In this podcast, Kari Kerr and Kristi Hall-Jiran talk about Safer Tomorrows, Grand
Forks, North Dakota’s Defending Childhood Initiative. Safer Tomorrows implemented universal violence prevention programming in public, private, and rural schools across
Grand Forks County, beginning with pre-kindergarten and extending to high school. The initative is part
of the Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program, which funded eight sites
across the country to  respond to the problem of children’s exposure to violence. The Center
for Court Innovation has produced a report on Safer Tomorrows, a series of reports on five other sites, and a report that condenses lessons learned across the sites.

Resources
mentioned in this podcast:

Safer
Tomorrows

The Community Violence
Intervention Center

Al’s
Pals

Friendships at Work

Lessons
from Literature

Digital
Citizenship

Coaching
Boys into Men

Lutheran Social Services Restorative Justice

Healthy Families

The
Fourth R

The following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, senior writer at the
Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another episode of our New Thinking Podcast. Today, we’re here to talk
about Safer Tomorrows. Safer Tomorrows was established in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, as part of the Department
of Justice-funded Defending Childhood Demonstration Project, which was designed to address children’s exposure
to violence through eight demonstration sites across the country.

We,
at the Center for Court Innovation, have just released individual process evaluation reports on six of these eight
sites, as well as a multi-site report that condenses the lessons learned through our research. Today, from Safer
Tomorrows, we are talking to: Kari Kerr, director of community innovations at the Community Violence Intervention
Center and leadership team member of the Safer Tomorrows project, amongst others; and Kristi Hall-Jiran, executive
director of the Community Violence Intervention Center. Kari and Kristi, welcome to our podcast.

KARI KERR: Thank you for having us.

KRISTI
HALL-JIRAN: Thanks. We’re glad to be here.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Let’s begin by talking a little bit about the project itself. Safer Tomorrows aimed to implement universal prevention
programming in Grand Forks County. My question is, what made you decide to focus on school-based prevention programming?

KERR: I think there are a couple of factors that went into our decision.
The main one was, our state had just actually passed anti-bullying laws requiring schools to develop some type of
a policy or a response, and so the timing was really good in terms of approaching the school system.

Then, we also know that, obviously, for our school system, we can have a
wide reach of youth that are attending school. Certainly, from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and we
went beyond that and looked at some of the pre-schools in our community as well.

HALL-JIRAN:
I think just to add to that, too. We also had really spent some time developing a good, strong working relationship
with the schools in several years before the project. We really felt like we already had the leadership of the school
system on board, the superintendent served on our agency’s board of directors, and so really felt that the timing
was right. We already have the collaborative relationship and so the natural outcome was to focus on that way.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When we talk about violence, what are some of the forms
of violence, specifically pertaining to children and teenagers, that need to be addressed urgently in your county?

KERR: When we first developed our Safer Tomorrows project, we, of course,
wanted to be very inclusive of all types of violence and really make sure that we were addressing anything that could
affect the child, and we also wanted to look at how to prevent violence and not just to intervene. We did want to
also look at the things that were most impacting our children. What we did before we even started developing our
programming was really to do a needs assessment as to what the most prevalent forms of violence were.

As we looked at existing statistics and then gathered additional data, what
we found was that the kinds of violence that we saw the most in our county was pertaining mostly to bullying in the
school system, or just anywhere, and then also children exposed to domestic violence at home. Though we had pure
statistics on dating violence, we heard from a lot of our stakeholders that they felt that that was a pretty primary
issue as well.

Though we tried to address all of
the issues, those are the areas that we’re really focusing on.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Can you talk to us a little bit about the different features or highlights of the project?

HALL-JIRAN: We’ve looked at it in three different areas. We designed
the program around intervention effort, so any child age 0 to 17 that is being impacted in some way by violence,
we wanted to make sure we were finding a way to intervene. Then, we also looked at prevention. How could we start
building the kind of programming in our community that would prevent this type of violence from happening so that
two generations from now we don’t even have to have these conversations anymore?

Then, the third piece, we really tried to build a very strong data and evaluation
component because we really wanted to base our decisions on available data and then ongoing evaluation so that we
could treat what we implemented as we found out if that was working or not, or as different types of violence change
and, hopefully, if we were seeing good results we could start making some of those adjustments.

As far as specific things that are under each of those areas, maybe I’ll
have Kari talk about that a little bit.

KERR: Sure.
We were able to implement a variety of different prevention programs, many of which are evidence-based. Some of those
included Al’s Pals, which is for our youngest population, that’s bullying prevention program. We also implemented
“The Fourth R” for health classes, Friendships at Work, which is a positive friendship curriculum.

A couple of different programs looking at some of the online issues that
can happen with students, that would be Digital Citizenship. Then, we also have one of our schools implement Lessons
from Literature. Then we did Coaching Boys into Men.

We
really had a variety of prevention programming starting from, again the early years all the way up to 12th grade.
As Kristi mentioned, we had a lot of intervention services offered as far as specialized therapy services and the
Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota has provided restorative justice programming and Healthy Families. We’ve
also been able to work with some of our families …

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Given that you’re targeting children and teenagers in such a wide age
range, from 0 through 17, how did you adapt your methods to different ages and specifically to the youngest children?

HALL-JIRAN: You’re right. That’s a very wide age range for, not
just prevention, but also for area of intervention as well. As Kari mentioned, for the youngest kid, we implemented
Al’s Pals. It’s a puppet program. It’s basically working with kids as they’re playing, so we
really try to adapt to what would be age-appropriate.

As
we got more into elementary school, the curriculum focuses more on respect and being kind to each other and all those
kinds of things. Then as we moved in the middle school age, we looked a little bit more at anti-bullying and respectful
friendship, and what would healthy friendship look like, how do we treat each other, those kinds of things. Then,
of course, as we got to the high school level, we looked more at dating violence and healthy relationships.

Really just trying to adapt the programming that we picked to really sit
with these age groups and what would be most primary for that group.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
How did you adapt evidence-based and promising practices and tools, especially given that your target audience spans
such a wide age range?

KERR: I think one of the ones
that we ended up having to adapt a little bit the most was our Friendships at Work curriculum, which is more of a
promising practice. It was initially designed for seventh grade classes. As we were implementing, we were receiving
feedback from some of the teachers, for a variety of reasons that they felt it would be better suited for fifth grade.

Again, the author of that curriculum went back in to adjust some of the
language that we used as we’re teaching it, some of the videos that she used, some of the examples that she
would give just to adjust that down to fifth grade level because, again, you’re going down three levels from
what it was initially designed for. We’re finding that it’s working really well in the fifth grade right
now.

HALL-JIRAN: One of the other adjustments that
we made was Lessons from Literature. That was something that we were originally going to do in our high school English
classes, but the curriculum was just designed in Canada and the literature that they used in Canada was not going
to work for our high schools here in Grand Forks. We basically did some research and decided to implement “The Fourth
R” in our health classes rather than Lessons from Literature.

It
was just some of the speed bumps along the way, just look at what else you can do instead and just always try to
adapt to your population.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: That’s
really interesting. What were some of the challenges you encountered as you went about implementing your various
programs?

KERR: I think anytime you are involved
in a whole county of people, which involves seven different school districts and thousands of kids, it’s really
hard to just make sure that it’s all being well-taught uniformly. We know that all the curriculum that we implemented
is only as good as it actually is at the level of the teacher implementing it or the staff person implementing it.
I think it’s always a challenge just to make sure that everybody is doing it and doing it in a consistent way.

HALL-JIRAN: I would just add to that, as Kari mentioned, just when you’ve
got seven different initiatives that are all trying to implement on a whole spectrum of ages 0 to 17, all the way
from intervention through prevention, you have got a lot of moving parts and I think you absolutely cannot over-communicate
at that point. Just trying to make sure everybody knew what each other was doing and that we were all keeping that
common vision in front of us was really a constant challenge.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What are some of the lessons learned that you can pass on to other counties that might be interested in implementing
prevention programming that is similar to yours.

