This podcast presents highlights from Sustainable Strategies, a one-day event organized by the Center for Court
Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center in September 2015. Representatives from 11 organizations
discussed successes, challenges, and strategies used to meaningfully engage young people and elevate their voices
in policy discussions through youth advisory boards. Members of youth justice boards also shared their experiences
and insights with the group. 

MARY WALLE: This
is Mary Walle from the Center for Court Innovation, and you’re listening to the New Thinking podcast. Today’s
conversation comes from Sustainable Strategies for Effective Youth Advisory Boards, a day-long convening of youth
advisory board practitioners, held by the Center for Court Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center thanks
to the generous funding of the WB Clement and Jesse V. Stone Foundation.

What are youth advisory
boards? They are small programs run by nonprofit organizations and government agencies that bring the voices of young
people into policy work. Sustainable Strategies brought together youth advisory board practitioners from across New
York City to discuss their work to bring young people’s voices and ideas into meaningful policy change.

In this podcast, you will first hear from four experienced youth advisory board practitioners about how
their programs operate, the challenges they face, questions they grapple with, and best practices to keep in mind
when designing and facilitating a youth advisory board program. Then, four youth advisory board program alumni will
share their experiences in these programs and the impact that membership has had on their lives.

We’ll
start by hearing from Brooke Richie-Babbage, the founder and executive director of the Resilience Advocacy Project.
Here, she discusses the mission, structure, and challenges of Resilience Advocacy Project’s youth advisory board
work.

BROOKE RICHIE-BABBAGE: Our mission is to empower youth to become leaders in the fight against
poverty. We train young people in these spaces to identify social justice issues that they are passionate about in
their communities, and then to develop concrete community impact initiatives in response to those problems. They
spend a year becoming an expert on their campaign topic, and then every campaign culminates in an event. The event
is designed to bring youth and adult leaders into the same space to discuss and develop recommendations to push for
change.

WALLE: Brooke also discussed the challenges and tensions organizations may face when the
youth participants, not adult staff, are by design in charge of the direction and the work of the program.

RICHIE-BABBAGE: This level of youth leadership makes me uncomfortable. I believe in it, right? I started
this organization. But the messiness of it, and not knowing before the citywide town hall meetings what is going
to happen at the end can make it difficult both for me personally and as an executive director to identify funding
and resources and to know where our partnerships and work are going to go, because I am not the one picking the topic.
How do you build a structure and build on successes when you’re not in charge of that aspect of guiding the
ship?

On the flip side, I think that the work is much more diverse in ways that I don’t know
that our staff who are deeply committed to youth leadership, and, quite frankly, better at it than me, would even
have paid attention to it.

It was really our youth leaders who were out there doing the recruitment
that said, “We also need to pay attention to things like age.” The dynamic of a room where everybody’s
a senior except for two people matters. That changes things in how we do work. We need to pay attention to the fact
that a lot of young people have to work after school. If, in order to be involved, you actually need to be here two
days a week, who are we then saying can’t be involved without actually saying that? That voice and that perspective
came from our young people, so the fact that they guide our recruitment and the way that the body itself is formed,
I think is very powerful.

WALLE: Brooke went on to explore the challenges her organization faces
in running a youth advisory board.

RICHIE-BABBAGE: I just want to highlight a couple of the tensions
or questions, really, that have come out of this youth leadership work and the youth council in particular, again,
against a backdrop of an organization that believes in leadership but practices it in different ways.

The
first is, how does this group fit into our larger organizational programmatic and policy advocacy structure? There’s
a real tension between remaining nimble and responsive to what they say they are interested in, and also running
an organization and having a program that is accountable for outcomes to funders.

Second is infrastructure.
If we want them to have a real system impact, how do we have a program that has a beginning and an end, that has
some kind of structure that is measurable and that allows the participants to feel like they are achieving something
and yet is also acknowledging of the fact that if we’re serious about them having a system impact that takes
longer than a year.

Rep’s board has identified five core social justice issues around which
we want to have an impact. What do we do if young people want to focus on something that’s not on that list,
and how do we guide their choice without making it not a meaningful choice?

Finally, who decides
and enforces the rules of the group? Group work, for those of you who do it, is hard. It’s messy. Striking the
right balance between being adult experts and facilitators in a room and also allowing the young people to grapple
with the messiness of becoming true leaders is difficult.

WALLE: Next, we’ll hear from Linda
Baird, associate director of youth justice programs at the Center for Court Innovation and former Youth Justice Board
program coordinator. The Center founded the Youth Justice Board in response to the realization that the young people
the Center worked with did not have a voice at the table where decisions were being made that would affect their
lives. Linda discusses the program’s goals and its challenges.

LINDA BAIRD: The goal of the
program is to bring the voices of young people into policymaking and have them be able to give their input on issues
that affect them. We really try to caution young people this isn’t just a program where you say, “I found
all this stuff is wrong. That’s too bad.” Then we ask them to take the next step, “And what can you
do about it as a young person? What are your ideas to fix it?” – because adults don’t often hear these.

WALLE: Building on Brooke’s earlier comments, Linda talked about how the program faced the realities
of changing policy.

BAIRD: As everybody in this room probably is aware, the timeline for policy
change … Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to make it align with the school calendar. We have thought about,
in our implementation phase, what we can do so that young people can have a few really credible, meaty projects that
come out of that period. Even with adding a full extra year on the topic of study, we at the Center realize that
that doesn’t necessarily mean the issue is wrapped up and that our work is done.

WALLE: Brooke
and Linda brought up many important questions to consider while designing and facilitating youth advisory board programs.
Up next, Laura Jankstrom, Youth Action NYC program coordinator, from the Citizens’ Committee for Children, discusses
how its youth programs are structured in response to similar questions.

LAURA JANKSTROM: The Youth
Action Community Leadership course is the point of entry into the Youth Action program for interested students. At
the end of the ten-week course, the students are eligible to become Youth Action members. This is the real youth-led
piece of what we do. These guys meet every week for a couple of hours on Wednesdays for the duration of the school
year, and they pick the topics that they want to work on, and they pick the types of projects that they want to do.

For some of their projects, they want to stick to the traditional “We want to research this issue,
we want to create policy recommendations, and we want to meet with elected officials to educate them on what we found.”
They want to feel an impact immediately. They don’t want to wait for the policy change to be made a year, two
years, three years down the line. It’s a lot of times difficult to follow an issue if it’s not something
that the news is really covering a lot, and so kids aren’t seeing movement on them. I can’t just send them
an article and say, “Hey, see what’s happening with the issue that we’re working on.” A lot of
that is really done behind the scenes.

An example I have, one semester, we were doing teen mental
health, and one of the recommendations that our group brought was that there should be a teen suicide awareness day
in New York City. The following year, councilmember Steve Levin introduced a bill that would make September Teen
Suicide Awareness Month for the entire state and credited the Youth Action meeting that he took with pushing him
to introduce that bill. By that time, a lot of those kids were moving on to greener pastures, but I did my best to
reach out to them and say, “Hey, congratuations, you made a difference.”

The final arm
of our three-pronged Youth Action program is peer trainers. Kids go through the training course. If they want to,
they become Youth Action members. Then, from that group, I pick about four students every year to become peer trainers.
They develop and facilitate workshops for other programs that are interested in civic engagement, advocacy, leadership,
New York City government.

WALLE: The final adult practitioner we’ll hear from is Chris Neal,
senior director of youth programs and initiatives from Coro New York Leadership Center. He discusses the pillars
and breadth of Coro’s youth programming and the importance of youth-adult partnerships.

CHRIS
NEAL: One of the major pillars of our work is this notion of youth-adult partnership, which you’ve heard talked
about today a little bit, and that’s the idea or the work of young people working in partnership and collaboration
with adults on common issues.

I believe in youth voice, I love youth voice, but I’m also
very clear about the role that we have as adults in the room, and that is to create the hooks for young people to
hang their ideas on. They have a number of ideas, lots of wonderful things they’d like to do, and our role,
sitting in the back, but leading from behind, as Obama would say, is to provide those hooks. “Well, maybe you
might think about doing this,” or “Have you ever thought about doing that?”

The
other pillar of our program is probably youth in policy in practice. What does that mean? Youth in policy in practice
means that over the course of our work, which is the last ten years, in working with youth councils both in schools
and across the city, we found that the area where young people have the greatest impact is on how policies are shaped,
the decision making process, and then how they are implemented. We rely and we spend a great deal of our time building
the capacity of our young people to go out, collect data, collect the authentic voice and experiences of their peers,
and bring those back in a meaningful way so they can contribute to the decision making process or the implementation
process of policy. That is a fundamental of our work.

Three years ago, Coro had one youth program
and about 24 young people. Now we have three youth programs and two initiatives and about 200 young people. One of
the biggest tensions, which you spoke to a little bit, Brooke, is organizationally realizing that rather we want
to think about it this way or not, we are a de facto youth development organization. Now we need to begin to think
about what that means organizationally.

WALLE: A common theme identified by the practitioners
was the challenge of convincing the youth advisory board host organization of the value of youth voice, and figuring
out how to integrate young people’s ideas. Here’s how Chris described that challenge.

NEAL:
Something I think we may have all run into is this notion of managing up. The folks that are above you may not always
understand the importance of youth programs and having youth councils in your agency. You might have to do a little
bit of managing up, I call it. “This is the benefit of this program. This is why we need to have this. This
is how it’s going to improve our work. This is how it’s going to make us have a greater impact.” Adultism
is real, and a lot of adults do not think that young people have a place in policy, practice, and implementation.
What are young people going to do? What are they going to do for this organization? How can we utilize them?

WALLE: Now we will hear from young people on their experience as youth advisory board members. BERNADETTE,
Stephanie, Alex, and Levi are alumni of youth advisory board programs at the Center for Court Innovation and Coro
New York Leadership Center. They first discuss how the program affected their growth as young leaders and then offer
their advice on how to lead and recruit for youth advisory board programs. Last, they share how the experience impacted
their lives.

ALEX: I’m Alex.  The Youth Justice Board exposed me to a whole other
world I never really about. [inaudible 00:11:37] Coro allowed me have unique access to the mayor’s office and
city government, which I think every youth should have some sort of access to. I think that’s really eye opening
and really an enlightening experience.

