At Reinvesting in
Justice, Dr. Bryon Adinoff, Distinguished Professor of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Research
at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Director of Research in Mental
Health at the VA North Texas Health Care System, talks about the latest research on addiction and pharmacological
or medication-assisted treatment, as well as how they can impact the criminal justice system.

The following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, and welcome to the New Thinking Podcast. This
is MAJITHIA-SEJPALejpal. Today, we are at Reinvesting in Justice at the Dallas City Hall,l where I’m in conversation
with Dr. Bryon Adinoff, the Distinguished Professor of Drug and Alcohol Abuse at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center and the director of research in mental health at the V.A. North Texas Healthcare System.

Dr. Adinoff, thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

BRYON ADINOFF: Good to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
You just gave a very interesting talk about the neuroscience of addiction. For the benefit of our listeners at home,
can you walk us through the highlights?

ADINOFF:The
key thing about the neuroscience of addiction, it is a brain disease. It’s a chronic medical illness just like
other medical illnesses whether it’s cardiovascular disease or pulmonary disease or epilepsy or schizophrenia
or bipolar disease. There are many similar characteristics in that it’s due to both specific genes that put
you at risk, environments that put you at risk and in the case of substances of course, the use of substances often
for a long time that develop the brain disease.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
More and more it seems that prosecutors and courts are seeking to link defendants with substance abuse issues to
treatment programs. What is the latest research telling us? What do we know now about the addicted brain?

ADINOFF: It appears that what happens over time in the addicted brain is
that the whole even though the drugs may be hitting particular parts of the brain involved in pleasure and reward,
the whole brain becomes hijacked by this reward system. So that all of the parts of the brain particularly the prefrontal
cortex that’s involved in who we are, the way we plan things, the way we think about things. This part of the
brain is hijacked by the reward system. We see many differences in people with addiction in their brain. We can certainly
tell that, for instance, the brain is far more reactive to certain cues that remind them about using. That there’s
memories of use of things that they associate with using, whether it’s a bottle of beer or a cocaine pipe or
joint that become hardwired into the brain of people with addiction. It can be very difficult to put these memories
away or make them quiet.

We found networks that work
in the brain. All of our brains, we have networks of brain regions that talk to one another and that there’s
impairments, for instance, in these networks in the addicted brain. For instance the brain areas just at rest called
the default mode network. These brain regions are active when we’re not doing anything, we’re just lying
there thinking. This activity in people with addiction in this default mode network appear to be hyperactive. Maybe
there’s a loop of craving that they’re not even aware of that is hyper-activated in addicts. Maybe they’re
scanning the environment without even thinking about it for addiction-related cues.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You mentioned in your talk pharmacological treatment? One buzzword
seems to be medication-assisted treatment. Are those two the same things?

ADINOFF:
They are the same thing. I prefer not to use the term medication-assisted. We do not talk about insulin being medication-assisted
treatment for diabetes even though the diabetic in addition to taking insulin needs to be watching their diet and
exercise and also some other things, losing weight but they’re all essential parts of treatment. Schizophrenia
we don’t talk about medication-assisted treatment when they’re taking anti-psychotic. I think in the same
way, for addiction disorders, we have medications that’s very useful. We have talk therapies that are very useful.
We have 12-step support groups that are very useful. They’re all important treatments or interventions.

It can be very successfully used in the treatment of addiction. The pharmacologic
approaches are medications that are helpful for the treatment of addiction.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you expand on pharmacological treatments?

ADINOFF:
There are many different good medications now for addictive disorders. For opiate disorders when opiates are drugs
like heroin or Percocet or codeine, Oxycontin, Vicodin. These substances all hit opiate receptors in the brain. There’s
two major pharmacologic approaches. One is to use what’s called an opiate agonist, where it replaces the effects
of these other drugs on the brain. So instead of taking heroin in you would take methadone or suboxone or buprenorphine.
What these medications do, they’re also opiates and they hit the opiate receptor in the same way, that say,
heroin might that replaces it, so the brain is no longer crying out demanding that it gets heroin. It’s been
satisfied or satiated with this other opiate agonist like suboxone or methadone.

Even
though they’re opiates and if you stop them suddenly you’d have withdrawal symptoms. They’re legal.
They take them once a day and they last for the full day and they take them by mouth so they can actually go on and
function with regular life so they don’t get in trouble with the law. They’re not using needles. There’s
doctors I know who are on suboxone. There’s a wide range of people that do very well on these medications.

Another approach is blocking the opiate receptors and there’s a shot
called Vivitrol and it has a drug in it called naltrexone that blocks these receptors for a month. Once you get that
shot you no longer can use. If you use, say heroin, you won’t get high. You’re throwing your money down
the drain and it’s all that work to get the heroin for nothing. What that month does, it seems to get people
the opportunity then to do their treatments so they have a whole month ahead of them for that treatment to kick in,
and then they just have to make a commitment once a month to get that shot.

For
alcohol, we have several other medications that hit different brain receptors or brain neurons that people that take
these medications do better than people that take a placebo or don’t take a medication at all.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You would say that these are effective?

ADINOFF: They are. There’s substantial literature on these medications.
They’re not cure-alls. They’re not magic pills. We certainly always recommend that somebody taking these
medications get their other therapy as well, but they do help.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
As someone who has done such extensive research on the subject, how do you address skepticism of pharmacological
treatment that suggests that it merely replaces one drug for another?

ADINOFF:
Well, in the case of the opiate agonist I mentioned like methadone and buprenorphine, they’re opiate replacement
therapy. They do in fact replace one drug with another. The difference is you’re not getting high and that all
the symptoms of addiction, the craving, the lost control, the consequences of use, the compulsive use, all those
things if you take it every day as prescribed, they go away. So you don’t have all the symptoms that make up
an addiction. They work. I understand the philosophy of not wanting to replace one drug with another but in this
position my goal is to help people get better. Other medications like I mentioned, the Vivitrol, are just medications.
They don’t replace the drug in the sense that we usually think about it. All other diseases that we think of,
we use medications. It’s not all we use but most diseases they’re physiologic illnesses and we use medications
with great success. Addictions are just another disease. They’re chronic. They’re marked by relapse. Again,
just like all other chronic diseases, so it makes sense. Again, the biggest thing is people do better on them–and
that’s the ultimate goal.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: There
was an interesting question that came up from an audience member in your talk about affordability and I was wondering
whether you could talk about that a little bit. How accessible is pharmacological treatment to the average person?

ADINOFF: It’s a great question and it certainly one concern in the
addiction field as well as all other fields, whether it’s chemotherapy or medication for schizophrenia or depression.
The newer drugs are always way more expensive. The methadone is very inexpensive. It can be a pain to get. You have
to go to special clinics but that’s been around a long time and it’s not expensive. Vivitrol is a shot
and it is expensive. My understanding is the company that makes Vivitrol has actually given grants or given a lot
of free Vivitrol to people that are in court systems. There’s ways around it. For alcohol dependence, many of
the medications are really old medications and are not that expensive.

When
you consider how much an addiction, even if you’re drinking, it really adds up very quickly and people put that
money into getting the medication and other treatment–they probably come way out ahead in the long run.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: How can some of the research that you’ve been doing
and citing inform and change the way the criminal justice system adjudicates addiction?

ADINOFF: I don’t know that it can change it because I think the reasons for
the drug laws that we presently have are political, social, cultural decisions that people have made and the government
has made. Many of our laws for better or worse are not necessarily based on the science and it can take a long time
for laws on the books to respond to the science. As a emotional issue, even though I believe, and I think many people
now believe, addiction is a brain disease. There’s something about people seemingly voluntarily taking drugs
that is hard for us to really think of as a brain disease. I think that’s changing is more and more people come
out and say, “You know I’ve been addicted.” I think gradually we’re changing but it’s very
slow and not only in the community but in the field of medicine. Doctors are sometimes extremely slow to prescribe
these medications that we were talking about.

It
will take a while. As I mentioned in my talk in DSM IV–DSM is our psychiatric bible–legal problems was one of the
ways we use to diagnose a substance disorder order, an addiction. And that was taken out for DSM V because they found
being arrested for a substance use justice disorder had more to do with your race and your economic standing and
your social standing than it did whether you were using or not. It really wasn’t very good at helping you diagnose–it
wouldn’t good at all at helping you diagnose somebody with addiction or not. The laws that we’ve been using
have not been effective in treating people with addiction or in decreasing the amount of use. We’ve certainly spent
a lot of money on this country on the drug war. Again, it was understandable because these drugs can cause a great
deal of harm to people and societies, but they haven’t been effective. So this conference, it’s been great in
trying to look at better ways to approach these problems other than incarcerating people.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That brings us to the end of our conversation. Dr. Adinoff,
thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

ADINOFF:
It’s been my pleasure.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m
MAJITHIA-SEJPALejpal and you’ve been listening to Dr. Bryon Adinoff about the latest research in the neuroscience
of addiction and what it means for prosecuting drug crimes. 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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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 Cabarrus Students Taking
a Right Stand (STARS), a school-based male youth leadership program based in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, that
seeks to create a healthy, positive school community through mentorship and positive role modeling.

Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS,
and Sue Yates, chief financial officer for the Cabarrus Health Alliance, joined this week’s podcast to discuss Cabarrus
STARS’ evidence-based curriculum and program results, and why STARS believes strong male role models are critical
for program participants.

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 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 U.S. 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
this week’s podcasts, we’re looking at Cabarrus Students Taking a Right Stand or STARS in Cabarrus County,
North Carolina. STARS is a school-based youth leadership program for males aimed at creating a healthy, positive
school community through mentorship and positive role modeling. Key activities for this initiative include youth
development, academic enrichment activities, service learning, tutoring, case management, and in-home parent resources.
Through Cabarrus STARS’ partnership with local law enforcement, the police department’s student resource officers
serve as mentors and assist with youth programming.

We’re
focusing this podcast on the specialized curriculum Cabarrus STARS uses with its youth, as well as the program’s
use of a range of evidence-based tools.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation. In today’s podcast we’re looking at
the Cabarrus STARS, or Students Taking a Right Stand, program in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. Joining us today
are Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS, and Sue Yates, chief financial officer for
the Cabarrus Health Alliance. Katie, Rolanda, and Sue, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

ALL: Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
It’s great to have you here. To start out, can you describe how Cabarrus STARS works?

KATIE DIGHT: This is Katie Dight. We are a three-tiered program. We have
tier one, which is systems level training and change within the schools. Tier two, which is our positive youth development
piece of it where we have a group-level intervention. Then tier three, where we have intensive individual services
both for the students, and then a parental engagement piece.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
The program partners with four schools. Can you talk me through those partnerships a bit? I know you focus on school
climate and bullying as part of that.

PATRICK: Yes,
sir. In regards to the four schools that we currently work with, two are located in Kannapolis City, so we actually
work with two different school systems. The first being Kannapolis City and the second being Cabarrus County Schools.
The schools in general are Kannapolis Middle School and A.L. Brown High School, both in Kannapolis, and Concord High
School and Concord Middle School in Cabarrus County. We’re able to work with a minimum of 15 students, 15 to
17 students, at each school for 15 weeks. We begin in September, our first session will end in January. Our second
semester will begin in January and end in May. During that time, we’re able to implement an evidence-based curriculum
called Too Good for Violence at the middle school level and Too Good for Drugs and Violence on the high school level.
At every school, we’re able to work with them for 15 weeks, a minimum of two hours.

Our other partners include our local law enforcement agencies, so that would be
Kannapolis City Police Department, as well as the Cabarrus County Police Department. We also have partnerships with
the Youth Educational Services Society in Charlotte. They actually serve as our facilitators for our program. We
also have a facilitator that comes from the Boys and Girls Club.

DIGHT:
In addition to that, each of the four schools also receives case management services. I’m sorry, this is Katie
Dight. They are given to about eight students per year at each of the four sites. Those students are selected from
our group and they might receive something like an interactive journaling program, some of them get a mentor. We
try to team them up with mentors who are either connected to their school or local public servants, either firefighters
or police officers. This year we expanded our mentoring program a little bit. We now work with more teachers and
coaches than we did last year.

PATRICK: We have a
total of 13 mentors.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’d love
to hear a little bit more about interactive journaling and the mechanism behind that part of the curriculum.

DIGHT: Sure. This is Katie Dight and I oversee the case manager who uses
the interactive journaling program. It’s called Keep It Direct and Simple, or KIDS for short. It’s a series
that’s divided up into different needs that the student might identify. We first meet with the student before
we select a journal. Once we kind of get to know them, talk about what they see as some of their biggest challenges,
we help them select a journal that might be most useful. For instance, a lot of our students select the one that
is called Anger and Other Feelings, other students opt for the one called Personal Relationships. It’s really
a great system that walks the student through each of these problems that are really in-depth but in an easy to understand
way.

Our middle and high schoolers both use it. We’ve
seen some pretty good results. There’s a pre- and post-test for each of the journals. They ask things–for instance,
for the Anger and Other Feelings, they’ll ask students to name five major feelings that they’ve experienced.
For a lot of our students, it’s difficult to name anything other than maybe angry or sad when we first start,
but by the end of it they’re able to identify other ones such as grief or shame or guilt, which just helps the
students really expand their vocabulary and put words to what they’re feeling rather than just always resorting
back to anger as their number one. We really aim to have each student who’s in case management complete one
journal at least. Most of them I can at least get onto the second one and like we said, we let the students kind
of guide which one they’re interested in, which one they think will benefit the most.

In addition to the KIDS series, we have another one we pull a few different
extra assignments from. They’re totally up to the student but we find that they kind of complement one another.
It’s aimed towards an older crowd, particularly a crowd that might be in the juvenile justice system. Most of
our kids don’t have that involvement but we do find that some of those different activities have been helpful
for the students to kind of go over in depth with our case manager.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Are there other evidence-based tools that you have in use right now or that you plan to use?

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. For the program, yes. Again, the evidence-based
curriculum that we utilize for the group-level component of our program, Too Good for Drugs and Too Good for Drugs
and Violence. They were both created by
the Mendez Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do those operate?

PATRICK: Each curriculum has
ten weeks of sessions. The topics include: conflict resolution, healthy relationships, goal setting, decision making,
identifying and managing emotions, bullying, peer violence, dating, drugs, media, and influence. Each curriculum
activity lasts about 55 minutes in general. Immediately following our curriculum lesson, we conduct positive development-type
activities with our youth that reflect team building and respect with a local partner, Capstone Climbing and Adventure.
That guides the young men through activities like low ropes course, working together, and making the right decisions.
We also include positive youth development activities as hip-hop workshops as well as inviting local law enforcement
officers in to talk to the youth about current events.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So the facilitators are all black men and the population of youth, they’re all young men. I’m curious about
the philosophy behind that.

PATRICK: This is Rolanda.
In regards to your question, we believe that our participants will respond best by identifying with a person that
looks like them. So in regards to our facilitators, we do have three African-American male facilitators. While the
young men do work well with myself and Ms. Katie Dight, when it comes to personal topics and just sharing what it
means to be a young man, what it means to be a young man in America, how to conquer some of the challenges that males
face, it’s easier for them to build this relationship and have that dialogue with a male facilitator versus
a female facilitator.

DIGHT: This is Katie Dight.
In addition to the facilitators, we also have all of our mentors. It is a requirement that all the mentors are male.
They don’t have to be specifically men of color but we do, like Rolanda mentioned, find it most helpful when
the students can see in either the facilitators or the mentors a positive male role model.

POPE-SUSSMAN: How do young people respond to that?

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. They absolutely love it. In regards to our attendance,
we have about a 93 percent retention rate throughout all 15 weeks. I would say that our young men are actually enjoying
the program and they are actually suggesting that their friends request to participate in the upcoming semesters.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I’m wondering if you might have a story of a young man
who came into the program and the outcome for him when he came out of the program.

PATRICK:
This is Rolanda. Last year it was brought to our attention that a young man, he was a 7th grader at one of our middle
schools, he did not respect teachers, he did not respect the administration. He received about 15 disciplinary write-ups
last year. This year he’s in our STARS program at one of our middle schools. This young man shared about two
weeks ago that he did not like the police. He did not like police officers. It didn’t matter whether they were
male, if they were female, regardless of their race or ethnicity. We also have an activity called Pizza with Police
that we host at our four schools. This young man, he participated. He didn’t say anything but he was definitely
observing what was going on. Immediately following that session, he shared with myself that he was interested in
receiving a mentor and that he wanted the mentor to be a police officer. That just goes to show how our activities
are actually able to change the mindset of some of our participants.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
On a more macro scale, I’m wondering how you’re measuring outcomes across the program.

DIGHT: Sure, this is Katie. We have a couple different ways that we’ve
been measuring it. First of all, we do without group-level individuals, we do a pre- and post-test. The very first
day of the program they receive two different evaluations. One is focusing on student knowledge and that could be
about bullying behavior, that could be about substance abuse. Then the other one is student attitudes and that’s
just towards their general attitudes on violence in general. They take that on the first day of the program and then
they complete the same two surveys on the last day of the program. So they have a semester of learning between the
two. We contract with an evaluator from UNC Charlotte. He’ll help us determine if there’s significant differences
in between those two pre- and post-.

In addition
to that, we have a group of control students at each of our four schools, so that’s about 15 students, who have
been matched with the STARS participants in terms of age, race, and their different behaviors at school. Some of
them have actually then gone on to be referred for their program for the second semester. They are also given the
pre- and post- test at the start and end of the semester. We compare whether or not the intervention group has improved
in comparison to the control group. So that’s one set that we do.

