Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University explains what ex-prisoners need to successfully reintegrate
into society, and how California’s correction system–once a national model–lost its way.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, and welcome to “New Thinking,” a podcast produced by the Center for Court
Innovation. Today I’m talking to Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University and one of the nation’s
foremost criminologist.

She’s the author of 11 books about crime and public policy. And her research
on parole reform, prison reintegration and sentencing policy has fueled changes in policies throughout the nation.
A criminologist with a background in empirical research and social science, Dr. Petersilia is also faculty co-director
for the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

JOAN PETERSILIA: My pleasure.

WOLF:
It seems to me that California is the perfect place to be for someone with a professional focus on parole reform
and prisoner reintegration. You, in fact, have described California’s prison system as a paradox of excess and deprivation.

I gather you mean by that and I’m quoting your article that appeared last year in the University
of Chicago’s journal, Crime and Justice, “no other state spends more on its correction system and gets back less.”
I thought maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that idea for me.

PETERSILIA:
Well, California spends $49,000 a year per inmate and that’s compared to the annual national average, which is about
$24,000.

So we spent twice as much and yet our recidivism rate is 70 percent, meaning that 70
percent of everybody who leaves the California prisons will come back to prison within three years. And that compares
to a national average of about 40 percent.

So we spend more and we actually get less in terms
of reduced recidivism and reduced crime. And that was what I meant by kind of a paradox. You would think if you’re
spending the most, it would in fact be doing the best. But we’re spending the most and doing the worst.

WOLF:
Maybe you can bring me up to date on what has happened in California regarding this recent federal court ruling that
requires the state to bring the prison population down from about 158,000 to 115,000. And I understand that would
still leave the state’s prisons at about 137 percent of their designed capacity.

PETERSILIA:
You will find two court cases that we have had in litigation for over 15 years in California that finally reached
kind of the end point in terms of the judges saying enough is enough. They have asked the Department of Corrections
to basically give better medical care and dental care. So that’s what the two cases revolve around.

And
the courts have said that the overcrowding in California prisons is such that there’s no way an inmate can get adequate
medical care or dental care. So the case has evolved but now become a test of overcrowding. And so, courts have ruled
that in order to be able to deliver the adequate medical care, the prison system must in fact become uncrowded. And
in the judge’s opinion, that means reducing from about 170,000, which is what we have today, to about a 135,000 or
so within the next two years.

WOLF: You have recognized in your
research and your writing and advocacy that prisoners suffer disproportionately from health problems, mental illness,
addiction; and clearly, would benefit and need medical care. But I imagine you feel that just releasing them without
any kind of treatment services doesn’t really address the underlying issue or the deeper issue of reintegration.

PETERSILIA: Well, prisoners, as you’ve said, are an incredibly sick
population. They are physically about 10 years older on average. If you take a 50-year old, (their health) will look
like a 60-year old.

So what’s happened to the U.S. prison population as sentences have gotten
longer and as the population has aged, and as medical costs, all medical costs, not only for prisoners but for people
outside of prison, have escalated over the last decade, this has just kind of become a perfect storm.

We
actually spend in California $14,000 per inmate for medical care. In the outside free citizens the average is about
$4,000.

WOLF: It’s interesting because again that’s another example
I guess of your – the paradox of excess and deprivation. I mean to spend so much more on prisoner healthcare and
yet get so little really.

In your research, in your work, you know, you focused a lot on prisoner
integration. What’s at stake here? Why is it important to focus on this issue and is it being lost now in the budget
crunches that so many states, including California, are facing and issues like overcrowding?

PETERSILIA:
Well, through that article that you mentioned—and I love the word “excess” leading to kind of less than public safety
because another example of this is in the parole system, which we’re now addressing.

California
is the only state that everybody who leaves prison goes on formal parole supervision for one to three years; usually
an average of about two and a half. Other states, again, send maybe 30 to 40 percent of prisoners to parole. So when
people get out, they in parole in most states select the most dangerous, put them on parole supervision, drug test
them, watches them closely, and then violate them if they commit a new crime or serious violation of parole.

California
has, again, incredible excess. Everybody—and that means 120,000 people who leave prison in California each year—goes
on parole supervision, which means that nobody really gets watched very closely.

So again, we
have excess of kind of what you would imagine kind of legal control, but very little public safety because it really
means, you know, one size fits all ends up meaning one size fits no one.

Here we saw a classic
example of Phillip Garrido, a sex offender who, you know, abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard and kept her as a – I guess
you’d have to call it a sex slave in his backyard and he fathered two of her children. And people have to ask the
question: how is it that he was on parole for 10 years and nobody knew he was doing this kind of thing?

And
when you know the parole system, it didn’t – wasn’t surprising to me at all because of the 120,000 people in California
the parole agents are trying to watch, and we only have about 5,000 parole agents, so they’re just simply spread
too thin

WOLF: I actually had read something a few years ago; I
think it was in 2005. California was experimenting I thought with putting fewer people on parole.

PETERSILIA:
Well, we are actually right now as we speak, our legislature is voting this week on a major, major – I mean it’s
the most important thing I think that has happened to California corrections in at least 20 years. Our legislature
is now voting on a parole reform package which will do three things.

It will place only high
risk people and moderate risk people on active parole supervision. Then it will shorten the length of time that people
are on parole. So people who are doing well on parole can actually discharge their parole at one year instead of
three years.

And then, probably most importantly, is the third aspect: if you violate parole
in California and your violation is only a technical violation, meaning you tested positive for drugs, let’s say,
or missed an appointment, you no longer will be sent to prison. You’ll only serve time in a local jail. That will
cut our prison population significantly.

WOLF: Are you concerned
that in cutting the number of prisoners on parole the result will not necessarily be higher quality supervision for
those who are still on parole, but it will just be the same kind of supervision that’s already being delivered?

PETERSILIA:
Well, I think the next major issue that criminologists and those interested in crime control have to face is that
what happens when prisoners are released back to communities where the services that are necessary for their success
are in fact being cut. And so, many of us who studied re-entry know that it wasn’t just about getting them off parole.
That really was not the intent.

The intent was to get them simply off surveillance and getting
them into some services plus surveillance. We know that what works is not simply sending somebody to treatment alone.
That hasn’t worked, and also, doesn’t work if you simply, you know, put them on electronic monitoring without services.

So a lot of the research shows that you must combine treatment with a kind of deterrence or surveillance.
Unfortunately, what is now happening is in most states, because of the pressure to reduce people from prisons, we’re
all going to see a lot of releases. We’re going to see releases from prison; we’re going to see releases from parole;
and we’re going to see technical violators not being sent back to prison.

Now I’m in favor of
doing that if the offender is low risk. But I was never in favor of it to simply let them out without anything. And
that doesn’t do anybody any good and threatens public safety, so the plan was always to provide services. So what
we’re getting is kind of half of the plan but the key ingredient missed.

WOLF:
You’ve participated in discussions here at the Center for Court Innovation that explored the topic of failure and
what we can learn from failed initiatives. With that in mind, I was wondering if you could tell me what re-entry
reforms have you tested in California that you think work or perhaps don’t work but tell us important lessons.

PETERSILIA:
Well, I’ve become involved in a small project that is counted across California as being one of the most successful
re-entry projects at a local level. And I’ve learned the lesson about what it takes to make re-entry successful.
And it’s more than simply programs. You know, an offender is more than the sum of his program.

And
we used to think if we just got them into the right program, whether it be a drug treatment facility or an employment
or work training, that that would be enough. It clearly isn’t enough. Even once you get those three things, and I
think the three keys of re-entry are addiction under control, stability and housing and a job. If you get all those
three things going, it’s still kind of isn’t enough we’ve learned. And you’ve really got to have kind of that community
support.

And with law enforcement, with children, with families, they’re all part of kind of
this network or constellation of support for offenders who eventually go straight and stay straight. We have some
success of what it means to get somebody to go straight in the short-run. We actually have pretty good success at
getting somebody to go straight for 12 months to 24 months, even 36 months.

The real challenge
is getting somebody to refrain from crime for the rest of their lives. And what we’ve learned about that is it eventually
is about families and children and parents and a broader community. And when it really works, all of that kind of
comes together.

So we know a lot about what it takes. The problem is it’s not easy and it’s not
inexpensive; and we need to acknowledge that. Community corrections, if done right, is actually probably as expensive
as prison in the short-run. But what we’re looking for is those lifetime cost benefits.

WOLF:
I think it’s fascinating that California once had what was considered the nation’s premier corrections system. I
guess that was from about the ’40s to the ’60s. So I’d like to ask you, in your view what happened? What can we learn
from where California is today? And do you think California will ever get back to that?

PETERSILIA:
Well, California, as you said, used to be a national model. And in fact, many of the programs that are being used
today, not only in California and the United States, but internationally, in fact, came from ideas developed in California
corrections in the period between the ’50s all up through the end of the ’70s. So there was a 25-year period where
California was really a model system of how to treat juveniles, in particular, as well as adults and how to bring
community into sanctioning, if you will.

And then you have to ask, well, how did it go from this
model to now I would think what everybody would recognize is probably one of the most dysfunctional systems we have?
And I think nobody could have foreseen how we just chipped away at it at every level. We chipped away at it in terms
of giving control over to a huge prisoner guard union so that, in fact, their money became very “money still talked.”
They were able to give large amounts of money to legislators running for office. Those legislators turned around,
ran on tough-on-crime platforms, passed things like three strikes, lengthened sentences, sent more people to prison.
And as a result, funding for programs had to be reduced.

So we were simply building, building,
building and cutting programs. And so, over the years what we go was, in fact, overcrowded, dangerous – 50 percent
of our prisoners never participated in any program at all for their entire stay in a California prison.

