Podcasts about second chance act

On this episode of Federal Prison Authority Presents: Around the Block, Bruce and Susan explore the topics of the First Step Act and the Second Chance Act. Bruce opens the floor to Susan so she can help explain the differences and clear up any confusion. This goes on for most of the show, but it is extensive and transparent on how the system is set up. Different court cases are brought up, and Bruce goes over how each case is different and unique. Susan explains how getting at least a GED will help them get the time credits and move them through faster. Towards the end, Bruce and Susan explain how the process is overly complicated and could be improved to benefit inmates and their families more. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Dr. Susan Giddings can be found on their shared website https://federalprisonauthority.com/who-we-are/ Bruce through his cell (214) 431-2032 and https://conciergecoach.net/ Their book can be bought here: https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Federal-Time-Credits-Attorneys/dp/B0D7RT3SMN

In NASW's latest episode of Social Work Talks, sponsored by Illinois Department of DCFS, we converse with the Maryland Office of Public Defenders about their Office of Reentry Services. With the help of social workers on staff, it focuses on helping incarcerated individuals re-enter society—and provides them with resources so they can get a fresh start in becoming productive members of their communities. This is thanks to the help of the Second Chance Act. Tune in, learn, and share.

The FSA is meant to give non-violent offenders a chance to significantly reduce their term of incarceration through programming and good conduct.  But, the BOP is proving to be unwilling or unable to properly implement the law.   Helping us get set for sentencing this week is Walt Pavlo, founder of prisonology.com and frequent contributor to BOP issues for Forbes online. Walt and I discuss all the issues with FSA (and Second Chance Act) implentation, as well as offer many useful practice pointers.   LINKS   www.prisonology.com   https://oig.justice.gov/news/compendium-federal-bureau-prisons-oversight-products    

This past Tuesday, April 16th, I was invited to attend a Congressional Briefing of the Second Chance Act in Washington D.C. held by The Council of State Governments Justice Center and The Correctional Leaders Association at the Senate building on Capital Hill. And for today's episode I'm sharing some of my takeaways from the discussion! Hear from New Jersey State Senator, Cory Booker, Peer Support Specialist at the Center for Family Services in NJ, Prince Alvarado, and Jail Population Manager for Camden County Department of Corrections, Sharon Bean on the impact the Second Chance Act has had over its 15 years since being passed into legislation by Congress. To contact your state senate rep. please find a complete list here. Happy 2 Year Anniversary Family

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 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.

The session, titled The Importance of Now: Maintaining Momentum in Criminal Justice Transformation, ranges from the personal to the national, covering how both these experts began in criminal justice change, and how to address the particular needs of women involved in the criminal legal system. The discussion also addresses how misinformation impacts reform strategies, the tendency to focus on wins and then move on—rather than maintaining those wins—and the need to reach wider audiences with our messages.Guest BiosErica BondVice-President, Social Justice Initiatives, John Jay College of Criminal JusticeErica Bond has experience in the government, non-profit, public policy, and legal sectors. Prior to becoming Vice President of Justice Initiatives at John Jay College, Erica was the Policy Director at the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, a research organization that seeks to advance safe, just and equitable communities through data and research on criminal justice policy, operations and reforms.  Previously, she served as Special Advisor for Criminal Justice to the First Deputy Mayor of New York City.Prior to joining city government, Erica was a Director of Criminal Justice at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now called Arnold Ventures), where she worked to develop new research, policy reforms and evidenced-based innovations with the goal of transforming criminal justice systems nationwide. In this role, she partnered with criminal justice practitioners, researchers, and policymakers on initiatives to improve community safety, increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system and ensure fairness in the criminal justice process. Erica is a mayoral designee to New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board. She has a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.DeAnna HoskinsPresident and CEO, JustLeadershipUSADeAnna R. Hoskins is President & CEO of JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA). Dedicated to cutting the U.S. correctional population in #halfby2030, JLUSA empowers people most affected by the criminal justice system to drive reform. DeAnna is a nationally recognized leader and a formerly incarcerated person with experience as an advocate and policy expert at the local, state, and federal level. Prior to joining JLUSA as its President and CEO, DeAnna served as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice, managing the Second Chance Act portfolio and serving as Deputy Director of the Federal Inter-Agency Reentry Council. Before that, she served as a county Director of Reentry in her home state of Ohio. DeAnna has always worked alongside advocates who have been impacted by incarceration, and knows that setting bold goals and investing in the leadership of directly impacted people is a necessary component of impactful, values-driven reform. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Aspen Institute is nonpartisan and does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates or parties. Further, the views and opinions of our guests and speakers do not necessarily reflect those of The Aspen Institute.Visit us online at The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative and follow us on Twitter @AspenCJRI.

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.

Here is the lineup for the month of May! These grants MUST be submitted by their deadlines in order to be considered.  Join me May 6th at bit.ly/fundingandfreelance for my "Where to find Funding" LIVE workshop!  Submit your questions to hello@buffaloambitionco.com or via Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/buffaloambitionco   Second Chance Act community Re-Entry Program:  -$750,000 geared towards juveniles or adults re-entering the community after incarceration - May 19, 2022 https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=338737   Jobber Grant:  -$15,000 for work-in-home programs in 3 different categories!-May 26, 2022-https://www.jobbergrants.com/ Chick fil a Inspiration Awards -$30,000 - $350,000 specifically for nonprofits -4 Categories (4 winners) -May 20, 2022 -https://www.chick-fil-a.com/true-inspiration-awards   Mrs. T's Pierogies -$15,000 for moms -May 08, 2022 -https://www.mrstspierogies.com/allstarmoms/

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.

In this episode, I speak with Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, a representative of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice about the Umar Muhammad Clean Slate Toolkit. This toolkit is a resource created by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice to help North Carolinians navigate the new Second Chance Act, which can help expunge the records of low-level, non-violent offenders who received their charges at a young age. Episode Links: Southern Coalition for Social Justice Umar Muhammad Clean Slate Toolkit My links:Website • YouTube • TikTok • Twitter • Patreon • Facebook

Bruce Cameron and Jose Santana discuss a new memorandum from the Department of Justice concerning Violent Offense Codes. Ramifications on Residential Re-entry placement, Home Confinement, Second Chance Act benefits, and First Step Act benefits were covered. Bruce and Jose may be reached at federalprisonauthoritybop@gmail.com or federalprisonauthority.com .

