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OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS September 29, 2000 CREATING A SEAMLESS REENTRY SYSTEM:
Focusing on Institutional Programming and Community Linkages A.T. Wall, Director
Roberta Richman, Warden
Dr. Virgil A. Wood, President
Drawing in the Family Elizabeth Gaynes, Director
Precious Bedell, Coordinator
Addressing Housing Challenges Debbie Mukamal, Staff Attorney
Meeting the Challenges of Job Training and Placement Todd Hazelton, Employment Trainer
MR. JEFFRIES: We're going to move right to our first panel which is on the agenda. You're in for a serious treat and some very interesting and kind of experienced people that you're going to hear from. I'm just going to introduce them from your left to right, in the order that they're going to present. I encourage you to look at their bios--they're in your packets--in the interest of time. Here's the plan. We're going to try to have both discussion and the presentations so that by 11:15 or so, we are done for a break. They have their marching orders about how much time. I'll be diligent about keeping them to that time. But we will have an opportunity for you to ask questions and have a discussion. Do you want to have the presentations first and then move intothe discussion? But again, I encourage you to jot down--yesterday, it's the same way. If you have a question that you feel didn't get addressed or time didn't permit or it took you a longer time to formulate it, jot that question down, get it to us, and we'll see that the person reaches out to you either today or at some other point so your question gets asked. From my left, we have a contingent from Rhode Island, Mr. Wall, A.T. Wall, Roberta Richman, Reverend Dr. Virgil A. Wood, Elizabeth Gaynes, Precious Bedell, then we're going to move to Debbie Mukamal and we're going to end with Todd Hazelton. Thank you. Focusing on Institutional Programming and Community Linkages MR. WALL: Good morning. Our panel's topic is "Creating a Seamless Reentry System," which is "Filling in the Gaps Between Pre-Release Planning and Post-Release Follow-Up." As Director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, that is very much an issue for me. I run a unified system in our jurisdiction. We're a full-service operation. I'm responsible for not only for the prisons but for the jails, for probation, for parole, and for home confinement. So when an offender is released from my institutions, it's not only that I want them to do well. I own the consequences of their failure because the scheme in Rhode Island is that virtually everybody released from prison is released to a period of post-institutional supervision under either probation or through--under either parole or through split sentences probation. So I have a real investment in pre-release planning and post-release follow-up. The target zone in the battle for reentry in Rhode Island is the City of Providence, the State's capital and the largest city in the State. It is about 200,000 people, but looks and feels very urban and thoroughly diverse. Rhode Island has the highest percentage of foreign-born individuals in the nation and many of those people--most, in fact--reside in the city of Providence. I think it stands in for a lot of mid-sized cities all around the country. Ground zero in the battle for reentry is two neighborhoods in the City of Providence, the south and west sides of the city. They are very diverse, with large numbers of individuals from every ethnic group, African-American, Caucasian, Hispanic, Southeast Asian--we have the highest percentage of Southeast Asians of any State in the nation, Hmong, Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, and also Native American. It is very diverse, it is very poor, and close to 25 percent of all my offenders released from prison are released into those neighborhoods on the south and west side. Almost one out of every four sentenced inmates is released to the south and west sides of the City of Providence, very large numbers every year. Some months ago, I received a visit from Reverend Dr. Virgil Wood, who is pastor of the Pond Street Baptist Church, an anchor in that part of the city, and also President of the Rhode Island Ministerial Alliance. And with him was Dennis Langley, Executive Director of the Urban League, whose offices are also in that part of the city, and they had an extraordinary proposition that they presented to me. They said, we know that large numbers of your offenders are coming back to us. We are bearing the burden of public safety in our community as they all come back into our neighborhoods. No one in our neighborhoods is untouched by this extraordinary influx of ex-offenders. And then Reverend Wood offered a building on his church property and said, "I want it to serve as a reentry site. I want it to be a multi-service center for released inmates and their families and I also want it to serve as a site for your probation and parole officers, as well as for community police." The point was to serve as a bridge to the community for stepped-up discharge planning, targeted primarily at male inmates coming out of my institutions. They also made it clear that they wanted to be true partners in this effort, not just junior members of the team. They wanted to be co-equals in program design and implementation, and in some cases, such as working with the community to achieve acceptance of this effort and in working with the local political power structure, they wanted to take the lead. Thus began a fascinating journey in coalition building for me, as the Director of