WOLF:
Ultimately, I guess we can see it as a blessing, the kind of overcrowding, in a way because it encourages a search
for alternatives. And hopefully, I guess we would hope effective alternatives that guarantee or promote the public
safety and a successful reintegration of ex-inmates into communities.

PETERSILIA:
Well, I think I see the current times as a crisis for sure. But in every crisis, there’s the potential for opportunity.
And I would like to think that what this does do for us is it makes us rethink and realign who should be in prison.

And I think most people and the public want dangerous, violent people in prison. And they’re
willing to pay for it. And they kind of really are also—the public opinion polls—willing to rethink what we do with
non-violent, particularly drug offenders.

So I think that we will be having those debates and
the poor economy kind of got those debates to the forefront. But the real question is “what do we do with the third
of the prison population that are there primarily for drug use, drug addiction, drug sale?” We simply can’t let those
people go without any treatment or any programs. Then we will simply have kind of a short-term gain and a long-term
blip in the crime rate, which will happen two, three, four, five years out.

I think we’ve got
to really think hard about “if not prison, what?” and that to me is the key question that we now need to address.

WOLF: Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you. And I really
appreciate again your taking the time. I’ve been talking with Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University,
the author of 11 books and an expert in the area of parole reform, prisoner reintegration and sentencing policy.

PETERSILIA: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for
Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

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Derek Miodownik, restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department of Corrections, talks about the state’s innovative experiments
in community and restorative justice, including Citizen Reparative Boards, which give panels of community members
a role in working with misdemeanor offenders, and Circles of Support and Accountability, which link community members
with parolees convicted of serious crimes.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and welcome to another New Thinking
podcast. Today I’m speaking with Derek Miodownik who is the restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department
of Corrections.

DEREK MIODOWNIK: Hi. Thanks for having me.

WOLF:
Absolutely. Vermont has quite a reputation for innovative thinking in the area of corrections. And so, I was wondering
if you could tell me a little bit about the philosophy that guides you and about some of the interesting things that
you’ve been working on.

MIODOWNIK: Absolutely. Yeah. I think Vermont’s
a state that’s had to play to its strengths, and one of our strengths is our relatively small size that we still
have a real sense of community and town, and active citizen participation in all sorts of civic life.

But
specific to corrections, one of the ways that’s becomes expressed for years now has been through citizen reparative
boards that have been operating since at least ’95, I think, here in Vermont, where individuals who’ve been convicted
of misdemeanors have for a long time now been required to appear before a volunteer citizen board. So, of course,
you’re talking about a restorative justice approach and philosophy that has really taken roots here in Vermont.

And
we have, over the past several years, begun to apply that not only on the low level of the offense scale but also
on to the more severe cases, and specifically, the re-entry process.

WOLF:
So you started with the reparative boards in Vermont, which focused on misdemeanor offenses. Is that correct?

MIODOWNIK:
That’s right. I’d say that’s where, as a state, we kind of cut our teeth.

WOLF:
And how widespread are they now? MIODOWNIK: We’ve got 76 individual community reparative boards.

WOLF:
What does that consist of? These are volunteers who do what with the offender?

MIODOWNIK:
Well, it’s really predicated on the notion that the person is showing up and at the very least saying
“Yes, I did it.” So they’re not fact finding. The conversation begins from the perspective of “How do you think other
people were harmed?” And it’s done not in a didactic way but I would say in an educational and informative and
a very personal way. And then, “What do you think you have to offer in the way of repairs?”

And
if they’re individual victims who’ve chose to participate in this process, first and foremost, what do they want,
what are their needs?

WOLF: Give me some examples of the kinds of
the kinds of misdemeanors and then the kinds of responses that panels come up with.

MIODOWNIK:
So yeah, again, we’re talking primarily about low-level offenses. That can include shoplifting, DUIs.

WOLF: And what would the sanctions perhaps be?

MIODOWNIK:
An example might be—I know there is a guy who had shoplifted from a video store. This is a guy struggling to keep
his store going. He came to the board and expressed just that, that this isn’t just a business to him, but that it’s
a business that’s hard for him to run, that he built at a time when that medium, frankly, was a lot more popular,
that he’s got children.

So all of a sudden, when you have somebody removing the barricades of
their life and saying “Hey, your decision to take six DVDs? Let me tell you about my 16-year-old daughter and let
me tell you about my 18-year-old that I sent to college.” And you know, all of a sudden, in a way a gift is being
offered, a gift of connection.

You know, in this case, ultimately, the guy who ran the store,
he needed some help. He needed some help at home. He was working a lot. He had injured his back, which prevented
him from mowing his lawn.

And you know, an agreement was reached that this guy would work off
his obligation through, you know, through a prescribed number of hours, just showing up, mowing this guy’s lawn.
In terms of a happy ending on this one, a fairy tale ending, this guy ended up getting a job working at H—- Video
in South Burlington, Vermont.

WOLF: And H—- Video was the victim?

MIODOWNIK: Yes.

WOLF:
The victim owned that store?

MIODOWNIK: That’s right. That’s right.

WOLF: Well, it is a happy ending because I was going to say that
it sounds like a lot of effort on all parts to resolve something that sounds like a rather minor offense.

MIODOWNIK:
You know, on one hand, there is definitely an outlay of effort. But on the other hand, the absence of that helps
to contribute to some pretty larger-scale matters that we see play out time and again with folks who don’t respond
very constructively to low-level misdemeanor sanctions, and ultimately, either continue at the same level of severity
or sometimes ultimately escalate.

So from a prevention perspective, it’s effort and the time
well spent, and it’s primarily driven by volunteers who are doing that because, again, they live in that town, and
it’s not academic to them.

WOLF: We’ve been talking about the response
to misdemeanor –

MIODOWNIK: That’s right.

WOLF:
…offenses and the Department of Corrections of Vermont is also addressing re-entry issues, offenders who have committed
more serious crimes who are right now returning to the community. You’ve developed a program there that’s also rather
creative and involves the community as well. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about that.

MIODOWNIK:
We responded in 2002 to what was called the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative. This was a federal initiative
to provide states with money specifically to enhance or promote their best thinking around offender re-entry. And
to us, it became a natural extension to build upon this culture of restorative justice, of relational justice, if
you will, and apply that where frankly the stakes are higher.

So we have, over time, created
an infrastructure of what we call community justice centers. And these are actually the places where many of the
volunteers that I mentioned on these reparative boards are organized and trained. So basically, we sub-granted the
first round of money to justice centers to do a design phase.

WOLF:
So did you end up with different programs all across the state?

MIODOWNIK:
Well originally, there was some variation. Yeah. And to some degree, there’s still some. One community adopted a
mentoring approach. But several other locations began to get excited about a model that was coming out of Toronto
called COSA.

COSA stands for Circle of Support and Accountability. And basically, some folks
up in Toronto began working with sex offenders who had maxed their sentences and were being released with no support
whatsoever or no accountability for that matter either. And so, the COSA model is rooted in the notion of “no more
victims”. And the COSA methodology is rooted in a blending of accountability and support.

Again,
this goes back to some pretty basic restorative principles that say if you provide a lot of support for somebody,
i.e., encouragement, positivity, but accountability so direct limit setting, having to answer for, you know, in this
case your whereabouts or your behaviors. Then you’re into an area that has the greatest potential for effecting positive
change.

WOLF: So how has it played in Vermont? How many of these
teams, these COSA teams do you have, and are they, in fact, working with sex offenders?

MIODOWNIK:
We didn’t restrict them just to sex offenders although we definitely worked with many sex offenders.
But we took a look at just what was the level of connectivity that these folks have when they’re coming back
to a place of very few connections. That was the main kind of driver of whether or not it made sense to invest that
type of volunteer resource.

Basically, about 50 individuals who came out during 2005 through
2007 were involved for at least a year. Out of that original 50 most, over at least a year period, were very successful.

Guys who had come in and out many times before were staying out far longer than they ever had.
Those who were re-incarcerated were re-incarcerated for really harm reductions behaviors and I actually think that
this is one of the best things that COSA is doing, frankly. They preempt the more severe offending behavior by virtue
of their knowledge and relationship to the offender so that if the guy has a condition that he can’t drink but goes
out and violates, he may tell his COSA “I went out, you know, I had beers last night.” Or they may start asking him
questions that yield that information. And that’s actionable information.

There is no secret
kept between the “core member,” who’s the offender, if you will, and the volunteer. So people have been but back
in jail but not because they went out and reoffended, but rather because they began to engage in the behaviors that
had, at another point, may have very well led to a re-offense. And that’s how you create no more victims.

WOLF:
Do the COSAs still exist now that the grant money has long expired?

MIODOWNIK:
Well, yes, several of the justice centers had very robust programs and coordinators that were hired, who ultimately
were not able to stay on. Several other programs were still develop COSAs for one or two offenders who they just
feel it’s the right thing to do, and even though they’re not being supplementally resourced for it, they, frankly,
have the knowhow and the volunteer base to do it.

WOLF: Well, let
me ask you. It seems to me one of the big advantages of the program is that you have volunteers who are doing a lot
of the work.

MIODOWNIK: Absolutely.

WOLF:
So where’s the cost? I mean why can’t – why isn’t this more easy to replicate or sustain beyond an initial startup
grant period?

MIODOWNIK: What we found is that you really do ideally
need a singular coordinator who really could work effectively between the volunteer world and the corrections world.

WOLF: So the cost is the staff person who’s there to support the
COSA, the volunteers who are making up this team of support and accountability.

MIODOWNIK:
Yup. And you know, for the cost of what it takes to incarcerate one person a year, that’s what we would actually
get, you know, frankly, that $50,000 will get us a full-time coordinator, who can really kind of tread both of these
waters very effectively.