Bruce and Jose Santana meticulously cover Compassionate Release cases that were granted in October 2020. Bruce and Jose explain how each inmate was able to achieve release. Salient factors such as release date, Pattern Risk Score, Age, medical conditions, etc were covered. Bruce and Jose can be reached at federalprisonauthoritybop@gmail.com or federalprisonauthority.com .

  The post Senator Valerie Foushee discusses systemic racism, the Second Chance Act, and the re-opening of schools in the COVID-19 era appeared first on NC Policy Watch.

  The post Senator Valerie Foushee discusses systemic racism, the Second Chance Act, and the re-opening of schools in the COVID-19 era appeared first on NC Policy Watch.

Facebook took down a Trump campaign ad that tried to scare grandma about “Dangerous Mobs of far-left groups”. That could be us he’s talking about… more or less minus returning guest Sarah Wagner (she’s Libertarian, so she occupies her own space). We celebrate what the Dangerous Mobs did with Confederate statues on the Capitol grounds this weekend (we’re including the Governor in that, as he ordered more monuments removed). Gary did a little tour of those monuments back in TTS 58.And we celebrate the SCOTUS decision on LGBTQ and Title 7. Another happy thought surrounds the legislature unanimously passing a pair of bills, the Second Chance Act and the First Step Act, allowing judges more latitude in sentencing and expunging the record of some types of criminal offenders. Jen and Gary round out the talk-a-thon discussing how Jeffery Billman was fired as the editor at Indy-Week even though he apologized for missing an important story of sexual harassment at a Raleigh restaurant. Jen knows a little more about the story that was reported in the N&O and Indy-Week.And we sort of rate our Skype (or Zoom) rooms. Jen is generous with Gary. Gary doesn’t really return the favor.MORE LINKS:This episode’s video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0stmXP0zAMIThe TTS Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TriangleTalkShow/The TTS Web Site: https://TriangleTalkShow.com

The post Much anticipated ‘Second Chance Act’ nears final approval appeared first on NC Policy Watch.

Question to Howard Lee and Anna Beavon Gravely – The legislature has passed the Second Chance Act to make it easier for young people to expunge nonviolent crimes from their records. Is this a good bill? Should the Govenor sign it into law? What took it so long to pass?

The post Much anticipated ‘Second Chance Act’ nears final approval appeared first on NC Policy Watch.

In this episode, I discuss the strategies between the parties on how to garner the black vote. Trump has found quite a bit of funding for HBCU's, passed the First Step Act, and recently passed the Second Chance Act. Democrats promise reparation and handouts.

Links Bernie Sanders – Justice and Safety For All (Bernie Sanders) For most of our history as a country, the United States incarcerated people at about the same rates as other western democracies do today. In the early 1970s we had the same low crime rate as today, but we now have an incarceration rate five times higher. Indeed, America is now the world’s leading jailer. We lock up more than 2 million people in America, which is more of our own people than any country on Earth. And that does not include another 5 million people who are under the supervision of the correctional system. Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people in America have not been convicted of a crime and are solely in jail because they can’t afford their bail. We are criminalizing poverty. Second Chance Act (2007) (Wikipedia) 14-year-old to be tried as an adult in killing of 16-year-old (Baltimore Sun) 14-year-old charged as an adult for the rape and murder of an 83-year-old woman (USA Today) Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Confining Juveniles with Adults After Graham and Miller (Emory Law) Thousands of juveniles are currently confined with adults in detention and correctional facilities throughout the United States. Juveniles confined in adult facilities face grave dangers to their safety and well-being, including significantly higher rates of physical assault, sexual abuse, and suicide than their counterparts in juvenile facilities. These dangers and other conditions of juvenile confinement with adults give rise to concerns of constitutional dimension. In its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the United States Supreme Court has created categorical rules prohibiting the imposition of certain punishments on entire categories of offenders as cruel and unusual punishment. The Court’s 2010 decision in Graham v. Florida, in which it held that a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole violates the Eighth Amendment when applied to juveniles convicted of nonhomicide offenses, and its 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, in which it held that mandatory life-without-parole sentencing schemes violate the Eighth Amendment when applied to juveniles, open the door to challenge the constitutionality of the confinement of juveniles with adults. Supreme Court restricts life without parole for juveniles (Washington Post) Tuesday, May 18, 2010 Juveniles may not be sentenced to life in prison without parole for any crime short of homicide, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, expanding its command that young offenders must be treated differently from adults even for heinous crimes. The court ruled 5 to 4 that denying juveniles who have not committed homicide a chance to ever rejoin society is counter to national and “global” consensus and violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The decision follows the court’s 2005 decision that, no matter what crime they commit, juveniles may not be executed. It also reinforced the court’s view that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against harsh punishment must be interpreted in light of the country’s “evolving standards of decency.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said states must provide juveniles who receive lengthy sentences a “meaningful” chance at some point to show they should be released. Minimum Age for Delinquency Adjudication—Multi-Jurisdiction Survey (National Juvenile Defender Center) While every state (and territory) sets a maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction (in most states it is 18), in about two thirds of the states (and territories), there is no statute that specifies a minimum age under which a child cannot be adjudicated delinquent. In those states without a statutory minimum, there is nothing legally preventing the state from prosecuting even the youngest of children. This runs contrary to all of the scientific research and emerging case law that recognizes children are inherently less culpable than adults and that the younger a person, the less competent he or she may be. Florida passed Amendment 4. That could be good news for Democrats (Pacific Standard) A study published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2014 found that, in New York, New Mexico, and North Carolina, felons favored the Democratic Party. In New York, some 62 percent were registered Democrats, compared to 9 percent who registered Republican; in New Mexico, 52 percent were Democrats, while about 10 percent were Republicans; and about 54 percent were Democrats in North Carolina, compared to the roughly 10 percent who were Republicans. Ep. 5 - How do we know what works? – Episode where we discuss “Ban the Box” Violence Against Women Act (Wikipedia) Guards Waited Hours to Stop a Prison Riot That Left 7 Inmates Dead (The New York Times)

New research from Duke University scholars questions Medicaid’s value for the people the health care program was designed to help. The research arrives as the N.C. General Assembly and Gov. Roy Cooper continue to bicker over Cooper’s proposal to expand Medicaid to several hundred thousand more people in the state. Jordan Roberts, John Locke Foundation health care policy analyst, assesses the new research and its potential impact. The latest U.S. Supreme Court term yielded several important rulings, including two with direct impacts on N.C. congressional elections and the state Revenue Department’s taxing authority. Ilya Shapiro, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, recaps those cases, other key decisions, and important trends from the nation’s highest court. Legislative supporters of President Trump’s latest trade deal with Mexico and Canada ran into trouble when they tried to approve a resolution supporting the agreement. The resolution included positive comments about the 1990s-era North American Free Trade Agreement. Opponents of NAFTA in the N.C. House refused to vote in favor of any legislation praising that trade deal. House leaders dumped the resolution back into a committee. State lawmakers continue to hear bipartisan arguments in favor of the Second Chance Act. It would allow more people to expunge old criminal convictions from their records. During a recent hearing, lawmakers heard support from the idea from district attorneys, the state’s leading business group, and former criminal offenders tied to the Second Chance Alliance. Evidence continues to mount that film incentives fail to live up to the economic promises advocates make for them. Jon Sanders, John Locke Foundation director of regulatory studies, offers an update on incentives. Sanders also highlights good news in the ongoing campaign to rid N.C. state government of unnecessary and outdated regulations.

As Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law a compromise between craft brewers and N.C. beer distributors, several other proposed alcohol reforms remain in play within the General Assembly. Rick Henderson, Carolina Journal editor-in-chief, analyzes the prospects for additional reforms during this legislative session. As Medicaid expansion continues to play a major role in this year’s legislative debates, State Auditor Beth Wood is drawing attention to disturbing findings her auditors have issued in connection with North Carolina’s existing multibillion-dollar Medicaid program. Wood explains why she is raising questions about management of existing Medicaid dollars. North Carolina’s craft brewers and the state’s beer distributors have reached a compromise to end a lawsuit involving state restrictions on brewers’ ability to expand their businesses. You’ll hear highlights from the state Senate’s debate of the measure. Advocates from across the political spectrum have endorsed the Second Chance Act. It’s a measure designed to expand opportunities for expunctions that clear crimes from a person’s criminal record. You’ll learn why the idea is winning support from both progressive and conservative groups. Supporters touted Common Core as a way to boost standards in public schools across the country. But recent research suggests Common Core has had a negative impact on student achievement. Terry Stoops, John Locke Foundation vice president for research and director of education studies, analyzes the findings. Stoops also discusses the implications for North Carolina.

In the final days of the 115th Congress, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the First Step Act, which made changes to the operation of the federal prison system. In this episode, learn every detail of this new law, including the big money interests who advocated for its passage and their possible motivations for doing so. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Click here to contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Click here to support Congressional Dish for each episode via Patreon Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536 Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes CD176: Target Venezuela: Regime Change in Progress CD129: The Impeachment of John Koskinen Bills/Laws S.756 - First Step Act of 2018 Govtrack Link Committee Summary Bill Text House Final Vote Results Senate Final Vote Results Sponsor: Sen. Dan Sullivan (AK) Original bill numbers for the First Step Act were S.2795 and HR 5682 First Step Act Outline TITLE I - RECIDIVISM REDUCTION Sec. 101: Risk and needs assessment system Orders the Attorney General to conduct a review current and possible recidivism reduction programs, including a review of products manufactured overseas the could be produced by prisoners and would not compete with the domestic private sector Orders the Attorney General to create an assessment system for each prisoner to be conducted during the intake process that will classify each of them as having minimum, low, medium, or high risk of recidivism, the prisoner’s likelihood of violent or serious misconduct, and assign them to programs accordingly. This process must be published on the Department of Justice website by July 19, 2019 (210 days after enactment). Prerelease custody means home confinement with 24 hour electronic monitoring, with the possibility of being allowed to leave to go to work, to participate in a recidivism reduction program, perform community service, go to the doctor, attend religious services, attend weddings or funerals, or visit a seriously ill family member. Sec. 102: Implementation of Risk and Needs Assessment System By mid-January 2020, the Attorney General must implement the new risk assessment system and complete the initial intake risk assessments of each prisoner and expand the recidivism reduction programs The Attorney General “shall” develop polices for the warden of each prison to enter into partnerships with “non-profit and other private organizations including faith-based, art, and community-based organizations”, schools, and “private entities that will deliver vocational training and certifications, provide equipment to facilitate vocational training…employ prisoners, or assist prisoners in prerelease custody or supervised related in finding employment” and “industry sponsored organization that will deliver workforce development and training, on a paid or volunteer basis.” Priority for participation will be given to medium and high risk prisoners Sec. 104: Authorization of Appropriations Authorizes, but does not appropriate, $75 million per year from 2019 to 2023. Sec. 106: Faith-Based Considerations In considering “any entity of any kind” for contracts “the fact that it may be or is faith-based may not be a basis for any discrimination against it in any manner or for any purpose.” Entities “may not engage in explicitly religious activities using direct financial assistance made available under this title” Sec. 107: Independent Review Committee The National Institute of Justice will select a “nonpartisan and nonprofit organization… to host the Independent Review Committee" The Committee will have 6 members selected by the nonprofit organization, 2 of whom must have published peer-reviewed scholarship about the risk and needs assessments in both corrections and community settings, 2 corrections officers - 1 of whom must have experience working in the Bureau of Prisons, and 1 individual with expertise in risk assessment implementation. The Committee will assist the Attorney General in reviewing the current system and making recommendations for the new system. TITLE II - BUREAU OF PRISONS SECURE FIREARMS STORAGE Sec. 202: Secure Firearms Storage Requires secure storage areas for Bureau of Prisons employees to store their firearms on the outside of the prisoner area. Allows Bureau of Prison employees to store firearms lockboxes in their cars Allows Bureau of Prison employees “to carry concealed firearms on the premises outside of the secure perimeter of the institution” TITLE III - RESTRAINTS ON PREGNANT PRISONERS PROHIBITED Sec. 301: Use of Restraints on Prisoners During the Period of Pregnancy and Postpartum Recovery Prohibited From the day a prisoner’s pregnancy is confirmed and ending 12 weeks or longer after the birth, a “prisoner in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, or in the custody of the United States Marshals Service… shall not be placed in restraints” Will not apply to state prisons or local jails Exceptions include if the prisoner is an “immediate and credible flight risk” or if she poses an “immediate and serious threat of harm to herself or others” No matter what, a pregnant or recovering mother can’t: Have restraints placed around her ankles, legs, or waist Have her hands tied behind her back Be restrained using “4-point restraints" Be attached to another prisoner Within 48 hours of the pregnancy confirmation, the prisoner must be notified of the restraint restrictions (it doesn’t say how they must be notified) TITLE IV - SENTENCING REFORM Sec. 401: Reduces Sentencing for Prior Drug Felonies Changes the mandatory minimum for repeat offender with a previous “serious drug felony” (which is defined based on the length of the prison sentence: An offense for which they served more than 12 months) or a “serious violent felony” (added by this bill) from an automatic 20 year sentence to an automatic 15 year sentence. Changes the mandatory minimum for repeat offenders with two or more previous “serious drug felony or serious violent felony” convictions from a mandatory life sentence to a mandatory 25 years. Applies to cases that have not been sentenced as of the date of enactment and is not retroactive Sec. 402: "Broadening of Existing Safety Valve” Expands the criteria for leniency from mandatory minimums to include people with up to 4 prior non-volent convictions, not including minor misdemeanors. Applies to cases that have not been sentence as of the date of enactment and is not retroactive. Sec. 404: Appeals For Current Prisoners Convicted of Crack Related Crimes Allows people who were convicted of crack related crimes prior to August 3, 2010 (when the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 - which reduced the sentencing differences between crack and power cocaine - became law) to be eligible for reduced sentences. TITLE V - SECOND CHANCE ACT OF 2007 REAUTHORIZATION Sec. 502: Changes Existing Programs Creates an optional grant program for the Attorney General allowing him to provide grants to private entities along with governmental ones, for consulting services (to “evaluate methods”, “make recommendations”, etc). Authorizes, but doesn’t appropriate, $10 million per year from 2019 through 2023 ($50 million total) Sec. 503: Audits of Grantees Requires annual audits of entities receiving grants under the Second Chance Act of 2007 beginning in fiscal year 2019. Prohibits grantees from using grant money to lobby Department of Justice officials or government representatives, punishable by the full repayment of the grant and disqualification for grants for 5 years. TITLE VI- MISCELLANEOUS CRIMINAL JUSTICE Sec. 601: Placement of Prisoners Close to Families Requires that attempts be made to place a prisoners within 500 driving miles of the prisoner’s primary residence Adds “a designation of a place of imprisonment… is not reviewable by any court.” Sec. 603: Terminally Ill Prisoners Can Go Home Allows some terminally ill or elderly prisoners over the age of 60 to serve the rest of their sentences in home confinement Sec. 605: Expanding Prison Labor Allows Federal Prison Industries to sell products, except for office furniture, to government entities for use in prisons, government entities for use in disaster relief, the government of Washington DC, or “any organization” that is a 501(c)3 (charities and nonprofits), 501(c)4s (dark money “social welfare" organizations), or 501d (religious organizations). Requires an audit of Federal Prison Industries to begin within 90 days of enactment, but no due date. Sec. 611: Healthcare Products Requires the Bureau of Prisons to provide tampons and sanitary napkins to prisoners for free Sec. 613: Juvenile Solitary Confinement Prohibits juvenile solitary confinement to only when needed as a 3 hour temporary response to behavior that risks harming the juvenile or others, but it can not be used for “discipline, punishment, or retaliation” Federal Prison Industries: UNICOR UNICOR Index FPI is a “wholly-owned government corporation established by Congress on June 23, 1934. It’s mission is to protect society and reduce crime by preparing inmates for successful reentry through job training” UNICOR FAQs UNICOR 2018 Sales Report UNICOR Federal Prison Industries, Inc., Fiscal Year 2015, Annual Management Report, November 16, 2015 Shutdown Back-Pay Law -Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, signed January 16 2019. - Bill Text Additional Reading Article: Revolving door brings Trump-tied lobbying firm even closer to the White House by Anna Massoglia and Karl Evers-Hillstrom, OpenSecrets News, January 22, 2019. Article: Trump fails the first test of the First Step Act by Edward Chung, The Hill, January 10, 2019. Article: The First Step Act could be a big gift to CoreCivic and the private prison industry by Liliana Segura, The Intercept, December 22, 2018. Article: For-profit prisons strongly approve of bipartisan criminal justice reform bill by Karl Evers-Hillstrom, OpenSecrets News, December 20, 2018. Statement: SPLC statement on bipartisan passage of First Step Act criminal justice reform bill by Lisa Graybill, Southern Poverty Law Center, December 20, 2018. Article: The First Step Act is not sweeping criminal justice reform - and the risk is that it becomes the only step by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, December 19, 2018. Article: Conservatives scramble to change criminal justice bill by Jordain Carney, The Hill, December 18, 2018. Article: The FIRST STEP Act will make us safer without the Cotton-Kennedy amendments by Tricia Forbes, The Hill, December 18, 2018. Article: Who no details about criminal justice 'reform'? by Thomas R. Ascik, The Hill, December 17, 2018. Letter: The ACLU and the Leadership Conference support S.756, and urge Senators to vote yes on Cloture and no on all amendments, The Leadership Conference, CivilRights.org, December 17, 2018. Article: Koch-backed criminal justice reform bill to reach Senate, All Things Considered, NPR, December 16, 2018. Article: The problem with the "First Step Act" by Peniel Ibe, American Friends Service Committee, December 14, 2018. Article: Why is a Florida for-profit prison company backing bipartisan criminal justice reform? by Steve Dontorno, Tampa Bay Times, December 7, 2018. Article: How the FIRST STEP Act moves criminal justice reform forward by Charlotte Resing, ACLU, December 3, 2018. Article: Private prison companies served with lawsuits over using detainee labor by Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian, November 25, 2018. Statement: GEO Group statement on federal legislation on prison reform (The FIRST STEP Act), GEO Group, November 19, 2018. Article: Karl Rove's crossroads GPS is dead, long live his multi-million dollar 'dark money' operation by Anna Massoglia and Karl Evers-Hillstrom, OpenSecrets News, November 16, 2018. Article: We are former attorneys general. We salute Jeff Sessions. by William P. Barr, Edwin Meese III, and Michael B. Mukasey, The Washington Post, November 7, 2018. Article: How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you've never heard of by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Caroline Tervo, and Theda Skocpol, The Guardian, September 26, 2018. Article: U.S. prisoners' strike is a reminder how common inmate labor is by Ruben J. Garcia, CBS News, September 8, 2018. Article: Kim Kardashian, activist, visits White House to call for prisoner freedom by Amelia McDonell-Parry, Rolling Stone, September 6, 2018. Article: Who is Chris Young? Kim Kardashian West to meet with Donald Trump to try to get prisoner pardoned by Janice Williams, Newsweek, September 5, 2018. Article: Kim Kardashian West visits White House to talk prison reform by Brett Samuels, The Hill, September 5, 2018. Article: Kim Kardashian West to another convicted felon's case: report by Brett Samuels, The Hill, September 5, 2018. Article: 'Prison slavery': Inmates are paid cents while manufacturing products sold to government by Daniel Moritz-Rabson, Newsweek, August 28, 2018. Article: Turf war between Kushner and Sessions drove federal prison director to quit by Glenn Thrush and Danielle Ivory, The New York Times, May 24, 2018. Report: Attorney General Sessions announces Hugh Hurwitz as the Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice, May 18, 2018. Article: Beware of big philanthropy's new enthusiasm for criminal justice reform by Michelle Chen, The Nation, March 16, 2018. Article: Corporations and governments collude in prison slavery racket by Mark Maxey, People's World, February 7, 2018. Article: Super PAC priorities USA plans to spend $50 million on digital ads for 2018 by Jessica Estepa, USA Today, November 2, 2017. Article: Private prisons firm to lobby, campaign against recidivism by Jonathan Mattise, AP News, October 31, 2017. Article: Slave labor widespread at ICE detention centers, lawyers say by Mia Steinle, POGO, September 7, 2017. Article: The sordid case behind Jared Kushner's grudge against Chris Christie by Byron York, The Washington Examiner, April 16, 2017. Report: How much do incarcerated people earn in each state? by Wendy Sawyer, Prison Policy Initiative, April 10, 2017. Press Release: The GEO Group closes $360 million acquisition of community education centers, Company Release, GEO Group, Inc., April 6, 2017. Article: How a private prison company used detained immigrants for free labor by Madison Pauly, Mother Jones, April 3, 2017. Article: Bias in criminal risk scores is mathematically inevitable, researchers say by Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, ProPublica, December 30, 2016. Article: Jailed for ending a pregnancy: How prosecutors get inventive on abortion by Molly Redden, The Guardian, November 22, 2016. Article: Federal prison-owned 'factories with fences' facing increased scrutiny by Safia Samee Ali, NBC News, September 4, 2016. Investigative Summary: Findings of fraud and other irregularities related to the manufacture and sale of combat helmets by the Federal Prison Industries and ArmorSource, LLC, to the Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, August 2016. Report: Federal prison industries: Background, debate, legislative history, and policy options, Congressional Research Service, May 11, 2016. Article: New Koch by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, January 25, 2016. Article: Pregnant and behind bars: how the US prison system abuses mothers-to-be by Victoria Law, The Guardian, October 20, 2015. Article: American slavery, reinvented by Whitney Benns, The Atlantic, September 21, 2015. Article: Yes, prisoners used to sew lingerie for Victoria's Secret - just like in 'Orange is the New Black' season 3 by Emily Yahr, The Washington Post, June 17, 2015. Report: Treatment industrial complex: How for-profit prison corporations are undermining efforts to treat and rehabilitate prisoners for corporate gain by Caroline Isaacs, Grassroots Leadership, November 2014. Report: The prison indistries Enhancement Certification Program: A program history by Barbara Auerbach, National CIA, May 4, 2012. Article: The hidden history of ALEC and prison labor by Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, The Nation, August 1, 2011. Article: Slave labor - money trail leads to Koch brothers and conservatives who want your job! by Bob Sloan, Daily Kos, February 21, 2011. Article: The Legacy by Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine, July 12, 2009. Hearing: Federal Prison Industries, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, C-SPAN, July 1, 2005. Article: Democratic donor receives two-year prison sentence by Ronald Smothers, The New York Times, March 5, 2005. Sound Clip Sources Discussion: Criminal Justice Reform and Senate Vote on First Step Act, C-SPAN, December 19, 2018. Speakers: - Mike Allen, Founder and Executive Editor of Axios - Mark Holden, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Koch Industries - Senator Amy Klobuchar Sound Clips: 22:27 Mike Allen: So, I have on NPR, “Koch-Backed Criminal Justice Reform to Reach Senate.” To some people, at least at first blush, there’s an incongruity to that. Tell us how Koch Industries got involved in this issue. Mark Holden: Yeah, well, I mean, Charles Koch and David Koch have been very focused on these issues forever, literally. They were early funders of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Institute for Justice, a lot of different groups. And from Charles’s perspective, the war on drugs, it’s been a failure. It doesn’t mean that you—there aren’t—it was in a criminal element within the war on drugs, but there are a lot of people in the war on drugs who don’t need to be incarcerated for so long. And so we’ve been very much in favor of proportional sentencing. You know, punishment must fit the crime. You break the law, you should pay a price, and then once you pay that price, you should be welcomed back into society, with all your rights. All your rights come back. That’s why we supported Amendment 4 down in Florida, the voting restoration rights for people with felonies in Florida. We don’t think it makes sense for people not to be able to participate once they’ve paid their debt to society. And for us, for Charles in particular, this is all about breaking barriers to opportunity. 24:10 Mark Holden: And last night, 87 to 12, that’s a curb stomping. And I will note, as a Patriots fan, Gronk is 87 and Brady’s 12, right? I mean, yeah. Something there. 49:00 Mike Allen: Watching last night, and the conversations today, it was clear there was a real sense of history, a sense of occasion on the Senate floor last night. Take us there. Tell us what that was like. Senator Amy Klobuchar (MN): Well, we haven’t had a lot of joyous moments in the Senate this year. Big-surprise-news item I gave you. And this was one of those because I think for one thing we’re coming to the end of the year. We were able to get some really important things done: the farm bill; the sex harassment bill that I led with Senator Blunt that had been really difficult to negotiate for the last year; and then of course the budget, which we hope to get done in the next two days; and then we’ve got this. And this was something that has been explained. It was five years in the making. It took people out of their comfort zones. You had people on both sides that never thought they’d be talking about reducing drug sentences. So in that way, it was kind of this Christmas miracle that people came together. But the second piece of it was just that we knew they were these bad amendments that you’ve heard about. Some of them we felt were maybe designed to put us in a bad place, only because politically the bill protected us from a lot of the things that were in the amendments. So what was the best part of the night for me was that it wasn’t Democrats fighting against Tom Cotton and these amendments; it was Chuck Grassley, in his festive-red holiday sweater, who went up there with that Iowa accent that maybe only I can understand, being from Minnesota, and was able to really effectively fight them down. And the second thing was just the final vote—I mean, we don’t get that many votes for a volleyball resolution—and that we had that strong of support for the reform was also really exciting. Senate Session: Senate floor First Step Act Debate and Vote, C-SPAN, December 18, 2018. Podcast: Wrongful Conviction Podcast: Kim Kardashian and Jason Flom join forces to advocate for Criminal Justice Reform and Clemency, September 5, 2018. Netflix Episode: Orange is the New Black, Season 3 Episode 5, Fake it Till You Make It Some More, June 11, 2015. Netflix Episode: Orange is the New Black, Season 3 Episode 6, Ching Chong, Chang, June 11, 2015. Video Clip: Whitney Houston 'Crack is Whack' Clip from 2002 Diane Sawyer Interview on ABC News, YouTube, February 11, 2012. Hearing: Federal Prison Industries, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, C-SPAN, July 1, 2005. Witnesses: - Phillip Glover - American Federation of Government Employees Prison Locals Council - President - Paul Miller - Independent Office Products & Furniture Dealers Association Sound Clips: 1:32 Former Representative Howard Coble: Prisoners who are physically able to work must labor in some capacity five days a week. FPI is a government corporation that operates the BOP’s correctional program and employs inmates of the federal prison population to manufacture goods for and provides services to federal agencies. About 20% of the inmates work in Federal Prison Industries’, FPI, factories. They generally work in factory operations such as metals, furniture, electronics, textiles, and graphic arts. FPI work assignments pay from $0.23 to $1.15 per hour. 6:19 Representative Bobby Scott (VA): FPI can only sell its products and services to federal agencies. The program was established in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, as a way to teach prisoners real work habits and skills so that when they are released from prison they’ll be able to find and hold jobs to support themselves and their families and be less likely to commit more crimes. It is clear that the program works to do just that. Followup studies covering as much as 16 years of data have shown that inmates who participate in Prison Industries are 14% more likely to be employed and 24% less likely to commit crimes than like prisoners who do not participate in the program. 1:39:58 Former Representative Pieter Hoekstra, current Ambassador to the Netherlands: Mandatory source was great for Federal Prison Industries during the 1990s and 2001 and 2002. But you know what? I think it was wrong that Federal Prison Industries was the fastest and probably the only growing office-furniture company in America during that time. As the industry was going through significant layoffs, Federal Prison Industries was growing by double digits each and every year. 1:46:40 Philip Glover: If you have someone serving at USP, Leavenworth, for instance, and they’re in for 45 years or 50 years, you can educate them, you can vo-tech them, but to keep them productive and occupied on a daily basis and feel like they have a little bit of worth, this program seems to do that. That’s where, at least as a correctional officer, that’s where I come from on this program is that it gives the inmate a sense of worth, and every day he goes down and does something productive. Resources About Page: Americans for Prosperity American Addiction Centers: Crack Cocaine & Cocaine: What's the Difference? Annual Report: The GEO Group, Inc. 2017 Annual Report Lobbying Report: Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (Section 5) Media Statement: Statement from CoreCivic President and CEO Damon Hininger on the First Step Act OpenSecrets: Americans for Prosperity OpenSecrets: CoreCivic Inc. Lobbyists OpenSecrets: CoreCivic Inc Profile for 2018 Election Cycle OpenSecrets: GEO Group Lobbyists OpenSecrets: GEO Group Profile for 2018 Election Cycle OpenSecrets: Outside Spending of Political Nonprofits OpenSecrets: Trump 2017 Inauguration Donors Product Page: Pride Enterprises Ranker.com: 50 American Companies That Have Ties to Modern Slavery SPLC: Criminal Justice Reform Visual Resources Community Suggestions See more Community Suggestions HERE. Cover Art Design by Only Child Imaginations Music Presented in This Episode Intro & Exit: Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito (found on Music Alley by mevio)

