people who are there, and we're - I think up against a lot of societal attitudes and resistance where it just feels wrong to a number of people to be providing services and shifting that investment to things that are seemingly helpful for the inmate, because everything about how we've been conditioned to understand our prison system has been - the punishment is kind of the key, and they'll make rational decisions afterwards to avoid prison based on how bad the punishment is. When it comes to community supervision, things like probation, what are the differences there? If there are better outcomes from that, what accounts for the better outcomes when it comes to probation versus incarceration? [00:45:23] Damon Petrich: I wouldn't say the outcomes are better - they're just pretty much the same as they would be if they're sentenced to prison. So, probation costs less and then it also enables the people to be out in the community doing community things, like being with their friends and families and all that. I mean, you can't quantify, based on a recidivism percentage, what their family members and friends and employers are getting out of it. So that's something we can't really look at - or I guess you could, but something we don't often do - but so there's intangible things that you would get by keeping people in the community. Plus it doesn't lead to all that other stuff I talked about where people become cynical of the legal system and it leads to this cycle of whatever. [00:46:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and so if we're were doing this programming in prison and helping people, I think your research shows it's extremely important to do both the structural, Hey, you need a place to live, you need to be able to pay your rent and your bills - so having a job, having housing, having healthcare, getting those very basic needs met is critical. But also addressing a number of the mental or behavioral health issues that are common among the incarcerated population - and dealing with that is as important. And basically those two things both need to happen hand-in-hand. How do we do a better job of that in our current system? [00:46:57] Damon Petrich: Well, first of all, I'd like to say that you're right there - I think maybe when I was talking earlier about employment, it might sound like giving people jobs is just a waste of time, but that's not the case. It needs - the two things need to be paired - you need to deal with the cognitive and behavioral problems in addition to giving them jobs and housing support and all that. In terms of how you actually go about doing that, there are examples in the literature of programs that do this, so there's examples out there. I think if you're a state or local or even federal correctional department and you're interested in doing this - implementing something that's evidence-based - or if you're just a concerned citizen that wants to rally your local officials to do that - go and talk to researchers like me, or people at universities that have criminology departments or criminal justice departments, because this knowledge is out there. It's widely available. You just have to go and seek it out. So at my university, for example, we have the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute and under the guidance of Ed Latessa, he was - now passed - but he was, over the last 30 years, responsible for disseminating a lot of this evidence-based practices to some of the state and local criminal justice agencies. And they helped with implementation and evaluation in a lot of these places, so the help is out there. You just have to look for it a little bit. [00:48:38] Crystal Fincher: And another question I had - your analysis seemed to suggest that when we're talking about low-risk, medium, and high-risk offenders - or people who have done relatively minor crimes versus those who have done more serious crimes - that these interventions are particularly effective the more serious the offense or crime has been. And that perhaps even sometimes treating someone who is a really low-risk as if they're a high-risk, can worsen the outcomes for that person. Is that the case? [00:49:21] Damon Petrich: Yeah, that tends to be a finding in research - we're not exactly sure why, but providing a lot of really intensive services to people deemed to be low-risk can actually be harmful rather than helpful. We don't know based on research why, but there's a lot of pretty good hypotheses about why. So a low-risk offender is going to be somebody who's a first-timer who's committed some not-that-serious crime. So they probably have a job, they probably have pretty strong connections with their family and all that. So if you're taking them and you're putting them in a program where you have to be there 40 hours a week, they're probably going to get fired from their job, it's going to be harder to stay in contact with friends and families that are sort of tying you into a non-criminal life. And then you're probably going to be associating with all kinds of people who are high-risk, and maybe they're going to draw you towards, oh yeah, I could earn four grand going out tonight and stealing some laptops. There's a lot of reasons why just taking low-risk people and putting them in these programs is going to be harmful rather than helpful. [00:50:31] Crystal Fincher: And so with that in mind, and you talk about, Hey, if we're trying to influence local electeds - one of the interesting things about having a podcast and radio show that caters to extremely politically and civically inclined people is that we actually do have a number of policymakers and politicians who listen, and people who are enacting and in control of this policy. If you were to talk to them and give them advice about how to move forward, especially in the current environment that we find ourselves in, where over the past few years has been increasing awareness of some of the defecits of our system and pushes to change those. And also, as we have seen more recently, a real strong pushback from a lot of people who are invested in our current system saying, Hey, let's not change things too much. Maybe we need to jail more and for longer. And maybe we're just not doing enough incarceration, and that's the answer. In that kind of political environment, what would you tell people who are in charge of this policy, who may be facing pressure to keep going forward with the status quo, about how they should evaluate how they should move forward and the kinds of things that they should do? [00:52:07] Damon Petrich: I know a lot of these politicians get lobbied by correctional officer groups or whatever, and that's whatever, but ultimately you get voted in by voters. So, I'm not an expert on public opinion - I have other friends who are more into that kind of stuff, but I do know from talking with them and from reading that literature, that the public actually does support rehabilitation. So they have for a long time and it's shifted more towards being in support of rehabilitation over time. So right now, most Americans support providing rehabilitation programs to prisoners and offenders. So this is something that's going to please your constituency, people want this kind of thing. And it's not like you're going to be losing all kinds of jobs by getting rid of prison - there's going to be a need for skilled people who can provide these programs and probation officers and all these sorts of things. So it's not a net loss when you're getting rid of prisons. There's a lot of reasons to sentence people to community supervision and things like that - provide rehabilitation. There's public support for it, there's jobs involved, there's cost savings - big time, obviously - it's way cheaper to keep somebody out of prison than it is to keep them in prison. So there's a lot of different reasons why you would want to do that as a politician. [00:53:43] Crystal Fincher: I think that makes sense. Certainly it's a lot cheaper to keep someone out of prison versus in prison. I mean, we talked about the annual costs - in the state of Washington over $40,000, King County over $70,000 - comparing that to how much we invest in a student of $11,500 a year. If we focus more on investing in people, both inside and outside the system, it seems like we set ourselves up for a safer community, fewer people being victimized, and more people leading thriving, productive, tax-paying lives. And we're all happier than we are right now, I would think, I would hope - it seems like the research points in that direction. So I certainly appreciate you taking the time to speak with us about this. Is there anything else that you want to leave with us, in thinking about this study and your research? [00:54:55] Damon Petrich: I think we covered it pretty well. Just to circle back to something you just said - I know this might put me out of a job since I focus on what happens when people's lives go awry, but you really are better off to invest in early prevention programs and giving people a good start on life than trying to correct the program or the problem afterwards. So yeah - politicians spend some money on prevention programs. I know the good effects of that are a long way out, but they're actually good on a societal level. So I guess I would add that, even though it's not good for criminologists, maybe, to put themselves out of a job like that. [00:55:40] Crystal Fincher: Well, much appreciated, and thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. [00:55:45] Damon Petrich: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on. I'm glad that there are people out there interested in this stuff, so thanks again. [00:55:51] Crystal Fincher: I thank you all for listening to Hacks & Wonks on KVRU 105.7 FM. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler with assistance from Shannon Cheng. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. Now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

In this episode, we discuss a book entitled Models-Based Practice in Physical Education written by world-renowned physical education scholars Drs. Ash Casey and David Kirk.  We are very fortunate to have Dr. Casey join us from the United Kingdom.   Dr. Ash Casey is a Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy at Loughborough University. His research focuses on Models-Based Practice, teacher learning/research, and the use of new technologies in learning. Ash is an Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (Routledge) and is the author, co-author, and editor of four Routledge books while continuing to publish regularly in leading education research journals. He is active on social where you connect with him directly on Twitter @DrAshCasey.  Alongside his impressive publication record, Dr. Casey has his own podcast and blog entitled Physical Education Practitioner Research Network (PEPRN).  Both are among the Health and PE profession's most pupular resources, not only in the U.S., but around the world.In addition to Dr. Casey, we have invited current graduate students who are taking a curriculum course with Dr. Seymour at Canisius College.  Dr. Casey and Kirk's Book - Models-Based Practice in Physical Education is the required textbook for the class.More information about Dr. Casey's Book and blog is below:https://www.routledge.com/Models-based-Practice-in-Physical-Education/Casey-Kirk/p/book/9780367680381https://www.peprn.com/

THIS IS PART 2 OF OUR EPISODE ON THE FINAL, PLEASE LISTEN TO PART 1 IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY!We finally wrap up the 1987 tournament, as David Kirk and the All Blacks lift the Webb Ellis Cup. We also finally reveal the immediate plans for the podcast, including which World Cup we'll be diving into next...Thank you for listening to this bizarre series. Thanks to all dogs who ran onto the pitch. And most importantly, thanks to Tom Rosenthal for our simply beautiful theme music. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you interested in becoming a DevOps Engineer? It's hard to solidify exactly what DevOps is and how to get into it, so I brought on a Senior DevOps Engineer to teach me more about it. As you'll learn, there's quite a variety of different types of DevOps positions, but David still managed to share solid advice on what to learn and how to land a DevOps job. For those potentially interested in this path, I hope this helps!David Kirk (guest):Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kirk-jr Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/1rPsb7EBWovFCNfS719AaR?si=Z3esnB1CRBm2ujaDYyBsNg---------------------------------------------------

On this Hacks & Wonks midweek show, Crystal has a robust conversation with Damon Petrich about his research at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. As lead author of the seminal work “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Damon performed an extensive analysis of 116 research studies looking at the effect of incarceration on reoffending. The review's finding that the oft-used policy of imprisonment does not reduce the likelihood of recidivism sparks a discussion about how the United States ended up as the world leader in mass incarceration and the disconnect between conventional assumptions about what prisons provide versus reality. Noting that the carceral system does a poor job of rehabilitation - while eating up budgets across the country and exacting significant societal costs - Damon and Crystal talk about how to design and evaluate programs that do work to deliver greater public safety for everyone. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal, on Twitter at @finchfrii and reach Damon for more information about his research at petricdm@ucmail.uc.edu   Resources  “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Damon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, and Francis T. Cullen for Crime and Justice: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715100   Scott Hechinger Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1447596444886523911   “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022” by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner from the Prison Policy Initiative: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html   “Risk-need-responsivity model for offender assessment and rehabilitation” by James Bonta and D. A. Andrews for Public Safety Canada: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/rsk-nd-rspnsvty/index-en.aspx   “Let's Take a Hard Look at Who Is in Jail and Why We Put Them There” by Alea Carr for the ACLU-WA blog: https://www.aclu-wa.org/blog/let-s-take-hard-look-who-jail-and-why-we-put-them-there   Book - “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect” by Robert J. Sampson: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo5514383.html   Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program - “Police Legitimacy and Legal Cynicism: Why They Matter and How to Measure in Your Community”: https://www.lisc.org/media/filer_public/05/0b/050ba3aa-044f-4676-bc1e-6e2b6c48412c/091317_bcji_resources_police_legitimacy_fundamentals.pdf   “Polls Show People Favor Rehabilitation over Incarceration” by Matt Clarke for Prison Legal News: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/polls-show-people-favor-rehabilitation-over-incarceration/   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, I am excited to welcome Damon Petrich, who's a doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at University of Cincinnati and incoming assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. He was the lead author of a recent article, "Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review," along with Travis Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, Francis T. Cullen. Damon's research focuses on the effectiveness of corrections and rehabilitation programs, desistance from crime, and the impact of community violence on youth development. Thank you so much for joining us, Damon. [00:01:13] Damon Petrich: Thank you very much for having me on, Crystal. I'm excited to talk a little bit about my work and the implications of that and all that, so thanks again. [00:01:20] Crystal Fincher: I'm very excited to talk about this and it's extremely timely - has been for a while. We have conversations almost every day in the public sphere having to do with public safety - this is such a major component of it. And so I'm hoping as we have this conversation, it'll help us to better assess what the costs and benefits are of custodial sanctions and incarceration, and alternatives to that - to have a conversation that kind of orients us more towards public safety. Sometimes we're so concerned with metrics around police and how many they are, and what the length of a sentence should be. And sometimes we focus on things that take us off of the overall goal of keeping us all safer and reducing the likelihood that each of us are victimized and to hopefully prevent people from becoming victims of crime. And just to have accurate conversations about how we invest our public resources - what we're actually getting from them, and then how to evaluate as we go along - what we should be tracking and measuring and incentivizing. As so many people talk about taking data-driven approaches and create all these dashboards - that we're really doing it from an informed perspective. So just to start out - what actually were you studying and what were you seeking to find out? [00:02:47] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so the main purpose of our meta-analysis, which I can explain exactly what that is later on if you have questions, but the main purpose was to understand what happens when you take one group of offenders and you sentence them to something custodial like prison or jail, and then you sentence another group of similar offenders to something non-custodial like probation. How do those two groups differ in terms of whether they reoffend? So does prison actually deter recidivism, or does it make people more likely to commit crime afterwards? So that's sort of what we were looking at and so we considered all of the available research on that, in this review. [00:03:29] Crystal Fincher: Got it. So right now we have gone down the path of mass incarceration - that is the default punishment that we, as society, have looked to for crime. Hey - sentence them and many times it's, Hey, they're going to jail. Sometimes they get out of jail and they have supervision that continues, but jail is really focused, where we focus a lot of our effort and where we put people and hope that that'll straighten them out and they come out and everything is fine. How did we get here and where are we in terms of how we're approaching incarceration in our society, in our country? [00:04:11] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so there is a lot of public uproar around a lot of issues, like race issues, and there was crime spikes and concerns over social welfare - and there's all this confluence of issues in the '60s and early '70s. And we decided to - as a country, not everyone, but politicians decided that we should tackle the crime problem by A) incarcerating more people, and then B) once they get there, keep them there for longer. So we enacted things like mandatory minimum sentences, where the judge really has no discretion over what happens - the person gets automatically a sentence of incarceration if they've committed a certain type of crime. You had habitual offender laws where if you're - like California's three strikes policy - where if you have two prior felonies and you get a third, no matter what it is, you're going to jail for life. Michigan had the "650 Lifer Law," where if you get caught with 650 grams of heroin or cocaine, you're automatically going to prison for life. And then we got rid of parole and stuff like that in a lot of states. So all these things lead to more people going to jail and then for longer, and those laws came to be in the '70s and '80s. And over that time, our incarceration rate ballooned up by about 700%, so by the early 2000s, we were at over 2 million people incarcerated and another 7-8 million people on probation or parole. So it's a pretty big expansion - the United States has 5% of the world's population and a quarter, or 25%, of the prisoners, so it's a little ridiculous. The crime rate here isn't nearly as high, or nearly high enough to justify that huge disparity. So yeah, it's a whole confluence of factors led us to be the world leader in incarceration. [00:06:14] Crystal Fincher: And what attitudes or what justifications are the people who have the power to enact these policies and continue these policies - how are they justifying them? [00:06:25] Damon Petrich: So there's a few reasons why you might want to incarcerate somebody. One is just because you want to punish them or get revenge on them, so that's more of a moral reason. But the main focus of politicians were twofold - one was incapacitation, so that one means that because you're keeping somebody locked up in a cage, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So the thought is that you're going to reduce crime that way. The research on that is a little squishy even now, and I can talk a little bit more about that later if you want. But the other reason, and the one that we focused on in our review, was that prison deters people from going back to crime after they get out. So the idea there is that prison sucks - you go in there, you're cut off from your job, from your family, from your friends, or from just having hobbies or things to do. And you're not going to want to go back, so when you get out of prison - you think real hard, and you think how much prison sucks, and you decide not to go back to crime. That's the thinking behind that deterrence hypothesis anyway. So those two - incapacitation and deterrence - were the main drivers of those increase in laws and stuff during the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there really wasn't any evidence for either of them - in the '70s and '80s in particular. So most of the research evaluating whether prison actually does deter recidivism has popped up over the last 25 years or so. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: And as you took a look at it - all of the studies that have popped up over the past 25 years had varying degrees of rigor and scientific validity. But as that body of research grew, people began to get a better idea of whether incarceration actually does reduce someone's likelihood of reoffending. How big was that body of work, in terms of studies, and what were you able to look at? [00:08:40] Damon Petrich: So in our particular review, we looked at 116 studies, which is a pretty sizable number. Most people - when you read through an article and a literature review might have 10 studies or something that they just narratively go through, but we looked at 116. And then within those 116 studies, there were 981 statistical models. So 901 different comparisons - or 981 different comparisons - of what happens to custodial versus non-custodial groups. So we looked at a pretty big chunk of literature. [00:09:20] Crystal Fincher: And in that, in the reliance of - that's a really big number - and I think, people now are maybe more familiar, just from a layperson's perspective, of just how big that number is. As we've seen throughout this pandemic that we're in the middle of, studies come out - people are looking at one study, and wow - study number two comes out and we're feeling really good about it. And man, we get to five studies and people are like, okay, we know what's going on. To get beyond a hundred is just a real comprehensive body of study and analysis. What were you able to determine from that? [00:10:05] Damon Petrich: So I should probably explain upfront what a meta-analysis is and why it's useful. So like you were just saying - like in the COVID pandemic, for example - one study will come out and it'll say, oh, Ivermectin reduces symptomatic COVID cases by X percent. And then the next study will come out and say, Ivermectin makes people way worse. So any individual study can be kind of misleading. A good analogy for what a meta-analysis does would be to look at baseball, for example. So let's say you're interested in some rookie player that's just come out, he's just joined Major League Baseball and you go to his - you want to know how good this player actually is? You've never seen him play, you've only heard rumors. So you go out to his first game, he gets up to bat four times and he gets no hits. So you walk away from that game thinking, wow, this player is terrible, the team wasted all their money recruiting and paying this guy's salary. But that could have just been an off game for many reasons - it's his debut game so maybe there's just first-game nerves, maybe the weather was bad, maybe he was having personal problems in his life, or he had a little bit of an injury. So there's a number of reasons why looking at his performance from that one game is not going to be representative of who he is as a player. Ideally, you'd want to look at all the games over a season where he might go up to bat 250 times. And over those 250 times, he gets 80 hits, which is a pretty good batting average - it's over .300. So with that amount of data, you could come to a more solid conclusion of whether he's actually a good player or not. And with that amount of data, you could also look at what we call moderating characteristics. So you could look at, for example, whether he plays better when it's an away game or in a home game, whether it's early or late season - you could look at all these sorts of things. So this is essentially what we're doing with research as well, in a meta-analysis. So if you look at studies on incarceration - one might show increases in recidivism after people go to prison, the next might show decreases, and the next might show that probationers and prisoners reoffend at about the same rates. So just like in the baseball analogy, in a meta-analysis, we're looking at all of the available research. We're combining it together and determining A) what the sort of overall or average effect of incarceration is, and then B) whether these moderating characteristics actually matter. So in other words, is the effect of incarceration pretty much the same for males as it is for females, or for juveniles as adults, or when the research design is really good versus when it's not so great. So that's basically what we did in this meta-analysis is again - looked at 116 studies and from those 981 statistical estimates. [00:13:13] Crystal Fincher: Very helpful. Totally makes sense with the baseball analogy, and I especially appreciate breaking down with all the statistical models and not just kind of thumbs up, thumbs down - the binary - it either increases or reduces the likelihood of recidivism. But under what conditions are - might it be more likely, less likely that someone does? What are some of those influencing effects on what happens? And so you were just talking about the justification that people used going into this, and now that we have data coming out - does it turn out that people go into prison or are incarcerated in jail, they think - wow, this is horrible. Some in society are like the more uncomfortable we make it in jail, the better we want to make sure it's a place that they never would want to come back to - that it's so scary and such a bad experience that they are just scared straight for the rest of their lives. Does it actually turn out to be that way? Do they take a rational look at - this was my experience, I don't want to go back again, therefore I will not do any of the things that I did going in. [00:14:28] Damon Petrich: I would not say that's the conclusion - no. So again, based on the 116 studies that we looked at, which is again a lot, people who are sentenced to incarceration - so jail, prison - they commit crime, they reoffend at about the same rates as if you'd sentence those same people to probation. So in other words, they're not being deterred by being sent to prison. These effects are the same for both males and females. So in other words, prison doesn't reduce reoffending for one group versus the other. It's the same whether we look at adults versus juveniles, it's the same regardless of what type of recidivism we're interested in - rearrests or convictions. It's pretty much the same across the board. There's some slight variations in research designs, but even within those, prison either has no effect or it slightly increases recidivism. We don't find any conditions under which prison is reducing reoffending or deterring these people from going back to those lives. [00:15:35] Crystal Fincher: So from a societal perspective, a lot of people kind of make the assumption that, Hey, we arrest and we incarcerate someone - whew, our streets are safer. They get out, and now they can choose to reintegrate themselves into society hopefully - they do and we're all safer because of it. But it looks like impressions that some people may have that, Hey, we're letting someone off easy. And suggestions - there's so much media coverage around this - and suggestions that because we're letting people off easy, that we're making it easier for them to reoffend, or they don't feel sufficiently punished enough and so that becomes an incentive to reoffend. Does that seem like it tracks with what the studies have shown? [00:16:33] Damon Petrich: Not really - so there's some studies that actually ask prisoners and offenders whether they'd prefer going to prison or probation. And a lot of them will say, oh, I'd rather do a year in prison than spend two or three years on probation. So it's not like they view probation as just being super easy. And they're not saying this because they received time off their sentence for being in the study or anything like that. Probation's not easy either - and you have to also think that while these people are on probation, they're able to stay in close touch with their family, they're able to maintain connections with work or find work, they're able to participate in the community, they can pay taxes - that I know a lot of people who are pro-prison love. So there's all sorts of reasons why - beyond just them reoffending at the same rates as if they'd gone to prison - there's a lot of reasons why we might want to keep these people in the community. And it's not like we're saying, let everybody out of prison - so the nature of this research - you want to