WOLF: Right. And hopefully, prevent, who
knows how many countless repeat crimes.

MIODOWNIK: Oh, yeah. The
math is a no-brainer when you do it. Yup.

WOLF: So give me a sense.
I mean we sort of ran out of time, but I would like to get a very quick sense of what it is like for a volunteer
who’s participating on a COSA team. I mean here’s someone who’s actually volunteering to develop a relationship with
someone who, for instance, might have sexually abused a child.

MIODOWNIK:
Yes.

WOLF: What does that consist of? I mean is it like “Come on
over to my house for dinner?” Or is it just, “I’ll drop by once a month with a checklist and make sure that you are
following a curfew or thus and such?” I mean how intimate do they get and what is the relationship like?

MIODOWNIK:
You know, I think like in any relationship, Rob, it progresses and they probably set the typical boundaries.

One
of the strengths of this model is the strong connection back to corrections and back to the probation or parole officer.
So a volunteer might think “hey, you know, I’ve been working with John for eight months. You know, my wife and I
would like to have him over for dinner.” Again, going back to the coordinator—they’d probably run that through the
coordinator. The coordinator will call the probation officer and say “what do you think of that?”

And
you know, we talked about sex offenders a little bit before. Sex offenders, you know, broad topic. To begin with,
there’s lots of typologies and a lot of MOs, if you will. So depending on a specific offender, something like “come
on over for dinner” may be a no-go because, yeah, you know, sometimes there’s somebody who lives in that house
that fits the original victim profile or it may not be a problem at all.

But basically, what’s
happening is that a personal relationship is being developed through reciprocity. Our volunteers have had tremendous,
tremendous experiences. I mean I think it’s a testament to the strength of the volunteers that several are still
doing this, like I said, even though we haven’t had a full-time coordinator so that the directors themselves have
taken over that coordination responsibility in some cases. But people tend to really – people who signed up for it
get a lot out of it.

WOLF: And just to be clear, I mean we’re talking
about teams here, so people aren’t being asked to have a one-on-one relationship with people. There’s a team of people,
of volunteers working together with one offender.

MIODOWNIK: Yes.
Usually, a COSA consists of at least three and sometimes about three to five individuals. Now sometimes within that
structure, maybe just one of them will get together with that core member for coffee or something like that. But
the primary structure is that they all get together as a group.

And they start that before the
person comes out ideally. That’s no small detail, too. There’s also just some public information too that we do,
Rob, which is the fact that people have to come out. And you know, like it or not, over 92 percent of people, I think,
nationally who are in prison are coming out of those prisons, right? So you can only be an ostrich for so long before
one of these folks is going to be your neighbor.

And at that point, are you better off knowing
them and having them care about what you think? The answer, you know, ultimately for many people in Vermont is yes.

WOLF: And Derek, if people want to find out more about what you’re
doing in Vermont, where can they go?

MIODOWNIK: Go on to the Vermont
Department of Corrections website, doc.vermont.gov. Now that doesn’t have any www in front of it. It’s just http
or double backslash.

WOLF: Okay. Well, thanks so much, Derek. I
appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.

MIODOWNIK: It’s my
pleasure. Thank you very much, Rob.

WOLF: I have been speaking with
Derek Miodownik who is the restorative systems administrator for the Vermont Department of Corrections. I am Rob
Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, www.courtinnovation.org.

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Legendary entertainer Harry Belafonte congratulates graduates of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court for satisfying
the program’s rigorous requirements.

ROBERT V. WOLF:
The 10^th graduation of the Harlem Parole Reentry Court featured a special guest.

HARRY
BELAFONTE: I was born in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem. I’m in my 82^nd year of
life and I’m still alive.

(APPLAUSE)

WOLF: That
was Harry Belafonte, singer, actor, and activist as he congratulated the Reentry Court’s graduates on satisfying
the program’s rigorous requirements.

BELAFONTE: And I am grateful,
very grateful to be here to meet you for the first time. You bring a gift. It is my responsibility to wrap my arms
around your gift, to make this program, this courtroom, all of the people you see here, feel that they have been
rewarded in the investment they make to get people to come out of the incarceration system.

WOLF:
The Harlem Parole Reentry Court helps parolees returning from incarceration make the transition from life in prison
to responsible citizenship. The court, housed in the Harlem Community Justice Center, and operated in cooperation
with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Division of Parole, links parolees to a wide
range of social services. To promote increased accountability, participants are required to return to the Justice
Center frequently to meet with case managers and parole officers and appear before and administrative law judge who
closely monitors their compliance with court orders. Judge Grace Bernstein outlined some of the graduates’ accomplishments.

JUDGE GRACE BERNSTEIN: You have really accomplished major things. At some point
within yourself, you have decided that you wanted to move on with your life. You have been able to stay away from
the lure of easy money, the lure of drugs—

WOLF: In addition to being
a top selling singer, Emmy and Grammy winner, Belafonte’s long been an outspoken advocate for many causes. He was
active in the civil rights movement, he served as a Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, he’s helped to raise money and
awareness across Africa about AIDS, poverty, and the needs of children. Closer to home, he makes regular visits to
prisoners in Sing Sing.

BELAFONTE: I am very much engaged in the
criminal justice system, and I got involved with the politics of America. I got involved with racism and became an
activist. And in that activism, I saw what was happening to us in the justice system. So I figured I’d focus on that.

WOLF: Belafonte told those assembled in the courtroom at the Harlem Community
Justice Center on 121^st Street about some of the hardships he faced growing up in that very
neighborhood.

BELAFONTE: I was a high school dropout. I never finished
high school. As a matter of fact, when I left high school I could hardly read or write. The compelling circumstances
and the opportunity to meet people who are indigenous to my community, who have done a lot with their lives, gave
me a chance to see alternatives.

WOLF: Other speakers at the graduation
included Program Director John Megawl, who described some of the challenges the reentry court’s graduates had overcome.

JOHN MEGAW: Our ceremony tonight is about 17 men who have made changes and
make decisions every day since they were released from prison that will allow them to remain free and enjoy the rest
of their freedom. But not everyone who started our program has made it. Some are back upstate thinking about bed-check
or writing a letter home. I wish they could be here with us. But for these men, it has meant returning from a series
of correctional facilities upstate, often after many years of incarceration, figuring out where to live, how to afford
the rent, how to find a job when you have a broken work history, staying away from drugs and alcohol, building relationships
with your children, your brothers and sisters, and your mother and father.

WOLF:
As they handed out graduation certificates, parole officers Devon Oliver and Carmen Levine spoke movingly about the
specific achievements of the participants, including the jobs they’d found, apartments they’d located, and their
studious observance of curfews and other rules.

CARMEN LEVINE: This
is a special group because a lot of you have shown me that, you know, you’ve taken a lot of initiatives. A lot of
you have gotten jobs, a lot of you have gone back to school, which is wonderful.

WOLF:
That was the voice of Parole Officer Levine at the 10^th graduation ceremony of the Harlem
Parole Reentry Court, which took place on September 1, 2009, and I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the
Center for Court Innovation. For more information about the Center for Court Innovation or the Harlem Parole Reentry
Court, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.

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West Huddleston, CEO of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, talks about his group’s new
web site, why the nation’s 2,300-plus drug courts reach only 10 percent of the people they’re designed
to help, and what’s next on the horizon for the drug court movement.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. My name is Rob Wolf and I’m director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with West Huddleston who is the executive director of the National Association
of Drug Court Professionals.

WEST HUDDLESTON: Thanks, Rob, for the
opportunity.

WOLF: I thought maybe we’d start off talking about
the new website for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. The address is www.allrise.org.
HUDDLESTON:
That’s right: allrise.org.

WOLF: What’s the thinking behind the
name and behind the new look for the website?

HUDDLESTON: Well,
the short story is although I’ve worked here at NADCP for the last 11 years, I’ve never – until three years ago when
I took the helm as the CEO, I was really not put in a position to sell drug courts to the general public.

When
I became CEO three years ago, I realized that those two words “drug court” or even if you put “treatment” in the
middle, “drug treatment court,” it still sells a problem; it doesn’t sell a solution. And it basically creates a
whole lot of questions.

So what I sought out to do is to find a public brand, if you will: if
our industry brand is drug court, you know, what would be a brand for the general public that would sell the solution?
And it struck me about a year ago that the two words “all rise” really do that for us.

I was
sitting at a drug court graduation one night in Jackson, Mississippi, and as the bailiff bellowed out those two words,
it struck me that those—that “all rise”—really carries with it an implicit and solemn promise that drug courts will
help those that come before it.

WOLF: You’ve always been an advocacy
organization to some extent, but are you putting advocacy and sort of promotion of the drug court concept more front
and center than in the past?

HUDDLESTON: Yeah, Rob. You’re hitting
it right on the head. You know, we’re 20 years old; drug courts are 20 years old. And the National Association of
Drug Court Professionals, which started in 1994, did exactly what its name implies, which was to focus on professionals,
focus on the courts, change the system from within.

What I wanted to do when I became CEO is,
in addition to that, which we will always do as a primary function of NADCP, but in addition to that, you know, it’s
my belief that drug courts are deeply under-utilized, are the most effective strategy for drug-using offenders and
need to be put within reach of every American in need.

And so, if we’re only serving 120,000
at any given time, and there are 1.2 million who need it, we need to tell our story to the general public. We need
to tell our story to the media. We need to tell our story better on Capitol Hill and in state capitol buildings.

WOLF: Before we continue, I guess I’m taking it for granted that
people listening know what a drug court is. But maybe in the simplest terms, could you just explain what the typical
drug court model is?

HUDDLESTON: Sure. In essence, someone who is
charged with a drug-driven offense, that could be anything from drug possession to burglary, theft, even drunk driving,
those types of charges can be pled into a drug court.