HALL-JIRAN:
I think one of the biggest lessons that we learned is to just plan for more time than you think you’re going
to need. I think, especially if it is involving federal funds, it’s really important to have adequate time to
have the review process that you need in place for different publications and things like that. That was one of the
things that sometimes the schools have found a little bit.

KERR:
I think in addition to that, just having good communication that’s ongoing with your collaborative partners
is important. We had lots of committees that we’ve set up to make sure that everyone stayed on top of what was
happening in our project. We did that through actual face-to-face meetings, as well as email and phone conversations,
and then being flexible as the project continues to make adaptations as they’re needed.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: What are some of the results that you have been witnessing.

HALL-JIRAN: We will be continuing to monitor this on an ongoing basis. Some
of the most exciting results that we’ve seen thus far is that, at the elementary level, we’ve seen 42 percent
fewer fourth and fifth grade students who are reporting being bullied. We’ve also had 46 percent fewer high
school students who have reported that during the past six months someone has forced them to do something sexual
that they did not want to do. We’ve had 28 percent fewer fourth through 12th grade students reporting that they
witnessed violence in their home.

We’re very
excited about the preliminary results and really are interested to see where this will go in the future.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Wonderful! Thanks so much for speaking to me. That was
really interesting.

KERR: Thank you so much. We really
appreciate it.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal
from the Center of Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking to Kari Kerr and Kristi Hall-Jiran about the Grand
Forks, North Dakota Defending Childhood Initiative, Safer Tomorrows. Visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org
to download other podcasts and reports on Defending Childhood Demonstration project. Thanks so much for listening.

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Jill Smialek and Dr. Jeff Kretschmar discuss the Cuyahoga
County Defending Childhood Initative, which  seeks to address violence against children in one
of the country’s most violent areas – Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Their
unique approach includes the creation of an integrated, county-wide screening, assessment, and service system for children ages
0-18 who have experienced violence and trauma. The initative is part of the Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration
Program, which funded eight sites across the country to  respond to the
problem of children’s exposure to violence. The Center for Court Innovation has produced a report on the Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initative,
a series of reports on five other sites, and a report that condenses
lessons learned across the sites. 

The
following is a transcript

AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi,
I’m Avni Majithia-SejpaL, senior writer at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another episode of our
New Thinking Podcast. Today, we’re here to talk about the Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initiative. Cuyahoga
County, in Ohio, which includes the Cleveland Metropolitan Area, was one of eight sites across the country to be
funded by the Department of Justice to address and raise awareness about children’s exposure to violence. We,
at the Center for Court Innovation, have just released our process evaluation on six of those sites, which includes
individual reports on each site and a report that condenses lessons learned across them. Today, from Cuyahoga County,
we’re talking to Jill Smialek, manager of the Family Justice Center and of the Witness Victim’s Service
Center, and to Dr. Jeff Kretschmar, research assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
at Case Western Reserve University, and senior research developer at the Gun Center for Violence Prevention, Research,
and Education. Jill and Jeff, welcome to our podcast.

DR. JEFF KRETSCHMAR:
Thanks, Avni.

JILL SMIALEK: Thank you.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
I want to start by talking about violence. I understand that the county, and Cleveland in particular, has one of
the highest violent crime rates in the country. What kinds of violence are kids exposed to?

KRETSCHMAR:
You’re right that the kids in Cuyahoga County witness and experience pretty high rates of violence. The kinds
of violence they’re experiencing or witnessing are similar to other kids in other communities. We have a lot
of kids saying that they are hit and attacked. They witness a lot of shootings. There’s lots of verbal abuse,
physical abuse. Our kids report high rates of bullying. I will say that of the kids who have been in our Defending
Childhood system and who have been assessed for violence exposure, 96% of those kids report at least one past year
victimization and 87% report as least two past year victimizations. Those numbers are really, really high.

SMIALEK: We also know that a lot of children who are coming through the Defending
Childhood system have witnessed domestic violence in their homes. From our most recent report, it looks like about
50% of our cases are kids who are dealing with domestic violence in the home.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
The Defending Childhood initiative created a streamlined county-wide screening assessment and service system up to
the age of eighteen who have exhibited symptoms of exposure to violence or trauma. Can you walk us through that process?

SMIALEK: When we were first starting the Defending Childhood initiative, we
wanted to make sure that we were implementing something that was not a new program, not a standalone program, but
rather something that was embedded within the very robust social service menu, or environment that we have here in
Cuyahoga County. We made the determination that we would work with our agencies and organizations that were already
serving a large proportion of kids who were exposed to violence but at the same time, not necessarily focusing on
that as the number one issue. We determined that we would work with our Children and Family Services, Juvenile Court,
and a number of our community based mental health service providers. We worked with Jeff and others to develop a
screening tool. We used that screening tool in those existing agencies. They screen very quickly for trauma symptoms
and trauma behaviors. Then, once they reach a specific threshold, they move on to a central intake and assessment
agency where they receive a full blown, roughly four-hour mental health assessment.

From there,
the mental health professional makes the determination as to any diagnoses that may apply and also makes a decision
as to an appropriate therapeutic intervention. From there, the child is referred into services.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
Jeff, do you want to talk about the tool that you developed?

KRETSCHMAR:
Sure. Very early on in the process, when we were first awarded the grant, one of the things that we quickly discovered
that while there was some screening going on for violence exposure and trauma in our child-serving systems, it wasn’t
consistent, it wasn’t uniform, and a lot of times, when kids were screened, nothing happened as a result of
those scores or that information. They knew that kids were exposed but they didn’t really have much unique services
to put these kids into. What we thought was it would be really beneficial if our entire system used the same screening
tool and had some training on how to use it. Then, that tool, the results of the information from that tool, could
then be used to refer children to fuller assessments and then if necessary, into trauma-focused CBT or other trauma
informed services designed specifically for cases like this.

We first thought to use an existing
tool that would look at trauma and violence exposure but confine any that were really short and free and that would
span kids from zero to eighteen. We created our own. We came up with two screeners. One’s for the younger kids,
zero to seven. One is for the older kids, eight and older. We ask them or their caregiver about what kind of violence
they’ve seen and what trauma symptoms are also co-occurring at that time. If kids score a certain level in that
screener, they are referred in for a fuller assessment, to really get a handle on what they’re experiencing
and if that’s had some mental health consequences for them.

The worker who’s administering
the screening, regardless of the score on the screener, can also decide to refer that child for additional assessment
if they feel like they need it.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I understand that
research was integral to the initiative from the very beginning of the planning process. How did you and your colleagues
go about this research? What were some of your insights?

KRETSCHMAR:
The most important thing we learned in the beginning was that there was just a lack of uniform screening for childhood
exposure to violence and trauma. We put a lot of effort into the development of the screener. We took information
from existing screeners, took data that we had collected previously on thousands and thousands of kids who have been
exposed to violence and trauma, and identified the questions that we could ask that best predicted how kids would
answer a much longer assessment. We were able to create these very short screeners. There are about fifteen questions,
they take on average four, five minutes, and essentially what we’re finding out is that these screeners are
really good at predicting who really has seen a lot of violence, who is experiencing trauma associated with that
violence. I think we’re probably close, at this point, to twenty thousand kids who have been screened since
July of 2012.

A lot of our research effort has focused on understanding what the kids in our community
were seeing and experiencing, figuring out how best to measure that in a consistent and uniform way, and then understanding
after the screening what needs to happen. What does a full assessment need to look like? What are the best treatments
for these kids? These kids, as you said, we’re talking about zero to eighteen. What might work in terms of a
therapy for an eight year old might not be appropriate for a seventeen year old.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
That leads me to another question. Given that you address the needs of children and teenagers in such a wide age
range, zero through eighteen, how did you adapt your methods to different age groups, and specifically to the youngest
children?