I'm Michael Santos with Prison Professors. Along with my partners, Shon Hopwood and Justin Paperny, we're glad to provide more information about how to prepare for the prison journey. Earlier episodes have given extensive biographical information on us. Complete your own due diligence. You'll see why we're exceptionally well qualified to help anyone who is going into the system.   More importantly, we're well qualified to help people who want to get out of the prison system successfully. Each of us succeeded after prison because we understood how to make good decisions as we worked our way through the journey. Always remember, the right decision at the wrong time is the wrong decision.   This episode is part of our series that we're calling how to prepare for prison. In the previous episode, we explained a bit about the process. As Dr. Stephen Covey advised in his best-selling book, it's always best to seek to understand before we seek to be understood.   In this segment of the Prison Professors podcast, we're going to discuss the importance of understanding stakeholders in the criminal justice system.     Federal Prison Hierarchy To succeed in the federal prison system, it's crucial to understand how it operates. Our partner, Shon Hopwood, tells a story that might help us illustrate the point. When Shon began serving his sentence for armed bank robbery, he wanted out. Many people in prison want out.   Shon read a case that highlighted a favorable decision. He thought the legal ruling might apply to him. Shon wrote a motion and he filed his motion in a court that he thought would grant relief. The judge refused to accept Shon's motion. Instead, the judge offered advice. He suggested that if Shon wanted to get relief in court, it would behoove him to file in an appropriate court that would have jurisdiction on his case.   Obviously, Shon went on to master the judicial system. As Steve Kroft of 60 Minute said, while serving his sentence, Shon became the most successful “jailhouse” lawyer in history. The legal briefs that he wrote for other prisoners resulted in victories in the district courts, circuit courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. His legal victories changed laws and resulted in liberty for many people in federal prison.   But if Shon did not learn how to master federal prison first, he would not have succeeded in mastering the federal judiciary, or become a skilled jailhouse lawyer. We must take first steps first. And for people going into the prison system, it's essential to understand how the Bureau of Prisons operates.     Branches of Government Like the federal courts, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is a massive bureaucracy. Many years may have passed since some of our readers took a class in civics. As a quick reminder, our nation has three bodies of government. They include the following branches:   The Legislative Branch The Judicial Branch The Executive Branch   Our elected members of Congress make up the Legislative Branch of government. They include representatives from each of the 500+ districts in the United States, and they include the two senators that represent each state. Those members vote on legislation in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Once they're in agreement, the legislative bills go to the President. If the President signs the legislative bills, they become laws.   In our country, we have more than 90 federal Judicial Districts. For example, in California, there are four separate federal Judicial Districts—including the Northern District Court, the Central District Court, the Southern District Court, and the Eastern District Court. Each of those Districts is part of a Circuit. We separate those Circuits by geographic regions. For example , California is in the Ninth Judicial Circuit. New York is in the Second Judicial Circuit. We have the U.S. Supreme Court that presides over all Circuit and District Courts. We have more than 1,000 federal judges that preside over the various courts. Each of the judges strives to ensure that people receive due process—meaning, the judges strive to apply fairness in the courts for all.   The Executive Branch of government oversees the many different applications of government. Our president appoints people who oversee the different departments. For our purposes, we know that the Attorney General of the United States oversees the Department of Justice. And the Attorney General of the United States oversees the Director of the Bureau of Prisons. For that reason, we must understand how the hierarchy operates.     Politics and Prisoners: Earlier, I encouraged you to complete your due diligence on my partners and me. That way you could assess the veracity of our claim to have mastered our time in federal prison. It takes a lot of discipline to grow in prison. In my case, I went through 26 years.   By the time that I met our co-founder Justin Paperny in the Taft Federal Prison Camp, our country was going through a historic election. The economy was in the tank, sliding into the worst recession in recent memory. Unemployment was on the rise. Justin asked me why I followed the political race so closely.   As a prisoner, I explained, we must live with decisions that come down from the top. The president's perspective on governing will influence the policies that he wants to set. As a prisoner, we must live with those policies. If the president believes that people have a capacity to change, the president will appoint an Attorney General that shares that liberal viewpoint. If the president believes that we need to preserve the systems that are in place, then the president will appoint an Attorney General that shares such a conservative viewpoint. Policy shifts in prison will reflect the perceptions of both the president and the Attorney General.   To illustrate, let us provide two recent examples of such change.   The Second Chance Act provided prison administrators with new discretion regarding halfway house placement. Prior to the Second Chance Act, leaders in The Bureau of Prisons could authorize prisoners to serve the final six months of their sentences in a halfway house. After The Second Chance Act, leaders in The Bureau of Prisons could authorize prisoners to serve the final 12 months of their sentences in a halfway house.   Obviously, from a prisoner's perspective, 12 months in a halfway house would be better than six months in a halfway house. But it was up to the Bureau of Prisons to apply the law.   The U.S. Congress passed The Second Chance Act. But leadership in the BOP has discretion. When President Obama was in office, the Attorney General was Eric Holder. Under that administration, people in prison could have some influence on how much halfway house time they could receive. As a master of federal prison, I succeeded in putting myself on a pathway to get the full 12 months of halfway house. Similarly, as a master in the federal prison system, Justin succeeded in getting the maximum halfway house placement that was available to him.   In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Jeff Sessions to serve as the Attorney General. Both President Trump and Attorney General Sessions had a different perspective. President Trump and AG Sessions had a conservative perspective, meaning that they believed that people should serve the maximum amount of time in federal prison. The 2017 administration cut funding to halfway houses.   But a master of federal prison would know how to cope with such change.   To prevail on maximum halfway house time—or any other matter pertaining to federal prison—Prison Professors urges people to understand the system. Pursue a strategy to get the best possible outcome, depending upon the political philosophy of the administration in power. The strategy that may result in success during a conservative administration may differ from the strategy that could result in success in a liberal administration.   To master federal prison quickly, make sure that you understand the political philosophy on both a macro and a micro level.     Directors of the Bureau of Prisons: The Bureau of Prisons is a massive organization. It employs more than 40,000 staff members that serve in six different regions. Those regions include federal prisons in most states, halfway houses in all states, regional offices, training centers, and headquarters in Washington D.C. The Director of the Bureau of Prisons presides over the entire bureaucracy. He reports to the Attorney General of the United States.   For the nearly 200,000 federal prisoners, it's important to understand the different roles in the BOP. What is the role of the Director?   Well, the Director must make sure that the prison system is operating in accordance with the wishes of the Attorney General. And the Attorney General wants the Director to operate the Bureau of Prisons in accordance with the political philosophy of the President.   The Director is not going to express concern for individual prisoner issues. Rather, the Director focuses on systemic policies. When prisoners attempt to seek relief from the Director, the prisoner reveals a lack of understanding for how the system operates. Masters understand the system. And they learn how to succeed, given the limitations of the system itself.   Unless a prisoner wants to advocate for systemic change, it doesn't make sense for him to advance arguments at the highest levels of the Bureau of Prisons. In fact, doing so can cause problems. Leaders know that the right decision at the wrong time is the wrong decision. Although people in prison may see many injustices on a systemic level, as masters, we should always have a very clear perspective. How are we defining success? What battles are we striving to win? What price are we willing to pay in pursuit of success over our battles.   