And in essence, are objective is to get
people into treatment quickly and to keep them long enough for treatment to actually benefit them. We hold them accountable
by requiring them to come before a judge on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at first, and then it’s titrated down to
maybe monthly or quarterly. And the participants are rewarded for doing well and sanctioned for not living up to
their obligations.

WOLF: You know, with all the research that has
shown how effective drug courts are in reducing recidivism, I wonder why you think drug courts have sort of hit a
wall. I mean they really grew very quickly, expanded to many, to all states in the United States and are spreading
internationally now.

And yet, as you say, they’re reaching only 10 percent of the potential population
who could benefit. And their growth seems to have slowed and I wonder what factors you think have played a role in
that. I wonder if the current economic crisis is having any impact. If you think the Obama administration policies
might have a positive impact down the road. What are your thoughts on this issue?

HUDDLESTON:
Well, I think that drug courts definitely stalled. And it was kind of shocking to us in that as the research, as
you said, was coming out in clear fashion that they reduced substance abuse significantly, they reduced recidivism,
and they saved money.

The funding for drug courts at the federal level went from 40, for instance,
at the Department of Justice, $40 million really all the way down to right at $10 million just three years ago. The
economy coupled with the federal investment dropping really hurt drug court’s ability to take on more clients, take
on more participants.

So what do we look like in the future? Drug court funding started to hit
back up under the former administration and certainly because of Congress. And funding last year was restored at
the federal level—went from about $10 million to $15.3 million two years ago. Then it was increased to $40 million
last year. And this year where we stand this afternoon, drug court funding at the Department of Justice, $64 million
which is a historical high.

And there’s another roughly $24 million at the Center for Substance
Abuse Treatment at SAMHSA. In the president’s budget for next year, it even looks better. The president requested
a total of about $120 million for drug courts and other problem-solving courts at the Department of Justice and at
CSAT.

I think that the new administration and the Congress in place recognizes that these courts
return a significant cost benefit. And by investing upfront, we’re going to see, you know, some significant return
anywhere from $3.36 to $12 depending on what variables you count for every dollar invested.

So
yeah, I think the future looks very good for drug courts and other problem-solving courts like mental health courts
and domestic violence courts and all the other types of courts that, you know, your own organization really helped
us think through.

WOLF: I’m wondering about all the research that’s
gone into drug courts. And we do some of that here and we also research other problem-solving courts. One thing some
of our researchers are trying to do are isolate some of the factors. Is it the role of the judge and the interaction
the judge has with the defendant that is one of the key ingredients? Is it the monitoring? Is it the kind of treatment,
and sort of trying to hone the model and find out what are the key elements. And I wonder as elements are identified
as being paramount or the most effective, I wonder if the money that’s coming in can be spent in such array to sort
of invest strategically in those things that work best.

HUDDLESTON:
Well, you know, we think a little bit differently about it. There was a remarkable report published March of last
year by NPC Research out of Portland, Oregon—So that’s Dr. Mike Finigan and Dr. Shannon Carey. This report explored
the 10 key components of drug courts which were written and published in 1997. And it is what defines a drug court
from any other court, distinguishes our model.

And it’s a comparative study of 18 drug courts
on, you know, practices, outcomes and costs. And what that study tells us is that the 10 key components, the courts
that follow the 10 key components do far better in terms of outcomes and costs than the drug courts that don’t.

And
so, what this study has taught us and what we’re, in turn, teaching the field is that you can’t water down the 10
key components. If you do, you will start significantly losing your impact.

WOLF:
Are they saying that all the components are equal though? I mean if someone has limited resources, and they want
to do eight of the components perhaps, are you saying that they shouldn’t think that way, the should… ?

HUDDLESTON:
That’s right. If you want good, if you want extraordinary outcomes, maintain the 10 key components. I am not convinced
that you can select, you know, drug testing, regular drug testing and treatment, which are two of the 10 key components.
I’m not convinced you can take those two key components and distill down or import them into everyday court practice
and expect to have very good outcomes.

What drug courts need to do is reorient themselves from
low-level offenders to a high-risk, high-need population meaning people with long histories of substance abuse, long
histories of criminality, people who really need this level of intervention because it’s very intensive. So you know,
I think our best outcomes according to NIDA’s research that Doug Marlowe published, you know, really looked at who
fares best in drug court. And the clear answer to that are individuals who need it the most, high risk-high need
people, people who failed out of treatment multiple times, people who have a long, you know, criminal record, those
are the people who do the best in our model.

WOLF: Are a lot of
drug courts avoiding that population for whatever reason?

HUDDLESTON:
Well, they certainly did at the beginning. I mean it’s, you know, much more politically palatable to take low-level
offenders and low-risk offenders, first time possession charges. That’s where drug courts started 20 years ago.

WOLF:
So I mean it’s an interesting irony I guess that the population that initially seemed most attractive politically,
drug courts are least effective with.

HUDDLESTON: Yeah. I mean that
is a 100 percent accurate statement according to the literature, according to the research.

You
know, I think the good news is drug court professionals are in that business to make a difference. And when they
were introduced to this research, I believe it was three years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, we really saw
a shift in population, in a drug court population, target population.

I think the tough road
is still ahead of us because assessment for risk and need is not done before disposition typically. Typically, disposition,
the court decides on what happens to the offender, and then the assessment kicks in. Well, it’s too late. You really
don’t know who you have sitting in front of you. If you’re really going to have what we know as evidence-based sentencing,
we’ve got to do assessment upfront at pre-trial level before the court decides or the prosecutor decides where the
individual goes.

WOLF: So you’re saying …

HUDDLESTON:
That’s a very radical change.

WOLF: But you’re saying right now
the problem is that quite often they’re saying “You’ll get a year of treatment; okay, and this is the jail alternative
if you don’t complete it. OK, agreed. Now let’s assess you if you really need a year or not”?

HUDDLESTON:
That’s exactly what happens. It happens as a result of, you know, plea bargain. And it happens because the justice
system tends to create eligibility criteria, not just for drug court but, you know, for DTAP, or any – for – pick
your alternative.

WOLF: You’re talking about other alternative sentencing
programs for drug treatment.

HUDDLESTON: Other alternative sentencing,
even probation, OK? Eligibility is based on the crime, not on the person. So assessment is thought of as kind of
“what are their clinical needs after we figure out legally where they belong?”

And you know,
we’re really wanting to see the justice system do it almost opposite of that, that individuals need to be assessed
for what they need and what is their risk and then make an appropriate decision on where they go.

WOLF:
That sounds like it’s going to be awfully hard to bring out or bring a change around that.

HUDDLESTON:
You know, it will be; it will be tough. But you know, we’ve added a million prison beds in this country in the last
20 years.

I mean it doesn’t make sense what we’re doing now. So I mean we’re – I think we’re
at a real tipping point. If not now, when will this tipping point occur, you know, where there really does need to
be some radical change in terms of who really does need to go to prison and jail versus who needs to go to a community
alternative and which community alternative?

WOLF: I appreciate
your taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I’ve been speaking with West Huddleston, the CEO of the National
Association of Drug Court Professionals, which can be found now on the web at www.allrise.org.

HUDDLESTON:
Yeah. It’s a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

WOLF:
Good luck with your work.

HUDDLESTON: Very good. Thanks so much.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation, which can be found on the web at www.courtinnovation.org.

July 2009

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Ronald B. Adrine, the administrative and presiding judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court talks about differentiating
between defendants who are habitual batterers and defendants who are one-time perpetrators (such as those acting
in self defense).

ROBERT V. WOLF: How, I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m speaking with Ronald B. Adrine, who is the administrative
and presiding Judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. And he’s here in New York at the Center for Court Innovation
at our open house, visiting some of our projects and meeting people involved with domestic violence courts and domestic
violence dockets around the country to share ideas and share best practices. Welcome to New York and the Center for
Court Innovation.

JUDGE RONALD ADRINE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having
me.

WOLF: I wanted to ask you about some of the interesting work
you’re doing in Cleveland. I thought we could start with how you first got involved with the dedicated domestic
violence docket. I understand that you volunteered to assume leadership in the docket when it was first created.
Maybe you can tell me about that.

ADRINE: Well I’ve been active
in the area of trying to come up with effective interventions revolving around domestic violence issues since the
early 1990’s, and actually before that. I’ve been on the bench since 1982 and have had domestic violence as
part of my docket ever since. Beginning in the early 90’s I’ve been working at it on a national level. So towards
the end of the 90’s an opportunity came to Cleveland to receive some money from the federal government to put together
what, for all intents and purposes, was a vertical prosecution pilot program. The police and prosecutor’s office,
as well as the Witness Victim Service Center in Cleveland, had all agreed to handle misdemeanor violations of the
domestic violence laws in such a way that the same detectives, the same prosecutors, the same advocates would all
service a certain percentage of cases. So when I heard that they were gonna do that, I volunteered outside the grant
to allow them to have all of those cases to be heard on my docket because otherwise they would have gone to 12 judges
throughout the courthouse and it would have just been maddening to try to keep up with the whole lot. So that’s
how it started.

WOLF: So I understand that recently, the program
has been expanded and you’ve added to it an interesting element—the deferred judgment initiative, which as far
as I know is unique to domestic violence courts and domestic violence dockets around the country. So maybe you could
explain to me what that is.