SMIALEK: I think in addition to the screening methods that
we use, we made sure when we were selecting the various evidence-based treatment modalities, that we were encompassing
some or selecting some that were appropriate for younger children. One of those that we selected was PCIT, the Parent-Child
Interactive Therapy, which we know is especially effective for younger children, and we also are able to use trauma-focused
cognitive behavioral therapy for younger children.

We also recognize that this is a really tough
area. It’s hard to find an appropriate way to intervene with children who are so young, because of the age that
they’re in in development. Here in Cuyahoga County, in addition to Defending Childhood, we have a number of
social service agencies and initiatives at the large scale level that deal with child well-being. One of those is
an initiative that’s dedicated to early childhood mental health. We do have the ability to refer into one of
the early childhood mental health services, which are separate and apart from Defending Childhood but again, I think
it kind of illustrates how we have fit Defending Childhood into the existing system and the existing infrastructure
that we have in Cuyahoga County so that if we come across a child who we can’t fit into PCIT or TFCBT, we know
that we have this additional referral source that we can tap into.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
How did you adapt and make use of evidence-based and promising practice into–

SMIALEK:
we worked a lot with a number of community based partners who have far more expertise than I do and that anybody
in my office has. When we were planning for the Defending Childhood initiative, there was a sub-committee that was
put together to specifically look at various services or various trauma modalities that would be appropriate for
Defending Childhood. We tapped into their brain power, their experience, their expertise, in order to come up with
some options that really made sense. We reviewed a number of different programs. We looked at not just therapies,
but also some community based group interventions, like the Families and Schools Together program, to make sure that
we were making smart decisions that would lead to good outcomes for us.

KRETSCHMAR:
In terms of the tools, we did a lot of work in establishing the screeners. Then, in the assessment process, we’re
using validated assessments, using validated and previously used questionnaires like the Child Behavior Checklist,
the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, to make sure we’re really measuring what we need to measure to best
be able to then refer kids into the appropriate services for them.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
In addition to providing direct services, you also focused on creating an infrastructure that would span the entire
county. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SMIALEK: What we wanted
to do was ensure that whatever we started was first of all, taken to scale, because as you said earlier, we have
a lot of crime in Cuyahoga County, and particularly in the city of Cleveland. I think that we are very well aware
of the number of kids who are exposed to violence. We want to be able to make a difference for as many of those children
as possible. If we’re going to take it to scale given the resources that we have, we knew that we had to work
with what’s already in place. It just made sense, as we were thinking through how to make the biggest impact
with the amount of resources that we had, how exactly would we do that. The answer to that was to build on top of
what we already have so that we can sustain it long term and make the biggest difference possible.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
What are some of the lessons for other counties that want to make changes on the level of infrastructure?

SMIALEK: I think there are several that kind Cuyahoga County can bring to the
table. The first is just to make sure that you take your time and do a thoughtful and thorough planning process.
I think that starts with doing a full environmental scan of the groups that are already in the neighborhood or in
the county or in the community, both groups who are interested in this issue, and who have the desire to be at the
table, and bringing them in and making sure that they have a relevant and meaningful role to play while they’re
engaged with the process.

I also think probably one of the most important lessons that we learned
here locally is that planning takes time and over time, things change. You have to make a promise to one another
that you will be flexible because the plan you write today, you may need to implement it a little differently tomorrow
when you’re finally ready to implement.

KRETSCHMAR: Something
else that we knew but was confirmed is that while you can have service providers and county employees and research
folks at the table, we’re talking about a program for and about kids. You need to have the involvement of the
kids. You need to understand what they’re experiencing, what their comfort level is with what we’re planning.
If you don’t have it, we can have a really, really great plan but if it’s not something that kids and families
are comfortable with, then it’s not going to work. Having that level of consumer involvement in the planning
process is really important. Also important is from day one, planning for sustainability of whatever it is you want
to implement, so thinking out a year or two years or three years ahead and say, “How are we going to make this
sustainable?” Which goes back to an earlier question around why we also focused on system issues in our project
is because if we can change the system, that’s a sustainable change. It doesn’t necessarily cost anything
to change the system like we’ve started to change it, but it can be really lasting.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL:
That’s really interesting. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

KRETSCHMAR:
Sure.

MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, from the Center
for Court Innovation and I’ve been speaking to Jill Smialek and Dr. Jeff Kretschmar about The Cuyahoga County
Defending Childhood Initiative. To read our report on the initiative, as well as our multi-site report, you can visit
our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks very much for listening.

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In this podcast, Center for Court Innovation researchers Rachel
Swaner, Lama Ayoub, and Elise Jensen discuss their National Institute of Justice funded report on the United
States Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program. The
program, which began in 2010, funded eight pilot sites across the country to address children’s exposure to
violence. The Center produced a series of reports on six of the eight sites, as well as a report that
condenses lessons learned across the sites. 

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Katheryn Lotsos and Stephen Forrester from the New York Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children discuss their organization’s approach to supervised
visitation. Supervised visitation is frequently required by courts in child welfare or domestic violence cases and
allows children to meet with non-custodial parents in a secure and controlled environment. The Society’s therapeutic
model includes safety planning, parent education classes, special training for the professionals supervising the
visits, and close collaboration with the courts.

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Center for Court Innovation researcher Sarah Picard-Fritsche discusses the risk-need-responsivity model for
working with offenders and the Center’s efforts to develop a screening tool for misdemeanor offenders.

The following is a transcript

Raphael:
Hi. I’m Raphael Pope-Sussman at the Center for Court Innovation and in today’s podcast, we’re looking
at risk-need assessment tools for offenders. Our guest is Sarah Fritsche, associate director of research here at
the Center. Sarah, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

SARAH
FRITSCHE: Thanks. Happy to be here.

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Wonderful. What
is risk-need?

FRITSCHE:  Well, risk-need-responsivity theory is essentially
a theory of crime prevention which has three core components. The risk principle, which suggests that courts and
treatment programs that are interested in reducing the risk of offenders should focus on those individuals coming
through the system who are at the highest risk for re-offense–as opposed to what we sometimes see happening, which
is lower risk offenders, we focus our resources on them based on an idea that they deserve a second chance or that
the higher risk offender is a lost cause.

All of those ideas are quite intuitive
but actually research evidence shows us that when we focus our resources on treating and intervening with and supervising
the higher risk group, that is when we achieve risk reductions and when we are able to get people out of the revolving
door where they keep coming through the jails over and over again.

When
we focus our resources on lower risk offenders, ironically enough or perhaps it’s not really an irony, I don’t
know, but unfortunately when we do that, what happens is that we sometimes increase risk because we put folks who
have pro-social networks and not very serious drug problems who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We
put them into intensive treatment and that exposes them to anti-social networks, that takes them away from their
job, that takes them away from their family, and this increases their risk for future offense and future involvement
in the justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN: What’s the origin of
this theory?

FRITSCHE:  The theory originates with two Canadian psychologists
in the late ’80s, early ’90s, James Bonta and his partner’s name was Andrews. They were actually developing
an assessment tool which is now one of the longest-used assessment tools in the field, called the “Level of Services
Inventory.” Their theories of criminal conduct are essentially psychological. Individual theories of criminal conduct
were what undergirded the assessment tool that they created. They came up with a theory– the main and most tested
principle in the theory is the risk principle, but there’s also two other components. One is the need principle,
which tells us that we should try to understand the specific needs of each individual person coming through the justice
system in order to give them the correct targeted treatment. It’s that part that is intuitive.

But without the correct assessment tools, we can’t figure out what that is. The third
component is responsivity, which means that we should develop treatment programs or therapeutic intervention programs
that respond to people’s learning styles and some clinical needs that might interfere with their ability to
recover, such as mental illness or trauma.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you talk a little
bit about what you’re working on in the Center and what is the Center’s focus right now in terms of risk-need
assessment?