compare apples to apples. So in this research, comparing prisoners to probationers - these have to be people who are getting - they could either legitimately get a sentence of jail or probation, or prison or probation. So these are going to be first-time offenders, people who are relatively low-level - they've committed low-level crimes and all that. So we're not saying - there's not going to be a situation where a murderer just gets probation - that sort of thing. So I know that might be a concern of some people - they think that's a natural argument of this analysis, but it's really not. [00:18:24] Crystal Fincher: Well, and to your point, we're really talking - if we're looking at all of the crime that gets people sentenced to prison time, a very small percentage of that is murder. A very small percentage of it is on that kind of scale - you can wind up in jail or prison for a wide variety of offenses - many of them, people perceive as relatively minor or that people might be surprised can land you in prison. Or if someone has committed a number of minor offenses, that can stack up - to your point in other situations - and increase the length of detention or the severity of the consequences. As we're looking through this and the conversation of, okay, so, we sentence them, we let them out - it's not looking like there's a difference between jail or community supervisions, things like probation - what is it about jail that is harmful or that is not helpful? What is it about the structure of our current system that doesn't improve recidivism outcomes for people? [00:19:42] Damon Petrich: Probably the main one is the rehabilitation is not the greatest. So just as an example, substance abuse is a very strong predictor whether people are going to reoffend, unsurprisingly. About 50% of prisoners at the state and federal level in The States meet the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria for having a substance use abuse disorder - so they meet the clinical criteria for substance abuse disorder. So half of them, and then more than that just use substances, but they don't meet the criteria for a disorder. But of that 50% who has a substance abuse disorder, only about 20% of those actually receives treatment for it while they're incarcerated. So, you're not dealing with a root cause of reoffending while they're in prison - so you're not deterring them, but you're also not rehabilitating them - so you're really not doing anything. And then in the rare cases where these people are provided with rehabilitation or reentry programming, it's often not based on any sort of evidence-based model of how you actually change people. So there's a lot of psychological and criminology theory and research on how you actually elicit behavioral change, and these programs really aren't in line with any of that. And I could give examples if you wanted, but - [00:21:17] Crystal Fincher: Sure. I think that's helpful, 'cause I think a lot of people do assume, and sometimes it's been controversial - wow, look at how much they're coddling these prisoners - they have these educational programs, and they get all this drug treatment for free, and if they don't come out fixed then it's their own fault because they have access to all of these treatment resources in prison. Is that the case? [00:21:43] Damon Petrich: No, I wouldn't say so - first of all, they don't have access, a lot of them, to any programs. And then, like I said, the programs that they do get really aren't that effective. So the big one that everybody loves to argue for is providing former inmates with jobs. If you look at any federal funding for program development, like the Second Chance Act or the First Step Act - I think that was one under Trump - and then under Bush, there was a Serious [and] Violent Offenders Reentry Initiative - pretty much all of these federal bills will be heavily focused on just providing offenders with jobs. And almost all of the evaluations of these programs show that they don't reduce reoffending. And it's not really that hard - again, if you go back to the literature on behavioral change and, criminology literature - it's not really that hard to understand why just providing a job isn't going to reduce or lead somebody away from a life of crime. A lot of these people have spotty work histories where they've never had a job at all, they believe and know that it's easier to gain money by doing illicit work than it is legal work, they have things like low self-control so they're very impulsive, they don't know how to take criticism or being told what to do by a boss. They live in neighborhoods with very poor opportunities for good jobs and education, and maybe there's a mindset around there that illegal work or whatever is just a better way to go - that's sort of ingrained. So there's a lot of different reasons why just handing somebody a job isn't going to lead them away from crime, 'cause they have all these other things that need to be dealt with first. So ideally, a rehabilitation program that's comprehensive would deal with all of those other background factors and then provide them with a job. Because if you make them less impulsive, better able to resist the influence of their antisocial friends, and get this thought out of their head that other people are being hostile towards them when they're really not - all these sorts of cognitive and behavioral biases that they have - if you deal with all of those things and then you give them a job, they're more likely to actually latch onto that job as something worthwhile doing. And then they're going to go on to get out of a life of crime. But if you just give them a job and you haven't dealt with any of those issues, you can't really expect that to work. And that is the model that we currently do - is something that we don't really expect to work that well. [00:24:28] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, that's - it's really interesting and I don't know that a lot of people actually know that, Hey, giving someone a job isn't sufficient - which is why I think it's so important to talk about studies like this, because some of what has become conventional wisdom, really is not accurate or reflects what has been studied and discovered. And I guess in that vein, what are the factors - you just talked about a few - but what does increase someone's likelihood of reoffending or recidivism, and what reduces it? [00:25:08] Damon Petrich: So those are probably two ends of the same, or two sides of the same coin, but this is pretty well known in criminology - a model called the risk-need-responsivity [RNR] model was developed by a couple of fellow Canadians, named James Bonta and Don Andrews, along with some of their colleagues in the '80s and '90s. And they, through again, other meta-analyses just like we did, found certain categories of characteristics of people who are more likely to reoffend. So you have things like having antisocial peers - so that one's pretty obvious - if you have a bunch of friends that are involved in crime, it's going to be pretty hard for you to get out of that life because you're surrounded by those people. Same with family members. If you have what are called criminal thinking patterns - so again, you might have what's called a hostile attribution bias, things like that, where somebody says something a little bit negative to you and you take that as a huge insult and you retaliate with anger and aggression - things like that. Or being impulsive - so you're again quick to anger, you're swayed by small little enticements in the environment and that sort of thing - so you're easily swayed one way or the other. Things like that are strong predictors of reoffending. Substance abuse - it's what I mentioned earlier. If you don't really have any sort of proactive leisure activities, like hobbies and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of well-known things that we know are strongly associated with recidivism, and a rehabilitation program should ideally deal with them. Now this model that Andrews and Bonta and all these other people came up with - this RNR risk-need-responsivity model - the risk part says that we should give people a risk assessment when they're entering prison or leaving prison and determine what level of risk are they from reoffending. And we assess these different criteria, like criminal thinking patterns and antisocial friends and substance abuse. So we determine what those factors are and then we design them a treatment program that actually deals with those factors at the individual level. So we're not just giving a blanket rehabilitation program to everybody, and you're providing the most amount of care to the people who most need it or who are the most likely to re-offend. And then once we've done all that, we need to make sure that we're addressing these problems in some sort of a format that we know actually works. The most well-known one, but not as often used, the most well-known within the sort of psychologist and criminological literature is cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT]. So this is pretty popular for dealing with depression and all sorts of eating disorders and substance abuse problems in non-offender populations. Well, those programs also work in offender populations and they work pretty well. So the research shows - again meta-analyses - that when you deal with all these three factors - risk, need, and responsivity - you can reduce reoffending rates by about 26%. So it's a pretty sizeable amount - it's much greater than you're getting by just sentencing people to prison without doing anything. [00:28:42] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and I think you cover in your paper - those things are absolutely true. And you just talked about several administrations' attempts to implement programming and resources to try and help people get jobs, potentially - hey, there's even a CBT treatment, but if that treatment has twice as many people as are recommended being in a session and occurs over half the time that it's supposed to, you really are sabotaging the entire process or really setting it up for failure. And it just seems to be an expensive exercise that we aren't really getting anything out of. Does that seem to be consistent with how you've seen the attempts at introducing this programming within prisons and jails? [00:29:40] Damon Petrich: Yeah, for sure - this is a pretty common finding too - so it's not just about preaching that you're going to do these things. You actually have to implement them well. So just like you said, there's a number of studies that show this - so you've designed some really great program that deals with all of these risk factors that lead people back into reoffending, you give it to them in a cognitive behavioral setting. So all seems good on paper, but in practice, like you said - one of the famous studies there - can't remember the names of the authors offhand right now - but one of the famous studies there showed that they're providing it to people in groups of 30, as opposed to 15, and they're delivering it in a really short amount of time. And they're not maybe giving it to the highest-risk people - so they're just mixing random people in there at varying levels of risk. So when you do all these sorts of things - you implement the program poorly - you can't really expect it to work. And this is often the case - is the government pays people to come up with these great programs, and then not enough funding is provided to actually make sure that they're implemented and evaluated well. So the amount of funding that actually goes into that - developing the programs to begin with - is small, but when you do do that, you're not making sure that you're actually implementing things well. So it's just sort of shooting yourself in the foot, and probably making people come to the conclusion that these things don't work - when they do work, if you just implement them well. [00:31:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and there's also a lot of rhetoric - and you discuss this - there's a lot of rhetoric coming from the government, even coming from leadership within the Bureau of Prisons or leadership in our carceral system, saying we do want to rehabilitate people. We are trying to implement programming that does this. You see - we have these educational opportunities and we are doing evaluations of people. And it may be happening while they're understaffed or other challenges, but one of the biggest, I guess, red flags is that none of the evaluation of their programs and none of the incentives that arise are in any way tied to what is the actual result of what happens. Are you actually succeeding on reducing someone's likelihood for reoffense? It does not seem like any compensation is tied to that, any kind of evaluation of positions or regular reporting - to say, is this program having its intended effect? And if not, what do we need to do to correct for that? Is that what you found? [00:32:33] Damon Petrich: I would say that's probably a pretty fair assessment. A lot of the programs that are implemented are never evaluated at all. And then the ones that are - it's usually once - there's one evaluation of those programs. And then, like you said, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of self-reflection - I don't know what other word you would use - but these programs don't really change on the basis of these evaluations. So, it's kind of disheartening to hear about, I guess. [00:33:14] Crystal Fincher: It feels very disheartening to live in the middle of - and one of the big things about this is that this - we have these conversations and we talk about these studies and we're saying, yeah, it actually - we're not doing anyone any favors right now when it comes to reducing recidivism. And having these conversations oftentimes detached from the cost associated with what we're paying for these. And my goodness are we paying to incarcerate people? It's not just, well, we do lock them up and we keep them away. Or we do a good job of keeping them in - they reoffend, they go back to jail. And lots of people are like, we did our job, they went back to jail - boom, everything is fine. But we are paying through the nose and out the ear for this - just here, we're in the state of Washington, and right now the state spends about $112 per day, or over $40,000 annually, to incarcerate one individual - that's the cost per inmate. In King County - the county that we're in - they spend $192 a day, or $70,000 annually, to incarcerate an individual. That is a huge amount of the tax dollars that we spend - these come out of our general fund, meaning that these are dollars that every service, everything that is not a dedicated source of revenue, is competing for. So when we talk about things and have conversations like, well, we don't have the budget for that and we don't have the money - that is related to how much of that money we're spending on other things. And my goodness, I would think that we want to get our money's worth for that level of expenditure. And it really appears that if we're saying the goal of jail is to get people on the straight and narrow path and becoming contributing members of society and all of the implications of