By focusing on victory as we define victory, we know where to concentrate our energy. It rarely works in our interest to seek relief from the highest levels of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.   To oversee the Bureau of Prisons, the Director relies upon a large team. That team includes a Deputy Director, several Acting Directors, and several Regional Directors. It would be highly unusual for any of those directors to make decisions regarding any individuals in prison. Rather, the directors rely upon their subordinates. We should expect the subordinates to make decisions in accordance with the political philosophies of the people in power. Directors set policies and oversee budgets. Subordinates carry out those policies.   Federal Prison, an Overview: We know that the Bureau of Prisons is a massive bureaucracy. It includes many different divisions. People who want to master federal prison should broaden their understanding of how it operates. The more people understand, the more likely they become to get on the best trajectory.   Masters seek to understand more so that they can influence more.   Although a later chapter discusses custody and classification levels in detail, we can provide a brief overview here. The Bureau of Prisons categorizes in accordance with security levels. Consider the following:   ADX: This designation refers to an Administrative-Maximum U.S. Penitentiary. It is the highest level of security. Most people who serve time in an ADX start in a lower-security prison. They make decisions in prison that result in new criminal charges, or disciplinary problems. When a team or staff member identifies people in prison as being sufficiently disruptive, they may send them to an ADX penitentiary.   SMU: This designation refers to a Special Management Unit. Like the ADX, the SMU is a highly restrictive prison. Staff members may send people to an SMU when they want to restrict their communication. Although most people who are in an SMU have violent histories, it's important to remember the adage “The pen is mightier than the sword.” If staff members consider a prisoner to be a prolific writer, and the prisoner writes content that staff members consider inflammatory, they may confine the person in an SMU.   USP: This designation refers to a United States Penitentiary. In the broader community, people consider the word penitentiary as being synonymous with prison. But in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the word penitentiary has a different meaning and connotation. It means high-security. People going to a USP live in restrictive conditions. Staff members consider USPs to be more volatile. They govern USPs in response to population levels that include higher percentages of people who have violent, volatile, and disruptive histories.   FCI: This designation refers to a Federal Correctional Institution. The FCI includes both medium-security and low-security prisons.   FSL: This designation refers to a Federal Satellite Low Security Prison. The people in an FSL have the custody scoring of people in a camp. But they have some issue that prevents them from going to a camp. For example, they may have a detainer of some type, or they may have longer than 10 years to serve.   SCP: This designation refers to a Satellite Prison Camp. The camp is adjacent to a secure prison, and the inmates in the camp provide labor that keeps the prison operating.   FPC: This designation refers to a federal prison camp. It is frequently a stand-alone camp, meaning it is not tied to another prison, as with the SCP.   FCC: This designation refers to a Federal Correctional Complex. A complex will have several prisons of different security levels in a single location. People in one prison do not mix with people in another prison, but they're all in the same geographical location.   FDC, MCC, or MDC: These designations refer detention centers. People in detention centers, ordinarily, await outcomes of judicial proceedings. Although some people serve the entire term in detention centers, or they are assigned to the work cadre—performing maintenance on the prison, they are not necessarily serving time.   FMC: This designation refers to a Federal Medical Center. People who need medical attention may serve all or a portion of their time in an FMC.   FTC: This designation refers to the Federal Transfer Center, in Oklahoma. Prisoners may spend time in the FTC while traveling to other institutions, or they may serve their sentence in the FTC if they're part of a work cadre.   CI: This designation refers to a privately operated federal prison.   CO and RO: These designation refers to the Central Office and the Regional Office. We can use our understanding of the regional office and the central office to influence our placement, or to influence favorable outcomes.   Mastering the federal prison system requires some knowledge of the different types of institutions. The more we know about the Bureau of Prisons and the staff, the better we can position ourselves to get to the best possible environment.   All secure institutions include the following staff members:     Warden: The warden is the CEO of the institution. Wardens have an enormous amount of influence with regard to how the prison operates. Some wardens make themselves approachable. To the extent that a person in prison positions himself well, he can influence the warden's perception.   As a prisoner, it's crucial to begin with a clear understanding of success. Exercise discretion when it comes to approaching a warden—or anyone else. Lay the groundwork first, before asking the warden to intervene on anything. Understand that the warden has enormous power with regard to every person in the prison. In the various books that Prison Professors have written, we described how wardens influenced our success through the journey. Pay close attention to the extensive amounts of back work that we did, and also note how we were selective when requesting assistance.   Associate Wardens: The associate wardens are part of the warden's executive staff. They oversee various departments within the prison. For example, the Associate Warden of Programs will oversee unit staff. The Associate Warden of Operations will oversee facility management. The population level of the prison will influence how many AWs are available.   Department Heads: Department heads oversee specific departments. For example, the Unit Manager oversees all case managers. A Unit Manager reports directly to the Associate Warden of Programs. The Unit Manager will ask inmates to resolve matters directly with the case manager.   Line Staff: Line staff includes case managers, cook supervisors, counselors, landscape foreman, maintenance leaders, and others who work in various departments. They report to their respective department heads.   Case Managers: Case managers oversee all matters that pertain to a person's case. Once the judge sentences a person “To the custody of the attorney general,” that person becomes an “inmate” as far as concerns the system. And case managers will have direct oversight of the inmate. The inmate will not have a lawyer. The inmate must learn how to advocate for himself effectively. Case managers will be a key person to influence. Although policies guide decisions, there is always some discretion. A master will learn how to influence staff members in the Bureau of Prisons in a positive way.   Counselors: Counselors in federal prison do not offer the type of counseling that someone outside of prison would expect. Rather, they perform jobs like approving visiting lists and assigning jobs. It's best to understand the limited role that counselors play in federal prison. That way, people spare themselves the disappointment that comes from expecting too much.     Influence and Manipulation At Prison Professors, we discuss the long-term approach of influencing a positive outcome. That differs from shortsighted efforts to manipulate staff members. To influence does not mean to manipulate.   For obvious reasons, staff members are extremely cynical. Every day, staff members in prison work with convicted felons. Many of those people have criminal mindsets. That is why staff members expect inmates to lie. They expect inmates to do or say anything that will ease their burden. Masters of the system do not whine or complain about this reality. Rather, they learn how to work within the system, and how to succeed in spite of the challenges.   Masters know that the Bureau of Prisons invests a considerable amount of resources in staff development and staff training. Part of that training teaches staff members how “to be firm but fair.” The Bureau of Prisons wants to make sure the public is safe, the prisons are safe, and the staff members are safe. As such, it's extremely conservative. Training encourages staff members to rely upon policy when making decisions, and it trains them to interpret those policies conservatively. For that reason, it's crucial for masters to understand all policies. By understanding the opportunity costs that come with every decision, masters can make better progress than those who flounder.   If you want to master federal prison, work through all of the programs available through PrisonProfessors.com. You will learn our strategies for making exceptional progress in prison. More importantly, you will learn how to succeed upon release.    