FRITSCHE: Sure. I started working in this area about five years
ago and my interest in it grew out of one of the first studies that I did here at the Center, which was a study of
Brooklyn’s program, which they call the Universal Screening for Drug Court, for people in the criminal court
who might have the need for drug treatment. They were trying to find as many people as they could and send them into
drug court as an alternative to maybe a short-term jail sentence that they might get. They had a screening system
that was effectively just based on present charge. I guess my response to the system was that it was well intentioned
but that based on the research that I did that they probably needed a little more information to identify the individuals
that were most appropriate for drug court programming. A little more clinical information, maybe a little more criminal
history information.

I started looking around to see if anybody else had had
that idea and that’s where I ran into risk-need-responsivity theory. One of our first projects here that’s
really about this theory is testing the LSI-R, which I just described to you as one of the earliest tools in …

POPE-SUSSMAN: Just for listeners who aren’t so savvy, what does LSI-R stand for?

FRITSCHE: Oh, it stands for the Level of Services Inventory and it’s just a 54-item
assessment tool that they developed to assess individual offenders along the areas that we know may be related to
re-offense. We wrote a proposal to the National Institute of Justice to do a randomized controlled trial where we
looked at whether … we’re looking, we’re actually now analyzing and writing up the data, at whether the
treatment plans and outcomes of a drug court participant that was assessed using the LSI-R would be any different
than those where they didn’t get a standardized or RNR-based assessment. That was our first project that began
in 2010 and is ongoing and will be reported on soon.

Then shortly following
that project, the world of evidence-based assessment, evidence-based practice just however coincidentally really
exploded and a lot of the federal government agencies that we worked with and other non-profit organizations that
work in the justice system became very interested in some of these concepts– whether we could use evidence-based
validated assessments to learn more about what keeps offenders caught in this revolving door of being incarcerated
and re-offending very quickly. And whether we could then use that information or evidence to develop better programs
that are therapeutic interventions. The Center has a long history of trying to create therapeutic or problem-solving
interventions for offenders. This foray into this field was very natural for us.

Since
the evidence-based assessment research in the drug court started, we have picked up several new projects that are
in this area. At the moment, we are looking at a different assessment tool that’s similar to the LSI-R called
the COMPAS. Don’t ask me what that stands for because nobody really knows, but it’s a similar tool and
we’re looking at that specifically in a sub-population of mentally ill offenders because there’s a lot
of questions in the field as to whether these validated assessments that have been historically used to predict outcomes
for general felony populations will work in some of the sub-populations that are important in the justice system,
mentally ill offenders being one of them.

Then the other project that’s
very important in this field that we’re doing right now began specifically from misdemeanor offenders, which
is another important and understudied subgroup. We have, nationally in our justice system, about 10 million individuals
per year that come through our criminal courts on misdemeanor charges. We have a very underdeveloped understanding
or comprehension of what the clinical and social service needs and criminal risk of these individuals is. That gap
in the research is what brought us to develop and seek funding for the Misdemeanor Assessment Project, which is a
two-part project. First, to develop an assessment tool that can accurately give us a profile of the risk and needs
of misdemeanor offenders rooted in risk-need-responsivity theory, and secondly to develop an intervention that we
hope will effectively reduce risk for re-arrest in this population. Because the misdemeanor population is also quite
tricky in terms of therapeutic intervention because they may have very high needs. They may have very serious drug
problems. They may have mental illness. They may be traumatized. They may have long rap sheets. Their current charge
will not allow you to put them in a two-year drug treatment program such as a drug court no matter how badly they
may need it. We have to maintain legal proportionality.

The second part of
the Misdemeanor Assessment Project is specifically to develop short-term interventions including evidence-based cognitive
behavioral treatments for this population that we hope will at least advance the ball for them somewhat in terms
of reducing the clinical and social structural factors that cause them to come back into the system so quickly.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Are there specific projects that we’re rolling out?

FRITSCHE:Yes.
The Misdemeanor Assessment Project is a specific project. We’re at a stage now where we have developed a short
screening tool that we feel is feasible for people in criminal courts here in New York City and nationally to try
to get an idea of what the profile of their low-level offender population is in terms of risk and needs. This short
screening tool is currently being used in Cook County, which is essentially Chicago, with a pilot test of a program
they have for misdemeanor offenders who have been diverted from jail from traditional processing, court processing,
and are given some level of treatment. Based on our screening tool, they’re going to make an assessment of whether
to give them a high level of treatment because they’re high risk, or something a little less if they’re
a moderate risk, or basically just refer them to services if they’re low risk. In Cook County, we’re using
this tool as a test of the risk principle, basically.

The same short assessment
tool is being rolled out in New York City, in Brooklyn and Manhattan criminal courts as a part of a larger research
study to re-validate whether the items and domains that we think are predicting re-arrest in this population in New
York City … we’re going to test them again. We tested them once last year and we’re going to test them
again. That’s one product that we have that we’re refining but we’re also giving to the field to use
and test and then at the same time, we’re developing a short-term intervention for misdemeanor offenders that
we’re going to pilot test in the community courts in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn over the next six months.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Great. Longer term on the horizon, are there any further plans?

FRITSCHE: Yes. I think it’s sometimes a little hard to see past the next six months
especially for those of us who do research because we’re oftentimes quite reticent to make claims. I think that
there’s definitely a demand on the ground for concrete tools, curriculums, assessment instruments that can help
people move the needle from their default response to a lot of criminal behavior and overloaded criminal dockets–which
is to put people into short-term stays and detention–to having more evidence-based responses to this kind of crime
that have the potential to reduce risk.

I think that it’s a very timely
field not just for practitioners but politically and especially socially here in the United States, that there’s
currently a public debate about whether incarceration is an effective response to crime, especially low-level crime.
I think that our focus on these issues is really going to become … I hope it will become a part of practical solutions
and a part of the national conversation on alternatives to incarceration.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
That’s very exciting. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I’m Raphael Pope-Sussman. I’ve
been speaking with Sarah Fritsche, associate director of research at the Center for Court Innovation about risk/need
assessment tools. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thank
you for listening.

FRITSCHE: Thanks.

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Dr. Susan Chinitz, a psychologist with specialties in the areas of infant mental health and developmental disabilities
in infancy and early childhood, and a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
discusses the new Strong Starts Court Initiative, which will enhance the capacity of Family Court to bring positive
changes to court-involved babies and their families. (April 2015)

The
following is a transcript

SARAH SCHWEIG:
Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Dr. Susan Chinitz,
a psychologist with specialties in the areas of infant mental health and developmental disabilities in infancy and
early childhood. Professor of clinical pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of

Medicine
here in New York, she has extensive experience in child and infant mental health and recently she teamed up with
the Center for Court Innovation to craft what’s called the Bronx Infant Court, which aims to enhance the capacity
of Family Court to bring positive changes to court-involved babies and their families. Thanks for speaking with me
today and welcome.

SUSAN CHINITZ: Thank
you, Sarah. Thank you.

SCHWEIG: First off, you’re
a psychologist and an expert in infancy studies. What made you start thinking about the justice system and infants?
Can you talk a bit about what drove you to look at how court cases handle infants–cases involving infants or families
with infants.

CHINITZ: I direct a center up at
Einstein, as you said. It’s a therapy program for children under five years of age and many of the children
that we work with, a very large proportion of them are child welfare system involved. Children come to attention
at such a young age when something pretty significant or dramatic has happened to them and, certainly, that’s
the story of young children in the child welfare system. Our clinical population at Einstein has always had a very
robust number of children who have had allegations of neglect or abuse, who are in foster care, or otherwise under
court supervision. I’ve just had lots and lots of day-to-day experience with these children and their birth
parents and their foster parents.

Though the children struggle in their home
environments, which I guess by definition is true when they’re child welfare system involved, it also seemed
that the courts and the foster care agencies could be more protective of these children if they knew more about babies.
Sometimes in the absence of that knowledge, and totally inadvertently of course, the courts or the child welfare
system can inflict more harm on the children. So it seemed very important while we were working with the children
clinically, to also bring expertise to the systems that are making decisions about them every day.