that, it doesn't seem like we're getting our money's worth. And so, if those aren't the goals and if we just want to punish people, it's not like we're punishing people for free. We're punishing people at the cost of $70,000 per day [year], and at the cost of all the other services and infrastructure needs that we have. So it really seems like we're punishing ourselves as much, or more, as others - particularly if we're bringing people back into society that are likely to reoffend in one way or another. And so if our goal is to keep our community safe and that is the North Star, it looks like we need to realign our processes and our expenditure of resources. I guess my question to you, after all that, is - how should we be moving forward? What should we be looking to do? What is shown to work? [00:36:24] Damon Petrich: Well, I would say - yeah, $70,000 a year as just a revenge cost per person seems like a lot. $80 billion in the country as a whole, for a revenge cost, seems like a pretty high price to pay, given we're not reducing reoffending. You could make the argument that these people aren't offending while they're in prison, but that's - there's other reasons why that might not be completely accurate, which I could talk about too, but - [00:36:59] Crystal Fincher: Well, I'm interested in that. Why might that not be accurate? [00:37:03] Damon Petrich: So, obviously the person - if you incarcerate a particular individual, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So that's obvious, but there's a number of reasons why that might not, en masse, actually reduce crime a whole lot. The research on it - this is a little bit squishy - in terms of whether incarcerating more people leads to lower crime rates, because one influences the other. But for example, if you look at illegal drug markets - a lot of the homicides in the United States and other violent crime that people are really concerned about, and it's plastered all over the media is - homicides, gang-related stuff. So if you take key gang members out and you put them in prison, what ends up happening is that there's competition in that market to take over that person's place, either within the gang or other gangs coming in. So what ends up happening oftentimes is a spike in violence. So that's one reason why just incapacitating, particularly high-crime individuals, might not actually lead to lower crime rates overall. Again, you're lowering crime for that one person, but you might be increasing crime on a more systemic level. Beyond that, these things have broader societal and community level impacts - incarcerating a lot of people. Again, research shows that when you're incarcerating a lot of people in a particular community - so there's a bunch of really good work by Robert Sampson - he has a book that came out a few years ago called Great American City. And he looked at these individual neighborhoods in Chicago over time, and what he finds is that in communities where there's a higher number of people incarcerated in a particular community, this ends up increasing what's called "legal cynicism." And this is done in some other work as well with David Kirk and Andrew Papachristos - but they show that this increases legal cynicism, which means people are skeptical of police helping them out, the police doing a good job. And what ends up happening after that - when people are more cynical of the legal system, they're less likely to report crimes to the police, they're less likely to cooperate with the police. So what ends up happening? You incarcerate more people and people in that community end up being less willing to cooperate with law enforcement. And this leads to sort of an endless cycle where things sort of get out of hand. So there's all these unintended and nonfinancial consequences of incarcerating a lot of people that could potentially end up leading to more crime. [00:40:03] Crystal Fincher: Well, and - speaking as a Black woman - obviously, looking at the impacts of mass incarceration in the Black community and in neighborhoods around the country - where it is almost like the community is responding to the actual outcome and that, Hey, this actually isn't making my community any better. I'm experiencing traumatic impacts from this - whether it's my relative went to prison or a sole breadwinner in the family and now we're thrown into poverty, or I'm in a situation where I don't have a parent who used to be there - who now is no longer there. Or causing instability and impacting the education that people get and the kind of job opportunity, watching someone who's come out have to struggle and be ostracized. And it looks like, Hey, this is just the first step on a long cycle of traumatic and undesirable events - and I don't want to participate in a system that is doing that. With that, as we look forward, and I think this is also related to conversations about just fundamental trust in our criminal legal system and relations with police and throughout the system. It's - if we think about how to turn that around - to me, seems related to thinking about the question of how do we get better outcomes for everyone? 'Cause it seems like right now where we're investing a lot in poor outcomes for people who were already, usually, in pretty poor spots leading to themselves being incarcerated, coming out and not necessarily improving, definitely not improving. And if anything, a chance that it gets a little bit worse. How do we change that entire outcome? And I know you're looking specifically in the incarceration space, but what should be, what could be done differently? Or do we just need a fundamental restructuring of the way we do this? [00:42:17] Damon Petrich: I don't know about a fundamental restructuring - I don't, I'm not great at that high-level thinking stuff, but what I do know is that - we're probably going to continue to incarcerate people. That's something that's done in every country and people seem to love here. So if we actually want to use prison for public safety - because 95% of inmates eventually get out - if we actually want to use it for public safety, then let's actually try wholeheartedly to rehabilitate them while they're in there. And again, there's a lot of theory and evidence-based principles on how we can do this, like the risk-need-responsivity model that I talked about earlier, cognitive behavioral therapy more broadly. If you use these types of things and continue to work on them and develop them over time, then yeah - prison might actually be helpful if people are going there and getting the help that they need. But that's not what's happening currently. So that's one level in incarceration terms - that's the area that I know best. So that's one way you could potentially alleviate some of this stuff is - if people are actually getting resources and stuff when they're in prison, and then when once they're reintegrating, they're not only going to reoffend less, but maybe they're going to contribute to their community more. They're going to be better able to connect with their family and stuff like that. So rather than being a hindrance, it could potentially be a help. Obviously, again, it's not ideal to remove people from their communities and their family and friends. And like I said earlier, if you have the option to sentence them to something community-based instead, I think that's the better route to go. But if you are going to send people to prison, which I think we're going to continue to do a lot of the time, then let's rehabilitate them while they're in there is the main point. And do so based on what actually works to do that. [00:44:23] Crystal Fincher: It's really the investment in the people who are there, and we're - I think up against a lot of societal attitudes and resistance where it just feels wrong to a number of people to be providing services and shifting that investment to things that are seemingly helpful for the inmate, because everything about how we've been conditioned to understand our prison system has been - the punishment is kind of the key, and they'll make rational decisions afterwards to avoid prison based on how bad the punishment is. When it comes to community supervision, things like probation, what are the differences there? If there are better outcomes from that, what accounts for the better outcomes when it comes to probation versus incarceration? [00:45:23] Damon Petrich: I wouldn't say the outcomes are better - they're just pretty much the same as they would be if they're sentenced to prison. So, probation costs less and then it also enables the people to be out in the community doing community things, like being with their friends and families and all that. I mean, you can't quantify, based on a recidivism percentage, what their family members and friends and employers are getting out of it. So that's something we can't really look at - or I guess you could, but something we don't often do - but so there's intangible things that you would get by keeping people in the community. Plus it doesn't lead to all that other stuff I talked about where people become cynical of the legal system and it leads to this cycle of whatever. [00:46:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and so if we're were doing this programming in prison and helping people, I think your research shows it's extremely important to do both the structural, Hey, you need a place to live, you need to be able to pay your rent and your bills - so having a job, having housing, having healthcare, getting those very basic needs met is critical. But also addressing a number of the mental or behavioral health issues that are common among the incarcerated population - and dealing with that is as important. And basically those two things both need to happen hand-in-hand. How do we do a better job of that in our current system? [00:46:57] Damon Petrich: Well, first of all, I'd like to say that you're right there - I think maybe when I was talking earlier about employment, it might sound like giving people jobs is just a waste of time, but that's not the case. It needs - the two things need to be paired - you need to deal with the cognitive and behavioral problems in addition to giving them jobs and housing support and all that. In terms of how you actually go about doing that, there are examples in the literature of programs that do this, so there's examples out there. I think if you're a state or local or even federal correctional department and you're interested in doing this - implementing something that's evidence-based - or if you're just a concerned citizen that wants to rally your local officials to do that - go and talk to researchers like me, or people at universities that have criminology departments or criminal justice departments, because this knowledge is out there. It's widely available. You just have to go and seek it out. So at my university, for example, we have the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute and under the guidance of Ed Latessa, he was - now passed - but he was, over the last 30 years, responsible for disseminating a lot of this evidence-based practices to some of the state and local criminal justice agencies. And they helped with implementation and evaluation in a lot of these places, so the help is out there. You just have to look for it a little bit. [00:48:38] Crystal Fincher: And another question I had - your analysis seemed to suggest that when we're talking about low-risk, medium, and high-risk offenders - or people who have done relatively minor crimes versus those who have done more serious crimes - that these interventions are particularly effective the more serious the offense or crime has been. And that perhaps even sometimes treating someone who is a really low-risk as if they're a high-risk, can worsen the outcomes for that person. Is that the case? [00:49:21] Damon Petrich: Yeah, that tends to be a finding in research - we're not exactly sure why, but providing a lot of really intensive services to people deemed to be low-risk can actually be harmful rather than helpful. We don't know based on research why, but there's a lot of pretty good hypotheses about why. So a low-risk offender is going to be somebody who's a first-timer who's committed some not-that-serious crime. So they probably have a job, they probably have pretty strong connections with their family and all that. So if you're taking them and you're putting them in a program where you have to be there 40 hours a week, they're probably going to get fired from their job, it's going to be harder to stay in contact with friends and families that are sort of tying you into a non-criminal life. And then you're probably going to be associating with all kinds of people who are high-risk, and maybe they're going to draw you towards, oh yeah, I could earn four grand going out tonight and stealing some laptops. There's a lot of reasons why just taking low-risk people and putting them in these programs is going to be harmful rather than helpful. [00:50:31] Crystal Fincher: And so with that in mind, and you talk about, Hey, if we're trying to influence local electeds - one of the interesting things about having a podcast and radio show that caters to extremely politically and civically inclined people is that we actually do have a number of policymakers and politicians who listen, and people who are enacting and in control of this policy. If you were to talk to them and give them advice about how to move forward, especially in the current environment that we find ourselves in, where over the past few years has been increasing awareness of some of the defecits of our system and pushes to change those. And also, as we have seen more recently, a real strong pushback from a lot of people who are invested in our current system saying, Hey, let's not change things too much. Maybe we need to jail more and for longer. And maybe we're just not doing enough incarceration, and that's the answer. In that kind of political environment, what would you tell people who are in charge of this policy, who may be facing pressure to keep going forward with the status quo, about how they should evaluate how they should move forward and the kinds of things that they should do? [00:52:07] Damon Petrich: I know a lot of these politicians get lobbied by correctional officer groups or whatever, and that's whatever, but ultimately you get voted in by voters. So, I'm not an expert on public opinion - I have other friends who are more into that kind of stuff, but I do know from talking with them and from reading that literature, that the public actually does support rehabilitation. So they have for a long time and it's shifted more towards being in support of rehabilitation over time. So right now, most Americans support providing rehabilitation programs to prisoners and offenders. So this is something that's going to please your constituency, people want this kind of thing. And it's not like you're going to be losing all kinds of jobs by getting rid of prison - there's going to be a need for skilled people who can provide these programs and probation officers and all these sorts of things. So it's not a net loss when you're getting rid of prisons. There's a lot of reasons to sentence people to community supervision and things like that - provide rehabilitation. There's public support for it, there's jobs involved, there's cost savings - big time, obviously - it's way cheaper to keep somebody out of prison than it is to keep them in prison. So there's a lot of different reasons why you would want to do that as a politician. [00:53:43] Crystal Fincher: I think that makes sense. Certainly it's a lot cheaper to keep someone out of prison versus in prison. I mean, we talked about the annual costs - in the state of Washington over $40,000, King County over $70,000 - comparing that to how much we invest in a student of $11,500 a year. If we focus more on investing in people, both inside and outside the system, it seems like we set ourselves up for a safer community, fewer people being victimized, and more people leading thriving, productive, tax-paying lives. And we're all happier than we are right now, I would think, I would hope - it seems like the research points in that direction. So I certainly appreciate you taking the time to speak with us about this. Is there anything else that you want to leave with us, in thinking about this study and your research? [00:54:55] Damon Petrich: I think we covered it pretty well. Just to circle back to something you just said - I know this might put me out of a job since I focus on what happens when people's lives go awry, but you really are better off to invest in early prevention programs and giving people a good start on life than trying to correct the program or the problem afterwards. So yeah - politicians spend some money on prevention programs. I know the good effects of that are a long way out, but they're actually good on a societal level. So I guess I would add that, even though it's not good for criminologists, maybe, to put themselves out of a job like that. [00:55:40] Crystal Fincher: Well, much appreciated, and thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. [00:55:45] Damon Petrich: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on. I'm glad that there are people out there interested in this stuff, so thanks again. [00:55:51] Crystal Fincher: I thank you all for listening to Hacks & Wonks on KVRU 105.7 FM. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler with assistance from Shannon Cheng. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. Now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

A leaked report finds that NZ Rugby may struggle to get the Silver Lake genie back in the bottle. Heartbreak for Scott Dixon at the Indy500. Sports commentator Phil Gifford joined Heather du Plessis-Allan. LISTEN ABOVE 

Support me on Patreon for behind the scenes content: https://www.patreon.com/loganskeele Get my FREE Copy of “Scale What Does It Mean” here: http://bit.ly/SCALE-MEAN BUY Greenlight Buildings at http://www.farmtoysandmore.com Shop online here: https://www.advantagediecast.com Connect with me on social media! Facebook: http://bit.ly/FBP-ADC Instagram: http://bit.ly/IG-ADC Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/FBG-64th-Gear-Jammers Podcast: http://bit.ly/Toy-Talk Send me your letters, snacks, or other things to: Toy Talk with Logan Skeele P.O. Box 508 Georgetown, KY 40324 What's up my 64th Gear Jammers? I'm Logan the founder of Advantage Diecast and I'm out here at this old gas station to talk about a Greenlight Building and the Pure Oil Company. Also you can get many of the Greenlight Collectibles buildings on my website https://www.farmtoysandmore.com Our story about the Pure Oil Company begins with its founding in 1914. Before that Three oil companies operating in the United States have used the Pure Oil name. The first of the three companies began in the fall of 1895 as a group of independent oil refiners, producers, and pipeline operators. Setting up in Butler, Pennsylvania, with headquarters in Pittsburgh, although it was incorporated in New Jersey. The Pure company was organized by independent interests to counter to the dominance of Standard Oil Company in the Pennsylvania oil fields and was the second oil company (after Standard) in the region. Operations were based in Oil City, Pennsylvania. David Kirk was elected the first president. He was succeeded in 1896 by James W. Lee. Pure Oil sold illuminating oil in Philadelphia and New York City. The second company: the Pure Oil Producing Co. was incorporated in 1902. In 1904 a refinery was built on the Delaware River which received 600 barrels per day from the United States Pipe Line. This increased to 1,800 barrels per day. The third Pure company began when Beman Gates Dawes, his brothers, and partner Fletcher Heath whose Columbus-based Ohio Cities Gas Company which had begun in 1914 made an offer of $24.50 a share for the Pure Oil Producing Co. Dawes was building an Oklahoma refinery, and Pure Oil had production capabilities there which would benefit his company. The Pennsylvania company accepted the offer. In 1920, Ohio Cities Gas Company's name changed to Pure Oil. In 1926, the headquarters moved to Chicago. Refineries were located in Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/logan-skeele/message

On this Hacks & Wonks midweek show, Crystal has a robust conversation with Damon Petrich about his research at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. As lead author of the seminal work “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Damon performed an extensive analysis of 116 research studies looking at the effect of incarceration on reoffending. The review's finding that the oft-used policy of imprisonment does not reduce the likelihood of recidivism sparks a discussion about how the United States ended up as the world leader in mass incarceration and the disconnect between conventional assumptions about what prisons provide versus reality. Noting that the carceral system does a poor job of rehabilitation - while eating up budgets across the country and exacting significant societal costs - Damon and Crystal talk about how to design and evaluate programs that do work to deliver greater public safety for everyone. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal, on Twitter at @finchfrii and reach Damon for more information about his research at petricdm@ucmail.uc.edu   Resources  “Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Damon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, and Francis T. Cullen for Crime and Justice: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715100   Scott Hechinger Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1447596444886523911   “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022” by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner from the Prison Policy Initiative: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html   “Risk-need-responsivity model for offender assessment and rehabilitation” by James Bonta and D. A. Andrews for Public Safety Canada: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/rsk-nd-rspnsvty/index-en.aspx   “Let's Take a Hard Look at Who Is in Jail and Why We Put Them There” by Alea Carr for the ACLU-WA blog: https://www.aclu-wa.org/blog/let-s-take-hard-look-who-jail-and-why-we-put-them-there   Book - “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect” by Robert J. Sampson: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo5514383.html   Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program - “Police Legitimacy and Legal Cynicism: Why They Matter and How to Measure in Your Community”: https://www.lisc.org/media/filer_public/05/0b/050ba3aa-044f-4676-bc1e-6e2b6c48412c/091317_bcji_resources_police_legitimacy_fundamentals.pdf   “Polls Show People Favor Rehabilitation over Incarceration” by Matt Clarke for Prison Legal News: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/polls-show-people-favor-rehabilitation-over-incarceration/   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, I am excited to welcome Damon Petrich, who's a doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at University of Cincinnati and incoming assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. He was the lead author of a recent article, "Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review," along with Travis Pratt, Cheryl Lero Johnson, Francis T. Cullen. Damon's research focuses on the effectiveness of corrections and rehabilitation programs, desistance from crime, and the impact of community violence on youth development. Thank you so much for joining us, Damon. [00:01:13] Damon Petrich: Thank you very much for having me on, Crystal. I'm excited to talk a little bit about my work and the implications of that and all that, so thanks again. [00:01:20] Crystal Fincher: I'm very excited to talk about this and it's extremely timely - has been for a while. We have conversations almost every day in the public sphere having to do with public safety - this is such a major component of it. And so I'm hoping as we have this conversation, it'll help us to better assess what the costs and benefits are of custodial sanctions and incarceration, and alternatives to that - to have a conversation that kind of orients us more towards public safety. Sometimes we're so concerned with metrics around police and how many they are, and what the length of a sentence should be. And sometimes we focus on things that take us off of the overall goal of keeping us all safer and reducing the likelihood that each of us are victimized and to hopefully prevent people from becoming victims of crime. And just to have accurate conversations about how we invest our public resources - what we're actually getting from them, and then how to evaluate as we go along - what we should be tracking and measuring and incentivizing. As so many people talk about taking data-driven approaches and create all these dashboards - that we're really doing it from an informed perspective. So just to start out - what actually were you studying and what were you seeking to find out? [00:02:47] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so the main purpose of our meta-analysis, which I can explain exactly what that is later on if you have questions, but the main purpose was to understand what happens when you take one group of offenders and you sentence them to something custodial like prison or jail, and then you sentence another group of similar offenders to something non-custodial like probation. How do those two groups differ in terms of whether they reoffend? So does prison actually deter recidivism, or does it make people more likely to commit crime afterwards? So that's sort of what we were looking at and so we considered all of the available research on that, in this review. [00:03:29] Crystal Fincher: Got it. So right now we have gone down the path of mass incarceration - that is the default punishment that we, as society, have looked to for crime. Hey - sentence them and many times it's, Hey, they're going to jail. Sometimes they get out of jail and they have supervision that continues, but jail is really focused, where we focus a lot of our effort and where we put people and hope that that'll straighten them out and they come out and everything is fine. How did we get here and where are we in terms of how we're approaching incarceration in our society, in our country? [00:04:11] Damon Petrich: Yeah, so there is a lot of public uproar around a lot of issues, like race issues, and there was crime spikes and concerns over social welfare - and there's all this confluence of issues in the '60s and early '70s. And we decided to - as a country, not everyone, but politicians decided that we should tackle the crime problem by A) incarcerating more people, and then B) once they get there, keep them there for longer. So we enacted things like mandatory minimum sentences, where the judge really has no discretion over what happens - the person gets automatically a sentence of incarceration if they've committed a certain type of crime. You had habitual offender laws where if you're - like California's three strikes policy - where if you have two prior felonies and you get a third, no matter what it is, you're going to jail for life. Michigan had the "650 Lifer Law," where if you get caught with 650 grams of heroin or cocaine, you're automatically going to prison for life. And then we got rid of parole and stuff like that in a lot of states. So all these things lead to more people going to jail and then for longer, and those laws came to be in the '70s and '80s. And over that time, our incarceration rate ballooned up by about 700%, so by the early 2000s, we were at over 2 million people incarcerated and another 7-8 million people on probation or parole. So it's a pretty big expansion - the United States has 5% of the world's population and a quarter, or 25%, of the prisoners, so it's a little ridiculous. The crime rate here isn't nearly as high, or nearly high enough to justify that huge disparity. So yeah, it's a whole confluence of factors led us to be the world leader in incarceration. [00:06:14] Crystal Fincher: And what attitudes or what justifications are the people who have the power to enact these policies and continue these policies - how are they justifying them? [00:06:25] Damon Petrich: So there's a few reasons why you might want to incarcerate somebody. One is just because you want to punish them or get revenge on them, so that's more of a moral reason. But the main focus of politicians were twofold - one was incapacitation, so that one means that because you're keeping somebody locked up in a cage, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So the thought is that you're going to reduce crime that way. The research on that is a little squishy even now, and I can talk a little bit more about that later if you want. But the other reason, and the one that we focused on in our review, was that prison deters people from going back to crime after they get out. So the idea there is that prison sucks - you go in there, you're cut off from your job, from your family, from your friends, or from just having hobbies or things to do. And you're not going to want to go back, so when you get out of prison - you think real hard, and you think how much prison sucks, and you decide not to go back to crime. That's the thinking behind that deterrence hypothesis anyway. So those two - incapacitation and deterrence - were the main drivers of those increase in laws and stuff during the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but there really wasn't any evidence for either of them - in the '70s and '80s in particular. So most of the research evaluating whether prison actually does deter recidivism has popped up over the last 25 years or so. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: And as you took a look at it - all of the studies that have popped up over the past 25 years had varying degrees of rigor and scientific validity. But as that body of research grew, people began to get a better idea of whether incarceration actually does reduce someone's likelihood of reoffending. How big was that body of work, in terms of studies, and what were you able to look at? [00:08:40] Damon Petrich: So in our particular review, we looked at 116 studies, which is a pretty sizable number. Most people - when you read through an article and a literature review might have 10 studies or something that they just narratively go through, but we looked at 116. And then within those 116 studies, there were 981 statistical models. So 901 different comparisons - or 981 different comparisons - of what happens to custodial versus non-custodial groups. So we looked at a pretty big chunk of literature. [00:09:20] Crystal Fincher: And in that, in the reliance of - that's a really big number - and I think, people now are maybe more familiar, just from a layperson's perspective, of just how big that number is. As we've seen throughout this pandemic that we're in the middle of, studies come out - people are looking at one study, and wow - study number two comes out and we're feeling really good about it. And man, we get to five studies and people are like, okay, we know what's going on. To get beyond a hundred is just a real comprehensive body of study and analysis. What were you able to determine from that? [00:10:05] Damon Petrich: So I should probably explain upfront what a meta-analysis is and why it's useful. So like you were just saying - like in the COVID pandemic, for example - one study will come out and it'll say, oh, Ivermectin reduces symptomatic COVID cases by X percent. And then the next study will come out and say, Ivermectin makes people way worse. So any individual study can be kind of misleading. A good analogy for what a meta-analysis does would be to look at baseball, for example. So let's say you're interested in some rookie player that's just come out, he's just joined Major League Baseball and you go to his - you want to know how good this player actually is? You've never seen him play, you've only heard rumors. So you go out to his first game, he gets up to bat four times and he gets no hits. So you walk away from that game thinking, wow, this player is terrible, the team wasted all their money recruiting and paying this guy's salary. But that could have just been an off game for many reasons - it's his debut game so maybe there's just first-game nerves, maybe the weather was bad, maybe he was having personal problems in his life, or he had a little bit of an injury. So there's a number of reasons why looking at his performance from that one game is not going to be representative of who he is as a player. Ideally, you'd want to look at all the games over a season where he might go up to bat 250 times. And over those 250 times, he gets 80 hits, which is a pretty good batting average - it's over .300. So with that amount of data, you could come to a more solid conclusion of whether he's actually a good player or not. And with that amount of data, you could also look at what we call moderating characteristics. So you could look at, for example, whether he plays better when it's an away game or in a home game, whether it's early or late season - you could look at all these sorts of things. So this is essentially what we're doing with research as well, in a meta-analysis. So if you look at studies on incarceration - one might show increases in recidivism after people go to prison, the next might show decreases, and the next might show that probationers and prisoners reoffend at about the same rates. So just like in the baseball analogy, in a meta-analysis, we're looking at all of the available research. We're combining it together and determining A) what the sort of overall or average effect of incarceration is, and then B) whether these moderating characteristics actually matter. So in other words, is the effect of incarceration pretty much the same for males as it is for females, or for juveniles as adults, or when the research design is really good versus when it's not so great. So that's basically what we did in this meta-analysis is again - looked at 116 studies and from those 981 statistical estimates. [00:13:13] Crystal Fincher: Very helpful. Totally makes sense with the baseball analogy, and I especially appreciate breaking down with all the statistical models and not just kind of thumbs up, thumbs down - the binary - it either increases or reduces the likelihood of recidivism. But under what conditions are - might it be more likely, less likely that someone does? What are some of those influencing effects on what happens? And so you were just talking about the justification that people used going into this, and now that we have data coming out - does it turn out that people go into prison or are incarcerated in jail, they think - wow, this is horrible. Some in society are like the more uncomfortable we make it in jail, the better we want to make sure it's a place that they never would want to come back to - that it's so scary and such a bad experience that they are just scared straight for the rest of their lives. Does it actually turn out to be that way? Do they take a rational look at - this was my experience, I don't want to go back again, therefore I will not do any of the things that I did going in. [00:14:28] Damon Petrich: I would not say that's the conclusion - no. So again, based on the 116 studies that we looked at, which is again a lot, people who are sentenced to incarceration - so jail, prison - they commit crime, they reoffend at about the same rates as if you'd sentence those same people to probation. So in other words, they're not being deterred by being sent to prison. These effects are the same for both males and females. So in other words, prison doesn't reduce reoffending for one group versus the other. It's the same whether we look at adults versus juveniles, it's the same regardless of what type of recidivism we're interested in - rearrests or convictions. It's pretty much the same across the board. There's some slight variations in research designs, but even within those, prison either has no effect or it slightly increases recidivism. We don't find any conditions under which prison is reducing reoffending or deterring these people from going back to those lives. [00:15:35] Crystal Fincher: So from a societal perspective, a lot of people kind of make the assumption that, Hey, we arrest and we incarcerate someone - whew, our streets are safer. They get out, and now they can choose to reintegrate themselves into society hopefully - they do and we're all safer because of it. But it looks like impressions that some people may have that, Hey, we're letting someone off easy. And suggestions - there's so much media coverage around this - and suggestions that because we're letting people off easy, that we're making it easier for them to reoffend, or they don't feel sufficiently punished enough and so that becomes an incentive to reoffend. Does that seem like it tracks with what the studies have shown? [00:16:33] Damon Petrich: Not really - so there's some studies that actually ask prisoners and offenders whether they'd prefer going to prison or probation. And a lot of them will say, oh, I'd rather do a year in prison than spend two or three years on probation. So it's not like they view probation as just being super easy. And they're not saying this because they received time off their sentence for being in the study or anything like that. Probation's not easy either - and you have to also think that while these people are on probation, they're able to stay in close touch with their family, they're able to maintain connections with work or find work, they're able to participate in the community, they can pay taxes - that I know a lot of people who are pro-prison love. So there's all sorts of reasons why - beyond just them reoffending at the same rates as if they'd gone to prison - there's a lot of reasons why we might want to keep these people in the community. And it's not like we're saying, let everybody out of prison - so the nature of this research - you want to compare apples to apples. So in this research, comparing prisoners to probationers - these have to be people who are getting - they could either legitimately get a sentence of jail or probation, or prison or probation. So these are going to be first-time offenders, people who are relatively low-level - they've committed low-level crimes and all that. So we're not saying - there's not going to be a situation where a murderer just gets probation - that sort of thing. So I know that might be a concern of some people - they think that's a natural argument of this analysis, but it's really not. [00:18:24] Crystal Fincher: Well, and to your point, we're really talking - if we're looking at all of the crime that gets people sentenced to prison time, a very small percentage of that is murder. A very small percentage of it is on that kind of scale - you can wind up in jail or prison for a wide variety of offenses - many of them, people perceive as relatively minor or that people might be surprised can land you in prison. Or if someone has committed a number of minor offenses, that can stack up - to your point in other situations - and increase the length of detention or the severity of the consequences. As we're looking through this and the conversation of, okay, so, we sentence them, we let them out - it's not looking like there's a difference between jail or community supervisions, things like probation - what is it about jail that is harmful or that is not helpful? What is it about the structure of our current system that doesn't improve recidivism outcomes for people? [00:19:42] Damon Petrich: Probably the main one is the rehabilitation is not the greatest. So just as an example, substance abuse is a very strong predictor whether people are going to reoffend, unsurprisingly. About 50% of prisoners at the state and federal level in The States meet the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria for having a substance use abuse disorder - so they meet the clinical criteria for substance abuse disorder. So half of them, and then more than that just use substances, but they don't meet the criteria for a disorder. But of that 50% who has a substance abuse disorder, only about 20% of those actually receives treatment for it while they're incarcerated. So, you're not dealing with a root cause of reoffending while they're in prison - so you're not deterring them, but you're also not rehabilitating them - so you're really not doing anything. And then in the rare cases where these people are provided with rehabilitation or reentry programming, it's often not based on any sort of evidence-based model of how you actually change people. So there's a lot of psychological and criminology theory and research on how you actually elicit behavioral change, and these programs really aren't in line with any of that. And I could give examples if you wanted, but - [00:21:17] Crystal Fincher: Sure. I think that's helpful, 'cause I think a lot of people do assume, and sometimes it's been controversial - wow, look at how much they're coddling these prisoners - they have these educational programs, and they get all this drug treatment for free, and if they don't come out fixed then it's their own fault because they have access to all of these treatment resources in prison. Is that the case? [00:21:43] Damon Petrich: No, I wouldn't say so - first of all, they don't have access, a lot of them, to any programs. And then, like I said, the programs that they do get really aren't that effective. So the big one that everybody loves to argue for is providing former inmates with jobs. If you look at any federal funding for program development, like the Second Chance Act or the First Step Act - I think that was one under Trump - and then under Bush, there was a Serious [and] Violent Offenders Reentry Initiative - pretty much all of these federal bills will be heavily focused on just providing offenders with jobs. And almost all of the evaluations of these programs show that they don't reduce reoffending. And it's not really that hard - again, if you go back to the literature on behavioral change and, criminology literature - it's not really that hard to understand why just providing a job isn't going to reduce or lead somebody away from a life of crime. A lot of these people have spotty work histories where they've never had a job at all, they believe and know that it's easier to gain money by doing illicit work than it is legal work, they have things like low self-control so they're very impulsive, they don't know how to take criticism or being told what to do by a boss. They live in neighborhoods with very poor opportunities for good jobs and education, and maybe there's a mindset around there that illegal work or whatever is just a better way to go - that's sort of ingrained. So there's a lot of different reasons why just handing somebody a job isn't going to lead them away from crime, 'cause they have all these other things that need to be dealt with first. So ideally, a rehabilitation program that's comprehensive would deal with all of those other background factors and then provide them with a job. Because if you make them less impulsive, better able to resist the influence of their antisocial friends, and get this thought out of their head that other people are being hostile towards them when they're really not - all these sorts of cognitive and behavioral biases that they have - if you deal with all of those things and then you give them a job, they're more likely to actually latch onto that job as something worthwhile doing. And then they're going to go on to get out of a life of crime. But if you just give them a job and you haven't dealt with any of those issues, you can't really expect that to work. And that is the model that we currently do - is something that we don't really expect to work that well. [00:24:28] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, that's - it's really interesting and I don't know that a lot of people actually know that, Hey, giving someone a job isn't sufficient - which is why I think it's so important to talk about studies like this, because some of what has become conventional wisdom, really is not accurate or reflects what has been studied and discovered. And I guess in that vein, what are the factors - you just talked about a few - but what does increase someone's likelihood of reoffending or recidivism, and what reduces it? [00:25:08] Damon Petrich: So those are probably two ends of the same, or two sides of the same coin, but this is pretty well known in criminology - a model called the risk-need-responsivity [RNR] model was developed by a couple of fellow Canadians, named James Bonta and Don Andrews, along with some of their colleagues in the '80s and '90s. And they, through again, other meta-analyses just like we did, found certain categories of characteristics of people who are more likely to reoffend. So you have things like having antisocial peers - so that one's pretty obvious - if you have a bunch of friends that are involved in crime, it's going to be pretty hard for you to get out of that life because you're surrounded by those people. Same with family members. If you have what are called criminal thinking patterns - so again, you might have what's called a hostile attribution bias, things like that, where somebody says something a little bit negative to you and you take that as a huge insult and you retaliate with anger and aggression - things like that. Or being impulsive - so you're again quick to anger, you're swayed by small little enticements in the environment and that sort of thing - so you're