On this program, Ann Baldwin and her co-host, Lisa Dematteis-Lepore are joined by Patrick Fallon, Director of Community Justice Services at The Connection, Inc. and State Representative Brandon L. McGee Jr. Listen to them discuss the struggles people face after incarceration and the important work being done through The Second Chance Act.

In today's episode, I explore the areas where America's prisons are failing society and the growing call for sensible, results-based criminal justice reform.  My guests are Senator Rob Portman, author of the Second Chance Act, Julie Stewart president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and Jeff Smith, author of Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What Me Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America's Prison Crisis.   In the first part, Jeff Smith will recount his eye-opening year in federal prison, and what he saw personally about how the prison system is failing to rehabilitate criminals, destroying families, and in many ways, financially crippling the most vulnerable Americans.  Then I'll talk with Julie Stewart, founder and president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, about how sentencing discretion has been taken away from judges, filling our prisons will non-violent offenders.  Finally, I'll talk with Senator Rob Portman of Ohio who authored The Second Chance Act and has been a leader on the Hill on the issue of criminal justice reform.  He'll explain how innovative programs like the Second Chance Act are doing a better job of reforming and rehabilitating criminals by giving them a shot at a better life.   If you enjoy this episode, visit the website for Families Against Mandatory Minimums at www.famm.org or follow Julie Stewart on Twitter at @julieonjustice.  Encourage your Congressman or Senator to support the re-authorization of the Second Chance Act and get involved with a local Prisoner Re-Entry Task Force in your county.  You can order Jeff Smith's book Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What Me Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America's Prison Crisis on Amazon or download the audio version of his book for free with a special promotion for our listeners at www.audibletrial.com/kickasspolitics.     Please subscribe to KickAss Politics on iTunes and leave us a review. You can also help us reach our fundraising goal for this year and donate at www.gofundme.com/kickasspolitics. Or go to the website for the show at www.kickasspolitics.com and click on the donate button. Thanks for listening!

In this February 2014 Congressional Briefing, Lois M. Davis shares results from a new RAND study on correctional education, conducted for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice and funded under the Second Chance Act of 2007.