SCHWEIG: Of course Family Court sees children of all ages. Could
you talk a little bit about what makes cases involving infants particularly different or difficult for courts to
handle?

CHINITZ: A lot of things–hard to know
even where to start but I’ll start with the fact that brain development is happening very, very rapidly during
these early stages of development, and we’ve learned through recent developmental neuroscience that children’s
brains’ development is very influenced by the environment and the context in which they live. In fact, in the field
we say that the brain recruits experience into its developing architecture. Children who have been removed from their
parents lose the biggest protection that children have; that bond with a committed and available caregiver. And we
know that that loss of a primary caregiver brings with it all kinds of risks to brain development.

It’s really out of nurture and security and engagement of a committed caregiver that
we see the brain develops. These children are struggling with attachment disruptions. Sometimes they’re struggling
with attachment disorders. If the interaction has been problematic, then they’re subject to exposure to violence
very often, instability in their care-giving as they move from caregiver to caregiver. There are just many, many
things that go on in the life of a young child during the stage of development of critical capacities; mediated by
brain development. It’s also a very important time for the consolidation of a secure attachment, so the whole
process of removing babies and moving them around in care is very detrimental to their development.

SCHWEIG: Maybe you can describe the traditional options available
for the court and dealing with cases involving infants and then how this new project is aiming to fill the gaps.

CHINITZ: Very interestingly, despite the fact that most
children become known to the courts because of abuse or neglect, or exposure to violence, there’s often very
little recommendation for relational parent-infant repair work. The typical interventions available through the courts
have been parenting classes, which means the parents attend a series of lectures about child development. But we’re
not identifying what went wrong in this particular dyad. Was it maternal depression? Was the child just so difficult
to manage that a parent just didn’t have enough support?

We have to really
understand what was the cause of the need to intervene with child welfare system intervention and then try to remediate
that, or even if we can’t remediate all of it, help the parent develop more safe and nurturing parenting skills
and help them learn to be with each other in ways that are healing to the child. We remove children but we don’t
do the critical work to repair what exactly went wrong. We’re trying to do that. We’re trying to evaluate
babies and parents and their relationship through this new project, so that the interventions that are court-mandated
will address the particular problems.

Not every family becomes child welfare
involved for the same reason, yet we’ve had one intervention of parenting classes. We want to tailor the interventions
to much better meet the needs of the babies and the parents. We have to help monitor these babies; there’s a
very high level of developmental delay and disability in children known to the foster care system and the courts
haven’t always known how to perform developmental surveillance, watching children’s development. What systems
are available to remediate that. You have to bring all kinds of expertise to the court in order for the court to
be a therapeutic agent that we think it can be through its authority and its involvement with the kids and families.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. I hear you saying that we’re moving
towards looking at the individual relationships between the infant and the parent, instead of just a catch-all approach.

CHINITZ: Right, exactly. Even babies have their own parenting
load. There are some easy babies and there are some very, very hard babies. We have to help identify what the baby
brings into the interaction in addition to what the parent does.

SCHWEIG:
Right. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the mechanism that’s being introduced here to Family Court and
how that’s going to work.

CHINITZ: The referrals
are going to, at least at the beginning until we are really up and running and see how this all works, the referrals
are going to come just through the particular judge who’s been selected through her usual intake process. As
she picks up new cases, we will look for the babies under three. In this project we’re going to target children
under three. We’ve been asked by our various stakeholders to work with babies who are in foster care but also
babies who have not been removed from their parents but are under court supervision due to concerns. We will be looking
for children under three whether or not they’re still home with their parents.

Then,
we’re going to have an Infant Court team coordinator. A full-time infant practitioner who’s going to work
in the Family Court in partnership with the judge. So there will then be already in-house expertise full-time on
infant development. This clinician or practitioner will help with the assessments of the babies and the parents,
and I should use this opportunity to say that we have very two generational focus in this project. We’re looking
to help the life trajectory and life outcomes of the parents as well as the children because children will only do
as well as their parents are able to do.

The infant practitioner will help
with the evaluation of the parent and the child and will assist the other people planning on the case; the foster
agency case worker, and others who do some planning in recommending particular interventions that the court and child
welfare system may not be as cognizant of as infant practitioners are. As examples, we have early Head Sart programs
that are very, very rich in child development resources. We have home visiting programs, which we know improve the
life trajectory of vulnerable children, yet we don’t see courts or foster agencies getting children involved
in a early Head Start or involved in home visiting, but an infant practitioner will have a broader array of the knowledge
of what’s out there for babies.

The infant coordinator will help with
assessment. She will help with referrals. Then we hope to have very frequent team conferences about these children
and families that will include the lawyers but will also include the community providers that were working with the
families. We’re hoping to get everybody together on a monthly basis to help monitor progress; particularly,
to help solve problems so that families are really getting what they need to get. There are no barriers to their
getting what they get. That we can keep a close eye on the case and hopefully move a little bit more quickly than
usual towards permanency because we’re really front-loading services and we’re giving a lot of attention
to the cases early on.

We’re hoping, also, to develop a more collaborative
approach and to try to leave some of the adversarial approach behind as everybody puts their heads together to think
about how to better serve babies and their families.

SCHWEIG:
As a last takeaway, what would you hope to see a few years down the line with this project? Would you like to see
it replicated, would you like to see it expanded outside of the Bronx? What’s your vision?

CHINITZ:
Babies are such a large presence in the child welfare system and in the courts. In 2013, which is the last year that
we’ve got numbers for, there was 711 just in the Bronx alone; babies under two, just in the Bronx alone. That’s
a lot of children who are living in very vulnerable situations. Young children remain the largest cohort of kids
who become court-involved every year. Yeah, we’d like to see infant expertise in all of the Family Courts. It’s
a system that does intervene every day in the life of these children and they should be imbued with expertise.

It should be a place where judges have access to the best information they can have
about babies. Yeah, my dream is that we’re in every borough of the city bringing infant expertise to judges
and helping evaluate babies so that they get the right service. Like we said, keeping a close eye on cases, moving
children to permanency as quickly as possible. That’s really important. A child has to have security with at
least one ongoing primary caregiver. We see enormous pain and suffering when children are in limbo. Year after year
if they start to have behavior problems, they can’t catch up with their learning problems, we need to bring
permanency and security.

Those things; bringing expertise, so decisions are
good decisions. Bringing resources to these families as soon as the case becomes identified, so the court can be
an agent in positive change and resolving the permanency as early as possible.

SCHWEIG:
Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

CHINITZ:
Thank you.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court
Innovation, and I’ve been speaking with Dr. Susan Chinitz about the complexities of infancy and infants who
become involved in family court cases. To learn more about the Bronx Infant Court or the Center for Court Innovation,
visit www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

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New York University Law School Professor James Jacobs, author of “The
Eternal Criminal Record” (Harvard University Press), discusses the proliferation of electronic criminal
records and the challenges they pose for a free society. (March 2015)

The following is a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN: Hi, I’m Raphael Pope ­Sussman of the Center for Court Innovation,
and today I am speaking with James Jacobs, professor of criminal law at New York University and the director of NYU
Center for Research in Crime and Justice. Jacobs is the author of the new book, “The Eternal Criminal Record,”
which examines the public nature of criminal records and the impact they can have on everything from voting rights
to employability for 16 million Americans.

Professor Jacobs, thank you for
speaking with me today and welcome.

JAMES JACOBS: Thank you. It’s my
pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN: So starting out, why do you write this book now?

JACOBS: I got interested in criminal records really in the early 2000s when I was working
on a book about gun control and the Brady Law and the creation of the national instant check system, which enables
federally licensed firearms dealers to determine instantaneously whether a prospective firearms purchaser has a criminal
record. So I came at this from that kind of law enforcement perspective thinking that was truly an amazing accomplishment.
Most people that work on criminal records come at it out of concern about collateral consequences. I too am concerned
about collateral consequences. I deal with that in my courses and in some writing, but that was not my first impulse,
and the book itself is not a book about collateral consequences. It’s a book about the information infrastructure
of the criminal justice system.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Let’s talk about the 60
million Americans with criminal records. What does that include?