easily swayed one way or the other. Things like that are strong predictors of reoffending. Substance abuse - it's what I mentioned earlier. If you don't really have any sort of proactive leisure activities, like hobbies and stuff like that. So there's a bunch of well-known things that we know are strongly associated with recidivism, and a rehabilitation program should ideally deal with them. Now this model that Andrews and Bonta and all these other people came up with - this RNR risk-need-responsivity model - the risk part says that we should give people a risk assessment when they're entering prison or leaving prison and determine what level of risk are they from reoffending. And we assess these different criteria, like criminal thinking patterns and antisocial friends and substance abuse. So we determine what those factors are and then we design them a treatment program that actually deals with those factors at the individual level. So we're not just giving a blanket rehabilitation program to everybody, and you're providing the most amount of care to the people who most need it or who are the most likely to re-offend. And then once we've done all that, we need to make sure that we're addressing these problems in some sort of a format that we know actually works. The most well-known one, but not as often used, the most well-known within the sort of psychologist and criminological literature is cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT]. So this is pretty popular for dealing with depression and all sorts of eating disorders and substance abuse problems in non-offender populations. Well, those programs also work in offender populations and they work pretty well. So the research shows - again meta-analyses - that when you deal with all these three factors - risk, need, and responsivity - you can reduce reoffending rates by about 26%. So it's a pretty sizeable amount - it's much greater than you're getting by just sentencing people to prison without doing anything. [00:28:42] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and I think you cover in your paper - those things are absolutely true. And you just talked about several administrations' attempts to implement programming and resources to try and help people get jobs, potentially - hey, there's even a CBT treatment, but if that treatment has twice as many people as are recommended being in a session and occurs over half the time that it's supposed to, you really are sabotaging the entire process or really setting it up for failure. And it just seems to be an expensive exercise that we aren't really getting anything out of. Does that seem to be consistent with how you've seen the attempts at introducing this programming within prisons and jails? [00:29:40] Damon Petrich: Yeah, for sure - this is a pretty common finding too - so it's not just about preaching that you're going to do these things. You actually have to implement them well. So just like you said, there's a number of studies that show this - so you've designed some really great program that deals with all of these risk factors that lead people back into reoffending, you give it to them in a cognitive behavioral setting. So all seems good on paper, but in practice, like you said - one of the famous studies there - can't remember the names of the authors offhand right now - but one of the famous studies there showed that they're providing it to people in groups of 30, as opposed to 15, and they're delivering it in a really short amount of time. And they're not maybe giving it to the highest-risk people - so they're just mixing random people in there at varying levels of risk. So when you do all these sorts of things - you implement the program poorly - you can't really expect it to work. And this is often the case - is the government pays people to come up with these great programs, and then not enough funding is provided to actually make sure that they're implemented and evaluated well. So the amount of funding that actually goes into that - developing the programs to begin with - is small, but when you do do that, you're not making sure that you're actually implementing things well. So it's just sort of shooting yourself in the foot, and probably making people come to the conclusion that these things don't work - when they do work, if you just implement them well. [00:31:17] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and there's also a lot of rhetoric - and you discuss this - there's a lot of rhetoric coming from the government, even coming from leadership within the Bureau of Prisons or leadership in our carceral system, saying we do want to rehabilitate people. We are trying to implement programming that does this. You see - we have these educational opportunities and we are doing evaluations of people. And it may be happening while they're understaffed or other challenges, but one of the biggest, I guess, red flags is that none of the evaluation of their programs and none of the incentives that arise are in any way tied to what is the actual result of what happens. Are you actually succeeding on reducing someone's likelihood for reoffense? It does not seem like any compensation is tied to that, any kind of evaluation of positions or regular reporting - to say, is this program having its intended effect? And if not, what do we need to do to correct for that? Is that what you found? [00:32:33] Damon Petrich: I would say that's probably a pretty fair assessment. A lot of the programs that are implemented are never evaluated at all. And then the ones that are - it's usually once - there's one evaluation of those programs. And then, like you said, there doesn't really seem to be a lot of self-reflection - I don't know what other word you would use - but these programs don't really change on the basis of these evaluations. So, it's kind of disheartening to hear about, I guess. [00:33:14] Crystal Fincher: It feels very disheartening to live in the middle of - and one of the big things about this is that this - we have these conversations and we talk about these studies and we're saying, yeah, it actually - we're not doing anyone any favors right now when it comes to reducing recidivism. And having these conversations oftentimes detached from the cost associated with what we're paying for these. And my goodness are we paying to incarcerate people? It's not just, well, we do lock them up and we keep them away. Or we do a good job of keeping them in - they reoffend, they go back to jail. And lots of people are like, we did our job, they went back to jail - boom, everything is fine. But we are paying through the nose and out the ear for this - just here, we're in the state of Washington, and right now the state spends about $112 per day, or over $40,000 annually, to incarcerate one individual - that's the cost per inmate. In King County - the county that we're in - they spend $192 a day, or $70,000 annually, to incarcerate an individual. That is a huge amount of the tax dollars that we spend - these come out of our general fund, meaning that these are dollars that every service, everything that is not a dedicated source of revenue, is competing for. So when we talk about things and have conversations like, well, we don't have the budget for that and we don't have the money - that is related to how much of that money we're spending on other things. And my goodness, I would think that we want to get our money's worth for that level of expenditure. And it really appears that if we're saying the goal of jail is to get people on the straight and narrow path and becoming contributing members of society and all of the implications of that, it doesn't seem like we're getting our money's worth. And so, if those aren't the goals and if we just want to punish people, it's not like we're punishing people for free. We're punishing people at the cost of $70,000 per day [year], and at the cost of all the other services and infrastructure needs that we have. So it really seems like we're punishing ourselves as much, or more, as others - particularly if we're bringing people back into society that are likely to reoffend in one way or another. And so if our goal is to keep our community safe and that is the North Star, it looks like we need to realign our processes and our expenditure of resources. I guess my question to you, after all that, is - how should we be moving forward? What should we be looking to do? What is shown to work? [00:36:24] Damon Petrich: Well, I would say - yeah, $70,000 a year as just a revenge cost per person seems like a lot. $80 billion in the country as a whole, for a revenge cost, seems like a pretty high price to pay, given we're not reducing reoffending. You could make the argument that these people aren't offending while they're in prison, but that's - there's other reasons why that might not be completely accurate, which I could talk about too, but - [00:36:59] Crystal Fincher: Well, I'm interested in that. Why might that not be accurate? [00:37:03] Damon Petrich: So, obviously the person - if you incarcerate a particular individual, obviously they can't be out in the community committing crimes. So that's obvious, but there's a number of reasons why that might not, en masse, actually reduce crime a whole lot. The research on it - this is a little bit squishy - in terms of whether incarcerating more people leads to lower crime rates, because one influences the other. But for example, if you look at illegal drug markets - a lot of the homicides in the United States and other violent crime that people are really concerned about, and it's plastered all over the media is - homicides, gang-related stuff. So if you take key gang members out and you put them in prison, what ends up happening is that there's competition in that market to take over that person's place, either within the gang or other gangs coming in. So what ends up happening oftentimes is a spike in violence. So that's one reason why just incapacitating, particularly high-crime individuals, might not actually lead to lower crime rates overall. Again, you're lowering crime for that one person, but you might be increasing crime on a more systemic level. Beyond that, these things have broader societal and community level impacts - incarcerating a lot of people. Again, research shows that when you're incarcerating a lot of people in a particular community - so there's a bunch of really good work by Robert Sampson - he has a book that came out a few years ago called Great American City. And he looked at these individual neighborhoods in Chicago over time, and what he finds is that in communities where there's a higher number of people incarcerated in a particular community, this ends up increasing what's called "legal cynicism." And this is done in some other work as well with David Kirk and Andrew Papachristos - but they show that this increases legal cynicism, which means people are skeptical of police helping them out, the police doing a good job. And what ends up happening after that - when people are more cynical of the legal system, they're less likely to report crimes to the police, they're less likely to cooperate with the police. So what ends up happening? You incarcerate more people and people in that community end up being less willing to cooperate with law enforcement. And this leads to sort of an endless cycle where things sort of get out of hand. So there's all these unintended and nonfinancial consequences of incarcerating a lot of people that could potentially end up leading to more crime. [00:40:03] Crystal Fincher: Well, and - speaking as a Black woman - obviously, looking at the impacts of mass incarceration in the Black community and in neighborhoods around the country - where it is almost like the community is responding to the actual outcome and that, Hey, this actually isn't making my community any better. I'm experiencing traumatic impacts from this - whether it's my relative went to prison or a sole breadwinner in the family and now we're thrown into poverty, or I'm in a situation where I don't have a parent who used to be there - who now is no longer there. Or causing instability and impacting the education that people get and the kind of job opportunity, watching someone who's come out have to struggle and be ostracized. And it looks like, Hey, this is just the first step on a long cycle of traumatic and undesirable events - and I don't want to participate in a system that is doing that. With that, as we look forward, and I think this is also related to conversations about just fundamental trust in our criminal legal system and relations with police and throughout the system. It's - if we think about how to turn that around - to me, seems related to thinking about the question of how do we get better outcomes for everyone? 'Cause it seems like right now where we're investing a lot in poor outcomes for people who were already, usually, in pretty poor spots leading to themselves being incarcerated, coming out and not necessarily improving, definitely not improving. And if anything, a chance that it gets a little bit worse. How do we change that entire outcome? And I know you're looking specifically in the incarceration space, but what should be, what could be done differently? Or do we just need a fundamental restructuring of the way we do this? [00:42:17] Damon Petrich: I don't know about a fundamental restructuring - I don't, I'm not great at that high-level thinking stuff, but what I do know is that - we're probably going to continue to incarcerate people. That's something that's done in every country and people seem to love here. So if we actually want to use prison for public safety - because 95% of inmates eventually get out - if we actually want to use it for public safety, then let's actually try wholeheartedly to rehabilitate them while they're in there. And again, there's a lot of theory and evidence-based principles on how we can do this, like the risk-need-responsivity model that I talked about earlier, cognitive behavioral therapy more broadly. If you use these types of things and continue to work on them and develop them over time, then yeah - prison might actually be helpful if people are going there and getting the help that they need. But that's not what's happening currently. So that's one level in incarceration terms - that's the area that I know best. So that's one way you could potentially alleviate some of this stuff is - if people are actually getting resources and stuff when they're in prison, and then when once they're reintegrating, they're not only going to reoffend less, but maybe they're going to contribute to their community more. They're going to be better able to connect with their family and stuff like that. So rather than being a hindrance, it could potentially be a help. Obviously, again, it's not ideal to remove people from their communities and their family and friends. And like I said earlier, if you have the option to sentence them to something community-based instead, I think that's the better route to go. But if you are going to send people to prison, which I think we're going to continue to do a lot of the time, then let's rehabilitate them while they're in there is the main point. And do so based on what actually works to do that. [00:44:23] Crystal