ADRINE: The deferred judgment portion
of the docket came about as a result of some conversations I’d had with a lot of people. I’ve worked in
the advocacy community, as well as in the prosecution and, and the police community, which pointed out that there
were people who were being arrested, charged, and convicted of domestic violence who clearly were not batterers.
And in my mind, the domestic violence laws in the United States were put together specifically—not to reach every
person that involve themselves in violence in an interpersonal relationship—but those people who were using violence
for purposes of control and power. A lot of other people get swept in because of the definitions that are used across
the country of what constitutes domestic violence. So, for instance, if I know that a person that I’m involved with
has been building up towards striking me, and they come towards me with their fist balled up, I might pick up a pot
and I might strike them before they strike me. Technically speaking, I’m guilty of domestic violence, even if
there are years that have gone on when I’ve just taken it. So knowing that there are some people who are out there
who fall in those—that kind of a category—the real challenge is to try to look at every domestic violence situation
and determine whether or not we’re dealing with someone who is truly a batterer, or whether we’re dealing
with someone who is reacting to stimulus that they know is going to result in their own injury.

WOLF:
How do you get the knowledge you need to differentiate?

ADRINE: What
we did was we created a series of screens, beginning with the police, who are the first responders. Asking that they
fill out a very short kind of checklist questionnaire that would identify whether or not somebody is likely to have
been the primary physical aggressor. The prosecutor can then compare what they got against the police report and
make a second screen as to whether or not the right person has been charged. If they decide that the wrong person
was charged, they can indicate that this person should not be the primary physical aggressor and move on. Their lawyer
has the opportunity to agree with the police, and the prosecutor could ask that the court take a look at this situation
and see whether or not their client is eligible for the deferred judgment initiative. We then give it to the probation
department, which conducts yet another screen to make a determination as to whether or not this is an appropriate
person. And then they give it to the court, and the court goes to the final screen. There’s only a small number
of cases that are going to have all the predicates on the front end that will cause them to get a second look past
the police department’s initial determination.

WOLF: I see.

ADRINE: So it’s only those cases where you know, there’s no prior
history of violence, there is no history of emotional battering that we’re able to determine. There is no history
of, of severe problems in the individual’s background, because all of those things are done by the probation
department at the final check to make sure that we’ve got people who are unlikely to engage in the kind of conduct
moving forward. Because what we’re trying to do with that group is to save them the types of problems that they
otherwise would face if they are convicted of domestic violence. That is, they could be prevented from engaging in
certain kinds of occupations, like healthcare. They might be prevented from getting certain kinds of licensing and
bonding in certain states. They may be cut off from certain kinds of federal assistance. We’ve got a list of
close to 20 different collateral damages that can be done to individuals convicted of domestic violence. So if somebody
is a batterer, I don’t have a problem with that individual having to deal with all of that. But if you’ve
got somebody who really is not a batterer—and worst case scenario is really a victim, who on one occasion has decided
to fight back, I’ve got a problem with that individual having to suffer that long list of collateral damages.

WOLF: And is it always—do they always fit that category, if they do pop up
with the program? That they were predominantly a victim, except in this situation?

ADRINE:
It might be a situation, for instance, where you’ve got a couple of folks that were involved in an argument
that actually got out of hand. Where—just to use as an example—one person pushed another, maybe against a wall, and
as a result, a picture fell and there’s a cut on the head. Okay. Bad business, no doubt about it. But one shove,
resulted in an injury, technically guilty of domestic violence, actually guilty of domestic violence under the way
that the law is posited. But is this person likely to engage in that kind of conduct again? Well, maybe yes, maybe
no, but that’s the reason to do the scrutiny on the front end, rather than letting this person go all the way
down through the system and ultimately end up with this kind of conviction. In Ohio, for instance, once they have
a domestic violence conviction, you know, if it’s for a first degree or misdemeanor or higher, they can’t
come back into court later and ask that that record be sealed or expunged. So they’re stuck with that record,
you know, forever more. So that being the case, I think that we want to be careful as to who we put in. And we’ve
been extremely careful. I think in the close to two years that we’ve had this deferred judgment initiative,
only about four people out of the several hundred that we’ve seen have qualified for placement.

WOLF:
You’ve made a persuasive argument that there are clearly people who would benefit from this and who should benefit
from this. I wonder why it’s not more common that we hear about this, more—programs like this, you know, trying
to make that differentiation between types of defendants.

ADRINE:
In the last two years, there has been an awful lot of discussion, particularly in the advocacy community, but I think
also in other parts of law enforcement and the criminal justice community about the context of violence between intimate
partners. And the one constant in all that is how difficult it is to make these determinations. And I think that
the reason why you’re not seeing efforts to do this is that a lot of people are saying, “We don’t think
we could make those determinations.” The thing that I guess I was doing with regard to this program, and it’s
the thing I’ve had to explain to judges who have followed me going in, is that a program like the deferred judgment
initiative is an exclusive program, not an inclusive program. When I’m looking at individuals, I’m looking for
reasons to put them into the regular criminal justice process, not reasons to put them into the deferred judgment
initiative. This deferred judgment initiative should only be for a limited number of people who we are confident
that we have screened in such a way so that within the parameters of human fallibility, we are pretty sure that they
are not going to engage in any more violent conduct. If we can’t say that almost to the high standard of beyond
a reasonable doubt, then they shouldn’t be placed in the program.

WOLF:
Let me ask you just about your experience here in New York. What have you found most valuable over the last couple
of days here?

ADRINE: As always, it’s an enlightening experience
because the things that you learn here are cutting edge. Yesterday we were looking at Integrated Domestic Violence
Courts, it was really interesting to see how both criminal and civil cases can actually be melded together and the
issues involving one family be heard by one judge, in a way that allows for a constriction of the number of court
appearances, and which allows that one judge to know just about everything that he or she needs to know about the
dynamics of that family to make good judgments, not only in the criminal case, but also in matters having to do with
custody, having to do with the matrimonial thing—that is, divorce—and all in one shot. It’s really kind of phenomenal.
And the complexity of trying to put that together in a way to make it work, and the dedication of the judges and
the other court actors, from the public defender’s office to the prosecuting attorney’s office, to the
court officers themselves, it’s just—it’s breathtaking. So I mean it’s been a really eye-opening experience.

WOLF: I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. This is Rob Wolf, I’ve
been speaking with Ronald B. Adrine, who is the administrative and presiding judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court.
I hope you have a safe trip home.

ADRINE: Thanks, Rob.

WOLF: It’s been a pleasure.

ADRINE:
Same here.

June 2009

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Herb Sturz–the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius, by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts–talks about
innovation, the power of private-public collaborations, the founding of the Midtown Community Court, and his current
work at the Open Society Institute.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi.
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Open Society Institute with Herb Sturz. It’s difficult for me to even begin
to describe who he is because he’s done so much. What draws me to him today in particular is a new book out by Sam
Roberts called A
Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, published by PublicAffairs.

Your
career has spanned so much over the last four decades or five decades. The Vera Institute of Justice, for instance: you spearheaded its creation and
led it. And Project Renewal,
the Center for Court Innovation… Maybe I should start out just by thanking you for having launched the Midtown Community
Court which led to the creation of the Center for Court Innovation, which has been my home for the last 10 years.

HERB STURZ: I’m delighted.

WOLF:
I thought I might begin with a big picture question, which is, in your incredible experience with public policy and
government, what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in terms of people’s attitudes about what government can
do and just the most important changes in public policy that you have seen?

STURZ:
It’s a large question, Rob. I don’t think I’ve seen a great change over the 50 years as it relates to what government
can do. I think we—back then people thought that government could do almost anything. One felt really that it took
the government to do things, and the role of the private sector was less out front than it is today. And I think
there’s been a much greater awareness both on the private, non-profit side or business-side and government that you
could do a lot more when you marry private non-profit and government together. They’re not necessarily on the opposite
sides of the line. In fact, they add to each other.

The Center for Court Innovation is a kind
of perfect example where you started with one experiment working closely with the court, police, D.A. It wasn’t always
easy, but it took both sides and a lot of finesse and thought and understanding on both sides. To that extent, I
think it just opened people’s eyes more rather than saying ‘it’s a new role for government,’ if you want to call
it a new role, as government has helped welcome the private sector. And that’s something that Vera helped certainly
start early in the sixties. I doubt it that it was original, that it never happened before. But we made that very
central to the way of modus operandi in those years and I think to this day.

WOLF:
You have had an extraordinary talent, it seems to me, to connect with the right people, to bridge differences between
people. I wonder what your secret is.

STURZ: It is not a secret.
What I have done and do to this day is I’m persistent. If I care about a problem, I stay with it and I try to understand
it. I try to understand it from everyone’s point of view. And you’re arresting somebody or stopping and frisking
someone down on the street, what is the impact on the person who’s stopped? What’s the impact on the person’s family.
From the police point of view does this really cut down serious crime, as they would suggest, by making it more certain
that people would leave loaded weapons or hard drugs home or not? But those are the – so you’re trying to understand
what is at play and what are the collateral effects and what’s more central. And so, it’s really a way of looking
at a problem and not assuming you have a lock on knowledge, and also trying to understand, I guess, the motivation
of individuals. And certainly in government, what do they need versus the private sector, non-profit sector, and
trying to uncover what’s involved in a problem.

WOLF: So much of
public policy, criminal justice especially, is fraught with ideologies and things are interpreted through, you know,
left and right, and conservative. How do you get people to see beyond that into just the practical aspects?

STURZ:
Not difficult. On paper they see it in the ideological side. But my experience with police has been – say, with skid
row derelicts, they didn’t like being thought of as street cleaners picking up the same drunk down on the Bowery
every day; nothing of value happening. Administrators there are aware that it doesn’t do the court system any favor
or anyone else including the skid row derelict to have them hauled into the lower courts everyday. It could be done
two, three times a day and nothing of value coming. I think defense lawyers or prosecutors realize they’ve lost dignity
dealing with an issue as important as this if, back then, you know, I think a third of all arrests were this skid
row-type in the City of New York.