JACOBS: What
triggers a criminal record is dependent upon the law of each state, and so states differ to some extent on the lowest
level crimes. Here in New York we have a lot of crimes that have been redefined as violations and not all of those
end up on your criminal record. Traffic offenses do not. Juvenile offenses also differ from one state to another.
But a very interesting question is whether a criminal record includes arrests as well as convictions, and the general
answer to that is, “Yes,” because our criminal records system is arrest-based. So once you are fingerprinted
and booked, that establishes an arrest record and it is not normally erased even if you are not convicted.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Something that really stood out to me in the book is the difference between
the American justice system, in which the right to know is privileged above all else, and the European system, where
there’s more of a focus on the right to privacy. Can you talk about that?

JACOBS:
Well, it’s a great example of American exceptionalism. I don’t think there are many if any other countries
in the world in which criminal records are as public as they are in the United States, and I think that brings out
our commitment to both free speech and to the transparency of governmental operations. Our court records have always
been open to the public, to anyone who wants to see them.

In European countries,
that’s not the case. You have to have a reason and convince the court you have a reason to look at a court record.
Our police records are not open to anyone who wants to see them, but our state legislatures have passed many laws
which give permission, authorization, to various industries and businesses and voluntary associations to obtain police
records. There’s a big difference. In Europe they consider a criminal record to be personal information. Here
we consider it to be quintessentially public information.

These are two different
systems with different values. I don’t want to say one is right. There is a value to an open society. There
is a value to open courts. But that also means that there’s negatives, and people are stigmatized by their criminal
records, and they can’t be kept confidential.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Do you believe
in a right to be forgotten?

JACOBS: I don’t really believe in a right
to be forgotten. I don’t like the idea of changing history. To me it conjures up one of those movies about Eastern
European dictatorships, and people going in and changing the historical record, and was this guy ever arrested or
was he ever convicted for corruption. People have a right to know.

In general,
I believe that we are better off with more information rather than less information. I’m one of these old fashioned
guys who really has a strong commitment to First Amendment rights. I believe people have a right to speak and to
convey information that they have. It’s also very difficult in the information age that we live in now to bury information.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Here in New York, low-level offenders are theoretically eligible to apply
for a certification of rehabilitation, which pending completion of a sentence restores a range of rights and removes
for example, legal barriers to employment. Why do you prefer this policy to the expungement or sealing of records?

JACOBS: Well, I think I do prefer certifications of rehabilitation to expungement. I
don’t like changing history. There’s all kinds of confusions about changing history. A libel suit could
come up. A newspaper could say this person now running for office, or such and such was once convicted of a crime.
The person could sue the newspaper and say, “I’ve never been convicted of a crime because it was expunged;
therefore it doesn’t exist.” You know, it doesn’t change.

We
shouldn’t be thinking of changing history. History is what it is. I have no objection, in fact, I think it’s
a sensible idea to try to help people overcome the bad and dangerous things they’ve done in their past. People
do change. They can demonstrate that change. So maybe we should have more information rather than less, and this
certification of rehabilitation is a step in the right direction. If the state recognizes that you have acted honorably
and credibly and in a law abiding way since the time of your conviction, giving you the certificate to recognize
that, I think is a very sound policy.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Homing in on the employability
of former offenders. What is “Ban the Box”?

JACOBS: “Ban the Box” is a movement
that started out in California, maybe a decade or more ago. A group of activists were lobbying to have the city of,
I believe it was in San Francisco or Oakland, to stop putting on their employment applications, “Have you ever
been convicted of a crime?” They said, “Eliminate that question because it screens out people to early
in the employment process.” It can be used as an automatic screen so that anyone who puts, “Yes, I have been convicted”
isn’t even considered regardless of the circumstances.

But the way that
it was, and this isn’t always understood, the way that it was lobbied for in the beginning, anyway, and the
way that it’s been enacted in many, many cities now and some states, is that it doesn’t mean that you’re
never asked. It means that you’re not asked in the initial employment application, and so it gives the public
employer a chance to look at you as an individual, and if they get to the point where they’re ready to make
an offer, or you get fairly far down in the hiring process, then they ask the question, and they get the answer,
and they’re looking at the answer in the context of someone for whom they’ve already developed a positive
impression. So that arguably should be helpful.

POPE-SUSSMAN: You worry about
the proliferation of intelligence databases that track persons who have not committed criminal acts, but are identified
as likely offenders. Those labeled dangerously mentally ill or alleged gang members. What does it mean for American
democracy that we’re becoming more and more reliant on these kinds of deterministic tools?

JACOBS:
Well, part of this is the information revolution washing right across policing and law enforcement and courts. So
we have the capacity to keep and create far more records than ever in our history. We can compile all kinds of databases
and those databases can have all kinds of consequences. So if we keep a database, as I talk about in the book, on
gang membership for example, there is some legitimacy to that. But people don’t get a hearing on whether they’re
in the gang. They wouldn’t know whether they’re in the gang database.

We
don’t know who has access to the gang database. For a gang database to make sense it has to be available to
a lot of police officers who may come into contact with someone and have some legitimate reason to be interested
in whether they are a member of a gang or not, as well as prosecutors. But that kind of information could be very
detrimental to somebody, and it could also be inaccurate.

You know, it’s
not all that clear what it means to be a gang member. So I mean we have to be very careful about putting those kinds
of labels on people, and then doubly careful about who has access to that information. Because we don’t even
know how accurate it is, and in fact as I talk about in the book and in some articles I’ve written, these gang
databases have proliferated all over the place. So I mean, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are
listed as gang members. It’s very hard to get off these databases once you’re in them. So I worry about
that.

The issue of the dangerous mentally ill is very interesting because
after the Sandy Hooks and some of the other mass shootings, there’s been a lot of calls for getting better intelligence
databases on people who are mentally ill and dangerous so that they cannot purchase a firearm. Right? We don’t
want people who are dangerous to have–so we create databases. Once we create a database and we insert somebody’s
name and we populate the database with people’s names, we are labeling them as “mentally ill and dangerous.”
Well, if I was an employer and, you know, the government has you on a list as “mentally ill and dangerous.” You know,
and they won’t sell you a firearm, I’m not so thrilled about inviting you into my organization when there
are hundreds of people who are applying for these jobs who are not mentally ill and dangerous.

Most
people, the vast majority of people who have mental illness in their history are not dangerous. So if you can label
people, whimsically label them, and they get onto databases as “mentally ill and dangerous’ without a hearing, without
a way off, without knowing how they got on, I think that’s something to be very concerned about. And interestingly
enough a lot of people in the mental health community have resisted cooperating with the government’s efforts
to compile lists of people who are mentally ill and dangerous.

So now we have
two groups competing. We have the people concerned about mass killings. They say, “What’s wrong with you?
You should be giving us all this information so that we can prevent the next mass killing.” And then you have
people in the mental health community saying, “This is so unlikely to prevent a mass killing, but what it is
likely to do is to stigmatize hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people and maybe even deter them from
seeking out assistance with problems of mental illness.”

So life is complicated.

POPE-SUSSMAN: I am Raphael Pope Sussman , and that was James Jacobs, professor of criminal
law at New York University and the author of the new book, “The Eternal Criminal Record” from Harvard University
Press. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation please visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

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At the kick-off summit for the Minority Youth Violence Prevention
initiative, Dr. Joel Fein, a pediatrician and emergency medicine physician at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
discusses youth relationships with authority, family dynamics, and how trauma and stress affect the developing brain.
(February 2015)

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William R. Kelly, professor of sociology
and director of the Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice Research at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses
his new book, “Criminal
Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment,” and the costs of mass incarceration.