Another
one is a school climate survey. That’s conducted in April. We did one last April, we’ll do one in 2016,
and we’ll do one more in 2017. We do that at our four target sites as well as two control schools. They have
schools that have been matched in terms of just general demographics, poverty levels in regards to free and reduced
lunch, the different ethnic makeup of the schools. We try to match them as closely as possible. They receive a school
climate survey that’s about 60 questions. We’ve added a few additional ones in terms of their relation
with their police departments in their neighborhood to gauge how students and staff are feeling on that. Then 10
percent of the school takes that. So it’s not just one grade, but rather all four grades in high school they’re
asked to take it or both of the grades in the middle school has to take it. That way we get a wide representation
about what school climate is in regards to “Is my school a safe place? Is my school clean? Do I feel welcomed?”
Then staff is asked to take a very similar school climate. Then we compare our target schools with our control schools
to see how school climate as a whole is being impacted.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Do you have some of those earlier results?

DIGHT:
We do. We have our first semester. We did see improvements, particularly within our intervention groups in terms
of their student attitude and student knowledge prior to the start of the program compared to the end of it. The
school climate, since it was a baseline, we don’t have any real data about how we’re doing in terms of
improving that. When we started, our control schools were actually doing well in terms of their school climate as
compared to our intervention schools. So there’s definitely room for improvement but we did see a lot of positive
feedback from the staff and students in terms of what areas they’d like to see improved upon.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s next?

DIGHT:
We are working on this second semester, we have three more … I’m sorry, this is Katie again. We have three
more semesters following this so the spring, then the next year will be fall 2016 and spring 2017. We’ll continue
to monitor school climate for the next two spring surveys. We’ll continue to work with three more groups of
students. Right now we’re just focused on the students that we have, both in our group-level intervention as
well as case management. We’ll start to think a little bit about our summer enrichment activities. Over the
next few weeks those ideas will really start to come together as we plan for the summer.

PATRICK: This is Rolanda. Also, building on our tutoring program at our middle
schools, increasing the number of mentors that we have, as well as the number of programs and participation that
our local law enforcement agencies provide.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Wonderful. Do you have anything else to add?

PATRICK:
This is Rolanda. I would like to add that it is a pleasure working with our four schools. We’ve had the opportunity
to reach over 120 students thus far. Katie and I are definitely looking forward to the upcoming semesters as well
as the summer. It’s a pleasure to work with the parents, the teachers, the administrators of course as we’re
building and encouraging our young men to be as successful as possible.

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

PATRICK:
It’s our pleasure.

DIGHT: Absolutely.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for Court
Innovation. We’ve been speaking with Katie Dight and Rolanda Patrick, program managers at Cabarrus STARS, and
Sue Yates, Chief Financial Officer for the Cabarrus Health Alliance. For more information on the Center for Court
Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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At Reinvesting
in Justice, Marc Levin, policy
director of the Texas-based conservative group Right
on Crime, talks about the need to work
towards criminal justice reform with stakeholders from across the ideological spectrum, both in Texas and nationwide. 

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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 Policing
Approach Through Health, Wellness and Youth (PATHWAY) in West Palm Beach, Fla., an
initiative led by the City of West Palm Beach that seeks to promote healthy adolescent development, discourage harmful
and violent behavior, and provide youth with opportunities for positive social involvement.

Reed Daniel, campus manager for the Youth Empowerment
Division of the City of West Palm Beach Department of Recreation & Strategic Innovations and Special Agent
James Lewis and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm Beach Police Department joined this week’s podcast
to discuss the role of law enforcement in PATHWAY, which includes offering critical mentorship and role modeling
for program participants and creating meaningful diversion opportunities for low-level youth offenders.

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 U.S. 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. Policing
Approach Through Health, Wellness, and Youth, or PATHWAY, is an initiative led by the city of West Palm Beach that
seeks to promote healthy adolescent development, discourage harmful and violent behavior, and provide youth with
opportunities for positive social involvement. Through the program, police officers serve as mentors and instructors,
and work alongside participants in community service projects.

In
October, I spoke with R. Reed Daniel, Campus Manager for the Youth Empowerment Division of the City of West Palm
Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic Innovations, Special Agent James Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police
Department, and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney, of the West Palm Beach Police Department. Our conversation focused
on the role of law enforcement in PATHWAY, which includes critical mentorship and role modeling for program participants,
and offering meaningful diversion to low level youth offenders.

Hi,
I’m Raphael Pope-­Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re speaking with R. Reed Daniel,
Campus Manager, Youth Empowerment Division for the City of West Palm Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic
Innovations, Agent Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police Department and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm
Beach Police Department. Reed, Agent Lewis, and Assistant Chief Mooney, thank you for speaking with me today and
welcome.

ALL: Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN: First of all, can you describe the PATHWAY program?

REED DANIEL: My name is Reed Daniel. I’m the manager of the Youth Empowerment
Center here in West Palm Beach. The PATHWAY Program came about about a year ago from a grant that we were seeking
from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health and the Department of Justice COPS
office, through which we implemented the city’s Policing Approach Through Health, Wellness, and Youth–PATHWAY.

PATHWAY expanded the city’s current crime prevention based programs
and activities which include diversion and restorative justice efforts to integrate health and wellness education
and services.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you talk about what
that looks like specifically?

DANIEL: We’ve
formed a number of relationships with what we call key partners. On the health side we have the Board of Department
of Health, Palm Beach County, the Health Care District of Palm Beach County, Mental Health Association of Palm Beach
County, and on the crime prevention side, our key partner is the City of West Palm Beach Police Department. We integrate
all those resources together in an effort to combat crime, and specifically juvenile crime, which really targets
and focuses on juvenile crime involving black males.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What kind of activities are involved?

DANIEL: The
program sends a lot of activities. All these programs are umbrellaed at the Youth Empowerment Center. We have programs
in restorative justice, we have programs in crime prevention, we have programs in health and wellness, we have nutrition
programs. All of these programs are joined together at the Youth Empowerment Center and offered to our teenagers,
our youth who attend here, free of charge.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What is the role of law enforcement in these programs?

DANIEL:
The police department actually is the component that drives the crime prevention initiative. West Palm Beach Police
works closely with the Youth Empowerment Center and other key partners to find solutions that will divert our youth
away from the criminal justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
The police in the program work with the youth in what context?

AGENT
LEWIS: Basically it would be the law enforcement part of it. We do have an officer that works at the Youth Empowerment
Center during the hours of the day and then also basically provides mentoring, give the kids an opportunity to have
someone that they can talk to, with a law enforcement background. Some of the other programs we also offer as Reed
mentioned earlier is the NAB–Neighborhood Accountability Board.

The
county itself has been experiencing an increase in juvenile that are entering the criminal justice system for misdemeanor
crimes. In efforts to reduce the number of juveniles going into the systems for crimes that are not felonies, we
created the Neighborhood Accountability Board and that gives our first time juvenile the opportunity to be diverted
from the juvenile justice system at the program where they can basically take responsibility for their actions or
the crime that they committed, but also it provides the community an opportunity to address the issue together. It
instills some community feelings to these kids so they understand the impact of crimes that they’ve committed.

We also have a great program that’s for gang prevention that’s
offered here at the Youth Empowerment Center and that gives kids– middle school and elementary kids–the opportunity
to learn and gang prevention before they get to into high school where they are kind of susceptible to be brought
into gangs. We also have our Operation Youth Violence, which addresses issue with offenders between the ages of 14
to 24 who committed a felony crimes within a certain area in our city. That program, when kids commit a crime, we
have a task force including members of our Youth Empowerment Center, the Urban League of Palm Beach County, and some
other partners that we have.

We give these kids an
opportunity to basically take ownership of what they did. It’s a voluntary program but when it’s time to go to court,
as long as they’ve successfully completed one of these programs offered here at the Youth Empowerment Center, we’ll
go in on their behalf and let the judge know that while they were awaiting trial they did some positive stuff, whether
it’s obtaining a GED, coming here for tutoring, or participating in one of the other programs we

POPE-SUSSMAN: Assistant Chief Mooney, do you have anything to add to that?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: I would say, we’ve gone into the second year
of this grant. We have an opportunity to kind of expand what we did last year. Last year the officers definitely
had more presence at the Youth Empowerment Center, but this year we’re going to have the opportunity to have
some of the officers that come in typically present some of their own types of programs that they want to initiate.

We’re trying to encourage the start up of a
couple of different initiatives that haven’t been laid out yet, that if we give the officer some time and have
some autonomy to develop things that they are already good at, whether it’s a sports program, it might be some
sort of hobby that they have that they could teach to the kids who come out to the center.