BERNADETTE: My name is Bernadette. YJB really influenced
me in understanding a lot about policy and how it was developed and how it affects young people. It definitely affected
me. I thought that it just affected adults, adults would just tell me what to do and I would listen. YJB really opened
a door to see how everything comes down from the top and it trickles down to the bottom.

I always
thought a leader was the one who was at the forefront of everything. I’m a shy person. Being in Coro, exploring
leadership there, I really find myself as a leader because of the fact that I can collaborate and communicate with
different people.

STEPHANIE: My name is Stephanie. One main point for me would be having to write
recommendations and actually being accomplished at the end of the year. Another highlight was the presentation at
Pace University. I felt like such an adult. It really exposed me to a world of people that I don’t think I would
have been talking to with the confidence I have now.

WALLE: One of the topics the youth discussed
was the qualities adult partners and program leaders should possess.

BERNADETTE: The relationship
should not be, “I’m the program facilitator and you’re the program participant.” It’s more
like, “Okay, so we’re working together on this same issue,” and so understanding that that type of
dynamic works best with young people, because a lot of people look at adults as authority figures, not as people
who I can be equal with.

ALEX: My facilitators would oftentimes step back, and they would say,
“Our job is to be a facilitator. It’s not to be someone who is governing over the situation that is happening
at the moment.” Oftentimes they left the room to let us sort of engage each other and not just speak to the
adult in the room, which I think does naturally happen because we’re used to a classroom environment where we
just respond to a teacher.

The facilitator is there to facilitate, but also to step back, but
also to help us have access to them and to the multiple resources that they can provide us as adults.

STEPHANIE:
Not only do we just focus on the program, but we always have check ins with our facilitators.

BERNADETTE:
I think what worked best is that the program itself is not based in a classroom style. Both YJB and Coro’s Leadership,
it’s a circle, so everybody can see each other, everybody get to talk to one another, and it’s discussion-based.
It’s not a lecture.

WALLE: Youth Advisory Program alumni continued sharing advice about these
programs, including how to recruit for them, during the question and answer segment.

LEVI: I think
that if you relate it back to current events and link the program to how it’s affecting society today, I think
they can definitely make people more interested.

BERNADETTE: They could also talk about skills
that they will do well in.

ALEX: I think maybe going in into schools and recruiting people through
the discussion of issues that are relating back to them would allow them to engage.

STEPHANIE:
I would just say get the message out to them that what they’re doing is going to be beneficial not only for
them, but for future generations.

JANKSTROM: What is one thing that really surprised you about
your experience in these programs? Is there something you think differently now than you thought when you started?

LEVI: Before I joined Youth Justice Board, I never knew much about policy or criminal justice or police-community
relationships. It gave me the opportunity to learn about it, and not only to learn about it, to be an active member
and do it. To be involved and try to change it.

ALEX: I joined the YJB in 9th grade, and that
was very early for me, but it allowed me to enter high school in a completely different perspective, in the sense
that I was able to … Instead of just having this feeling that I needed to keep my head down and do my work and
do all these different things, I felt like I could understand the people that were in society that I walked by every
day and took the subway with, and I felt like I had a closer connection to a community that wasn’t my school.
I think that’s really important, because yeah, we could all be class president or anything, but it’s important
to engage in the community, especially in a community as large as New York City.

RICHIE-BABBAGE:
In retrospect, how do you feel this work has impacted your life beyond the work in your council? How has it helped
you in school or with your peers? Can you speak to anything, one thing that really resonated with you that you’ve
been able to take away and apply it in other areas of your life?

BERNADETTE: For me, two things.
One, I am a founder of a new club called DP, which is basically Diversity Project. The main focus of DP is to include
people who you really don’t hear about or backgrounds you don’t really hear about. For me, the second thing
would be dynamics and how I was perceived the world and how other people would perceive the world, and things that
I would do or my tendencies. I think what it allowed me in school is how to navigate with different people, because
you have the loud people and you have the shy people, and so how do I connect with them to make sure that the work
is done.

ALEX: Well, the Youth Justice Board taught me, it helps practical fields like time management,
note-taking skills, and it also teaches you responsibility, which is important. I think I became more responsible
throughout the program.

STEPHANIE: It also helps you connect to the real world. For example, we
did a lot of interviews last year with stakeholders and a lot of these important people, but when we actually asked
teams to go out to the real world and to apply for a job and get the interview, it helps us in that sort of way because
now we are better at our speaking skills and communication skills.

WALLE: This has been Mary Walle
with the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening to advice and best practices from youth advisory
board practitioners and youth participants from Sustainable Strategies for Effective Youth Advisory Boards.

For more information on the Youth Justice Board and the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org/yjb.

For more information about the Coro New York Leadership Center, you can visit www.coronewyork.org.

Thank you to the W. Clement and Jesse. B. Stone Foundation for their generous funding that made this event
and podcast possible. To hear more New Thinking podcasts, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is the Children in Trauma Intervention, or CITI, program in Cincinnati, an anti-violence initiative
led by the Cincinnati Police Department’s Youth Services Unit in partnership with the Cincinnati Health Department,
Cincinnati Public Schools, and Hamilton County Juvenile Court that seeks to reduce violence and youth involvement
in the juvenile justice system through a mentorship program that pairs police officers with youth. 

Nancy Wagner, who oversees grants and grant information for the Cincinnati Police
Department and Lieutenant Jay Johnstone, of the department’s Youth Services Unit, joined this week’s podcast
to discuss CITI’s unique curriculum, parent-engagement strategy, and trauma-informed approach.

The
following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:         
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series we are doing
with people seeking to curb violence and improve access to public health for at risk minority youth, as part of the
Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority Health at
the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the US
Department of Justice that encourages collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies and
community based groups. Our podcast series highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that
have received funding under the program. In this week’s podcast, we’re exploring the Children in Trauma
Intervention program, or CITI in Cincinnati, OH. CITI is spearheaded by the Cincinnati police department’s Youth
Services Unit in partnership with the Cincinnati Health Department, Cincinnati public schools and Hamilton County
Juvenile Court. The program seeks to reduce violence
and youth involvement in the juvenile justice system through a mentorship system that pairs police officers with
youth. This podcast focuses on CITI’S approach to trauma and the philosophy behind CITI’s unique parent
engagement strategy, which includes requiring parents of youth to participate along with their children in the program.    I’m joined by Nancy Wagner, who oversees grants
and grant information for the Cincinnati Police Department, and Lieutenant Jay Johnstone of the department’s
Youth Services Unit. Nancy, Lieutenant Johnstone, thank you for being here today, and welcome.

NANCY WAGNER:           
Thank you.

JAY JOHNSTONE :            
Thank you for having us.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
So, can you describe to me how CITI functions?

JOHNSTONE :    
Well, we run three separate sessions a year and we invite 40 kids between the age of 11 and 14 to attend each of
the sessions. And what we’re looking for are kids who are kind of on the borderline of having discipline problems
or attendance problems or struggling with their grades at school. So those are the youth that we reach out to and
that’s who we’re looking for.

               
It starts off with an interview process where we interview the youth. We also interview the parents of the youth
because the parents are … a large component of our program, is the Parent to Parent Program. So the parents and
the youth are equally involved through the program which runs 10 weeks. The parents meet weekly for 90 minutes and
their presence is actually required as part of the program for the kids, in order to graduate. The parents also inevitably
graduate. So the parents are required to attend and the parents then meet with a certified therapist at the meeting.

               
So, what we do is they start off talking as a group together and they address issues that everybody is experiencing
with their youth and then they break off into smaller groups and talk in a little more intimate setting. And then
towards the end of the session, they come back together and discuss the various ideas that they’ve learned,
the different characteristics that they actually share with the other [inaudible 03:18] parents.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
This approach is I think unique among the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Programs. Why do you feel that it’s
so important to have parents involved?

JOHNSTONE :     We
think the parents help to reinforce these lessons that we’re trying to teach. The lessons of leadership and
the lessons of conflict resolution. Also, just the idea of respect. So, these are the lessons that we’re teaching
the kids and we found a strong correlation that the better attendance and stronger buy in that we have from the parents
then the better buy in and the better attendance that we have from the youth that participated in the program. So
that way when the youth go home, their parents are able to reinforce the lessons that are being taught.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
Where does law enforcement fit into the program specifically?

JOHNSTONE :    
What we’re trying to do is bridge that gap between the youth and law enforcement and improve those relationships
and we feel that by having the direct contact that we have with the youth in our program, we are able to help lower
those barriers and break some of the stereotypes that some of the youth might have toward the police officers. So
the police officers, is they help run the Parent to Parent. They run the daily operation of the camp itself. The
officers, they organize the lesson plan. They teach physical training and also military drills. So it’s designed
by officers and run by officers.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
Can you tell me a little bit more about the curriculum that the youth follow? I know that it’s pretty structured.
I think they wear uniforms.

JOHNSTONE :     Yes, the youth
wear uniforms and we try to have a pretty structured setting. Probably particularly come on a little bit stronger
at the beginning and then kind of lighten up and that’s when you find that the bond really starts forming with
the officers and the youth. And then we do teach an enrichment portion throughout the entire 10 weeks and we use
the GREAT curriculum, which is a Gang Resistance Education Training curriculum. And then we also introduce that same
curriculum to the Parent to Parent.

WAGNER:           
We also have like the physical PT training. We have military drills. We have an officer that teaches…

JOHNSTONE :     Martial arts.

WAGNER:           
Martial arts. And then our sex education program – we have someone from the Health Department come over to teach
a class on that.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
And what is the response from the youth?

JOHNSTONE :     Tremendous.
And that’s probably the most rewarding portion of the program is watching the transition from the beginning
all the way to the end and we end it with a graduation ceremony. And just watching the pride that the kids experience
and then watching the pride of the parents for completing the program. Even during the graduation ceremony we have
the youth actually give the parent awards out themselves. And it’s just a really gratifying moment. So, the
youth are very thankful of it. They show that through officers that follow up. As WAGNER talked about before, there’s
follow up and there’s mentorship. We make sure that there’s consistent follow up so that we’re always
monitoring their progress even after the camp. So, we don’t want it just to be a temporary, 10 week fix. We’re
looking more towards permanent where we’re going to follow them all the way up to the point of college and beyond.