The following is
a transcript

RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi. This is Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m speaking with William Kelly,
professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of the new book, Criminal Justice at the
Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment, from Columbia University Press. Professor Kelly, thank you for speaking
with me today, and welcome.

WILLIAM KELLY: It
is my pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Why is this a crossroads
in the American criminal justice system?

KELLY:
I believe we’re at a decision point that was triggered from the recession that began in 2008, that caused states
to start taking a hard look at how they spend money. They began to realize that crime control was a very expensive
proposition, and that began the discussion affecting about how might we go about doing this differently, primarily
motivated by trying to save public revenue. That seems to have begun to evolve into a broader discussion of, not
only saving money, but trying to be more effective in how we go about the business of administering criminal justice.

It’s a crossroads because of the opportunities that have been presented by economic
considerations, really a fair amount of lead from the U.S. Justice Department. Eric Holder, when he was the attorney
general, launched a discussion about being “smart on crime.” And those types of phrases and that type of thinking
has really begun to take hold.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Your book explores the origins and evolution of America’s fixation on this idea of being “tough on crime.” Can
you give our audience a sense of what that’s translated into in terms of policy?

KELLY:
Beginning in the early 1970s, we shifted policy rather dramatically from focusing more on rehabilitation than on
punishment. The events of the 1960s, 1970s–high crime rates, race riots, campus protests, led to the evolution of
a focus on controlling crime primarily through the mechanism of punishment. That policy, at the time, made really
quite perfect intuitive sense. The problem is disorder; the remedy is punishment. Policymakers got it; the public
got it. That launched decades of what we call “crime control,” or “tough on crime” policies that led to, among other
things, a really substantial capital investment in things like prisons, extraordinary expansion of the criminal justice
system, fundamental changes in statutes like sentencing laws that shift discretion away from judges to more determinate
sentences that, in the end, are more severe, changes in parole policies and laws that keep inmates in prison longer
and longer.

As the dust has settled on 45 plus years of tough on crime policy,
we see the largest prison system in the world. We are the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
I think the public is getting to be familiar with the statistics that we have 5 percent of the world’s population,
but 25 percent of the world’s inmates. The image that the world has about the U.S., is the use of incarceration,
which is certainly a distinguishing point, but that’s not the end result of the reach of the American criminal
justice system. It is much bigger, much broader, and deeper than that. Jails serve to incarcerate huge numbers of
individuals on a day-to-day basis. Probation and parole, versions of community supervision, also have very extensive
reaches in terms of supervising and trying to control criminal offenders.

The
end result of this has been a fairly deliberate march, decade after decade, into developing a fairly efficient system
of punishment. Unfortunately, as it turns out, punishment doesn’t work. It’s legitimate to want to punish somebody
for punishment’s sake. That’s fine, but I think part of the bigger picture here is we need to appreciate
that retribution as a motivation for punishment has no utility other than some emotional satisfaction or emotional
release that we get from an eye-for-an-eye type of approach.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What was the biggest revelation for you in researching and writing your book?

KELLY:
Now that is a really good question. I would say the greatest revelation is that a fairly comprehensive package of
reforms that I talk about in the book, that are evidence-based, for which we have sufficient scientific research
indicating that these are effective mechanisms, that that package of reform is feasible. It is doable. It is cost-effective,
and it can accomplish the goal of enhancing public safety, reducing victimization, and saving money.

I think the thing that’s the most troubling thing about it, about the path forward, is not
so much the mechanics of what reform should look like. In my mind, the most concerning challenge is changing how
we think about crime and punishment, changing the culture, not so much of the public, but the culture of the administration
of criminal justice. We’ve all been pretty much focused on trying to punish people, and it’s difficult
to change the environment, the day-to-day working environment of probation officers, of law enforcement officials,
of, in-particular, prosecutors. Some individuals will embrace some reform more than others, pretty much as we saw
what happened with crime control decades ago.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What are the most promising reforms or proposed reforms out there?

KELLY:
Diversion is the key in terms of overall umbrella policy going forward. We should reserve prison, which all evidence
indicates is criminogenic in and of itself–we should reserve incarceration for those people, those offenders, that
we reasonably, truly, fear, violent offenders, clearly habitual offenders, not just somebody who has a third strike.
Those are the individuals that we need to incarcerate. That should reduce the prison population dramatically. Everybody
else should have some version of a balance between control, compliance, accountability on the one hand, and rehabilitation,
behavioral change, on the other.

Another major challenge is the scope and
scale of the criminogenic circumstances that bring criminal offenders into the justice system in the first place.
We know that poverty and crime are linked, but today we know that it’s much more than just, “I don’t
have money because I’m poor. I’m going to have to go out and commit a crime.”

There
are clear neurodevelopmental implications of living in poverty. There are clear neurocognitive implications of being
in an environment of violence, and all the factors that are correlated with poverty play out in a variety of different
ways, including mental illness, substance abuse, things like that, but a much bigger and ever-evolving list of implications
in terms of the less-visible neurodevelopmental problems. If you ask the basic question, “Why didn’t punishment
work?” The answer is, “Because punishment doesn’t change somebody’s mental illness. Punishment
doesn’t address addiction recovery. Punishment doesn’t fix somebody who has a neurocognitive deficit or
impairment.” Punishment doesn’t address why many people commit crime.

Now,
this is not an excuse for crime. Criminals commit bad acts and they need to be held accountable, and we need to keep
the public safe as we attempt to change their behavior. In my mind, and I believe the evidence pretty clearly supports
this, that environment of behavioral change is not prison, but rather a balance of supervision and control in the
community, and vigorous efforts at behavioral change.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I’m wondering what you think the ultimate goal of reform is. Is all policy dictated by the bottom line?

KELLY: You know, I think the thing that’s going to
move the public and policymakers in the direction of serious criminal justice reform is precisely that, the money
issue. We can debate until the end of time what is morally correct, what is ethically correct, what is fair, and
what is just, but if we want to attract attention from a variety of different perspectives, and I think that’s
precisely what has happened here, the reason that the Koch brothers and Right on Crime are at the same table as the
ACLU is the same reason that we had sentencing reform in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. We had both political
parties concerned with different things, but with the same solution.

Republicans,
the conservatives, were concerned about judges being too lenient. Liberals were concerned about unfairness and discrimination.
The remedy was, get judges out of the picture. I think it’s the same thing here. What brings the Koch brothers
and Right on Crime to the table, at least initially, is the financial issue. What brings the ACLU and liberals to
the table is that we can do a better job of this. We can make it a fairer system, but also, perhaps, a more effective
system.

I think they’re at the table and I think they’re
heading down the same road. That road is one that appreciates the fact that, while behavioral change may be expensive,
it is not nearly as expensive as what we have been doing in terms of simply incarcerating individuals. The evidence
indicates that, in the moment, using interventions to change behavior is generally cheaper than incarceration, and
I think what policymakers sometimes fail to appreciate is that, for every offender that we can effectively change
behavior, every time they don’t reoffend, the cash register doesn’t ring. The cost savings we can incur
now will reap benefits longer term if we can reduce recidivism.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How should we define success?

KELLY: I think
success is multidimensional. After a period of serious reform effort, can we look back and say, “We have really
developed a system that is more cost-effective”? That’s important, but that is not the end game. The end
game, really, is public safety. Can we then, at some point, say, “We have effectively by whatever amount reduced
recidivism”? Can we say that we have a system that does not unnecessarily place all the rest of us who are not
involved in crime at the risk of being a victim?

Public support–does the
public believe that justice is being done? Reducing inequity in terms of race and ethnic concentrations of individuals
in the justice system, and, ultimately, the extent of which we can take individuals who grow up in circumstances
many of us would find foreign and horrific, can engage them in sufficient behavioral change to become productive
members of society.

POPE-SUSSMAN: Thank you.

KELLY: My pleasure.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman for the Center for Court Innovation, and I have been speaking with William Kelly,
author of the new book, Criminal Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime and Punishment from Columbia University
Press. For more information on the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.