Something that’s totally different, outside of the typical police interaction
with the youth. They let the kids see that the officers aren’t just officers. They are just like everybody else.
This year, that’s going to be our goal. To expand what we did last year instead of just having a presence and
just interacting, that we actually develop new programs that will be specific to officer-initiated type of events.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have a sense of any specific programs that you have
in mind?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: We were talking
about even having like maybe a basketball three-on-three competition where you have some officers come in, play against
the kids or play with the kids. They have a tennis court and we have a couple of officers that are tennis players.
We’re going to try and initiate something with that this year. We also are involved in doing kids-and-cops meetings
where basically some can sit down, sort of a chat session where you have a couple of officers come in and the kids
have the opportunity to ask any questions they want and have a one-on one or a group setting so that they have access
to the officers and get a feel for where we’re coming from and we get a feel for where they’re coming from
too.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What has been their response?

ASSISTANT CHIEF MOONEY: I’ll leave that to you.

DANIEL: It’s been phenomenal. We have officers who actually come here
and I want to say they become like a surrogate parent in a way. They really attach and bond to some of these kids.
Many of our kids who come to our center come from low-income, at-risk homes. Single parent homes, where the mom is
working most likely, in most cases, the dad’s away.

These
kids come here and we provide to them that community culture of safety, first of all, but we also, through these
officers, are able to provide mentoring and really those relationships that start to grow beyond the Youth Empowerment
Center and into the community. We’re excited about that. I’ve seen that happen and it’s a tremendous
way of impacting a child’s life when you see these officers and these kids engage in different activities and
conversations. I think that’s one of the greatest opportunities we provide here at the Youth Empowerment Program.

AGENT LEWIS: When Reed first approached us with the grant, he mentioned
that there was a health component and policing. Myself, Detective Mooney, and Sergeant Neely, we basically did not
understand where the health part and the police came into play, but after we sat down and we realized that the health
part includes mental health, we saw a true definition, a true connection between the police department and the Youth
Empowerment Center.

Because a lot of our offenders,
a lot of crimes that they commit are crimes that at the end of it you realize that there’s a mental aspect to
it, whether it’s the behavioral part or it’s some issues that are deep embedded in the youth that we’re
dealing with. Before, we brought out this kids saying, “We can get you a job. We can get you a GED,” but
then, we don’t realize there’s a lot more that they’re going through. Whether it’s broken homes,
just needing someone to talk to. Mental health folks that we have as partners, have really been instrumental in helping
these kids with some of the things that they need or that they have. So this grant has worked great for us. We’re
seeing reduction in crimes that are being committed by some of our youth because now they have an avenue, they someone
they can talk to. If they have some anger issues, they know they can call over at the Youth Empowerment Center or
the staff members and they can get to talk with some of our partners on the mental health side.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you have any plans to measure results, whether it’s
community survey …

DANIEL: Of course during the first
year of the grant, the Center for Court Innovation provided what they call a process evaluation. We’ve just
been in touch with our local criminal justice commission and they will probably do our outcome evaluation over the
three years. Document registrations, document assessments, pre-assessments, post assessments, document how many kids
come in the program, where they go. We’re going to track these kids up to six months after they even leave our
program to just see how it’s going and what the results are.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
On the police department side?

AGENT LEWIS: On the
police department side, the kids who went through our program we also keep track of them, especially those who went
through Operation Youth Violence–reduction, prevention, and intervention. Those kids that go through this program
who have an active court case, we document them or observe them throughout the process. After they complete our program,
we do a six months evaluation and we stay in contact with them and also the providers, the service providers, that
they reached out to.

For the NAB, we’ve got
to do a six months evaluation basically to make sure that they’re still using the principles of restorative
justice and then a one year assessment to see where they are in live to make sure they are still on track. Also,
one thing that we do give all our participants, they have all our contact information so they can during the course
of six months or a year they have any issues or any obstacles, we encourage them to give us a call so that we can
help them along the way.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Great. Thank
you so much for speaking with me today.

ALL: You’re
welcome.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope-­Sussman
and I’ve been speaking with Reed Daniel, Campus Manager for the Youth Empowerment division of the City of West
Palm Beach, Department of Recreation and Strategic Innovations, Agent James Lewis of the West Palm Beach Police Department,
and Assistant Chief Sarah Mooney of the West Palm Beach Police Department. For more information about the Center
for Court Innovation visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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In this New Thinking podcast, Dr. Oliver Williams brings questions of
race, faith, and incarceration into a conversation on domestic violence. Drawing on his work with both victims and
perpetrators from African-American, Latina, and other immigrant and diasporic communities, Dr. Williams examines
the import of cultural responsivity in the justice system’s response to domestic violence.  

This product was supported by Grant No. 2013-TA-AX-K042 awarded by the Office on
Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this
podcast are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Department of Justice, Office
on Violence Against Women.

The
following is a transcript. 

AVNI
MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hello, this is Avni Majithia-Sejpal at the Center for Court Innovation.
You’re listening to the New Thinking podcast. I’m here today with Dr. Oliver Williams. Dr. Williams has
been working in the field of domestic violence for over 30 years. He is a professor at the University of Minnesota
School of Social Work and the Executive Director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community.
In addition to authoring numerous research papers and a book on the subject, he was invited to the National Advisory
Council on Domestic Violence in 2000 and has provided technical assistance and trainings on the subject, both in
the US and internationally. Dr. Williams, welcome.

DR. OLIVER
WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me, Avni.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:You
have written extensively about the need to understand domestic violence through the lens of race. Can you explain
why race is significant?

WILLIAMS: When I started
working in the movements, you didn’t see a lot of men of color coming into batterers’ intervention programs.
You didn’t see much outreach to get them to come into the programs. When we were beginning to talk about domestic
violence, largely they were talking about mainstream populations, but also the way that we talked about solving the
problems. Early studies talked about the disproportionate rates of domestic violence in African-American communities.
Dr. Lettie Lockhart and Dr. Robert Hampton and Dr. Richard Gelles ended up redoing some of the studies and found
out the rates were still challenging with regard to the African-American community.

If
you go about doing the work without hearing the challenges that exist within different communities, you miss something.
I think that you also see a reluctance to participate or what I’ve heard people say over the years, “They’re
not talking about me. It’s not my voice in the discussion,” or, “That’s not the way that I experience
it.”

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the
challenges that people from minority communities face when they go through the domestic violence court process?

WILLIAMS: That’s an interesting question. We did a
project for the Office on Violence Against Women that looked at that. We did focus groups with Latinas, that were
both national and immigrant-refugee. We also had African-American women and then we had African women. For the African-American
women, they felt that there was little empathy for their experience. They had some concerns with how the judge made
decisions. They felt like some more of the challenges, in terms of dealing with things, were put on their shoulders.
The thing that was interesting with Latinas was the fact that sometimes what the court would do, particularly if
their partner could go to the country of origin, if the judges could get them out of the courtroom, then they felt
like justice was served. The women tended to feel as though that gave him an upper-hand because he can sneak in the
country or he could go back home and then harm family members. There was a lot of discomfort associated with that.

The other thing too was the fact that they wanted to see justice served to the person
that had done the harm and they felt like there was a challenge in terms of making that happen. I think there’s
also issues with regard to language. Is somebody translating things accurately? Those are some things that courts
need to be informed about.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: This
project that you’re referring to is the cultural responsiveness project that you did in collaboration with the
Office of Violence Against Women and the Center for Court Innovation. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

WILLIAMS: We went to the Latina shelter program and they
helped us to organize a group of Latinas to have a conversation with. The people who were the interviewers were fluent
in Spanish, and the women spoke in English and in Spanish. It was very powerful because the women were very emotional
about their experiences. The same thing with African women, were expressing the challenges that they were experiencing
in the court and how difficult it could be for them, the injustices that they experienced, same thing with the African-American
women. That’s where we started. Next, we ended up doing data analysis on the responses. Next, we ended up going
to judges who represented various cultural communities. Some were African-American, some were Asian, in particular
Korean, and the others were Latino, and had a chance to pick their brain in terms of the things that they saw and
what they thought they could do and that the court systems could do generally, in terms of improving those circumstances.

They reported on the fact that there were judges whose intentions were good, but were
uninformed, and so they also offered recommendations on what to do and how they could become more culturally responsive.
Then we put those things together. We asked each group to come up with stories about what they experienced and we
put those things into scripts and we had it acted out and then what we tried to do is to come up with alternative
responses. What could a judge do differently? What could they do in terms of thinking about the challenges of the
population? What could create a better outcome where justice is served, but at the same time where you don’t
subject the woman that comes to you to a situation where she has to deal with such injustice? We were able to pull
together the stories of the women, the judges’ recommendations, but also key informants from each one of the communities.
That will be on Vimeo.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What
does it mean to be culturally competent?

WILLIAMS:
How I think about it is that you’re informed enough about the community to know what things you need to confront,
but also what things that you need to respond to. You have to hear the stories of the community that you’re
serving. If it’s LGBT communities that deal with different challenges around violence, if you’re dealing
with Asian or South Asian communities, to hear stories of Native American women who have challenges both in the Native
American court but also in mainstream courts in the United States. Each one has a set of challenges.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: You have worked with both victims and perpetrators.
How does it differ?