WAGNER:           
And also a lot of the officers are school resource officers. So, they’ll see these kids at the school so they
can keep in contact with them to see how things are going. And a lot of the kids form that bond and if things are
happening with them, at home or whatever, they’ll go to that officer for advice. And then we’ll also have
parents calling afterward just saying what a change in the kids. Or if they’re having a problem with the kid,
they’ll call afterwards and then an officer will go out to talk to the kid and see how he or she can help.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
You mentioned earlier that you have a trauma specialist to work with the youth. What is trauma informed care mean
to you at CITI?

JOHNSTONE :     I think we’re trying
to look at from the vantage point of the youth themselves and the various traumas they might be experiencing through
a variety of stressors in their lives. So that’s where the trauma specialist comes in because she’s able
to speak with not only the children but the parents … most of us understand there’s going to be two vantage
points when you’re talking with two different parts of a relationship. So, the trauma specialist is able to
help bridge that relationship and bring the parents and the youth closer together.

               
One of the highlights of the program is when we have a one on one session and that’s when midway through the
program we have the child and the parent sit down together. It’s actually quite moving because at this point
a lot of feelings and concerns start to come to the surface and we’re able to work with the families and help
work through some of these issues that have been causing problems in the past.

WAGNER:           
And also at the beginning each student is given an Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE Questionnaire, and that assesses
the risk of increase health issues associated with maltreatment or other adverse childhood experiences. So then the
trauma expert will go over all this and then work with the student or the parent to see if she can help resolve some
of their issues.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
Stepping back a bit, can you describe what support from the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative has enabled
you to do?

WAGNER:           
Actually it’s been able to keep the program going because there’s a lot of money involved. A lot of it
goes for overtime for the officers because the city is down in their [inaudible 09:14] in officers so they wouldn’t
be able to put the program on during the work period and due to contractual issues, we can’t have officers volunteering
their time. And then, the food to feed the kids involved, the trauma specialists. We also have University of Cincinnati
is our evaluator, so we need to pay them. We also have incentives which is big for the kids that’s provided
by the grant. So, it gives them a goal to reach not only to be a better person, but a lot of people know that if
you kind of put that carrot out there, they’re going to try a whole lot harder.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
And what are those incentives?

JOHNSTONE :     Well, we have
weekly incentives where we recognize like the top students, the top leaders, ones who do well on the weekly spelling
test, ones that do well on the physical fitness test. We kind of toggle it back and forth between like 5 dollar Subway
card or 5 dollar BW3 Wings card. We also offer for attendance for the parents we offer 2 increments, anywhere between
10 and up to 25 dollars depending on how long they maintain their presence throughout the program, as well. And then
ultimately if the kid shows perfect attendance and shows good progress they eventually can earn a tablet.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
The kids must get very excited for that.

JOHNSTONE :     Absolutely.

WAGNER:           
(laughs)

JOHNSTONE :     (laughs) That’s something that
you’ll see where they strive and work very hard because they realize that it’s very attainable.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

WAGNER:           
Thank you.

JOHNSTONE :     All right.  Thank you,
Raphael.

POPE-SUSSMAN:            
This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation speaking with Nancy Wagner and Lieutenant
Jay Johnstone. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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This podcast is part of a series highlighting innovative approaches to reducing violence and improving health
outcomes among at-risk minority youth at the nine demonstration sites of the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One of these demonstrations sites is Youth Intercept,
a hospital-based violence-prevention program in Chatham County, Georgia, that aims to break the cycle of youth violence
and retaliation by providing educational services and referrals to public health services to at-risk minority youth.

Sheryl Sams, director of Youth Intercept, joined this week’s podcast
to discuss how Youth Intercept has adapted the hospital-based violence intervention model to meet the needs of Chatham
County, including the program’s development of a school-based element to serve youth in the Chatham County Public
Schools

The
following is a transcript.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, this is Rafael Pope-Sussman
of the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series we are doing with people seeking to curb violence
and improve access to public health for at-risk minority youth as part of the Minority Youth Violence Prevention
Initiative. The initiative is a partnership of the Office of Minority Health at the US Department of Health and Human
Services, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S. Department of Justice that encourages
collaboration among public health organizations, law enforcement agencies, and community-based groups. Our podcast
series highlights innovative approaches at the nine demonstration sites that have received funding under the program.

In today’s podcast, I’m speaking with Sheryl Sams, director of the Youth Intercept Program, an
anti-violence program in Chatham Country, Georgia, operated by the Chatham County district attorney’s office
in partnership with Memorial Health University Medical Center, the Chatham County Public Schools, and other local
justice system agencies. Youth Intercept provides educational services and referrals to public health services to
at-risk youth, particularly black males between the ages of 10 to 18. This podcast focuses on how Youth Intercept
has adapted the hospital-based violence intervention model to meet the needs of Chatham County, including the program’s
development of a school-based element to serve youth in the Chatham County Public Schools.

Sheryl,
thank you for speaking with me today, and welcome. What is Youth Intercept?

SAMS: Youth Intercept
is basically a violence intervention program. We work first to assist individuals who actually come in the hospital
between the ages of 12 and 25 to break the cycle of violence first, to encourage positive interactions in the community,
to assist in decreasing the amount of retaliation in our community, as well as re-offenses and re-admissions to the
hospital. The other aspect of that is the prevention piece, where we are working with individuals in our school systems,
kids in our school systems between the ages of 12 and 20 who are having behavioral issues or truancy issues, or any
of those things that may be a concern to the school system as far as teachers or social workers as well as parents
that may be alarming to them that there’s a possibility of those children actually committing crimes or getting
into trouble. We work with them to actually develop positive self-esteem and give them other avenues of engagement
in the community that are positive.

POPE-SUSSMAN: The Youth Intercept Program has received funding
under the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which is really focused on partnerships between law enforcement
and public health. I was wondering if you could talk about how that model fits into the work that is being done at
Youth Intercept.

SAMS: We are, with the district attorney office of course, it is a law enforcement
entity. What we do is, instead of trying to put people behind bars, we’re trying to keep them out, particularly
with our youth, just being able to work together to change the way that our young people think about law enforcement.
Typically, as they’re growing, they get this negative impression of law enforcement, and they think that we’re
there to harm them. However, with this partnership, we’re able to create healthy relationships between the two.
It really works well.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Your program is based on the hospital-based violence intervention
model that was created by Youth Alive in Oakland. I was wondering if we could talk about how the model works at Youth
Intercept, and how you’ve adapted it for your jurisdiction.

SAMS: Really, it works hand in
hand, pretty much the same. We are at a hospital, we’re at Memorial University Medical Center. We have a collaboration
with them, and we are able to work directly in the hospital. Our office is located 100 feet away from the ER, which
allows us to respond immediately to victims of violence and intentional injuries. They allow us to have pagers, so
we have pagers on us at all time. At that point, any time a victim of a violent intentional injury actually is seem
in the ED, we get a page letting us know that that person is there. It gives specific information on the age and
race of the individual as well as the type of injury. We’re able to respond immediately.

In
addition to that, we work with the medical staff, the trauma staff, which actually contacts us as well. We’re
able to work with them immediately within a 24-hour period, just depending on the type of injury they have. We also
work with their family members if there’s a situation where the injured party cannot talk at that time. We are
at the hospital waiting to talk to family members to get pertinent information so that we’re able to move forward
with that client.

Once we have contact with the client or family member, we basically offer them
what we call Georgia Crimes Compensation, which allows them an opportunity to have their hospital bills paid up to
$15,000 as well as counseling. If the person is working, it allows them economic support for reimbursement of $10,000,
and in the event that that person [expires 00:06:15], Georgia Crimes Compensation can actually pay up to $6,000.
We inform either the family member or the injured party about the resources that are available to assist, and then
we inform them about our Youth Intercept Program, and what services we can provide. Upon leaving the hospital, we
set up an appointment with them to then work with them on a case management plan.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
In the original Youth Alive model, there was not a school-based component, and I know that’s something the district
attorney she brought in when she came into office. I’m wondering how your office thinks that fits into the model?

SAMS: Well, I would say that with the data that we collected over the years with the hospital-based portion
of the program, we saw that there was a lot of the victims that have some of the same background information such
as truancy issues and school, and the reason why they actually dropped out of school. There were certain risk factors
that we saw that lead us to the school system. We felt there was a need to reach out to the schools and say hey,
let’s get this program started so that we can prevent other youth from coming into the hospital if we work on
the side of eliminating the issues that they have on the front end so that they don’t end up in the hospital
or perhaps deceased.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the results you’ve seen?

SAMS:
I would say definitely we’re having a huge success rate in the sense that we actually had about 1% of the individuals
that we’re working with who actually commit a re-offense. However, we’re seeing that there is an increase
in their education levels as well as their truancy rates, so they’re staying in school, they’re enrolled
into positive after-school activities, and are able to increase their academic scores. We’re seeing that that
has been a positive thing.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’m wondering how you’re measuring outcomes.

SAMS:
With our school-based program, we measure the individual at intake, so we’re looking at their grades at intake,
and we compare it to their exit, as well as a midpoint of achievement. Also, looking at their truancy rate, how many
days they actually missed, when they entered our program, where were they at, and where are they now? We document
changes in behavior as well as during life skills, we do pre and post exams to determine if they are actually learning
from the life skills that we’re teaching. With the hospital-based program, we measure whether those individuals
have actually received certain services like mental health counseling and if they actually did not have a job, and
now they have a job. Or if they weren’t enrolled in school, and now they are enrolled in school. Those are some
of the things that we look at. Also, if there has been a re-offence or a re-injury, also looking at mental health.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Have you partnered with any sort of research organization?

SAMS: We are
actually working with Georgia Southern University; I think it’s the criminal justice department that will actually
work directly with us to gather data to be able to do it in a research-based form.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

SAMS: Thank you, I certainly
appreciate it. It’s been delightful.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This has been Rafael Pope-Sussman with
the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Sheryl Sams, the director of Youth Intercept. For
more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, Susan Turner, professor in the department of Criminology,
Law & Society at the University of California-Irvine, explains how risk assessment tools are developed and
discusses the strengths and limitations of risk assessment. 

RAPHAEL
POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope Sussman, with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series
of dispatches from the Court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape Symposium
held in Anaheim in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms, including recent developments in California,
public safety realignment and Proposition 47. Public safety realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011 legislation
that shifted responsibility for certain populations of offenders from the State to the county level. Proposition
47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014 reclassified certain low level felonies as misdemeanors. I hope
you enjoy listening.

Hi, this is Raphael Pope Sussman, with the Center for Court Innovation, and
I’m here today at the Court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape Conference
in Anaheim. Right now I’m sitting with Susan Turner, professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society
at University of California, Irvine. Susan, thank you for speaking with me today.