Fincher: It's really the investment in the people who are there, and we're - I think up against a lot of societal attitudes and resistance where it just feels wrong to a number of people to be providing services and shifting that investment to things that are seemingly helpful for the inmate, because everything about how we've been conditioned to understand our prison system has been - the punishment is kind of the key, and they'll make rational decisions afterwards to avoid prison based on how bad the punishment is. When it comes to community supervision, things like probation, what are the differences there? If there are better outcomes from that, what accounts for the better outcomes when it comes to probation versus incarceration? [00:45:23] Damon Petrich: I wouldn't say the outcomes are better - they're just pretty much the same as they would be if they're sentenced to prison. So, probation costs less and then it also enables the people to be out in the community doing community things, like being with their friends and families and all that. I mean, you can't quantify, based on a recidivism percentage, what their family members and friends and employers are getting out of it. So that's something we can't really look at - or I guess you could, but something we don't often do - but so there's intangible things that you would get by keeping people in the community. Plus it doesn't lead to all that other stuff I talked about where people become cynical of the legal system and it leads to this cycle of whatever. [00:46:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, and so if we're were doing this programming in prison and helping people, I think your research shows it's extremely important to do both the structural, Hey, you need a place to live, you need to be able to pay your rent and your bills - so having a job, having housing, having healthcare, getting those very basic needs met is critical. But also addressing a number of the mental or behavioral health issues that are common among the incarcerated population - and dealing with that is as important. And basically those two things both need to happen hand-in-hand. How do we do a better job of that in our current system? [00:46:57] Damon Petrich: Well, first of all, I'd like to say that you're right there - I think maybe when I was talking earlier about employment, it might sound like giving people jobs is just a waste of time, but that's not the case. It needs - the two things need to be paired - you need to deal with the cognitive and behavioral problems in addition to giving them jobs and housing support and all that. In terms of how you actually go about doing that, there are examples in the literature of programs that do this, so there's examples out there. I think if you're a state or local or even federal correctional department and you're interested in doing this - implementing something that's evidence-based - or if you're just a concerned citizen that wants to rally your local officials to do that - go and talk to researchers like me, or people at universities that have criminology departments or criminal justice departments, because this knowledge is out there. It's widely available. You just have to go and seek it out. So at my university, for example, we have the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute and under the guidance of Ed Latessa, he was - now passed - but he was, over the last 30 years, responsible for disseminating a lot of this evidence-based practices to some of the state and local criminal justice agencies. And they helped with implementation and evaluation in a lot of these places, so the help is out there. You just have to look for it a little bit. [00:48:38] Crystal Fincher: And another question I had - your analysis seemed to suggest that when we're talking about low-risk, medium, and high-risk offenders - or people who have done relatively minor crimes versus those who have done more serious crimes - that these interventions are particularly effective the more serious the offense or crime has been. And that perhaps even sometimes treating someone who is a really low-risk as if they're a high-risk, can worsen the outcomes for that person. Is that the case? [00:49:21] Damon Petrich: Yeah, that tends to be a finding in research - we're not exactly sure why, but providing a lot of really intensive services to people deemed to be low-risk can actually be harmful rather than helpful. We don't know based on research why, but there's a lot of pretty good hypotheses about why. So a low-risk offender is going to be somebody who's a first-timer who's committed some not-that-serious crime. So they probably have a job, they probably have pretty strong connections with their family and all that. So if you're taking them and you're putting them in a program where you have to be there 40 hours a week, they're probably going to get fired from their job, it's going to be harder to stay in contact with friends and families that are sort of tying you into a non-criminal life. And then you're probably going to be associating with all kinds of people who are high-risk, and maybe they're going to draw you towards, oh yeah, I could earn four grand going out tonight and stealing some laptops. There's a lot of reasons why just taking low-risk people and putting them in these programs is going to be harmful rather than helpful. [00:50:31] Crystal Fincher: And so with that in mind, and you talk about, Hey, if we're trying to influence local electeds - one of the interesting things about having a podcast and radio show that caters to extremely politically and civically inclined people is that we actually do have a number of policymakers and politicians who listen, and people who are enacting and in control of this policy. If you were to talk to them and give them advice about how to move forward, especially in the current environment that we find ourselves in, where over the past few years has been increasing awareness of some of the defecits of our system and pushes to change those. And also, as we have seen more recently, a real strong pushback from a lot of people who are invested in our current system saying, Hey, let's not change things too much. Maybe we need to jail more and for longer. And maybe we're just not doing enough incarceration, and that's the answer. In that kind of political environment, what would you tell people who are in charge of this policy, who may be facing pressure to keep going forward with the status quo, about how they should evaluate how they should move forward and the kinds of things that they should do? [00:52:07] Damon Petrich: I know a lot of these politicians get lobbied by correctional officer groups or whatever, and that's whatever, but ultimately you get voted in by voters. So, I'm not an expert on public opinion - I have other friends who are more into that kind of stuff, but I do know from talking with them and from reading that literature, that the public actually does support rehabilitation. So they have for a long time and it's shifted more towards being in support of rehabilitation over time. So right now, most Americans support providing rehabilitation programs to prisoners and offenders. So this is something that's going to please your constituency, people want this kind of thing. And it's not like you're going to be losing all kinds of jobs by getting rid of prison - there's going to be a need for skilled people who can provide these programs and probation officers and all these sorts of things. So it's not a net loss when you're getting rid of prisons. There's a lot of reasons to sentence people to community supervision and things like that - provide rehabilitation. There's public support for it, there's jobs involved, there's cost savings - big time, obviously - it's way cheaper to keep somebody out of prison than it is to keep them in prison. So there's a lot of different reasons why you would want to do that as a politician. [00:53:43] Crystal Fincher: I think that makes sense. Certainly it's a lot cheaper to keep someone out of prison versus in prison. I mean, we talked about the annual costs - in the state of Washington over $40,000, King County over $70,000 - comparing that to how much we invest in a student of $11,500 a year. If we focus more on investing in people, both inside and outside the system, it seems like we set ourselves up for a safer community, fewer people being victimized, and more people leading thriving, productive, tax-paying lives. And we're all happier than we are right now, I would think, I would hope - it seems like the research points in that direction. So I certainly appreciate you taking the time to speak with us about this. Is there anything else that you want to leave with us, in thinking about this study and your research? [00:54:55] Damon Petrich: I think we covered it pretty well. Just to circle back to something you just said - I know this might put me out of a job since I focus on what happens when people's lives go awry, but you really are better off to invest in early prevention programs and giving people a good start on life than trying to correct the program or the problem afterwards. So yeah - politicians spend some money on prevention programs. I know the good effects of that are a long way out, but they're actually good on a societal level. So I guess I would add that, even though it's not good for criminologists, maybe, to put themselves out of a job like that. [00:55:40] Crystal Fincher: Well, much appreciated, and thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. [00:55:45] Damon Petrich: Yeah, thank you very much for having me on. I'm glad that there are people out there interested in this stuff, so thanks again. [00:55:51] Crystal Fincher: I thank you all for listening to Hacks & Wonks on KVRU 105.7 FM. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler with assistance from Shannon Cheng. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. Now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - we'll talk to you next time.

**This episode was taken from Julianne's recent Instagram Live** Click HERE to watch!   Enjoy this fiery episode about a “double inner ear infection” that turned into a cold that Julianne kept getting put on antibiotics for that was nearly gone overnight with help from homeopathic doctor David Kirk, ND.   Come home to your body's wisdom! Trust your intuition. Not everything is so scary like we've been taught! Your body knows how to heal with the right support & information

A Podcast Series produced for and with LifeScience ORG Molecular Microbiologist and Podcast Producer, Dr David Kirk, talks to the people behind early-stage translational life science across Europe whose innovative research today may be the blockbusters and game-changing technologies of tomorrow. Join the conversation: www.lifescienceorg.com Episode length: 12-15 Minutes

In the episode, Professor Kirk shares his deep insight related to critical pedagogies of affect and also gives us a glimpse into two of his latest books, the first one Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education and Models-based Practice in Physical Education that was co-authored with Dr. Ash Casey. We begin this discussion talking about early days in David's life and how moving from Scotland to Australia really helped to shape his world view and the way came to better understand people and culture. David speaks about the role that physical activity and sport played in his life and how it led him toward a career in education and ultimately on the path to becoming a world renown educational researcher in his field. David will challenge listeners from the physical education profession to think differently about how we might approach the future of our discipline in order to address the social and economic challenges that shape young people's health, happiness and life chances. About Professor KirkDavid is  currently Professor of Education and former Head of the School of Education (2014-17) at the University of Strathclyde. His is an educational researcher with teaching and research interests in educational innovation, curriculum history, and physical education and sport pedagogy. He is founding editor of the peer reviewed journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (Routledge) and editor of Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport. He has held academic appointments previously in universities in England, Australia, Ireland and Belgium and is currently Honorary Professor of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland. His most recent book Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education was published by Routledge in 2020. His most recent co-authored book with Dr Kimberly Oliver, Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An Activist Perspective, was published by Routledge in August 2015. A book co-edited with Professor Patricia Vertinsky (University of British Columbia) Female Traditions in Physical Education: 'Women First' Revisted was published by Routledge in 2016.Connect With Professor KirkWebsite: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/kirkdavidprof/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ayLHQNEAAAAJ&hl=enDavid's Recent Books: https://www.routledge.com/Precarity-Critical-Pedagogy-and-Physical-Education/Kirk/p/book/9780367345129https://www.amazon.com/Models-based-Practice-Physical-Education-Routledge/dp/0367333325

Here is Campus Rec Magazine's first ever Digital Roundtable! We discussed how to implement an esports program at your university. On the panel: David Kirk, the assistant director of esports at The University of Akron; Nicholas Singer, the assistant director of competitive sports at Vanderbilt University; and Dylan Wray, the recreation program specialist/esports coordinator at the University of North Texas. Listen to the experts dissect esports programs and answer your questions.

This week I talk to Dr. David Kirk, Director, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Director eICU Service at WakeMed in Raleigh North Carolina. This is a great conversation on how ICU's had to rapidly adapt and learn to deal with the Coronavirus Pandemic. David shares his unique views as both a clinician and director. I hope you enjoy!

Dr. David Kirk is a world-class naturopathic physician who practices homeopathy in his medical practice. His successes with severe neurological cases like bipolar, schizophrenia anxiety and depression are known throughout the world. Today he gets on the podcast with me to discuss what his journey to utilizing homeopathy was like, what he does as a physician to help heal conditions that are thought to be incurable.  Dr. Kirk is a naturopathic physician who specializes in mental health and the natural treatment of severe neurological conditions. He explores the depths of the human soul and works to connect his patients with the love and spirit of the Earth. Dr. Kirk uses natural medicines to heal brain pathways and regrow neural connections.  You can find him leading workshops in Southern California, and guiding folks along the journey of contacting the spirit of plant medicines.  Hope you guys enjoyed the podcast!  Links:  Dr. Kirk's Website I  https://www.drdavidkirk.com/whatwedo Videos with Dr. Kirk Podcast I Sacred Sons