Corrections. What we have now is a partnership that includes not only me and representatives of my department, but leaders from the three primary communities, African-American, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian in that neighborhood, local political leaders, representatives of the local human services agencies--housing, substance abuse, mental health, that provide services in that neighborhood, clergy, and local citizens, some of them parishioners at the churches in that part of the city. What have I learned from this effort? One, it is challenging work for us professionals. What I've discovered is building these kinds of coalitions is harder than those involving just the professional members of the criminal justice system, which as you well know and I know, too, are plenty hard in and of themselves. As somebody with 25 years of experience in corrections, I and I think people like me, we tend to think we have the expertise, and this kind of process has obliged us to respect the insights and the intuitions of people we don't ordinarily and traditionally look to for solutions in criminal justice. Two, it has meant letting go of control. Again, as somebody in corrections for all these years, control is something I'm accustomed to. Control is something that my professional field is built upon. And this letting go of control has meant even unto letting the money flow not into my budget but into the budget of the consortium of community agencies that are my partners in this effort. Three, I've learned that this process is messy, it is inefficient, and it can be unwieldy. Sometimes there are 20 people around that table and we are struggling for compromise and consensus and our conversations take a lot of circuitous routes. It involves a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of patience. And four, I've had to accept that there is going to be conflict and tension in that room. My own relationship with the community was actually born of a history of sharp criticism ofcriminal justice and its institutions, including corrections, and before Virgil and Dennis came to me, we had had months, going back a couple of years, of tough, hard meetings with the community. Many of them were hostile and angry. But we stuck with it and ultimately we built up trust and were able together to forge a pretrial services program in the State's busiest court. So I've learned it's hard, but I've also discovered that it's absolutely essential for success. We don't own these offenders. The community owns them. Even with the rising length of stay in our institutions, we have our offenders in custody for maybe two-and-a-half years. The rest of their time--less, of course, in the jail system. The rest of the time, they're in the community, and in the community our offenders are not the other, they are neighbors, they are parents, they are children, they are friends, they are coworkers, they are parishioners. They are coming home. This community site is not luring people to the south and west sides of the city. That's where they're going to be anyway. I also understand that we, the professionals, can't do our work in isolation. The burden is too great. Our resources are too few. Even with intensive probation supervision, which we have and which many of you have, there's so much time when we are not in contact with our client base. And ultimately, we, the professionals, are strangers in those communities. We must engage the members of the community. We must expand our networks and reach out to people that we don't ordinarily communicate with as equals, some of whom may even be our adversaries in other contexts. We also learned that it's important to the financial success of our project. To our delight, we have attracted a lot of attention from not only some national foundations but also community foundations which exist in virtually every jurisdiction. What we've discovered is that they weren't particularly interested in me. They expect government to fund government programs. They don't want to devote their dollars to my budget. What they do want to see is a buy-in on the part of the people who have a direct stake in success, and that is, again, our community partners. So what I would say is that the work is exciting, it's hard, it's challenging, but most important, it's absolutely critical, because if the community is not prepared as our partners to support the people who will be living and working among them as our offenders, then as professionals, all our efforts to change that behavior may well come to naught. Thank you very much. I'll turn it over to Roberta Richman, warden of the women's facilities. [Applause.] MS. RICHMAN: Good morning. I've actually been doing what you're calling reentry for about 20 years. We didn't maybe call it reentry, we called it discharge planning and after-care, but I've been inside the prisons living with offenders day by day, learning and being humbled, in fact, by the struggles that they're facing as they come into prison and leave prison, often frequently. Now, these last ten years, I've been working with female offenders as warden of the women'sprison, but I'll preface my remarks by saying that having worked the first 12 years of my career with men, everything we're doing now in the women's prison, which is a model I'll describe to you, is equally critical for male offenders. So don't stereotype these remarks and think it's women and it doesn't apply to males. In fact, probably dealing with women and their issues is more complicated, more challenging, maybe, from my perspective anyway, but certainly male offenders, who represent