SUSAN TURNER:
Glad to be here.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s the process for developing a new risk assessment tool?

TURNER: Well, risk assessment tools can be developed by an organization. There are also ones that are available
that have been developed by others, so some of the first decisions that jurisdictions make is whether to do it home
grown or whether or not to buy something that’s been developed and is available for purchase, or is perhaps
free. If you’re interested in developing a risk tool for your jurisdiction, one of first things you need to
decide is what are you interested in predicting? Most jurisdictions in risk assessment are interested in predicting
some kind of recidivism behavior, such as arrest or incarceration or conviction. Then we generally use a set of variables
that are related to an offender’s prior record, age or gender, and then some other factors that may be related
to their drug use, mental health status, their association with criminal peers. You basically need to make sure that
you have the data for your left hand and your right hand side of the equation.

You gather the
information on an individual level, so for every person you’re interested in, you gather information on whatever
outcome and then their record, their variables such as their gender, their age, and their prior record. You want
to have a sample that’s large enough. You put them generally in a regression equation, where you try to figure
out whether or not these factors are predictive. You’re able to gather weights for the variables based on these
mocks. For example, if you’re predicting whether somebody would be convicted, you might have age and you’d
have a weight of 5, gender you’d have a weight of 3, different prior record variables would have various weights.
You can just imagine sort of scoring everybody up, and the higher the scores, generally the more likely someone will
recidivate. Once you do that on one half of your sample, you build your model. Then you do something called validation
on a separate set of data that you haven’t looked at before and that tells you whether or not what you’ve
developed on your first sample validates or is predictive on your second sample. That’s basically a kind of
simplistic view, but the overall gist is that you have data available, you develop your instrument on one half of
the sample and test it on the second.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the limitations of these tools?

TURNER: Well, there’s a lot of good things about the tools and there are, of course, always limitations
with any kind of tool. Risk assessment for recidivism is, like many other risk tools, we have risk tools in our regular
lives. You think of your car insurance premiums that you pay are based on risk assessment tools. Risk assessments
tools are only as good as the data that are behind them, number one. Another limitation to risk assessments tools
that we all need to be aware of is that they’re never 100% accurate, and probably will never be 100% accurate.
They generally are what’s referred to as a moderately good predictor, but because of the nature of human behavior
and variables that we don’t know why people do the things we do, we can never gain 100% accuracy, which sometimes
gets us into trouble with say politicians who have very high standards for whether or not you want to use an instrument.
Sometimes so high that they’re really not practical.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are the great strengths?

TURNER: Great strengths are that we normally discuss risk assessments tools contrasted with what we refer
to clinical judgment, or some people call it gut. The research has shown that actuarial tools or risk prediction
instruments are more accurate than gut or clinical experience. Many people don’t like to believe that because
they’re often trained in a clinical background, or you can imagine a parole agent with 30 years of experience
is sometimes looking askew at risk assessments tool, but they’re more accurate. They can also result in decision
making that’s more consistent, because you can imagine the great variability if everyone follows their own gut.
You have lots of different ways the same person might be scored, so there’s consistency. There’s also,
with some risk assessments tools the advantage of time. Some of them are automated so for large numbers of people
they can be scored pretty quickly, allowing an agency to be able to get actuarial tool on a number of offenders without
the resources that may be required for, say, 45 or 50 minute instruments that are collected individually.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What roles do you see for risk assessments tools in the larger project of decarceration?

TURNER: One of the things we’ve talked about here today was the use of risk assessment and one of the
things I mentioned was that risk assessment’s been around for a long time. It’s got a resurgence nowadays,
I think partly because we’re trying to reduce the current populations that we have incarcerated and we don’t
have enough money to be able to keep everyone locked up. Money is driving a lot of decisions and one of them I think
actually may be risk assessment. We need to decide who are the highest risk people, the ones that we need to devote
our resources to, our public safety resources, and to not spend the resources on the ones who are the lower risk.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How do we ensure that risk tools don’t show bias against individuals and communities
that may have disproportionate rates of established risk factors, like housing or employment or disability?

TURNER: Very good question. I think there are a number of people who are concerned with risk assessments
tools based on dimensions that may impact certain groups unfairly. Many risk assessments tools use an offender’s
prior record as a major variable in their recidivism outcomes. Then there’s obviously the question, if prior
records are somehow biased in their very creation within communities of color, what does that mean in terms of risk
assessments tools. It’s a very valid question. One of the ways that we help address this is when we develop
tools, we take a look at and see how well the tools works with the different populations of interest.

For
example, when we developed a tool for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, we were particularly
concerned about whether the tool predicted for females as well as males, because there’s a lot of work suggesting
that some of the risk factors for women are different and for men. Also, we were concerned about whether the risk
tool worked equally well for blacks and Hispanics and whites and other groups. What we do with those is that we separate
the samples into the groups of interest and check to see whether the tool is as predictive in each of the groups.
If you find a tool that doesn’t work very well in one of the segments that you’re interested in, then you
need to go back to the drawing board.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’ve heard that misdemeanor populations
are particularly difficult to assess. Why is that?

TURNER: Well, the discussion of misdemeanor
risk assessments has really come into the light here in California with proposition 47. Traditionally, most of us
deal with risk assessments in the felony world. All the risk assessments tools I’ve done are pretty much predicting
felony recidivism. There is a question, are these tools good for misdemeanors. There are tools out there that have
been developed for misdemeanors. There’s a tool for misdemeanor DUIs and some tools that are developed by the
University of Cincinnati team have established one that’s for misdemeanors. They basically work the same as
the felony tools. They’re predicting a different kind of an outcome, which is maybe a lower level of behavior.
What we find with our risk tools is that these tools can be very robust to different populations and different kind
of outcomes.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have any big vision going forward, the next step for risk assessment?

TURNER: Well, one of the risk assessment has always been used pretrial for a long time. It’s been used
the last 20 or 30 years at the probation stage. I think more recently it’s being considered at the sentencing
stage, which I think in many ways has a little more ethical issues, whether or not in sentencing actually considering
risk as opposed to the sentence type.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What do you mean by ethical issues?

TURNER: I mean, what’s the purpose of sentencing and some people say the purpose of sentencing is that
it should be proportionate to the crime that was committed and that our statutes are based, sentences are based on
perceived severity of violent offences being more serious that property offenses and you reserve the highest sentence
lengths for the more violent. If you move to a risk based system and you say, well as we found in our research, people
convicted of violent crimes are not necessarily the most likely to re-offend, so you basically a conflict going with
what is the justice based, in terms of the offense, versus a risk based, which is about future behavior. That’s
sort of conflict that you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to deal with. In our own development of
the risk tool for the State, in our training and discussion of the tool, we’ve come across people who are very
perplexed by our findings that show that people who have convictions for violent offenses, there’s actually
what we refer to as negative weights on that, so that people with violent offenses are actually less likely to have
recidivism than those that don’t, which is very counter-intuitive.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I guess
that would also get to people’s ideas about what the justice system is supposed to do. Is it supposed to be
punitive? Is it supposed to be rehabilitative? Is it supposed to be utilitarian?

TURNER: Yeah,
I think, as I teach my students, a couple things you have to remember. If you remember a couple of things, you go
out after school it’ll be very helpful. One of the them is to remember always the different purposes of punishment.
One is deterrence, and that’s what we we think risk based decision making is based on. But there’s retribution,
incapacitation. Yeah, there’s many philosophies of what the goal of punishment is. I think risk prediction sets
you straight in the cross hairs of some of the other theories of punishment.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Well,
thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.

TURNER: Thank you very much
for the opportunity.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope Sussman, of the Center for Court Innovation,
and I’ve been speaking with Susan Turner, Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the
University of California, Irvine. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org

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In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, San Diego County Chief Probation Office Mack Jenkins discusses the importance
of risk assessment and how his department uses evidence-based practices to tailor its responses to offenders on probation.

The
following is a transcript.

Pope-Sussman:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series of dispatches
from the Courts, Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held in
Anaheim in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms including recent developments in California,
public safety realignment, and proposition 47. Public safety realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011
legislation that shifted responsibility for certain populations of offenders from the state to the county level.
Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014, reclassified certain low level felonies as misdemeanors.

Today I’m speaking with chief Mack Jenkins, chief probation officer San Diego County. Mack, thank you
for speaking with me today and welcome.

Jenkins: Thank you for having
me. I look forward to the conversation.

Pope-Sussman:
After proposition 47, what’s the role of the probation department? How has your job changed and how is the job
of individual probation officers changed?

Jenkins: With 47, what
happens is a number of individuals that we’re responsible for supervising may be eligible to be re-sentenced.
If they’re re-sentenced, some of them might actually leave our workload as it were. In that sense, we really
don’t have a role. Part of what we do right now in San Diego County as a state actually as well, is going through
the process of trying to identify individuals who are eligible to be re-sentenced under prop 47. We cooperate with
the court, with the public defenders office, and with the district attorney’s office in trying to identify individuals
who again may be eligible to be re-sentenced.

Pope-Sussman: Can you
talk about your work on community supervision? I know you’ve worked on supervision programs for DV offenders,
sex offenders, substance offenders.

Jenkins: Sure, happy to. The
great role that the probation department plays in the criminal justice system is a community supervision role. What
that means is I actually think we are very key players and sometimes understated players because folks don’t
really have general public and sometimes even other system stakeholders, don’t have a great awareness of what
we do. What we do is critical because when you think about the American criminal justice system, law enforcement
is very well known. The courts are really well known, but law enforcement’s role really ends at arrest. The
court’s role in the traditional system ends at this position. Those individuals who are in the juvenile justice
system, probation is the most common judicial sanction in this country in the criminal justice system.

What that means is individuals who’ve committed crimes get arrested and are adjudicated come to probation.
Our role there is to work with those individuals, hold them accountable for orders that the court may have imposed
on them, then this is the most important part of our role. Our role is to help them make changes in their behavior
so that they can leave system better than how they came to it. That’s what we do. We, probation as an entity,
as community corrections practitioners I think are critical in recidivism reductions and keeping our public safe
and restoring troubled lives.

Pope-Sussman: How do you deal with
maybe some of those particularly challenging demographics?