WILLIAMS: In working with
men, the voice of the victim is always in the back of my head. When I see issues with regard to victims, I just wonder
a few things. One is the trauma that she goes through, but also and I’ve heard this from women over the years,
is they really want to know how to heal. They want to figure out how they can move beyond these experiences to a
level of balance and peace.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I want to talk now about the Safe Return Initiative. As I understand it, the initiative addresses the challenges
faced by African-American men returning to their families after incarceration with the aim of preventing domestic
violence and strengthening the family. Can you tell us a little bit about the need to work with men returning from
prison?

WILLIAMS: Between one-third to one-half
of the men going to prison had some experience with domestic violence in their life. We broadened it, not to just
focus on men that went to prison because of domestic violence, there were men that went to prison for a range of
issues and they come out. Some of the men, we know, who have been violent and abusive, won’t change, but we
know that some men can. The other portion of that was we weren’t clear that battered women’s organizations
knew the narratives of the women whose partners or former partners went to jail and what their challenges and what
their experiences were. Another area was really understanding her story and trying to figure out how do you end up
supporting her if he comes out, whether she wants to be with him or whether she doesn’t want to be with him?
What we tried to do is come up with a range of issues to take a look at. One, most prison programs didn’t really
have any focus on batterer’s intervention. They had what they call “victim impact statements.” Victim
impact statements were not a program to talk to them about changing their violent behavior.

Secondly,
we realized that even if you did have a prison program, it didn’t mean that people had a connection in the community
that they were returning to. For women who were in relationships with these men, they didn’t have a connection
to battered women’s programs, they didn’t have insight about whether or not they would even identify themselves
as a victim of abuse, but also exploring questions to challenge what it means to be in a violence-free relationship.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m also interested in the intersections
of domestic violence and religion. You have said that the black church is a crucial space through which domestic
violence interventions can happen. Can you elaborate on that for us?

WILLIAMS:
One of the things that needs to occur is that we need to have primary and secondary prevention in communities, but
not law enforcement as the only consideration. What we ended up doing was making connections with churches that did
programming around the issues of domestic violence. They can provide proper guidance to men about the way that they
should behave, but they also should be able to respond to women who have a crisis of faith as a consequence of their
victimization. We found churches that have a rape crisis line at the church, a shelter program that they’re
connected with. They’ll work with men who batter and then the men come back and start working with you. We’ve
also tried to have a conversation with imams and so Islam is another part of our effort to speak with faith communities.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: In your view, what are the most urgent
concerns of the field of domestic violence today and what do you think the next steps should be?

WILLIAMS: One thing, I think, is to understand from the perspective
of people who represent those communities. I think more research by people who come from the various communities
and then more discussion about that. I think that cultural diversity in different communities also are evolving and
so what will be useful for them in terms of the way that they see the world and engage in our community? The question
becomes, has our knowledge and the way that we look at serving them expanded? I think recognition that knowledge
isn’t static, that it’s evolving.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Thank you so much. That has been a very instructive conversation.

WILLIAMS:
I hope so.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal
and I’ve been talking to Dr. Oliver Williams about the field of domestic violence and the need to address the
concerns of minority communities. To learn more about our various projects and those of Dr. Williams, you can visit
our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks so much for listening.

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This podcast covers the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Red Hook Community Justice Center, with highlights
including speeches from New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson,
and honoree Stuart Gold, of Cravath, Swain, and Moore. 

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman of the Center for
Court Innovation. Tonight we are here at the Brooklyn Museum, celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Red Hook Community
Justice Center. The Justice Center has been documented to reduce crime, increase public safety, and improve public
trust in justice. Judge Alex Calabrese, who has presided over the courtroom at Red Hook since the Justice Center
opened in 2000, said defendants who come to the Justice Center know this is a special place from the moment they
walk in the door.

JUDGE ALEX CALABRESE: Justice starts
at our front door. Our clerks and court officers treat everyone who comes through our doors and throughout the building
with respect. Our community feels welcome to come to the Justice Center, and they feel it’s their Justice Center
due to their efforts. They know they’re in a different place.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
New York 1 anchor Errol Louis, who emceed the event, said that for him, the work of the Justice Center means something
personal.

ERROL LOUIS: I live here in Brooklyn, and
one of the things that I’ve learned is the importance of neighborhood trust, and events like this are what I
think of as the making of the glue that holds our communities together. At the end of the day, neighborhood trust
is what makes us safe.

POPE-SUSSMAN: The event honored
Stu Gold, of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, for his long-time support of the Center for Court innovation and the
Red Hook Community Justice Center. Gold, who first got involved with the Center for Court Innovation through his
work with the Midtown Community Court, was an instrumental member of the planning team that launched the Red Hook
Community Justice Center. Gold spoke about the key role the Justice Center plays in the community in Red Hook.

STUART GOLD: I grew up in Brooklyn, and as many teenagers do, I got into
trouble from time to time. I remember I had an array of adults, my parents, my teachers, to help me figure out how
to rehabilitate myself and get on a better trajectory. Many teenagers and young adults, for a variety of reasons,
don’t have those support structures ready at hand. The Red Hook Community Justice Center now supplies that support
for a significant part of its community. For that, it deserves to be lauded, and I’m grateful that I’ve
had the opportunity to help.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Pauline
Nevins, a former client of the Justice Center, was also honored.

PAULINE
NEVINS: I struggled with addiction for more than a decade of my life. Throughout that time, I cycled in and out of
the system, appearing before countless judges in countless courtrooms, where I was just a number: a criminal charge,
a docket number, a body that had to be moved swiftly through the system so they could make room for the next one.

But in 2010, I was fortunate enough to end up at the Justice Center in Red
Hook. Coming to the Justice Center was a whole new experience. When I went before the judge I expected what I was
used to: a quick interaction, a bail or a short jail sentence. But instead, Judge Calabrese wanted to know why I
was there and if I wanted help.

POPE-SUSSMAN: New
York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman offered a call to arms.

CHIEF
JUDGE JONATHAN LIPPMAN: It is easy in a justice system as large as we have in New York, to just count the cases coming
through, one in, one out. But that’s not enough. Every single case we hear is a test of the system. A test of
our commitment to equal justice. It doesn’t matter who is standing before the judge–young or old, rich or poor,
black or white–justice is equal justice.

You see
this kind of justice in action when you visit the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Judge Alex Calabrese doesn’t
sit up on a bench at Red Hook, high above everybody else. He sits on the same level as everyone else in the courtroom.
He listens to the people who come before him. He explains the procedures and the protocols. Each person is treated
as an individual, each case given equal importance. This is the justice we aspire to, and this is the justice that
works.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Kings County District Attorney
Ken Thompson praised the Justice Center for building ties between the community in Red Hook and the justice system.
He also spoke about the need to bring the principles of the Justice Center to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, particularly
Brownsville.

DA KENNETH THOMPSON: We need to make
sure that the people of Brownsville see that we’re invested in their safety. We must show them that we’re
there to keep them safe and that we’re determined to do justice in partnership with them. I’m determined
to make sure that we get all the great things that we’ve done in Red Hook, that we take it to the people of
Brownsville.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Nevins, who spoke last,
left the audience with some powerful words.

NEVINS:
The judge always tells me that I did all the work, and I did. But I would not be here today if I had never been given
the opportunities, the encouragement, and the support that I needed. That is what the Justice Center did for me.

POPE-SUSSMAN: This is Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation.
For more information about 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 the Youth
ALIVE! anti-violence program in Oakland, Calif. Rafael Vasquez of Youth ALIVE!’s
hospital-based violence intervention program, Caught in the Crossfire, joins the Center in this podcast to discuss
Caught in the Crossfire and Youth ALIVE!’s novel approach to treating trauma.

The following
is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN :
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman for 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 U.S. 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. Youth ALIVE!,
which is based in Oakland, is an anti-violence program that serves youth injured by violence or exposed to violence,
youth who have a close relationship with murder victims, and formerly incarcerated youth. In August, I spoke with
Rafael Vasquez, program coordinator at Youth ALIVE!’s “Caught in the Crossfire” hospital-based violence
intervention program, about “Caught in the Crossfire” and Youth ALIVE!’s new trauma screening tool:
The Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma, also known as START. This interview was recorded at Youth
ALIVE! headquarters.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, I’m Raphael
Pope-Sussman and today we’re speaking with Rafael Vasquez, program coordinator at “Caught in the Crossfire”
at the Youth ALIVE! program. Rafael, thank you for speaking with me.

RAFAEL
VASQUEZ: You’re welcome. Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: So …  “Caught in the Crossfire.”