WOLF: You’re talking about the
1960s when you developed Project Renewal.

STURZ: That was then called
Manhattan Bowery Project. It evolved to Project Renewal. And the police became our allies. The Correction Department
understood it and soon became our allies. It’s not like on all these things that everybody’s going to become your
ally. You have to go at a problem also, at times, when you’re going to have groups that are not sympathetic–in their
perspective for good reasons. You have to be very careful how you articulate something for sure. But you can articulate
it in terms of—and we did, certainly—both fairness and efficiency, and they’re not contradictory.

I
think if Vera and its off springs from the beginning just put it as ‘All we care about is the maltreatment of defendants,’
we would have done some good things, but we never would have taken it the next step to understand and open up doors
that weren’t all that hard to break down. A good idea, it takes you away. Then you have to be I will say a little
smart and persistent, again surrounding the problem, and how to articulate it.

WOLF:
So it sounds like seeing from the perspective of all the players allows you to find common ground. I mean you know
what the police, how they’re seeing this problem, you can find a way to come up with a solution that …

STURZ:
Often. Not always.

WOLF: Okay.

STURZ:
Not always. And there will be problems in anything. You may have to put it off a month or two months or three. Or
you have to figure out what the entry point is to get support. And it differs. There’s no rule. You have to get the
feel of the situation, the feel of what the public policy person has to—what his or her needs are at a certain time—what
politics of the government is.

WOLF: Well, so let me ask you: Have
you ever been arrested? Have you ever been through the justice system?

STURZ:
Well, let’s see. When I was about nine, I was sort of arrested. Someone stole a bicycle that was in our garage, my
first bike. And they left an old used bike in there. And so, that was all there was. And so, one day a few days later
I was driving the bicycle on the street, and I felt somebody grab my arm and said that’s my son’s bicycle. And they
took me, believe it or not, to the police station, and they put me behind the bar. I was about nine. I couldn’t remember.
They called my family and I was – you know, it wasn’t real traumatic, but I was so scared. I always remember most
the police bringing me in there and that arm and hand grabbing me and his saying, ‘You stole my son’s bike.’

WOLF:
It’s an interesting story because it is – it’s a complicated story, you know. It’s not like you were entirely – you
were innocent in a sense, but on the other hand, you understand that it was probably a stolen bike.

STURZ:
I did understand it, but also you get back to – I was nine.

WOLF:
Right. Yes.

STURZ: How much did I understand?

WOLF:
Well, right, right.

STURZ: And I had support from my family that
didn’t know the nuance of that. And then I was arrested, as it were, at the University of Wisconsin, when a friend
of mine, who later became deputy police commissioner of New York, and I were trying to earn some money with our variation
of “simonizing” carwash business. And we put on up and down the street, putting on a little tag on people’s windshields
saying ‘here’s your ticket’ to getting a good “simonizing”.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: The police took us and brought us into the police
station in Madison, Wisconsin. And then a third sort of thing was in Chicago where I went for a weekend just to feel
what it was like to be, knowing it was a phony in a way, what it’s like to be kind of poor. I went with old clothes
and no money. And I spent a weekend sleeping one night in a flophouse and another in a police station and spending
it during the day in a sawdust covered saloon, getting a feel of what it was like to just drink beer and all that
sort of thing.

WOLF: Well, let me ask you, I know I’m sure you’ve
told the story many times, but since I am from the Center for Court Innovation, maybe you could take a few minutes
and just talk about what led to the creation of the Midtown Community Court, you know, what you were thinking at the time.

STURZ:
Well, I really was sensitive to the idea of community and justice and working in the community. That was consistent
with certainly early work with the Bowery, with Wildcat. I also played a role in the redevelopment of Times Square
when I was chairman of the Planning Commission. And then I got to know Gerry Schoenfeld. I met him first in City Hall when we came to see Mayor Koch
and I was deputy mayor.

WOLF: And Schoenfeld is the theater owner,
Broadway producer.

STURZ: He was the head of the whole Shubert Organization.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And it was really over I think breakfast, I was always complaining about panhandlers and such, and the mess-up in
Times Square, and what can be done about it, and no one cared but the theater. Whether he first said it or I first
said it, I’m not sure, but let’s say he did about doing something with the courts. It just was not necessarily original,
the concept, in Times Square. And I do remember very well saying to Gerry, “Gerry, you know what? If you give me
a theater, I’ll give you a court” because I knew he’s so dramatic and that we could do it and that will take care
of a place in Times Square. He offered it rent-free for three years.

WOLF:
This is when you were a planning commissioner.

STURZ: No. This is
while I was doing housing, working for Mullen Corporation.

WOLF:
So you weren’t in government. You weren’t in the judiciary, but you were promising you’d give him a court.

STURZ:
Yes. And one of the first persons I went to was Bob Keating. And Bob, whom I knew, I mean who in fact had followed
me as coordinator of criminal justice –

WOLF: I’m sorry, and Judge
Keating was the –

STURZ: City Administrator Judge of Criminal Court.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
And Bob was welcoming, but we got overwhelmed by opposition from neighboring real estate owners, from theater preservationists.
We had opposition from the New York County district attorney. We had a mixed response from the police at different
levels. The defense bar was concerned about ‘will this be a plea factory?’ and so on.

And ultimately,
we had to change the venue from the Long Acre Theater to the current home on 54th Street. There I started with no
money. I think I raised $5,000 or $10,000, not more than that I know, from the Shubert Theaters. And then I knew
I needed more money so I went to see Peter Goldmark who was then president of Rockefeller, very shortly or around
that same time, I hired John Feinblatt because then I had the nucleus of some money.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: Not a lot.

WOLF:
Right.

STURZ: But it started with like nothing.

WOLF:
And you had to get the courts backing, too.

STURZ: Well, not just
one. We had to get the state administrative judge. We had to get ultimately Chief Judge Judith Kaye and, you know,
of the story of her coming the night before.

WOLF: Right.

STURZ:
In her jeans to help whitewash the walls of that court. Midtown Community Court and Red Hook and then Center were
blessed with two really extraordinary persons to really make it work, which was John Feinblatt and Greg Berman, two
great people.

WOLF: And so, maybe you can tell me a little bit about
the kinds of work you’re doing, how you’re occupying yourself here at the Open Society Institute?

STURZ:
I guess I’m spending most of my time working on the mortgage foreclosure problems. George Soros asked me to try to look at this and what collateral impact on
young people is when they get thrown out of school, have to move or lose their homes.

I helped
set up something called the Center for New York City Neighborhoods ,which became a not-for-profit that was set up
by Shaun Donovan, now secretary of HUD and the mayor and Christine Quinn, head of the City Council. But I also went
back to my past and helped them to start something called the Neighborhood Improvement Project. Taking the elements
of supported work, we put people, in this case welfare recipients and homeless people, and capture their welfare
entitlements through the city’s Human Resources Administration and put them out in work crews. And ironically the
first group that received an award to do that from HRA was Wildcat
Corporation.

WOLF: Which you had started.

STURZ:
And so, what I did was change the concept and bring it up 30 years later to a whole other big problem, which was
mortgage foreclosure. And the idea is can you use people like this as a sort of mini-WPA, you might say, in the neighborhood,
not to go necessarily to the houses that are foreclosed but at the surrounding houses.

WOLF:
And do what?

STURZ: Remove the graffiti, remove debris ranging from
old refrigerators to cars, re-sod the lawns, fix broken fences.

WOLF:
You know, with Obama in the White House, I just wonder what your hopes are for this administration, what you see
that might be different.

STURZ: My thoughts are just filled with
hope. I love to turn on the television and read the paper and see Obama in action talking. I love to see Michele
Obama and the two kids. It gives me a great expanse of feeling when you have high, real quality people in the White
House trying to do hard stuff. I have no wild expectations. There’s a lot of stuff that would be out of his control.
But I feel there’s a real intelligence and a big heart going for him.

WOLF:
Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I learned a lot. I’ve been talking to Herb Sturz who is
the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, by
Sam Roberts ,who details all of Herb Sturz’ amazing achievements whether he’ll call them that or not from the founding
of the Vera Institute of Justice to the Wildcat Corporation to Project Renewal to the Center for Court Innovation
and Midtown Community Court. The list is quite long and it’s still being added to. So thank you for taking the time.
This is Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

May 2009

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After visiting the Harlem Community Justice Center, Katherine McQuay and Zoe Mentel of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) talk about reentry, community policing, and
the stimulus package.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here
today at the Harlem Community Justice Center with Katherine McQuay who is a supervisory policy analyst with the Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services, and with Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services, otherwise known as the COPS Office. You came to learn a little bit about the Harlem Reentry
Court. Maybe you could tell me what interested you in it and what you thought about what you saw.

KATHERINE
McQUAY: Sure. The COPS Office is all about community policing, so we’re all about partnering, problem
solving, organizational change, and reentry is tailor-made for community policing because it’s all about partnering,
it’s law enforcement, with the community and the social service agencies, with other criminal justice agencies. And
we’ve been involved with reentry to a small extent in the past. We had a pilot program where we funded five pilot
reentry sites, and we’ve required community-based or faith-based organizations to partner with law enforcement agencies,
and faith-based mentoring is the centerpiece of those programs.

WOLF:
I know maybe it’s too soon. You’re still processing what you’ve seen, but are there some takeaways here, things that
you learned or think you might be able to apply?

MCQUAY: Well, I
think it really fits with everything we’ve learned over the years. Someone today said, you know, it’s all about partnering,
which, you know, that speaks to us, and it’s knowing what everybody else is doing and seeing how we can collaborate
because it’s not – no one person can do it alone.

ZOE MENTEL: And
what about other lessons that we’ve learned from hearing the parole officers is that offering services isn’t just
one more thing that you have to do in the course of your job. It’s something that’s going to make your job easier
or make it easier for you to have a positive impact.