Jenkins:
Again, that’s a good question. I appreciate that you ask it because what we are learning in 2013, 2015 is that
in order to really deal with individuals that come into the system, we shouldn’t look at them by the crime that
they were convicted of. What we have to do is look at them to see who they are as an individual. See what has been
their history both in the criminal justice system but also outside of it. What have been their efforts at prior treatment,
other things in their lives so that we can have a better understanding of how that person got to where they are today.
Then craft an intervention, a case plan that addresses deficits that may have been in their life, and try and engage
them in a positive case plan or treatment plan to make changes.

That’s how we deal with them.
It’s not to say that folks that have been convicted of domestic violence offenses are the same as everybody
else because they are many times there are things related to individuals who and I’m just using domestic violence
as an example. Many times individuals who are domestic violence offenders do have some common traits. One of them
being alcohol. Alcohol is very, very common in domestic violence offenses. Again, we know that what we want to do
with individuals like that is focus on alcohol services, but at the same time maybe anger management and things like
that.

Pope-Sussman: Something that I’ve been reading about in
this field of community supervision and I’m wondering your perspective is, how would you respond to concerns
that expanded community supervision makes it easier or more palatable to keep individuals under some form of correctional
authority?

Jenkins: Again, I think it’s a good question. Here’s
my thought, is part of what we do is we do use in my field right now the term evidence-based practices. I always
say evidence-based practices for community corrections. Some of the tenets of the evidence-based practices, in other
words, some of the basic tenets of using practices that show research, by research that they’re effective. One
of the tenets is recognizing who you need to spend time with and who you don’t. Not everybody that comes into
the criminal justice system is at the same risk or has the same likelihood of staying in it, or has the same likelihood
of continuing their behavior.

In terms of questions about community corrections keeps people under
correctional supervision, what we actually know is that even if somebody comes into the criminal justice system doesn’t
want doesn’t mean they need to stay there. Basically what I’m describing is the tenet of risk-based supervision.
What we do is we employ tools to help us identify who’s who. We try to identify those folks who are most in
need of intensive supervision. At the same time identify those folks who don’t need it. Those folks who don’t
need it, we call them low risk offenders. They might well be on probation, but they might be on an unsupervised probation,
because they don’t need intervention. That’s how I respond to it. We don’t treat everybody the same.

Pope-Sussman: Where would you like to see probation in your jurisdiction in
10 years?

Jenkins: What I’d really like to see is the rank and
file officers becoming in addition to as a part of being an impactful and effective deputy probation officer, behavioral
specialists. What I tell my staff now is that they are criminal justice [behavioralists 00:07:17]. What that means
is I think that the profession, the vocation, deputy probation officers can have a higher level of competency of
knowing more about what are some of the behavioral factors that or some of the factors that influence behavior of
the individuals that they work with, and can be across the board better prepared and better skilled at engaging with
those individuals and helping them change their behavior.

Sometimes it happens right now an experienced
officer might learn some of those things, I won’t say intuitively because it’s from experience, it’s
not intuition, it’s from experience and so they do that already. There’s a way for us to teach it. There’s
a way for us to teach those skills, to teach very specific interventions, to teach engagement techniques, that’s
what I’d really like to see and I think can happen. I’m retiring now so I won’t continue that effort
in my role as chief, but I do hope to continue where to try and take the vocation to that level across the board.

Pope-Sussman: Is there an idea of maybe of some sort of formal professional
development in that area?

Jenkins: I think so. I think we’re
already and a lot of individuals that become probation officers come with academic backgrounds in criminal justice,
but as many may come from academic backgrounds of social work or psychology and things like that. That just makes
the point that what a probation officer is is somebody who works with another person, who works with people. One
of the efforts that I’m already involved in is working on a way of changing criminal justice curriculum for
criminal justice schools around the country, to make sure that it includes a curriculum that better prepares future
probation officers to be behavioralists as it were.

That involves things like teaching motivational
interviewing skills so that criminal justice graduates I think should come out of the school with if not a level
of competence in motivational interviewing, a level of understanding about what it is, and so they may later can
get training to hone the skill. Again the effort is to really change criminal justice degrees around the country
so that we can take advantage of I’ll even use the word science of behavior change. The individuals that are
being educated right now are better educated and then later can be better skilled to employ some of the practices
that the research is very clear show is effective in behavior change.

Pope-Sussman:
Those are all my questions. I really appreciate you taking out the time to speak to me.

Jenkins:
Thank you and good questions.

Pope-Sussman: This is Raphael Pope-Sussman
of the Center for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking with Mack Jenkins, chief probation officer for San
Diego County. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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At Reinvesting
in Justice, Wesley Shackleford, deputy director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, talks about indigent defense, procedural
justice, and improving access to legal services for those who cannot afford it.

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal and you’re listening to the New Thinking Podcast. I’m
at the Dallas City Hall with Wesley Shackelford, Deputy Director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission in Austin.
We’re both here at Reinvesting in Justice, a conference that brings together a wide range of criminal justice
practitioners to discuss challenges and highlight innovative work being done in the field of Criminal Justice today.
Wesley is speaking on a panel about procedural justice a little bit later today, specifically as procedural justice
intersects with thinking about racial disparity within the justice system. Wesley, welcome to the New Thinking Podcast.

WESLEY SHACKELFORD: Thanks, Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Today’s big topic is Reinvesting
in Justice. How do you interpret that?

SHACKELFORD: Coming at it from the indigent defense world,
we’re looking to find new innovative ways to provide required indigent defense services in working with partners
in county government who are interested in trying new approaches.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the benefit
of our listeners, can you summarize what your panel is going to be about and also what you specifically will be talking
about?

SHACKELFORD: Sure. It’s a diverse panel, the Chief of Police for Dallas and he’s
going to be talking I think about community relations with the police department especially with communities of color
in Dallas. We also have panelists from my parent organization, the Office of Court Administration also based in Austin
and he’s going to be talking about procedural justice in the court system directly. I’ll be addressing
indigent defense systems and innovative programs that my agency’s been involved in creating.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SHACKELFORD: My organization provides grant funding to
counties to help support the provision of legal services to poor people charged with crimes. I’m going to be
talking in particular about our discretionary grant programs where we’re partnering with counties who are interested
in advancing their own systems through partnerships. Really moving in new directions from what I’ll call the
legacy system of court-appointed counsel systems, which is still the by far predominant form of provision of indigent
defense services in Texas. Some of the programs that we’ve been working on are what we call managed assigned
counsel programs. This is in communities where the courts who by statute are the ones in charge in Texas of determining
who is going to be appointed to represent indigent defendants. They make the assignments on individual cases to specific
attorneys.

They in some places have decided that that’s not something they want to do. We’ve
been supporting them in developing this new system. It really started back in 2009 in Lubbock County. The judges
there took the initiative to essentially spin off the management of the appointment list and the assignment of counsel
to a non-profit Bar-led organization. They started it with a subset of cases, mental health defendants and with some
case workers to support the attorneys in that work. After a couple of years in learning the new system and what the
issues were, they expanded it to the entire criminal court system. At this point in Lubbock all of the appointments
are managed by this Bar-led organization. The courts have nothing to do with the selection of counsel. The Bar panels
with the Chief Defender reviews all requests for support services like investigators, expert witnesses. They also
review and approve all the fee vouchers which is another of the powers that is given to the judges in this state.

That was such a success that Travis County in Austin has also now launched the same system. As of this year
the criminal court appointment system is managed by a non-profit Bar Association with Chief Defender, two Deputy
Defenders, an investigator and so forth. This has been a big sea change and we see it as an opportunity for counties
around the state who may not be ready to take over the entire system through the creation of, say, a public defender’s
office where you have staff attorneys managing the provision of counsel. These are still private attorneys but it
provides a lot of independence from the courts and it also provides an opportunity for more direct oversight and
quality control which are things that judges aren’t really in a position to do.

Chief Defenders
who manage the system are. They help staff cases if need be. They provide mentoring services and then they annually
review performance and provide pointers and training opportunities for all of the private assigned counsel attorneys
in the jurisdiction.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That’s really interesting. You talked about the success
of the reform initiatives in Lubbock County. Can you elaborate on that? What kinds of results are you really seeing?

SHACKELFORD: I think it is the same attorneys but I would say the quality is better. They’ve created
mentoring programs both in Lubbock and now in Travis County which I think has the effect of enhancing the quality
of representation, bringing up the new generation. I think Lubbock, one of the challenges they faced was an aging
criminal defense attorney population retiring. It wasn’t really a process without a public defender’s office
to mentor and train young attorneys who wanted to go into the defense world. The old model of starting in a prosecutor’s
office, it wasn’t really attractive to a lot of young attorneys so they’ve been able to establish a full-scale
mentoring program under the auspices of the Managed Assigned Counsel program. I think that’s probably one of
the biggest enhancements.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Why is procedural justice important according to you,
and how can it really speak to addressing issues that minorities face within the criminal justice system?

SHACKELFORD: For the criminal justice system to have credibility in the community or at large, there has
to be justice perceived. It’s both the appearance and the actuality of fairness in the proceedings. Really that’s
what the initiatives that we’ve been undertaking are trying to enhance. The court-appointed counsel system can
at least lead to the appearance that the defendant’s attorney may not have their interests aligned with the
defendant. You speak to defense attorneys and they’ll talk about the difficulties in establishing a good relationship
with their client when they may feel like the attorney was foisted on them and works for the judge. Even the prosecutor
when in fact, the prosecutor doesn’t have anything to do with it but there’s still that perception. The
procedure, if you will, of having the court assign it can lead to that and that undermines really the whole justice
system and really is at the root of the second initiative that I wanted to speak about.

That’s
a client choice initiative that’s underway in Comal County which is New Braunsfels. It’s a small to mid-size
community between San Antonio and Austin. They are for the first time in the United States have implemented a system
whereby the clients, the defendants who’ve been charged with a crime, get to select the attorney who will represent
them. This is the system that’s in place in common law countries across the world, England, Scotland, Australia.
It has been for many, many years but has never really been tried here. We got the idea from a Cato Institute report,
Free Market Principles from 2010 and Norman Lefstein which is one of the thought leaders in Indigent Offense nationally
from the Indiana University School of Law, has partnered with us to create the program.