about 96 percent of the people we're incarcerating in America today, need every bit as much of our attention. I do want to preface my remarks with just a few observations that I would make, which I've learned somewhat painfully, I guess, through the years, and one is that we talk about incentives, rewards, positive reinforcement for people, sanctions for people. One of my learning curves, my sharp learning curves, has been that people, being what they are, change when they're ready to change, and if we attempt to force people to change their lives, we're wasting our resources. We assess readiness for change at the women's prison in Rhode Island, and given the limited resources we have to work with them, we try to figure out who will be most likely to benefit from intensive services during the incarceration period, and that's tricky. You can assess readiness for change around simple behaviors like smoking cessation or exercise. But when you're talking about a woman who has multiple needs, who has three or four children, who has an addiction that she's been in the habit of using for 15 or 20 or 30 years, when you're talking about women who have little or no education, have been sexually abused as children, have that whole array of struggles, you really have to be humble around what they're facing and you have to be realistic about your expectations. You can't expect that someone who's been living that life for 15, 20, 25 years is going to change just because you give her a pass to the movies. It's not going to happen. And we're used to that at the women's prison and we accept failure and we accept relapse and we forgive it and start over again. I've seen women come back to prison eight, ten, 12 times, and it's painful and it hurts. And when I see them come through, my comment is always--it's consistent--you're back. You made a mistake. We'll start over again. You're still alive. We'll pick up where you left off. The other, just before I describe the program, which I will do briefly because if you want to know more about it, I'd be happy to tell you the details of it, it's built on the premise, again, as A.T. has said, that this is not corrections' job. This is the community's job, especially with females, but males, as well. More than half of our inmates in Rhode Island are doing less than six months at a time. They may do six months repeatedly, but they come in for six months and they leave. What we have found doing this work over ten years now is that an untreated population, that is, those offenders who come into the system and essentially reject our efforts to help them, untreated while they're incarcerated, the recidivism rate is around 55 to 60 percent. A treated population, a woman who says, yes, I'm ready for help, help me. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Those people who enter treatment programs while they're incarcerated, the recidivism rate has dropped for us by at least ten to 15 percent. So we're talking about a 35 to 40 percent recidivism rate with folks who say, put me in your programs. Help-- [Break between sides of recorded tape.] MS. RICHMAN: --about 35, 40 percent. But if we can give that woman that seamless reentry that we're talking about, if we let her leave with her case manager who stays with her for at least 12 months after she's released, if we let her leave with her mentor who we have trained and nurtured and counseled, if she leaves with a mentor who also stays with her in the community, who literally holds her hand as she goes to her first appointment, that recidivism rate drops yet again to about 25 to 28 percent. And folks, that's as good as it gets. If you're looking for a zero percent recidivism rate, you're in the wrong business, and all of you have been doing this work long enough to know better. Don't look for perfection. It's not there. But if you can reduce a recidivism rate by providing institutional treatment and reentry assistance and support in the community, you're going to get it down to as good as it can get. I'll describe what we do and fill in the details with those of you who want it. We talk about discharge the minute a woman is sentenced. She comes before that classification board and the board asks her, what are you going to do when you get out? Who's there for you? What kind of family support do you have? Where are your children? Where are you going to live? How are you going to earn a living? If a woman chooses, if she is at that stage of readiness to choose being in treatment, she goes into our therapeutic community and the therapeutic community, as are all of our services, are run by community-based agencies with whom we have contracted to bring their services inside the institution. If a woman or a man builds a relationship with me, with the corrections professional, I have to say good bye when he or she leaves. But if that relationship, that trust that a person builds in another one, another person, can remain consistent as the woman leaves the prison, it makes a big difference. So our therapeutic community, our counseling for victims of sexual violence, our domestic violence counseling, our vocational training setting, our psychological services, our parenting counseling, we actually contract with community agencies presently existing in the community who serve these women when they're out there anyway, to come inside the prison and provide those services, build those trusting relationships while the woman is incarcerated. The other comment, observation I would make, and I'm sure this has occurred to you, given the prison industrial complex as it exists today in America, we know that the