McQUAY: And
I think that the discussion afterwards emphasized the need for law enforcement involvement because law enforcement
can be a detriment to these efforts or a great plus to these efforts.

WOLF:
I see.

McQUAY: And I think it really points to the need to partner
with law enforcement, to let law enforcement know what you’re doing with these efforts and to try to get them on
board so you can work in a coordinated fashion. We’ve talked to jurisdictions; there aren’t many but there are few
who do have law enforcement officers and probation-parole officers going out together, so really presenting a united
front and working together. And that seems to be a really good idea that’s starting to catch on.

WOLF:
As opposed to cross-purposes, it sounds like you can have different goals where the parole-reentry attitude sort
of encourages a certain amount of perhaps forgiveness with technical, very technical violations, and the police might
be presuming something else along the lines of zero tolerance.

McQUAY:
And the reentry parole officer talked about, you know, even if there is a technical violation of parole-probation,
that doesn’t mean they’re automatically going back to prison, so there seems to be a new attitude here where you’re
really trying to work with that individual and giving them every break possible to help get them on the right road.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the COPS Office?
Tell me about its history.

McQUAY: We were created in 1994 as part
of the Violent Crime Control Act under President Clinton. And we were initially known for putting a hundred thousand
community policing officers on the street. And since then, we’ve done that and much more. We’ve created a network.
We call them the RCPIs: the Regional Community Policing Institutes that provide training and technical assistance
to law enforcement and the community on a variety of topics. We have a research and evaluation division that does
a lot of publications for us on a variety of subjects. We just distributed our 2 millionth publication. And we cover
everything from reentry to law enforcement agencies, internal affairs department, to hiring and recruitment to domestic
violence, to innovative ways for law enforcement to partner with the community. So we offer a lot to law enforcement
and the community on ways to work together.

WOLF: And is that the
theme that runs through all your work, the community-oriented element where you’re trying to build bridges between
law enforcement and the community?

McQUAY: Exactly. And the three
elements of community policing which are partnering, problem solving, and organizational change, getting across the
idea that, you know, it’s not enough for law enforcement agencies to say this is our community policing officer.
It really has to be a philosophy that goes through the department.

MENTEL:
And it’s a philosophical change from moving away from a reactive stance to a proactive stance. And that’s one of
the commonalities between community policing and the community justice movement. There are a lot of similarities,
especially when you hear community justice people say that most of the courts out there are doing some form of community
justice but not calling it by that name. We have the same sort of phenomenon happening with law enforcement agencies
where they’ll be doing community policing and maybe they won’t even know that’s what it’s called but just through
innovations that they kind of fall into it.

WOLF: So in what direction,
what’s new in the agenda going forward here in 2009?

McQUAY: Oh,
we were pleased to be a part of President Obama’s stimulus package. So the COPS Office has a billion dollars that
will go for funding officers. It’s all hiring money. But we have to hire quite a few officers across the country
with that money and we think that’s a great way to help revive the economy and create jobs, and at the same time
increase public safety and reduce crime. So we were very excited about that.

WOLF:
About how many people does a billion dollars pay for?

McQUAY: You
know, we’re not sure. But when you take it over three years because it’s a three-year program and then you add on
benefits, maybe around 5,000 and that’s a very rough estimate at this point.

The COPS office
always has tribal money, methamphetamine money, technology money. So we’re involved in a lot of areas. And then our
area of the office is currently looking over the things we would like to focus on this year. And we haven’t nailed
those down yet, but certainly, violent crime would probably be among those. Youth violence may be among those. The
effect of the worsening economy on crime may be among those,

MENTEL:
Urban violence.

McQUAY: Urban violence. So a lot of key things we
have to look at in 2009, 2010.

WOLF: Interesting.

MENTEL:
Busy.

WOLF: Busy, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for
taking the time.

McQUAY: Thank you. It’s great to see this today
and see how it works.

WOLF: It’s very nice to meet you. I’ve been
speaking with Katherine McQuay, supervisory policy analyst with the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
and her colleague, Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the COPS Office. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks.

April 2009

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Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney in the Dallas City Attorney’s Office, describes how prosecutors
across the U.S. are responding to the crisis in foreclosed and vacant properties.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with Roxann Pais, who is the executive assistant city attorney with the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office and the special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. And she
and I have both been in Washington a few days before President-elect Obama’s inauguration—but that’s not why we’re
here—to discuss mortgage fraud and the foreclosure crisis and how they are affecting communities and what law enforcement,
prosecutors and police can possibly do about it. Roxann, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

ROXANN
PAIS: Absolutely, Rob. How are you doing today?

WOLF:
I’m doing great.

PAIS: We have some friends here in Washington.

WOLF: Yeah, we have. It’s been very interesting. I’ve learned a
lot.

PAIS: It’s been so exciting to be able to see people so passionate
about their work and the hope of a new era.

WOLF: You know, when
I think of foreclosures, I associate that within a problem for individuals who are perhaps having problems paying
their mortgage and with the banks. Tell my why prosecutors should be interested in foreclosures and why you and the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office have become interested in it.

PAIS:
The prosecutors are in the business of ensuring that quality of life is improved in their neighborhoods. They are
in the business of reducing crime and prosecuting crime. They are in the business of making sure that justice is
served to the fullest extent possible under our laws.

If you take a look at the mortgage crisis,
the foreclosure crisis, what you’ll find is that this results in vacancy of structures on blocks. And typically,
these vacancies are occurring in some of the most crime-ridden, poorest neighborhoods in our country. And as a result,
crime begins to flourish with vacancy. Austin, Texas did a study where they found a block that had a vacant structure
on it had crime two times more than a block next door that didn’t have a vacant structure on it. So you could imagine
the cost that police incur in addressing crime with vacant structures on the block.

WOLF:
What kinds of crimes are we talking about?

PAIS: The drug dealing,
the gangs. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that about 6,000 firefighters are injured every year
just to put out fires in these abandoned vacant structures. There’s been a lot of talk about domestic violence increases
as a result of the foreclosure crisis and the stress that it has placed on families. There’s been talk about juvenile
delinquency and the amount of pressure that it’s putting on children who are being torn from their neighborhoods
and put somewhere else where they don’t know anyone.

WOLF: And is
it true that if you have a vacant property that that can lead, that can generate more vacant properties?

PAIS:
It’s an extreme domino effect and it can lead to potentially serious, serious problems not only resulting in crime
but even in city budgets, for example. We have a vacant structure. The value of the property is less than if it was
occupied. So when cities have lower property values, their tax base is lost. And when they have a lost tax base,
the municipal budgets are lower than they were in the preceding year. When you have a lower budget, municipal budget,
you have less services, such as police and fire services.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me, what can prosecutors do in response to this crisis and to prevent this crisis?

PAIS:
I’ve had the great opportunity to actually look across America and study various jurisdictions to see what they’re
doing. It’s important as we discuss a holistic approach to solving problems that we look at making sure that a jurisdiction
has prevention methods to prevent foreclosed or vacant structures, that they have enforcement methods, and that they
have a plan to reuse the property. And I’ve studied probably 80 different jurisdictions and have come up with about
80 different ideas on how to attack the problem through prevention, enforcement and reuse methods.

WOLF:
Wow. And so, there is a lot going on.

PAIS: Prevention methods,
for example: we have jurisdictions that are having to hire vacant property coordinators because there’s really not
a sophisticated method in place for municipalities or districts or counties to identify where vacant structures are
located. So they’re actually having to be pretty sophisticated in terms of gathering information from their fire
inspectors, their code inspectors, the U.S. Post Office.

WOLF: So
you’re saying they hire a coordinator who then specializes in this because …

PAIS:
Correct.

WOLF: Prior to this crisis, they didn’t know even where
to begin to …

PAIS: Correct.

WOLF:
To identify where these properties were let alone what to do with them.

PAIS:
Some creatively are even looking at the foreclosure dockets [to] identify where the vacant structures are located
and being foreclosed on. Some are actually looking in the newspaper to get identification of the structures that
are being foreclosed upon and their public notice.

WOLF: In the
legal notices. And what do they do when they identify, you know, so they know where the properties are?

PAIS:
Well, a lot of these vacant structures that have been foreclosed are actually owned by the banks. And many banks
are not taking care of their properties. So prosecutors are beginning to hold the property owners, which are the
banks, responsible for making sure that those properties meet minimum housing standards and are boarded up and secured
so that we can avoid any kind of violent crime occurring on the property.

In terms of enforcement,
many jurisdictions around the country—and I would say Chicago, Illinois is leading this effort; Dallas, Texas also
just recently passed one—there’s an ordinance called the Vacant Registration Ordinance, and this is where the municipality
places the burden on the property owner of the vacant structure to register the vacant structure with the city. They
usually have to pay some sort of registration fee and they have to file an application that identifies all the information
that a city would need to know to contact the vacant structure owner if there are any problems on the property.

WOLF:
Because this is not information that is readily available?

PAIS:
Correct. Usually, there are also very specific ordinance requirements for these vacant structure registration ordinances.
Many cities are requiring these property owners to have security lighting or alarm systems or fire sprinkler systems
as a way to encourage public safety and discourage vacancy. Some jurisdictions are actually even requiring vacant
liability insurance so that if you have a vacant structure, they’re going to mandate that it be insured. And many
jurisdictions have gotten really creative on their reuse methods. And some cities are actually taking vacant lots
and selling them at a very nominal price. For example, Columbus, Ohio can sell their vacant lot for $500, but they
enter into an agreement with the purchaser that they’re going to do certain things to that property to improve the
development in that neighborhood. And if the property owner doesn’t comply with that agreement, the property reverts
back to the city.