There
was a very large stakeholder committee with a national oversight board to develop the model and it began operation
just at the beginning of this year. There’s going to be a full evaluation of course, but the main concept behind
it is that the interests of the clients are going to be aligned with their defense attorney rather than the defense
attorney’s interests are aligned with the client. The only way they’re going to get appointments in the
system is if a client chooses to have them represent them. It piggybacks on the court appointed system. These are
attorneys who have already been qualified and screened by the judges, which is the system we have, as being qualified,
have the requisite training and experience to provide representation. From that pool, that relatively large list,
basically all the criminal defense attorneys in the community, the clients can choose.

We found
so far that about three-quarters of them do elect to choose their own attorney. If they don’t maybe they don’t
have any knowledge, they will be assigned an attorney off the wheel as they always have been. It turns out that attorneys
do have reputations in the community and defendants can get information to make an informed decision. It’s really
no different than anyone else who need to buy a service be it hiring a plumber or an accountant or anything else.
You gather the information and you make a choice about who you think is going to provide you the best service.

The attorneys at least initially, have already reported that it’s much easier to establish a trusting
relationship with their client because they feel vested in the choice. This was the attorney they in fact chose to
represent them. It’s going to be really interesting to see what the results are. Does it improve the quality?
What are the perceptions of the clients in the community? What do the defense attorneys report? There’s a robust
evaluation by the Justice Management Institute that’s going to take a look at this and we’ll have a full
report in 2016.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the challenges facing indigent defense today,
particularly as it intersects with procedural justice and issues of disparity?

SHACKELFORD: The
overarching issue and it may always be issue is inadequate resources. In public defender programs and assigned counsel
systems, if there isn’t enough funding to provide meaningful representation, then it’s very hard to have
procedural justice. You can have a system of attorneys who are there in name only who stand up with the defendant
while they plead guilty to the crime they’ve been charged with and accept the offer that the prosecutor makes.
We do have a system that’s based largely on guilty pleas. The challenge is when the defense attorneys don’t
have adequate time and resources to properly investigate the cases that you can undermine the belief that the system
is fair. If you’re in the defense community, if your attorney doesn’t have time to actually track down
the witness that may be able to attest to your defense, then you’re not going to have any trust in the system.
I think that’s probably the overarching consideration.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Thanks for talking
to me today.

SHACKELFORD: Thanks for having me.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni
Majithia-Sejpal and I’ve been talking to Wesley Shackelford at Reinvesting in Justice. To listen to more New
Thinking Podcasts or to learn more about our work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for
listening.

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At Reinvesting
in Justice, Aubree Cote, smart pretrial site coordinator for Denver, talks about the city’s
reform efforts and what different states and jurisdictions can learn from each other regarding pretrial justice.

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello and welcome to the New Thinking Podcast. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I am here in Dallas
today talking to Aubree Cote at the Reinvesting In Justice conference. Aubree is the Denver site coordinator for
the Bureau of Justice Assistance Smart Pretrial Demonstration Initiative. Welcome, Aubree.

AUBREE
COTE: Hi, thank you.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You just participated in a panel that was very interesting.
For the benefit of our listeners at home, can you tell us what that panel was about and what you specifically were
talking about there?

COTE: Sure. The panel was around pretrial practices, and I was able to talk
about the Smart Pretrial, which is a demonstration initiative that Denver is participating in as one of three sites.
The other two sites are the state of Delaware and Yakima County, which is in Washington State. The Smart Pretrial
is a program that is allowing all three of those jurisdictions to look at front end processes within their criminal
justice systems. The work is divided in three different phases. Phase one of the grant is around planning, which
has really been about system analysis and looking at system processes, system mapping, gaps within our pretrial system,
and evaluating that so that we can, in phase two, implement some opportunities we may have to make improvements in
that system. The third phase, which would be the third year of the program, is sustainability. That’s where
hopefully the successful practices we put in place in phase two, we can sustain as well as working as a site for
other jurisdictions who may be looking at pretrial reform.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Speaking of Denver
and pretrial practices, what is the Smart Pretrial grant attempting to address?

COTE: Denver is
very fortunate in that we have a pretrial services program that has been around for a very long time. We started
doing some pretty significant pretrial reform work about 7 years ago in Denver. Some of that was around the implementation
of risk assessment. Colorado uses a risk assessment specific to a Colorado population. Denver implemented that in
2012. Additionally, in 2013, the bail statute in Colorado was essentially rewritten, which really changed how bail
was set. Smart Pretrial has really helped us to focus in on some of the changes that we’ve already made, and,
as a system, really look at what other opportunities that we have now that we know more about some of the changes
that were made a few years ago.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can we break down what pretrial practices are?

COTE: Pretrial… The system itself is really the time where a defendant, between the time of arrest all
the way until disposition in a case. What we’ve found is that many defendants are in custody during that period,
and oftentimes are in custody held on a financial bail. If they’re not able to post that, they remain in custody
until disposition. Pretrial reform really looks at using risk assessment to determine whether those defendants should
be released or detained. Generally, most defendants are low-risk and can be released. Supervision practices can be
used for moderate risk-level defendants who, with some case management, specifically around appearance and not committing
new crimes, can be successful during that pretrial period.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Why is pretrial reform
so urgent today?

COTE: I think it’s interesting that there has been a concentration on looking
at the front end of the system that, 10 years ago, you didn’t hear much about. Most of nationally, jail populations,
or around 60% of the jail populations, are pretrial defendants. Obviously, that’s having a huge impact on those
that are in custody and haven’t even been found guilty and are not serving a sentence. A second piece to that
is that, historically, bail has been around financial means. I think in looking at jail, we’re seeing that,
oftentimes, defendants are buying their way out of custody, leaving poorer defendants to remain in custody.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about some specific pretrial practices that help to reduce incarceration?

COTE: Yes. I would definitely go back to risk assessment. I think that has been very important in Denver,
and nationally also. I think changing the culture where judges and court personnel are making decisions based on
either detention or release, instead of a financial amount that they think may or may not ensure that the defendant
returns. Risk assessment has really helped us change how we look at a defendant that is arrested, and also the need
to be arrested. Is it necessary for a defendant to go into the jail, or can we somehow look at risk on the front
end and determine that they don’t even need to take up a jail bed day. We know the research is telling us that
defendants who are in custody even for 2 or 3 days can be very negatively impacted by that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
In Denver, what are some of the key causes of incarceration?

COTE: Denver is an interesting jurisdiction
because we are a city and a county. There are multiple layers within our system. We have municipal cases, which are
very low level ordinance nuisance type crimes, and then we have misdemeanors and we have felonies. Because of that,
we have a jail that has a variety of populations. What we’ve found is that, when we apply risk, it doesn’t
always correlate to charge type. In the past, felonies obviously would have higher financial bonds. We can’t
now assume that, just because they have a felony, that they’re higher or lower risk. That risk assessment has
really allowed us to look through a different lens to see who should be in our jail. Ideally, we would have a jail
that is high-risk defendants, and all of our low-risk, which would be most of them, are released, and the medium-risk
population is released with some type of pretrial supervision.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Are there any
strategies that you can share with us regarding implementing successful alternatives to pretrial detention without
compromising public safety?

COTE: I think that making decisions around supervision based on risk.
One of the things that we’re looking at in Denver is our pretrial supervision. We have several levels of pretrial
supervision. Our outcomes are very positive for defendants who are on that supervision. One of the things that we’d
really like to look more deeply into is specifically what type of supervision works well for different risk levels
of defendants. Right now, the research in the field doesn’t get very specific about what we know works with
certain levels of defendants. One of the things that we want to look at in Denver is really specifically what part
of our supervision is working well and for which defendants.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I wanted to return
to your panel for a moment. Given a variety of stakeholders involved coming from different parts of the country,
I imagine it generated some interesting conversations and insights.

COTE: One of the benefits
of forums like this, where different jurisdictions are able to sit down and talk, is it’s always so interesting
that we all work in very different systems. However, there was definitely a conversation within that panel that there
is a large pretrial jail population, and what different jurisdictions can do. It’s interesting. The judge on
our panel from New York statutorily has different limitations than we may have in Colorado. Yet, they are instituting
a program around pretrial release. That’s very similar to what we’re doing in Colorado and is being done
in other states. I think that part is always very beneficial.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Thanks so much
for talking to me. That was an instructive conversation. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I have been talking to
Aubree Cote at Reinvesting In Justice. To listen to more New Thinking Podcasts, or to learn more about our work,
you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

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At Reinvesting
in Justice, David Slayton, executive director of the Texas Office of Court Administration, talks
about using data to implement procedural justice and address racial disparities in the justice system.

The following is
a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, this is
Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and you’re listening to the New Thinking Podcast. Today I’m at the Dallas City Hall
with David Slayton, who is the administrative director of the Texas Office of Court Administration in Austin. We’re
both here at Reinvesting in Justice, a conference that brings together a wide range of criminal justice practitioners
to discuss challenges and highlight innovative work being done in the field of criminal justice across the state
of Texas and elsewhere. David is speaking on a panel about procedural justice in a little while here. Specifically,
how procedural justice intersects with thinking about racial disparity in the justice system. David, welcome to the
New Thinking Podcast.

DAVID SLAYTON: It’s great to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Today’s big subject is “Reinvesting in Justice.” From
where you sit, what does reinvesting in justice even look like, and why is it so important right now.

SLAYTON: Right now, we face really challenging times, and making sure that the dollars and
the efforts that we put into criminal justice are being effective at what we want them to do. The outcomes are important.
It’s not just about inputs and outputs anymore, whereas maybe in the past that was a huge focus, how many cases can
we get done, or how many are we having filed. Focusing on, are we actually making an impact with the efforts that
we’re putting in? I think that’s an exciting thing to be able to focus on as we do our work.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the benefit of those who are not here today, can you summarize
what your panel is going to be about, and what you specifically will be talking about?

SLAYTON:
We have the Dallas City Police Chief on the panel, which will be really interesting to hear his perspective on law
enforcement’s interaction with the public. We’re going to have the deputy director of the Texas Indigent
Defense Commission, whose focus is upon court-appointed counsel, and of course, making sure that there’s a feeling
of fairness in that system. I’m particularly focusing on procedural fairness, and the work that we’re doing
in the state to try to make sure that people, not only are being treated fairly, but that they feel that they’re
being treated fairly in the court system. Obviously, that feeling is as important as the reality.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about procedural fairness?