VASQUEZ:
“Caught in the Crossfire” is a hospital-based intervention program. It’s been around for over 20 years.
It was started at Highland Hospital. We service young men who have been victims of crime. We provide wraparound management
services and we meet them at the hospital, which we believe, it’s a crucial place to meet them at. We try to
build the trust and a relationship with them, so that we can follow them out once they are discharged from the hospital.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Can you talk about how that happens logistically?

VASQUEZ: If someone comes into the hospital, we have an injury prevention
coordinator at the hospital, she works for the hospital. She is the actually first interviewer of the client. She
tells them a little bit about the program. She lets them know what sort of services we provide. She will then make
a referral out to the program manager and then I actually go and meet with the client, in person, at the hospital.
From there on, we match them up with an interventions specialist.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Can you tell me a little bit about the first visit?

VASQUEZ:
The first visit can go in a lot of different ways. Generally, what should happen is you go in, make introductions,
you introduce the program yourself, explain the program, you also let them know, depending on the severity of the
injury, what sort of things they can expect from the doctors, what questions they may have. You can sometimes answer
some of those questions for them, give them advice in terms of what they can do to feel better. Sometimes they’re
in a lot of pain and the interactions that they’re having are not necessarily positive at that time. They’re
scared, so you try to gain as much information as you can. Do they have legal problems, or that kind of thing? Are
they okay at home? Do they have children? Are the kids okay? Are there any safety issues where they’re going?

Often times, we’ve had to move families out of where they’re at
just for their own safety. That’s what tends to happen in the first visit. That’s what you want to do.
The idea is that you want to make sure they’re not going to retaliate, go after somebody. Make sure that they’re
safe once they exit the hospital and someone isn’t going to come after them or their family members.

POPE-SUSSMAN : You’re coming in at an incredibly sensitive time.

VASQUEZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

POPE-SUSSMAN
: How do you build trust?

VASQUEZ: It depends a lot
on the individual. You have to be genuine and actually talk about things, so that they get a sense for you and they
know that you understand. You don’t want to necessarily self-divulge personal things, but the idea is that most
of us have overcome violence in our own lives. We have experienced, whether it’s a family loss, or a friend.
You talk on that level with them. You also show them that their concern goes beyond, “Hey, you’re going
to be okay. We’re going to ship you out and that’ll be it. We’re going to track you. We’re going
to be with you. We’re going to be there to support you. Anything you may need, give us a call. We may not be
able to do it, but we’ll never lie to you. We’ll tell you what we can and can’t do.” We try to
meet them where they’re at.

A lot of times,
it may not be the first time you get there. By the time they have a feel for you … By the time their visit is over,
they have a feel for you that you’re actually in their corner. That’s what you want to try to establish
with them.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What is the rule of law
enforcement?

VASQUEZ: We let them know if … for
example, you’re my client and you have a warrant. You’re on probation, so we let them know, “We’ll
support you. Is there anyone we can contact? Do you have a PO? That kind of thing.” We also let them know that
any time that there’s law enforcement contact, you’re always going to know first. It’s something that
you’re going to request for us to do. We’re never going to go behind your back, do something, and talk
to law enforcement without your knowledge. Everything is confidential in that, for the most part, any conversation
that happens with law enforcement is on their behalf and for their benefit.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Is there apprehension sometimes when you are coming in about whether you’re representing more of an institutional
angle?

VASQUEZ: Always. That’s the thing that
we always try to address from the beginning. “We’re actually here for you. We’re in your corner and
we’re going to help you navigate through all these different systems.” We like to make sure that they understand
that even though we are at the hospital, we’re not the hospital. Sometimes, unfortunately, they have negative
interactions with hospital staff, so we want to separate that. “Hey, we’re going to try to broker a better
relationship between you and the nurse, between you and the doctors, whatever is going on, and we’re working
for you.” The idea is that we’re not going to place judgement on the client because we don’t actually
know what the full story is.

There are often times
where you have medical staff who do place judgments, or they have their own ideas about why a certain person is in
there, whether they way they speak, or the way they look, whatever the case may be. We try to advocate on their end
that there could’ve been a number of historical things that led up to that shooting. That doesn’t necessarily,
or shouldn’t necessarily make a difference on what kind of treatment they receive at the hospital.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Have you seen changes with your partners in terms of how
they do treat the people who are coming in?

VASQUEZ:
Yeah, there are some wonderful staff people at Highland. Over the years, I have seen they’ve grown more empathetic,
I would say, towards young people and there’s still a lot of hold-outs that are like, “Something’s wrong
with the parenting, these kids didn’t get enough parenting, or their behavior,” or whatever the case may be
that they will point the finger or the blame. I’m not saying that all youth are completely innocent from why
they’re there, but we’re there to provide medical care for them. The word “care” needs to be
in there. It’s not about placing judgement, or making someone feel like, “You’re in here because it’s
your fault. You need to shape up, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and get over it.”

POPE-SUSSMAN : Can you talk me through a case that you felt was a successful
outcome?

VASQUEZ: Success can have many faces. Success
can be simply not retaliating and not putting another body in the hospital or the morgue. It can also mean that the
client, himself or herself, continues to move on and have a positive life, they have a family going, get jobs, go
to college, or whatever their journey is. That’s the ideal. Many times, depending on how severe the injury is,
you can have a kid who ends up in a wheelchair. Getting him through not giving up on his own life, moving through,
functioning somehow in society, and that sort of thing can also be a success. That’s why we say, “We meet
them where they’re at,” because you don’t actually know where they’re going to end up at, depending
on how severe the injury is.

If they’re already
bringing a lot of historical factors that affect them, you want to see if you can get them the help, one–if you
do get them around a whole stigma of getting mental health services, they actually sign up to mental health services,
you move them past that, and they get something from the mental health, that’s also a type of success. Success
can vary, depending on what you’re looking for.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: If you can, tell me a recent story that sticks in your mind.

VASQUEZ:
Let’s see. One of the recent stories is two sisters that were shot together, in front of their home, trying to stop
a fight. They apparently got into a fight over the dogs with the neighbors. The neighbors called somebody up and
said, “I have a problem with my neighbor. Come over here.” Things escalated, they ended up shot. They have
to go back into their neighborhood, into that same house. Luckily, we partnered with another agency that was able
to get them safety relocation and got them out of the immediate area for a few days. Part of their other program
is to come in and make peace between different people having different kinds of issues and we were able to calm things
down through that.

Now, we’re still working
with both of the sisters. They’re going to be moving out and being relocated. They have kids in their home,
so we, for the most part, stopped the violence. We’re ensuring that it doesn’t keep going. The idea is
that once they exit the immediate area where they’re at, that danger will be gone for both sides. That’s
one that sticks out in my mind.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What
is the follow-up there?

VASQUEZ: The follow-up would
be making sure they’re all right because they’re still freshly out of the hospital. The danger is that
they get re-injured, they’re back in the hospital, now the injury is worse, or they can be killed, depending
how serious it gets. The follow-up is that once you get them out of there, now you’ve focused them on getting
the medical attention, then getting mental health, if the kids … there’s a total of four kids in the home,
little kids. If they need assistance, getting them the assistance that they need, and then moving them past as a
unit because there’s two families that are being affected, then seeing where they end up in support. It could
be getting them jobs wherever they’re going to move to, making sure that they’re okay, and they have some
support group. Whether it’s another agency, family members, churches, whatever it is that we need to hook them
up with once they are wherever area they end up at.

That’s
the follow-up and then we just track them to see what kind of things come up as they go.

POPE-SUSSMAN : What is the role that this new trauma screening tool is playing?

VASQUEZ: The START program … The cool thing about the START program for
the kids, the really nice thing, is that they actually get techniques that really help them deal with the stress
from day to day. The questions that are already there help them to open up, to talk about it, so they don’t
feel like when they’re coming in, “Oh, somebody’s going to lay me down on the couch and they’re
going to want me to talk about my feelings.” Most of the young men we deal with don’t react well to that.
The major role that it’s playing is that it’s opening the kids up and prepping them for actually meeting
one-on-one with their therapists. Knowing that the therapy is … The way that we do it here is make sure that it’s
about your current injury and not about all your historic … They can do that, too. Once they get a feel for the
therapists and the trust is there, they tend to open up even more. That’s the main impact that I’ve had.

POPE-SUSSMAN : Wonderful.

VASQUEZ:
No, you got me before coffee. I hope I did all right.

POPE-SUSSMAN
: Fantastic. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman, speaking with Raphael Vasquez, program coordinator at Youth ALIVE. For
more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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Lama Hassoun Ayoub, researcher and co-author of Coming Home to Harlem, discusses the impact of the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court on the lives of parolees returning to Harlem after incarceration. 

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Hi. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, Senior Writer at the Center for Court Innovation. In today’s New Thinking
podcast we’re talking about reentry courts, specifically, the Harlem Parole Reentry Court in New York City operated
by the Harlem Community Justice Center. Researchers from the  Center for Court Innovation recently completed
a comprehensive study that explores the reentry court’s impact on the lives of its participants, comparing their
experiences and outcomes to those of individuals on traditional parole. Their report, titled “Coming Home to
Harlem,” has yielded some interesting results and can be accessed at courtinnovation.org. Here with me today
is one of the report’s authors, Lama Hassoun Ayoub, Senior Research Associate with the Center. Welcome, Lama.