drive is to incarcerate. It's economically driven. It's fear driven. People want offenders in prison and no one of us is going to change that. It will change. I'm convinced we're on the cusp of a new time when people will begin to understand that we can't be locking up every other person we see. But given the fact that so many people are in prison and we are paying millions of dollars to incarcerate them, let's at least use that window of opportunity while they're safe, they're off the street, they're not having access to weapons, they're not using drugs, they're not going to miss appointments, not if they're in jail, let's bring those treatment providers into the prison and givepeople who are ready to accept the opportunity a chance to start examining themselves and their values while we've got them, while they're in prison, and then preparing the community and the family becomes a natural segue to release. In our therapeutic community, a team approach exists. There's a mentor assigned to every offender. The mentor is a one-to-one relationship. We recruit volunteers. We train them. We nurture them. They need as much support and nurturing as the offender does. She gets a substance abuse treatment provider. She gets a case manager for discharge planning. And she is her own advocate. So the team is four people, including the offender. The accent, the obvious kind of emphasis we make is that we want to take a strength-based approach. This woman, when she returns, has to be an asset to the community, has to be able to offer something back to her family. She doesn't only have needs. She has strengths, as well, and we start talking about that early on. In the therapeutic community, the thrust is on treatment, education, counseling. It's a full-day marginal work period, but mostly they're in treatment. As they approach release, we put them into a community service program for a while and transitioning them--I'm trying to look at notes at the same time, and I have one minute left--and the concept is trying to prepare them for release by putting them into community service programs and then work release programs, so that as a woman leaves into the community with family counseling and reunification with children prior to release, she leaves with the same people that she's met and come to trust while she's been incarcerated. It sounds simple. It sounds logical. It's taken us ten years to evolve to a place where we think we're starting to do a few things right, but we also know that what's right for one person is not right for everybody and the plan is to keep trying. Thank you. [Applause.] DR. WOOD: I'm going to try to work a miracle this morning. For a Baptist preacher to say everything in five minutes is a challenge, but I'm going to meet it this morning. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much. And I'm also thrilled and feel blessed to have colleagues as you have just heard. I left the university 17 years ago because I was using my weekends to run around the country making speeches, like the outline I'm going to give you this morning, and one Sunday morning an old lady grabbed me after the service, shook a dollar in my hand and said, "Boy?" "Yes, ma'am?" "I've been looking for you." I said, "Yes, ma'am." She said, "You meet me tomorrow morning," gave me a time and a place. Based on what I'd said in that pulpit, I should have been able to keep that assignment with her, but I had to get back to the university. Within six months, I was out of that university, back in the local community, and it's from that perspective that I want to make my remarks this morning. I feel like Ezekiel, the prophet, who walked around in the midst of death valley. He said he saw these bones lying around and they were very dry, a death valley. Our community is a deathvalley. There is a trail that runs through poor communities in America. We call it the jail trail. For you, it may be something else, but for the people who live there, it's death valley. It's a jail trail. And it starts for our boys at grade four. Dr. Kunjufu [ph.] documents that. I want to tell you that I've been dreaming and praying and hoping for a day like this, and I'm so excited that it has come, because as partners in reentry, we have a chance to reverse the jail trail and allow America to get on to other things that it must face. Our predicament is described by Jesse Jackson as having first class jail systems and second class school systems. That, in a sense, speaks to the predicament. But I'm delighted that in our little State of Rhode Island, one million people, we have the possibility of making a real contribution to this effort in our land. We have church, town, and gown in partnership--church, town, and gown. When I look at the people whom I serve, my neighbors in the community, I realize that as we have said in this effort, our churches, our community agencies, particularly the Urban League, are prepared to make an equal investment in this matter of minds, money, and markets and we will put those on the table as we have already begun to do. We recognize that if an inmate is to rehabilitate, he or she must return to a different community from which they left. We cannot give a different community yet. We cannot give a different neighborhood yet. But what we can do is to give different neighbors, and therefore we have begun to fashion the ability to welcome the offenders back into their own community as neighbors. Our churches have agreed to a program that we're going to call "One Church, One Neighbor." Many of you are familiar with the "One Church, One Child," highly successful. But I want to tell