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Our Lady of Lourdes Memorial Hospital in Binghamton, New York is working with community partners to develop
a restorative, strength-based program that will divert high-risk youth from gang involvement as well as violent behavior.
At the kick-off summit for the Minority
Youth Violence Prevention initiative, Nancy Frank and Ralphalla Richardson discuss how they became interested
in partnering with police to help stop the cycle of harm in some of Binghamton’s struggling neighborhoods.

The following is a transcript

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today, I am just outside Atlanta, Georgia,
for the first summit for the Minority Youth Violence Prevention Initiative out of the Office of Minority Health at
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who partnered with the Office of Community Oriented Policing at
the U.S. Department of Justice. Today, I’m here with Ralphalla Richardson and Nancy Frank from Lourdes Memorial
Hospital in Binghamton. Just to start off, Nancy, who is the director, will just talk a little bit about why you
guys got interested in Minority Youth Violence Prevention.

NANCY FRANK: As
a hospital system, we are part of a department called Youth Services Department, and we’ve been running programs,
youth development programs, since 1996. We have been running juvenile justice programs for youth, juvenile justice
prevention programs, and being a hospital system, we also are looking at mitigating some of the risk factors for
the social determinants of health. One area that we’ve really wanted to get into is the restorative justice
area of being able to look at youth violence with a different kind of lens. One of the programs we currently run
is a detention alternative after school program, but these kids are already in the juvenile justice system. We’ve
talked about wanting to get kids before they enter the system and use more of a preventative approach. We have, for
many years, been providing youth services in our county–in Broome County–and also in Binghamton. That was our interest
in getting this program together.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. Maybe Ralphalla can
talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve been doing with the youth. I know we had a conversation before
about some trips you guys take and what you see that affecting with the kids you’re working with.

RALPHALLA RICHARDSON:  Because we’ve been doing the detention alternative
after school program for so long, we’ve learned some really cool things. Like by taking the kids and exposing
them to just different situations, different environments, you get a very immediate and visceral reaction, so we
implemented a lot of that into our, we’re calling it BCAST in our area, Binghamton Community and Schools Together.
What we’re hoping to do is do some team-building trips. Like our local ski resort has a ropes course, so one
of our first big trips is all the kids in the program are going to go out, do some ropes course, do some team-building.
But we’re also going to do trips to science museums as incentives to keep them going but also then do other
trips to NICUs, kind of show them the adverse effects of getting involved in risky behaviors.

SCHWEIG:
NICUs is…

RICHARDSON: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

SCHWEIG:
Oh, okay.

RICHARDSON: Also doing maybe interacting with some parolees recently
that are their own age. But also maybe going into what it’s actually like in jail because there’s this
very glamorized version of it but actually let them see what it really is. You get more of an immediate switch in
behavior, and then doing the follow-up work with our in-school groups, working with the SROs there, doing structured
recreation activities after school where the SROs can also be involved and build those positive relationships. We
also—

FRANK: SRO being the School Resource Officer.

SCHWEIG:
Okay.

RICHARDSON: That’s our police component to build that healthy relationship
with the local law enforcement but also to address some of the parent behaviors. They have their own negative impression
of the police force so to work with them to improve that but also to address their own immediate needs to improve
the home environment, so that some of the changes the kids are working on have a better chance of sticking. So the
entire family can improve.

SCHWEIG: One thing that either of you could answer
it sounds like is that partnership with police. How did you guys really establish that? I feel like every city is
very different in terms of the relationship the police have with other agencies. Sometimes they tend to be more siloed,
sometimes they’re more out in the community, so maybe you can give a little bit of a sense of what that was
like.

FRANK: Well, we started this process by reaching out to the mayor of
the city of Binghamton who, ultimately, oversees the police department for Binghamton. He was very interested in
doing this program, so he’s on board. They’ve started a Youth Success initiative through the city of Binghamton,
and the police also sit on that. It’s a Community Youth Services Board. They’re going to be acting as our
advisory board in a sense. That’s one area that we have to start focusing a little bit more on is the police
involvement.

However, with partnering with the BOCES programs, there are kids
from Binghamton who are attending BOCES schools, so there are two different they’re called learning centers,
east and west. Each of those buildings have School Resource Officers who some are from the Binghamton Police, some
are also from our Broome County Sheriff’s Department. Our kids are pretty transient, so many times they move
from Binghamton to other parts of the county. To be able to have that good relationship not only with the city police
force but with the county sheriff’s department is not a bad thing as well. We’re still working on that
aspect of it, but it’s a new development. It’s not really something we’ve done before. We’ve
had a lot of interaction with the county attorney’s office, probation, but not so much law enforcement. That’s
the piece that we really are excited about adding to our existing program.

SCHWEIG:
Yeah. That’s what this whole summit is about is ways of partnering…

FRANK:
Right.

SCHWEIG: … across health and policing.

FRANK:
One thing we’re real excited about is we’re having a community-wide restorative justice training. We’ve
been able to use the funds through this grant to bring in a gentleman by the name of Duke Fisher who is a nationally
renowned expert on restorative justice models. He’s had a lot of success working in schools, college campuses,
communities, and he’s going to be coming in and doing a free training for our community stakeholders. From that
training, we’re going to identify facilitators to actually be able to perform restorative justice activities.
It’s something that’s not being done in our community, and we’re really excited that this grant’s
going to allow us to bring that. That’s a sustainability piece because when this funding goes away, to have
people that are trained to continue a different way of looking at juvenile justice and youth offenders. We’re
excited about that.

SCHWEIG: That’s wonderful. Maybe a last question
to add is just from your experience and starting this process, do you have any takeaways, any lessons for any of
the other sites however anecdotal it might be just because you’re in a very unique situation where you’re
in a hospital, you have this program already in place? Any sort of suggestions?

RICHARDSON:
I would say just don’t be afraid to think of unique ways of doing them. Just because you haven’t done it
before doesn’t mean you can’t, and it’s people that you maybe are hesitant to think of that would
want to partner with you are more than willing to because that was one of the things when we started letting in our
community, letting other agencies that we hadn’t even approached when we were writing it, writing the proposal.
You know, “We got this,” and telling them what we were doing. They were so supportive, and they’re
all like, “What can we do?” Once you actually tell people what you’re doing, you’d be surprised
how many people actually want to help you and want to be involved in the process.

FRANK:
One example of that is there’s the Healthy Lifestyles Coalition that was funded by a private not-for-profit
foundation, and they’re running out of money. But they have established great connections in a particular neighborhood
in Binghamton with the parents of the kids in that community, and they do a lot of cooking classes and things like
that. We’re sort of starting a discussion with them to say, “Well, how can we go in then with this established
group and do some of the things that we want to do? We can pay for the food…” Just those connections, and
we’re a small community. Everybody kind of knows everybody, so it’s been …

SCHWEIG:
Using other organization’s knowledge or populations-

FRANK: Yes.

SCHWEIG: Seems really helpful.

RICHARDSON: Their
connections, especially with what Nancy was saying with the parents. That’s a really hard group to break into,
but this particular agency, they’ve had some great success in engaging these parents–

FRANK:
And neighborhood.

RICHARDSON: Yeah. It’s a neighborhood that really could
benefit from this violence prevention because it’s a rougher neighborhood, and it’s a generational: generations
of poverty, generations of high school dropouts. That we can actually use their connections, and they’ll almost
vouch for us. They’ll be like, “These people are okay. You can”–

FRANK: Right.
Trust them.

RICHARDSON: It’s giving us access to people we hadn’t
even–

FRANK: Thought about. Right.

SCHWEIG:
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Hopefully you enjoy the rest of the visit. I’m
Sarah Schweig, and I’ve been speaking with Nancy Frank and Ralphalla Richardson of Lourdes Memorial Hospital
in Binghamton, New York, about gaining trust within communities and partnering with people you might not have normally
thought of. To learn more about the Minority Youth Violence Prevention initiative, visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

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