Other jurisdictions, for example, have a side yard program. These may actually
be properties where the vacant land is too small to redevelop. And so, they offer the lot to the neighboring property
at a very nominal price so long as they keep it up..

WOLF: So someone
who – a non-vacant owner who is responsibly taking care of their property can then annex this side yard as long as
they are committed to maintaining it.

PAIS: Sure. And other jurisdictions
are even becoming more green and allowing non-profits and neighborhood association groups to purchase land for a
dollar as long as they turn it into some sort of garden.

WOLF: Wow.

PAIS: For beautification purposes. There have been other very creative
methods. Some non-profit organizations are actually purchasing the land and house, and they keep the land and sell
the house so it makes the house sale more affordable for people to buy. The creativity involved among prosecutors
and those at the table working with them is pretty phenomenal.

WOLF:
It sounds like – it sounds very encouraging. It sounds like there’s a lot of good ideas out there to respond to this
what is now a growing crisis. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

PAIS:
In Washington D.C.

WOLF: In Washington D.C. I have been talking
to Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District
of Texas. Thank you so much. This is Rob Wolf. Thank you all for listening.

March 2009

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Ann Fulmer, a lawyer and community activist, explains how mortgage fraud harms neighborhoods—including her own
community outside Atlanta, Georgia—and what residents can do to stop it.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. Today I’m with Ann Fulmer who is a vice president at Interthinx, and she’s also
the co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And we just spent a couple of
days in Washington D.C. at the Bureau of Justice Assistance at a focus group discussing the impact that foreclosures
are having and mortgage fraud is having on communities around the country and various law enforcement and justice
system responses. First of all, welcome.

ANN FULMER: Thank you.
Glad to be here.

WOLF: Happy to have you here. You are a dynamic
speaker and that’s one reason I invited you. And you’ve been doing some interesting work. I wanted to ask how mortgage
fraud, which maybe people associate or think of as a white collar crime, think of it as something involving the financial
world, how that actually impacts crime and impacts communities?

FULMER:
Well, mortgage fraud is literally bank robbery without a gun. But it brings other crimes and other really negative
effects into a community. When you have people who are acquiring properties and mortgages with the intent of taking
money and not occupying the home or rent it out to people who are criminals—because a lot of times we see that, you
know, it’s a way to launder cash—there’s a whole cascade of events that happen.

When you have
inflated values, the tax assessments go up. People who move into the neighborhood later are going to pay more than
the houses are really worth because on paper, in the real estate listings and in the tax digest, the properties look
like they’re worth more. But because it’s bank robbery without a gun, these properties inevitably go into foreclosure.
And foreclosures, as you know, have a negative impact on all the surrounding properties in the immediate vicinity.
And then you have underwater borrowers. You have vacant houses; you have blighted houses. And as you know, vacant
houses invite crimes like prostitution, vagrancy, arson, drug dealing, those kinds of things.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me about your personal experience because I’m interested in how you as a community member became aware
of this and actually became very involved in fighting it.

FULMER:
Well, I’m a recovering lawyer. And I was at home on the mommy track after my children were born in a very high end
– well, maybe not very high end, but a very nice neighborhood in the eastern suburbs at Atlanta. Yes, it was a suburban
neighborhood. And back in 1996 we started noticing, and I started being told because I was involved with the community
association, that people were buying houses in our community and walking away with a lot of money. And I thought
how did they do that because I haven’t bought that many houses but I’ve always written a big check; what am I doing
wrong? Over time I started to notice that houses in our neighborhood were selling twice on the same day and for hundreds
of thousands of dollars on the second transaction.

WOLF: Wow.

FULMER:
There were a couple of houses on my street that sold for about $300,000 more than they were worth at the time. And
one of the things that—one of the houses was never occupied. So that’s what the FBI would call a clue. When you have
somebody who’s paying too much money for a house and they don’t bother to move in, you might have a problem with
mortgage fraud. The other house, which was directly across the street from that one, and that’s one of the reasons
fraud is such a problem because they tend to cluster. And the other clue that I had was this house right across the
street from the one that was never occupied, even though UPS was delivering packages, which turns out that they were
delivering drugs to these houses and picking them up at night. The other house across the street was occupied, but
the people moved in, in the middle of the night with the teeniest little—and this is like a 6,000 square foot house—so
the teeniest little U-Haul you’ve ever seen and everything they owned they carried into this house was in 30-gallon
trash bags.

Well, the next thing you know there’s kids from the school who are living in this
now 600,000, 500, $600,000 house 12, 15 years ago who are going to our elementary school. And all of a sudden, the
school’s asking me what do you know about your neighbors because here’s these kids, they live in a $600,000 house.
Grandma, who is now a convicted felon, by the way, is driving a Jaguar or a brand new Jaguar, and these kids are
on free lunch. What’s up with that? And because these things were happening and because of my work in the community
people were telling me about other houses, I started to look into these transactions.

And I discovered
this really very typical web of transactions where you have a few people who are buying a lot of houses all over.
And I realized it wasn’t just, you know, the 20 or so houses that I ultimately identified in my neighborhood, but
it was happening all over Atlanta. And as I kept trying to get someone to address the problem, which at first they
wouldn’t do because I was dismissed as a bored housewife who needed a better hobby, I started finding out that it
was happening – it wasn’t just Atlanta; it was all over the country.

WOLF:
Now without going to too much detail, what’s the basic principle here? I mean this person moved in with trash bags
and yet could afford this house. How did this person profit from this transaction?

FULMER:
The people that moved in with the garbage bags were actually ex-cons who were friends of what we call the orchestrators.
The orchestrators are the people who are the brains behind and who profit most from these transactions.

WOLF:
I see.

FULMER: And they were recruiting people who were coming out
of the Georgia prisons to act as what we call straw buyers to stand, to actually fill out the paperwork. So they
were profiting because they were getting paid five to $10,000 per transaction that they lent their name to and showed
up at the closing to sign the paper. And this particular group used a lot of identity theft too. So these guys were
standing in for people in Michigan and in Florida who had no idea that they were buying overpriced property in Georgia.

The orchestrators are profiting because let’s say you have all – I’m not good with numbers so
I’ll just use low simple numbers. But say you have a house worth $100,000. If you can flip it for $200,000 by getting
a bad appraisal or a bad appraiser to say that it’s worth $200,000, then there’s a $100,000 profit there.

WOLF:
Right.

FULMER: One of our cases the closing attorney was getting
$4,000 per transaction under the table when the normal fee’s about $500. And these people were walking away with
anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000 per transaction.

WOLF: So they
don’t pay off the mortgage. These people do temporarily until the bank foreclosed or something.

FULMER:
Like I said in the beginning, it’s bank robbery without a gun. There’s no intention to pay for the property.

WOLF:
What’s interesting to me is how can community play a role in assisting law enforcement prosecutors, people who are
attempting to address this problem. You as a citizen, you went ahead and you started …

FULMER:
GREFPAC?

WOLF: Right. The Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and
Awareness Coalition. Maybe not everyone can do that, but maybe you can tell me what GREFPAC encourages people to
do.

FULMER: Right. And with the banking crisis, one of the things
that’s happened now is people who are in danger of being foreclosed or fallen victim to a whole new world of scams
that are designed to take advantage of desperate borrowers like that.

I think that there’s a
couple of things. One, when we’re talking about spotting fraud, people who are in neighborhoods are the canaries
in the mine because you know when somebody gets a hundred thousand dollars more than their asking price. You know
because you hear through the grapevine that somebody came in and, you know, the house is on the market and somebody
made an offer, sight unseen. You hear these kinds of things, or that the seller got $75,000 back or that the borrower
got a bunch of money back. So in that sense, you know, you can be the first eyes and ears for your law enforcement
community.

One of the things community associations need to—can do—is cultivate relationships
with law enforcement agencies because these crimes do bring in street level crimes. A lot of these houses get turned
into meth labs. They get turned into “grow” houses so they’ve got a pot farm in the basement. If they’re not occupied,
you have arsonists; you got prostitution; you got drug dealing; you got vandalism; you got fires – all this kinds
of stuff.

WOLF: So it really behooves community members to inform
themselves about this and for community groups to do it because it really can have a tangible impact on their very
quality of life and their safety, public safety.

FULMER: Absolutely.
And you need law enforcement to help you with that. But the other thing, the other side of the equation I think is
education because one of the ways that my community ultimately shut down the flipping was by engaging the community
in dialogue about what mortgage fraud is. We didn’t know the whole scope; we didn’t know the whole panoply of damages
that were going to happen. But we started talking about what we were seeing. And one of the things we were able to
do was to educate sellers so that they would be wary when somebody came in and made a weird offer. Instead of just
saying “Wow, somebody wants to me a hundred thousand more than I’m asking, cool; where do I sign,” they would stop
and they would ask. And we could say yeah, that’s a huge red flag for mortgage fraud.

We educated
the realtors who farm our neighborhood because realtors like to have a specialty in an area. We worked with closing
attorneys. We worked – I mean, basically, we made a whole lot of noise and said, “you know, not in our backyard.”
But it really is a lot about education.

WOLF: Wow. Well, you know,
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. And it was a pleasure to meet you. Once again, I’ve
been speaking with Ann Fulmer who’s a vice president at Interthinx and a co-founder of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud
Prevention and Awareness Coalition. And I don’t know if you have a website or something that you might want to refer
people to.

FULMER: Well, Interthinx is at interthinx.com and GREFPAC
is at grefpac.org.

WOLF: Wonderful. This is Rob Wolf and thanks
so much for listening.

February 2009

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Linda Baird discusses the Youth Justice Board, which brings together high schoolers across New York City to
study and make recommendations about justice policies that affect their peers.

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