you that when I look at my brothers and sisters, I think about Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall and Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall, and all the king's horses and all the king's men and all the agencies could not put Humpty Dumpty together again, but there is news. Humpty Dumpty, Brother H.D., Sister H.D., is being put back together by my colleagues here, by Peter Young, by other people across this land, and I think the trick is to find out who is putting Humpty Dumpty back together again and then join forces. All together, all across America, we can face our brothers and our sisters, the brokenness of our land, and heal it. And make no mistake about it, the brokenness is not just in the inner cities or the broken rural communities. It's in the Columbines and the other communities and we must love them all. We must love all the children, whether in Columbine or in South Providence, if we are to heal any of the children and any of our neighbors. We're prepared to give our offenders an appropriate party back home. We don't know yet how to do that, but when the prodigal son came home, he was a rascal, but he got a big party. So we want to say at least to the offenders, happy birthday, Humpty Dumpty. [Applause.] Drawing in the Family MS. GAYNES: Good morning. There's been some reference to community and some passing references to family but I want to bring family a little more present in the room. I'm not quite sure what the resistance is to seeing our families of our clients as being the single best resource that we have in this effort. I think every team should have had a family member on it. We could have had a table here for family members. It would have improved the demographics of this room a little bit, and it would have given us some real important information on how we can best get this done. It's not a radical idea. I have heard the chairman of our parole board in New York State stand up and say that families are the best resource. They're free, they're committed, and they really do not want their formerly incarcerated family member to go back to prison. So I think there's a great opportunity here to have our reentry courts and our reentry system look at ways to help families provide support for their parolee or client and to help the parolees provide support for their families. As obvious as it seems, most of us or many of us get jaded about this a little bit because it's not that simple. In this country, whenever you see some child committing a crime, we immediately blame the parents. We don't think of family members as being good news, necessarily. When I was at the American Correctional Association winter convention--that's the other privilege to going to these things. There's these vendors there. They're selling hardware and software and the phone companies are there. The guy from AT&T was there so he could sell these great phone systems that allow family members to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars a year accepting collect phone calls from prisoners who are trying to stay connected to their families. I was there with a name tag that said New York, and he didn't realize that I was from a community-based organization. He assumed that I controlled a billion-dollar prison system so he was ready to make his sale, and his sale was, you know, prisoners should really be paying for their own incarceration and we can tell you how to do that. And I said, oh, tell me more. And he said, well, our phone system, and he began explaining it, and I said, but aren't these collect calls? He said, yes. And I said, well, aren't the family members paying for it? He said, yes. And I said, so how is it the prisoner that's paying for his own incarceration? It's the family members. He said, well, you know, he's a criminal, his families are probably criminal. They're really all in this together. This is not an uncommon belief. There's a strong feeling in a country that is so built on vengeance and blame to always look for someone to blame, and very, very often, we do make assumptions that people's families are the cause of, the source or, or at least in many ways contributing to their bad behavior, and to some degree, in some cases, no doubt, that is true. A lot of what we need to be doing in this work, of course, is looking at each offender as an individual, each parole officer as an individual, each family member as an individual, and knowthat we're not always dealing with the same thing. My organization, the Osborne Association, has been doing, I guess, reentry work for 75 years, since our founder, Thomas Mott Osborne, was a warden at Sing Sing prison in the early part of the century. But we really got involved in the family work about 15 years ago when a woman who was in the research department of our division of parole shared with me some really interesting data that showed that 80 percent of the people who failed on parole had been released to unstable domestic situations and that it was dramatically different from the data around people who succeeded on parole. And so as an organization, we decided to put our energies, a lot of our energies, into reestablishing family ties, and I'm not going to describe our program in great detail, but family works provides--it works in several men's prisons in New York State and we do parenting education, family counseling, preparing people to reintegrate with their families, and are now building a family resource center in New York City that's being coordinated by Precious Bedell. So we came to it a long time ago and our work has gotten bigger since because mass