LAMA HASSOUN AYOUB: It’s great to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: My first question is what is a reentry court and what does it
do?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Reentry courts are specialized
courts that work to reduce the recidivism of ex-offenders and improve public safety. They work with people coming
home, usually from prison, to help them reintegrate into society. They’re considered to be a problem-solving
court and they’re really built off the drug court model that we know is successful.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: For the record, what recidivism entail?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Recidivism is the rate at which people who have returned
home from prison after incarceration re-offend. We measure recidivism by looking at a variety of different factors.
We look at rearrest, reconviction, and what we call revocations. Revocations are returns to prisons, usually related
to violating parole. Of the people who are released nationally, we know that about two-thirds of them will be rearrested
within five years of their release. Over half of them will be returned to prison on a new conviction or a violation
within five years of their release.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I see. When people return home from prison, what kinds of challenges do they face as they attempt to transition back
into their communities?

HASSOUN AYOUB: There are
a lot of challenges associated with reentry. One of the biggest ones is employment. It’s very hard to find a
job after you come home from prison, especially with a record, a criminal record. Another challenges is housing.
People have trouble finding stable housing, and research shows that housing is actually really important to be successful
in your reentry. There are also many other challenges such as substance use, getting appropriate services and treatment,
and reintegrating with families and children.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you talk a little bit about the Harlem Parole Reentry Court. How does it work?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: The Harlem Parole Reentry Court works specifically with parolees. Those are people who are coming home from
prison to be supervised in the community by parole officers. For a typical parolee, they interact with the staff
from the reentry court even before their release. They receive pre-release services that often involve risk and needs
assessment and some planning. Sometimes that risk and needs assessment occurs once they’re released. The first thing
that really happens with them is that they report to the reentry court, they see their parole officer, they see a
dedicated case manager, and they also meet the reentry court judge for the first time.

That’s the real center of the reentry court that makes it very different
from parole, the fact that they have to report regularly to a judge and have judicial oversight during the time that
they’re there. The reentry court team works closely together; the judge, the parole officer, the case manager,
and other staff to coordinate support services for the client. They also use a schedule of rewards or sanctions,
so that means that people get sanctioned based on their behavior, and they also get rewards based on positive behavior.
Those are really the elements that are central to the operations of the reentry court.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Who are the participants that go through this court and what
kinds of offenses are we talking about here?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: The reentry court works with clients who have felony offenses, for the most part. About half of them were
in prison for violent offense and another half were in prison for drug offenses. There are also small percentages
of property offenses. Most of the reentry court participants have been in prison for quite some time. They were in
state prison, which means they’ve served at least one year. For many of them, it been many, many years since
they were home in Harlem. The reentry court does exclude a few people. They exclude sex offenders, arsonists, and
people with diagnosed Axis I mental health issues. Just so you know, this population is predominantly male, it’s
only about two or three percent female, and it’s mostly black or Hispanic. Around 97 percent of the population
identifies as either black or Hispanic, or both.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Let’s turn our attention to the study that you recently completed: “Coming Home to Harlem.”How do
you go about your research?

HASSOUN AYOUB: The study
had four major components. The first component was what we call a randomized control trial. That basically involves
randomly assigning parolees to either Harlem Reentry Court or traditional parole. The second component was looking
at the official records of those randomly assigned parolees. The third component was in-depth interviews with a subset
of the parolees that were randomly assigned. The fourth component was interviews with the reentry court judges. We
were actually able to interview six reentry court judges who served on the court over the last ten years.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Based on your research, what kind of impact does the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court have on recidivism rates? Can you break down the numbers for us.

HASSOUN AYOUB: Sure. When we looked at recidivism we looked at rearrest, reconviction,
and revocation. By revocation, I mean, returns to prison that are associated with violations of parole, specifically,
not necessarily new arrest. With rearrest we really didn’t see a big difference. About half of the population
of the reentry court and half of the parolees are regular parole were rearrested within 18 months of their release.
We believe that we didn’t see a big difference because this population has a high exposure to arrest. They live
in Harlem and they’re a minority community.

However,
when we looked at reconviction and revocation we did see significant differences. Reentry court parolees were significantly
less likely than the control group to be reconvicted within 18 months and we saw a 22 percent reduction in reconviction.
When we looked specifically at felony reconviction, we saw a 60 percent reduction in felonies. We also looked at
revocations. It’s important to know that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has been working
to reduce revocations, generally, so even the parolees on regular parole had lower revocations than they would’ve
had historically. But then we also saw a statistically significant difference, in fact, there was a 45 percent reduction
in revocations when we compared the reentry court group to the traditional parole group.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What about the impact on other aspects of the parolees lives?

HASSOUN AYOUB: By doing the in-depth interviews we were able to explore
the other aspects of their lives because it’s hard to get official data on things like education or family relationships.
Our interviews really provided us with information we wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere. We saw significant differences
when we looked at employment. The reentry court parolees were more likely to report being in school or having a job
at one year after their release. In fact, 75 percent of them said they were in school or had a job compared to only
45 percent of the parolees on regular parole. They also had higher quality jobs. By that, I mean, jobs that give
you paid days off or provide you with health insurance. They also worked more hours per week than the parolees on
regular parole and they also worked more months in the past year. Because they worked more hours they also had a
slightly higher income than the parolees on regular parole.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Were there any other differences that you found between the experiences of participants of the reentry program and
those that had a more traditional experience of parole?

HASSOUN
AYOUB: We saw some big differences when it came to their supervision experiences. We asked people in interviews about
how many times they saw their parole officer, but we also asked them about their perceptions of the criminal justice
system, an area that we call procedural justice. In that, we saw statistically significant differences. The reentry
court parolees had much more positive perceptions of the criminal justice system. They also had more positive attitudes
about the judge that they last interacted with. They also even had better attitudes toward their parole officer.
Those were statistically significant differences that we think may also be connected recidivism. I also want to add
that the reentry court parolees were also more likely to receive a reward during their parole and less likely to
receive a sanction, so only 30 percent of them said they had received any kind of sanction or consequence to their
bad behavior compared to nearly 70 percent of the regular parolees.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
By reward, you mean?

HASSOUN AYOUB: Reward could
be something as simple as praise from your parole officer, like getting a pat on the back, but could also mean things
like gift cards or actual gifts.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
To conclude, what are some of the challenges that the court faces today, and what are the next steps for the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court?

HASSOUN AYOUB: The evaluation
showed that reentry court model, as implemented in Harlem, is successful. They were successfully able to reduce recidivism
and have an impact of the lives of parolees. Many of their challenges today are associated with things like sustainability
and expanding the court, making sure that the lessons we’ve learned from this evaluation and from the work they’ve
done can be used in other areas, and that they can continue to sustain this work and help parolees coming home to
Harlem.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Lama, thanks for sitting
down with me today.

HASSOUN AYOUB: Thank you, I appreciate
it. It’s really important for us to share the findings of this evaluation.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, and I’ve been talking to Lama Hassoun Ayoub about the Center for Court Innovation’s
report “Coming Home to Harlem,” which examines the impact of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court on the lives
of participants who are returning home from prison. To read and download the report, go to research
on courtinnovation.org. Thanks for joining us today.

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John Chisholm, district attorney of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, joins the New Thinking podcast
to discuss community prosecution, diversion, and his
work to reduce mass incarceration and racial inequities in the justice system.

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In this podcast, Anne Marks, executive director of the Youth
ALIVE! hospital-based anti-violence program in Oakland, discusses the history and mission of Youth ALIVE!,
its partnerships with local public health and law enforcement agencies, and how funding under the Minority Youth
Violence Prevention Initiative is increasing the organization’s capacity to serve high-risk minority youth.

The
following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re speaking with Anne Marks,
executive director of Youth ALIVE!, and training director for the National Network of Hospital-based Violence Intervention
Programs. Anne, thank you for speaking with us today, and welcome.

ANNE MARKS:
Thanks.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Tell me a bit about Youth Alive.

MARKS: Youth ALIVE! is an almost 25-year-old violence prevention intervention
and youth leadership organization. We are a home-grown organization. We began with a group of students 25 years ago
in East Oakland who were dealing with violence in and around their school, and in their community who wanted to do
something about it, and they developed a series of workshops, which they peer lead to this day, to talk to young
people about gang, gun, family, and dating violence and what people can do to make themselves safer and to make choices
that are healthier.

Starting with those young people is how we began. We incorporated it to support
their vision and their work. They also do a number of community engagement and organizing and advocacy activities,
and from there, we actually had a staff person working in that program, who founded our Caught in the Crossfire program.