SLAYTON:
Sure. One of the key things with procedural fairness is we want to make sure that when people enter the court system,
that they know what to do and that they understand what’s going on. The court system has been around for centuries
and it’s built for attorneys who are very learned in the system and understand exactly how it works, it’s built for
judges. Sometimes the language that’s used and the procedures that’s used in the courts are not as easily
understandable to the public and sometimes that leads to confusion, leads to a feeling of unfairness. So, making
sure that people not only are treated fairly, but that they understand what’s going on, that they are able to
understand those procedures and the forms and the languages that’s going on is really important. Then, obviously,
at the end of the day, making sure that people are, indeed, treated fairly based upon the situation in their case,
and that outcomes are similar for all different groups, no matter what their background is.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
There is a lot of discussion across the spectrum about racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and outside
of it. Can you talk about how maybe procedural fairness actually addresses that, or can possibly address that?

SLAYTON: Yeah. I think one of the real key things that’s important … I’m
going to be talking about this on my panel today … is the need for us to really take hard look at that with data.
There are different communities that are involved in our criminal justice system who are over-represented. We know
that for a fact, we see it. Oftentimes, I’m not sure that we have, in the past, been willing to take a hard
look at the data to see–what are those degrees of over-representation?

What
I see happening today, at least in the judiciary in Texas, is, really, a willingness to really peel back the layers
and see: what does the data show, as far as the effect on different groups, and the disparities that are there? And
what can we do about it? Whether it be in the child protective system, child welfare system, we’ve been looking
at that, the truancy system, the children involved in the juvenile justice system, all the way up to the criminal
justice system. I think it’s really important for us to take a look at that. And making sure that people are being
treated from the beginning of their involvement in this system, all the way to the end is important. I think procedural
fairness plays a big part in that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What is the data telling
us?

SLAYTON: I think the data is revealing what we know, which we know anecdotally,
there is indeed over-representation of certain groups. I look, in particular, to a study that was done a few years
ago, that has had tremendous impact in our state, which was a report called “Breaking Schools Rules.” It
was done by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Policy Research Institute from Texas A&M.
It looked at about a million kids in our school system in the state, and what their involvement was in the school
ticketing for minor offences.

What the report found is that, number one, there
was over-representation of minorities, but even disparity in the treatment of those minorities for similar offences.
With all other factors equalized, the educational background of the parents, to the income, to school district, to
even school campus level; if we equalized all those things, the factor that still showed as a differentiation in
the way they were treated was race. Besides race, we also saw an issue with individuals who had disabilities being
overrepresented and the treatment being different. What that led to was really a real focus, and a real effort to
try to reform and put in place reforms that would address that. It’s a really excting thing to be able to see the
data show that, and then to take action based upon that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Are there specific practices of procedural fairness that can actually address some of these disparities that we are
talking about?

SLAYTON: You know, one of the things that’s really important
is the training that we have been in … I want to talk about this today too … is the training that we have been
doing with judges on implicit bias. We know it exists. We know, as humans, we have our biases. I think it’s sort
of like the step one of AA, admitting we have a problem is sometimes the number one. I think, a lot of times, just
for judges and court staff and prosecutors and defense attorneys to realize that they have implicit bias is an important
factor. Then, controlling that with tools, to make sure they can overcome those natural biases that exist. I think
that’s number one, the training behind that is really important.

Then
number two, really trying to overcome that by making sure that we have things like community courts and drug courts.
Making sure that the people who are on the bench and in the courtroom look and act like we do, that speak the same
language as we do. All those types of things, I think, are really important to making sure that people really do
feel that the system is fair and that they are not going against someone who is very different than them, speaks
a different language from them, and therefore, they don’t feel they are getting treated as fairly as they should.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Are there any interesting initiatives in the state of Texas that you
can talk about?

SLAYTON: One of the things that I am going to talk about today,
when I was court administrator in Lubbock County, which is a medium-sized county in west Texas … The judges there
really felt like it was important to ask the people who were coming before them, how they felt about the job the
judges were doing. In fact they labeled it “Judge the Judges.” So, everyone who went before the judges
was asked to answer a survey about their interactions with the judges that day.

Some
of the questions that they asked were, first of all, “Was finding the courthouse easy? Did I have forms that
I needed? Did I feel safe? Was I able to do my business in a reasonable amount of time?” and “Were the
hours that the court was open, did that make it easy to conduct my business?” Because oftentimes that can be
an issue. Then it went a step further, and for those individuals who actually appeared before a judge, it asked them
the following questions. They were asked to grade on these statements:  “The judge listened to my side
of the story before the decision was made”; “The judge had information necessary to make a good decision”; “I was
treated as everyone else”: and “As I leave I know what to do next.”

 What
we did was, we asked everyone who was leaving the courthouse that had been before the judge, “How do you feel
about this?” And we got some really great feedback. We asked information on the survey about demographics, and
what type of case it was, and which court level they went before. We really started to get some information that
allowed to drill down into the feelings of different individuals who were coming before the courts. It gave the judges
valuable feedback as to how they could address the issues that might be a concern for the public. So, that’s
one example. We’ve seen some other courts in the state also replicate that survey. I think that it’s really
just helping us to use that information to make positive changes within the court system.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When it comes to procedural fairness there are sometimes skeptics who
suggest that perceptions of fairness have very little to do with actually adjudicating, and also take up a lot of
time that judges and others don’t necessarily have. Are there ways you address the skepticism?

SLAYTON: You know, I am going to say this today, and I think, in this day and age, it’s really
true that the public sees the court system through the lens of the entire criminal justice system. So, if you have
police brutality, or you have a wrongful conviction, or you have an issue in the defense side or the prosecution
side, it’s all the court system, in people’s eyes. So, I think you have to think about this with our partners and
the criminal justice system, as a system-wide issue that we have to address. And if we don’t do that I’m
not sure we really make a real difference. I think that’s the key, is really looking at that from the system-wide
perspective and then making changes based upon that.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
are some of the most urgent challenges facing procedural justice, particularly as it pertains to dealing with some
of the racial disparities that we are seeing across various platforms and institutions in the country right now?

SLAYTON: I’m gonna talk about this today. One of the real issues that I see is
the whole issue of community engagement. I’ve been talking at the state level with the chief justice and others
about the need for us to really do a better job of engaging with the community. In the past when we looked at judges
doing community engagement, it’s been going to the Rotary or going to the bar assar association and speaking. I’m
not sure that’s exactly that type of community engagement that is most beneficial, and we need to figure out
a way to get into different communities across our state and our local communities and have discussions about, how
do you feel about the court system? What do you think the challenges are? How can we better connect? I think that
is one of the biggest things.

The second thing, in my mind, that we can do
better is to be more transparent. We are doing our best to be transparent, but there is even more we can do. For
instance, we have limitations in our data. If someone asks me for racial disparity data, I have limitations in what
I can say. So, we are doing some work at the state level to try to get more data, that is more granular that we can
begin to really take a look and study these issues a little bit better.

Then,
the last thing I would say, is really opening up our records from a perspective so that anybody can see what is going
on. You mentioned earlier, “Is this a real issue, is this a perception issue.” It doesn’t really matter
at the end of the day. Perception is reality. So, I think making sure that people can actually validate or not, their
assumption, is really important, and so, that transparency, I think, is really key.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Great. David, thanks so much!

SLAYTON: Thank you for having me today.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal and I’ve been talking to David Slayton
at Reinvesting in Justice about racial disparity and the need for procedural fairness. To listen to more New Thinking
podcasts, or to learn more about our work, you can visit our website atwww.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks so much for listening.

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At Reinvesting
in Justice, Michael Young, chief public defender of Bexar County in Texas, talks about innovative
programs to assist defendants with mental health challenges.

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello
and welcome to the New Thinking podcast. This is Avni Majithia-Sejpal and I’m here in Dallas talking to Michael
Young at the Reinvesting in Justice conference. Michael is the Chief Public Defender for Bexar County in Texas. Welcome
Michael.

MICHAEL YOUNG: Good afternoon
Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk about your
panel today which just concluded and particularly your own contribution to it?

YOUNG: This
afternoon we participated in a panel for dealing with persons in the criminal justice system who have a co-occurring
disorder. A co-occurring disorder means you’re charged with a crime, but at the same time you’re going
through the criminal justice system, you’re suffering from a mental illness or an addiction or some other condition
attendant to that criminal justice situation. Basically, the gist of the panel was myself, also Stephen Bush from
Shelby, Tennessee, Shelby County, Tennessee, and Judge Marcia Hirsch out of New York. Each of them deal with the
mentally ill in the criminal justice system through different programs.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
are some of the various challenges facing practitioners who are working with defendants who have co-occurring conditions?

YOUNG: There are a lot of different considerations
you have to think about. Obviously, if you’re dealing with someone who has a mental illness as a criminal defense
attorney, one of your first considerations is: is this person competent to proceed? Do they understand the proceedings
against them? Sometimes that’s a fine line when you have someone who’s suffering from a mental illness.
Now, obviously, if you do have a mental illness, that doesn’t mean per se that you’re incompetent, but
it’s certainly one thing that you have to be looking at. Another thing is I think you need to be prepared for
a great deal of client contact because a lot of representing those who are mentally ill is developing trust. You
will probably spend 10, 15 times the amount of time dealing with a client who has a mental illness over one who doesn’t
because there are so many issues of trust, of explaining the process to them. It’s very time intensive.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I understand that you work specifically
with indigent defendants dealing with mental illness. Is that correct?

YOUNG: Yes. We have a mental illness defense team. They’re
attorneys who represent persons who have a mental illness but are also charged with an offense. We’re also working
at the jail during the initial booking process to represent those persons who have come into the criminal justice
system but have a mental illness.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you tell us more about the program itself?

YOUNG:
It’s the first of its kind in the state of Texas. Right now, you are entitled to an attorney if you’re
indigent, if you cannot afford to pay for one. The difference is: when do you get to see that attorney? It may be
several days after your arrest before you actually are able to visit with your attorney. The program that we’ve
initiated, we actually have public defenders at the jail, so immediately when you walk in the jail, if you’re
identified as a person with mental illness, that public defender is your attorney from that moment forward. We determine
if you have a mental illness through several different mechanisms. Law enforcement will talk to them and ask them
questions about their mental health background. There’s also an ability to do what’s called a CCQ which
is a Continuity of Care Query. There’s a database for people who’ve ever had a mental illness that’s
maintained, and if we find that they have already a diagnosis for mental illness, we’ll begin representing them
right then.