Sherman Spears was, as a young man, a victim of violence. He was a gunshot victim and found that that moment
was pivotal in his life, and he wanted to make sure that he was there for people who dealt with that in the future.
Whereas his options at the time were to retaliate or to just die, he wanted to find another way out, and so he found
a way to start working in violence prevention, so he started the Caught in the Crossfire program to help respond
immediately after a young person has experienced trauma, gunshot, stabbing, assault, to help them get on a different
path with a peer who can relate to them to support them.

That program then later incorporated
not just people who had been recently assaulted, but also people who had recently experienced the trauma of incarceration,
so we’ve been working with youth and young adults for some time through that program. That program has actually
been replicated in dozens of communities, and we support those programs through our National Network of Hospital-based
Violence Intervention Programs.

The last thing that we do at Youth ALIVE! is, we work not just
with young people who have been injured, but we work with the families and friends left behind when someone has been
killed by violence. We respond to every single homicide in the city of Oakland to provide the family and friends
with support. We do that work in the memory of Khadafy Washington, who was the murdered son of the founder of that
project, the Khadafy Washington project.

POPE-SUSSMAN: A lot of your
work really focuses on trauma and responding to trauma.

MARKS: Absolutely.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you tell me a bit about the Screening Tool for Awareness
and Relief of Trauma, and what the origin of that is?

MARKS: So START,
we call it the Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma. It’s really just that. It’s a start for
addressing trauma. The metaphor that we think to look at this is that, trauma is something that hurts, and START
is not a cure. START is aspirin that helps relieve the pain of trauma. It doesn’t make it go away. It’s
not the same thing as engaging in long-term therapy or other support, but it’s something that can help people
feel better and get some relief. How it works is we do a brief screening with someone around different symptoms of
trauma, how it may actually be affecting their life. What their actual experiences of trauma are are actually irrelevant
to how we do this, so we don’t need to know the details of what happened to them to be able to say, “are
these things affecting your life?”

For example, issues with focusing, issues with sleep,
things that can really impact how you live. Then, based on how the respondent answers these questions, we give them
a series of one to three different tools that are brief. We can usually get through this interview in 10-25 minutes,
and give them tools they can walk away with, things they can take home. Maybe it’s a plan on how to sleep better,
maybe it’s a relaxation exercise they didn’t have before, so when they leave, they’ll have something
that will make their lives better.

The goal with START is two things. One, give people some relief,
but the other is that when they have this relief, either they will go home, and because they have some relief, they’ll
be able to kick in their own resilience and their own coping skills and strategies, and turn their life into a better
direction. And, the second thing is, maybe the experience of something actually being beneficial to them, that positive
experience will actually make them want to continue to get care and believe that change and improvement is possible
in their lives.

There have been a lot of tools out there that address trauma, and trauma is something
that, historically there have been three groups that have been treated for trauma: veterans of wars, refugees, and
survivors of domestic violence. What is in fact true right here, in America, and particularly here in Oakland, is
that the vast majority of people who are affected by violence are actually young men of color who are affected by
street violence. They are overwhelmingly the victims of street violence, community violence, and yet none of these
tools have ever been developed with their needs in mind, and none of them had ever been developed understanding that,
given the poor treatment they had had at the hands of a lot of institutions that are set up to “care for them,”
that the likelihood of someone attaching to long-term services was not necessarily something you could count on. So, how to give someone something when you, maybe this might be the only
time you interact with them that can actually help them, was really important to us.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What’s the strategy for evaluating the efficacy of this tool?

MARKS:
This tool we use internally, and then we have a couple community partners that use it as well. Because there’s
a screen that is part of the tool, what we’re able to do is, 30-45 days after we’ve given them the tool,
we can do follow-up phone calls where we ask them again, questions about their symptoms that they’re having
and then also ask them questions about qualitatively, have they used any of the tools since then and has it helped
them in any way.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Are there plans to study that on a
larger level?

MARKS: Yes, we’re working right now with a couple
of clinics. One operated by Kaiser Permanente Vallejo and another operated by the county Alameda Health System in
East Oakland, as sites to do a randomized control trial to compare and show the efficacy of this, not just sort of
in people’s symptoms but potentially how it affects their other health concerns. We think that will be important
for the science for how this goes down. So we can really show the effectiveness of it. I will say, internally it’s
been very surprisingly dramatic just the responses that we’ve gotten from individuals who have received this.
We developed this over two years through a series of focus groups with young men who were gunshot victims, and then
a series of 69 structured interviews with young men who we didn’t know, who came in just from all parts of Oakland
to do an interview, and it was profound, the impact it had.

We feel very hopeful that this is
going to be something that we can publish and show the efficacy of so that other people can use it, but we have lots
of partners who are involved in the development of it who are going to use it right now.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So, Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Can you talk about how that is allowing you to expand the work
that you do?

MARKS: Yeah, absolutely. Minority Youth Violence Prevention
was a way for us to do two things. One, pay for a community health advocate who can then do County Alameda Health
System interviews, so use this Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma with young people that we work with,
and then it also helps pay for mental health services. For a long time, all of our services that we offered were
peer-based, and all of our intervention specialists were community members that didn’t have clinical training,
and we would always refer to mental health services when needed.

What we found was that people
didn’t stick. But when a mental health therapist was introduced as a counselor, or someone you might want to
talk to, and came along with them in the car, to someone’s house, to someone’s school, spent time with
them in a more casual setting, that people were able to feel more comfortable with starting to engage in mental health
services.

In any case, in the process of doing the County Alameda Health System interviews, some
people are going to be flagged, because they present as needing an assessment for PTSD, right? Trauma can affect
your life, and it can make your life unpleasant even without a full-blown PTSD diagnosis. We believe that people
deserve help no matter where they are, but some people will actually have severe symptoms that require an assessment
and it would be helpful to do, so that’s also why we brought mental health services on through this grant.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What are your hopes for START?

MARKS:
Our hopes for START is that it has a catalytic effect on how people in our community talk about trauma, and in the
process of doing that, changes how the institutions that are incorporating START into their settings treat these
young men. We have a culture that treats young men of color as if they are potential perpetrators when in fact, a
young man of color is much more likely to be a victim.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What are the biggest challenges that you think Youth ALIVE! is facing right now?

MARKS:
I guess I would say the biggest challenges that Youth ALIVE! faces are the same challenges that the people we serve
face. Locally, that can mean the challenges of gentrification and equity. Largely, it means the challenges of the
systems that interact with our young people that are also the systems we have to interact with. We pride ourselves
on having worked a great deal with institutional partners that have not always best served the interests of our young
people, from probation to police to health care systems, to the school district, but these are large systems, and
helping these systems move along is always going to be a challenge.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Where do you see your relationship with law enforcement right now?

MARKS:
Youth ALIVE! has an excellent relationship for example, with the police department. Our work with homicide victims
we could not do without a strong partnership with the Oakland Police Department, who pass along next-of-kin notification
to us, so we can reach out to these families. It works out really well because for them, having us work with the
family actually de-escalates the tension that that family is dealing with, so that we’re able to make them more
calm and ready to deal with whatever the next steps are. They might have to deal with law enforcement, and it works
out for us, obviously, because we get access to these families and can give them help. And it wasn’t quick,
but we’re at a point now where the police never ask us for information about any of the incidents that led to
the violence that we’re dealing with, so that’s been a great thing for us. I think for them it’s been
a really excellent relationship.

POPE-SUSSMAN: And the DA?

MARKS: Well we work a lot with the DA because we work with Victims of Crime.
So we have a relationship with Victims of Crime that’s such that they will let us know, for example, if a family
of a homicide victim is coming in to the office, in case we haven’t gotten the notification yet that the family
has contacted them. We’re able to actually meet them there in the office. They’ll bring us in to actually
meet with the family with them to help explain what the VOC process is. With that, we’ve had an excellent relationship
with the DA.
Our board president for Youth ALIVE! is actually a deputy district attorney. I guess I would
say this, I think one of the things that’s unique about, for example, our board president, Mike Nieto, and our
relationship with police and with the district attorney’s office is that, given the work that we do, and given
how the cycle of violence works, it is not helpful to draw a line between victim and perpetrator. That distinction
makes a lot of sense in certain settings, like the criminal justice setting, but it makes no sense in the lives of
the people that we work with.

Helping people think about breaking cycles of violence, helping
people understand that someone may be in a system as a perpetrator but their actual history of trauma is much different
than that is something that we’ve had some real traction in doing here, and I think that before the concept,
the word of trauma-informed was out there, that was something that we’ve been working on here locally for some
time–is helping really look at violent incidents and not as, who did what, but as, how do we respond to this eruption
in way that helps all the parties not further hurt themselves or anyone else.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Wonderful. That’s it.

MARKS: Thanks!

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I am Raphael Pope-Sussman, of the Center for Court Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Anne Marks, executive
director of Youth ALIVE! For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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