That’s especially critical because these people are already
in crisis. They’ve just been arrested. They’re going to see a judge. We want to make sure they don’t
say anything that’s going to damage their case, and the primary focus of what we’re trying to do is find
some type of community based treatment to send them to in lieu of them being booked into jail. It could be a homeless
shelter if that’s their primary problem. It could be drug treatment if that’s a problem. It could be counseling.
Basically, we try to connect that person with treatment in the community, and then we present it to the judge that,
“Judge, if you give this person a bond, they are not going to go to jail, but they’re
going to comply with this treatment that we’ve setup for them.”

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
You mentioned it’s the first such program in Texas. How long has it been up?

YOUNG:
The program was actually supported by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. That’s the entity in Texas that
was created as part of the Fair Defense Act which oversees indigent defense. They fund indigent defense through either
discretionary spending or through grants if we have an innovative program, so we presented this as a grant proposal.
It was funded effective October 1, so we’re very new into the program.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Wow. Was there a history there? Were you finding that in Bexar County there was a need specifically to work with
defendants who are dealing with mental health issues?

YOUNG:
That’s a great question Avni. The Council of State Governments is really a national organization that’s
focused on criminal justice reform. They did a study for Bexar County from April 2014 through February 2015. During
that time period, there were 55,000 people who were booked into Bexar County Jail. They were able to determine that
approximately 11,656 of those persons had a mental disorder attendant to their arrest, so that’s a large population
that was not being diverted from the jail even though the county had setup programs, and there were a lot of community
based programs available. During the time period of the study, only 125 of the approximately 11,000 were diverted
from the jail. The goal of the program, obviously, is to increase the number of people we divert from the jail to
these community based treatment.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Right. I know it’s early, but have you been seeing any preliminary results?

YOUNG:
Everything in criminal justice right now is being driven by evidence based methods. In other words, data collection
is critical to whatever we’re doing, so we are collecting data to prove the viability of this program. Obviously,
anecdotally we have a lot of stories.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I’d love to hear some.

YOUNG: We have one
young lady who came in, and when the judge evaluates someone for bond, generally, they only look at the criminal
history and the current charge. The judge basically told us before we presented the case, “This person’s
not a candidate. I’m not going to give them a PR bond” even though she was suffering from a major depressive
disorder. Upon evaluation, we found out that the reason she had this depressive disorder is because she had been
diagnosed with terminal cancer, only four months to live. After verifying that with her oncologist, presenting that
to the judge, obviously, the judge changed their mind, and I think that was a great victory. This lady only had four
months to live, and she was probably going to spend several months of those in jail if we hadn’t of gotten her
out.

Also, people actually come to court. That’s what we’ve been
noticing. Before, if people got out on a commercial bond with no treatment, we had a big problem with them failing
to appear. At least in the last 30 days, we’re seeing people show up. We’re seeing them complying with
coming to court, and I think that has a lot to do with the arrestee feeling like they have an advocate. They have
somebody who’s working for them, somebody that’s believing in them. Because a lot of the times what has
happened, people at this point in their life have strained most of their relationships, and nobody really believes
that they’re going to do what they say anymore. Our public defenders work hard to build a relationship with
them there at the jail and say, “Now come on. You’re going to come to court. You’re going to go do
this treatment.” I just think that connection really impacts them actually, ultimately showing up for court.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Speaking of community, do you find that
linking defendants with community services has an impact on recidivism rates?

YOUNG:
We are going to be looking at that. We believe that if we treat the co-occurring disorder, if we get them into some
kind of community based treatment facility, that it is going to have a great impact on recidivism. Again, anecdotally
it’s easy to see. We’ve had a young man who is a serial criminal trespasser. He routinely trespasses at
a bus stop, and every time he gets picked up, he spends 20 days in jail, and then he’s released credit for time
served. He spend 20 days in jail, and the reason he’s doing this is he’s homeless, so the last time he
got arrested, we were able to connect him with Haven for Hope which is a local homeless shelter. The idea being he’s
not going to be coming back through the system because we’ve addressed the base cause of his repeated criminal
trespassing.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Right. Based on
your panel and the other conversations happening here today, it sounds like there are a lot of new and fairly innovative
programs dealing with mental health in the state of Texas or just nationally.

YOUNG:
Certainly in Texas, we’re not unique. We being Bexar County in that we are trying to use provisions of the Code
of Criminal Procedures, specifically 17.032, to get these mental health bonds. What’s unique about our program
is when we’re doing it. We’re doing it when they first walk in the jail, but Collin County in McKinney,
Texas very near here in Dallas, they have a similar program where they’re trying to connect the defender with
the arrestee as quickly as possible to get them out into treatment. I think there’s a lot of different counties
in Texas that are looking at it. Houston, Harris County is doing something similar, but nationally, Stephen Bush,
talking about the Jericho Project, a great project out of Tennessee where they’ve been working with getting
people into treatment instead of a conviction or keeping them in a criminal justice system.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What do you think are the most urgent needs for supporting defendants with co-occurring conditions?

YOUNG: That’s an excellent question. A lot of our problem
right now is, again, the misperception of the public that these are inherently violent people because they have a
mental illness. Obviously, that is not the case, but we need to ensure that the public understands that what we are
doing is actually going to maximize their protections. For example, if someone commits a crime and they’re given
a commercial bond, if they can somehow pull together $200 or $500, they’re going to get out, and they’re
not going to be seen by the system for several months until they actually come to court. Under what we’re proposing,
the person who’s going to get out, it’s not going to cost them anything, but they’re going to be required
to go to weekly treatment, report to pretrial officer once a week, and if they step out of line, either don’t
go to treatment or don’t report, that’s going to immediately be reported back to the judge. It’s actually
a program that’s going to maximize public safety.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Thank you so much for talking to me. It was a really instructive conversation. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal and
I have been talking to Michael Young at Reinvesting in Justice. To listen to more New Thinking podcasts or to learn
more about our work, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

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In this podcast recorded at the Courts,
Community Engagement, and Innovative Practices in a Changing Landscape symposium held
in Anaheim in December 2015, Alameda County Chief Public Defender Brendon Woods discusses diversion and
the importance of giving low-level offenders the opportunity to avoid a criminal record.

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. This podcast is part of a series of dispatches
from the court’s Community Engagement and Innovative Practices In a Changing Landscape symposium, held in Anaheim
in December 2015. The conference focused on justice reforms, including recent developments in California, Public
Safety Realignment, and Proposition 47.

Public Safety
Realignment refers to changes brought about by 2011 legislation that shifted responsibility for certain populations
of offenders from the state to the county level. Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed by referendum in 2014,
reclassified certain low-level felonies as misdemeanors. I hope you enjoy listening.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman with
the Center for Court Innovation. I’m sitting here with Brendon Woods, Chief Public Defender for Alameda County.
Brendon, thank you for speaking with me today.

BRENDON
WOODS: Sure. Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Can you talk a little bit about how your office works with the DA’s office?

WOODS:
Yeah, I guess it depends on what we’re talking about with regards to working together. We collaborate on many
issues. Probably our biggest one is our Clean Slate Program, where we collaborate together with regards to getting
our clients’ cases reduced to misdemeanors, or getting them dismissed completely off their record.

Another one of our big collaborations was, about a year and a half ago,
two years ago, we started our Veterans Treatment Court. That took a real collaborative effort between the DA, public
defense, and probation, sheriff’s office, and the courts.That’s really a great program we started.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do you balance those partnerships with the need to obviously represent the interests of your clients?

WOODS: I think always at the forefront and
at the very beginning is a zealous advocacy that never goes away, and that’s always the case. Where we collaborate
is where we can see there will be a benefit for our clients, but a lot of that collaboration takes place every day,
takes place during pre-trial conferences, takes place with regards to resolving cases.

Once we get past that, and we know we’re going to be litigating a case and
trial, it’s all about advocacy. Even with the collaboration it’s all about advocacy. We’re always
putting our clients first.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do you talk to your clients about opportunities for diversion?

WOODS:
I think that’s great. Any time we have a client where they can hopefully avoid having a criminal conviction
on their record by completing a program, or doing some some sort of diversion, we completely advocate for that, because
once you get that conviction on your record it turns into this horrible cycle. Once you get that conviction with
probation, it turns into a horrible cycle, so if we can get our client some sort of diversion or treatment program,
and they avoid having a felony record, it’s critical.        

At least in Alameda County, probation is in some ways, I don’t like
to call it this, but a real set up, because once you go down that path, once you’re on probation, you don’t
have the same rights you do as if you weren’t. You have the search clauses. You don’t have the right to
a trial when you violate. It’s just such a terrible downfall, so we really try to avoid that if we can, especially
with a diversion opportunity.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Are there situations where there are options for maybe a low-level diversion as opposed to a few days in jail, where
you might be concerned that the diversion opportunity is going to maybe be more onerous than the alternative, or
that the alternative might be just that they’re going to just let your client off entirely?  

WOODS: No, there aren’t many diversion
programs where I would say I’m concerned about that, but if there’s a diversion program and they’re
talking about some sort of considerable amount of jail time if my client fails a diversion program then I’m
not going to agree to that. That’s a problem. We’ve got to stop going towards that model where if a client
does not complete this program they will be hammered. Hammers don’t work, especially now in the criminal justice
system. They just don’t work.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Do you think a lot of that comes from public fear?

WOODS:
It’s public fear, and it’s the old school way of thinking, and we’ve got to stop thinking that way.
It’s all about rehabilitation and incentives, as opposed to hammers.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Where do public defenders fit into this national conversation about justice reform?

WOODS: I think it’s incumbent upon us as public
defenders to direct and drive the conversation, because we’re the ones who are advocating and representing our
clients. We should be the loudest voice at the table.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Have you seen particular changes after Prop 47 in California? How has it changed the way your office works, and the
kinds of outcomes you’re seeing for your clients?

WOODS:
Primarily with my office, we do a lot of focus on Prop 47 with regards to the record remedies, and getting our clients
into court, getting their cases reduced to misdemeanors, and getting them dismissed. That’s the biggest spoke
that we focus on right now. A lot of people talk about Prop 47, and it’s going to add to the increasing crime,
or putting all these dangerous criminals out, and that’s just not the case.

That’s
not the case at all. I haven’t seen any evidence of that. We’re talking about low-level offenders who have
drug possession being treated as misdemeanors, and then low-level theft offenses. That population should never have
seen a prison in the first place.   

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Brendon D. Woods,
Chief Public Defender for Alameda County. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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