incarceration during that time doesn't--the unintended consequences of incarcerating two million people is that now we've got also two million children, two million mothers, several million cousins and brothers and sisters, and part of what we need to do here in order for any of our sort of incentives to work is to begin to seeing these folks as partners, people who, for the most part, share your goals and want people to succeed. Unfortunately, just the same way that we don't draw prisoners evenly from communities across America, their family members also tend to live in communities that are devastated by having removed large numbers of men and have weakened social networks and human capital. So we're asking families to provide the support generally when they are least able to do that in communities that have been hit hard, and the stigma from the guy from AT&T is really not the only one. Families generally have been treated poorly from the moment of arrest, from the moment they've tried to visit in a jail, from the moment they come into court, and certainly in most of our--in New York State, the vast majority of our prisons are very far away from the communities in which people live. Families, to stay in touch, have to travel long distances, have to go to communities in which they stand out and are not welcome, have to go through processes of search and inquiry, which are not designed for the most part to be welcoming, although we have exceptions, and they've become essentially double victimized. I want to say something about the stigma because I think it's important how I've begun to see this. I come here and I look at my biography and I say that I've been able to do this work, but I am one of millions of people now in this country who has a family member in prison, and I don't think it's particularly helped my career and I definitely experienced the sense that it's not the kind of thing you want to share, but I promised Ms. McBride that I would because I think it's time for family members to come out and bring present what it's like to listen to these conversations about people who are not really seen as people, and for the most part, we're not, either. We're not prepared. Family members are not prepared for people coming home, and I think it's something that this effort could make a big difference with. If you're beginning to work with people before they come out, you can begin to work with their families also so that they know something of what to expect. Prisons are not good for people. They're not healthy places, for the most part. Warden Richman and Elaine Lord in New York being two great exceptions, having run, I think, really humane prisons, and I think most people intend to run humane prisons, but the truth is that putting people in cages is not a natural thing to do and most people come out of prison angry, hyper-sensitive to disrespect, unable to deal with the experiences they've had, not knowing what to do with their feelings, and their families, who are the ones really who are treated to this behavior, have no idea how to respond to it. You have no idea what to do when somebody comes out and they're waking up at five o'clock in the morning and going in and out of the bathroom and the shower, fascinated by the ability to finally shave after several years of not having real shaving equipment, wanting to look in mirrors, not wanting to go out to dinner because they're a little worried about which fork to use after years of using a spork in a prison dining hall, thinking that everyone's looking at them, never wanting to wear green in New York State, because that's what they've had to wear for years before, and in that environment we expect--never mind what the issues are for them, which you've been actually, I think, dealing with--we expect their families to actually know what to do with this, know how to help. And for the most part, as I said, they don't even want to tell people that they're in this circumstance. When my children's father was incarcerated and they shared this information with people, there were families who told their kids they could not play with my kids. As soon as the school knew, every time something went missing, the assumption was that the kid whose father was in prison was probably the culprit. So families have been going through this for a while and they will need help to provide the support that they need, and I think that this group of people could really begin to think about how to do that. You could prepare them for what's expected and then you can help provide them. The other thing that's really important in the area you were talking about, about graduated sanctions and incentives, family members are often victimized in many ways by the people who are coming out. I don't want to make light of the fact that it's not easy on both times. You all have people who were released with histories of drugs, but they're also maybe the first person who will observe that this guy is picking up and using again. They have a lot of mixed feelings about they don't want the guy to use and they don't want him to go back to prison. Can they call the parole officer? What's the parole officer going to do? Is the parole officer going to tell him that I snitched on him and make my life more difficult? Is he going to help him get into treatment? Is he going to send him back to prison? These are very complicated issues. I'm not here to give those answers. I want to just really get this whole issue higher up on your kind of list of questions to ask and answers to seek and toencourage you to seek them from the people best able to really think this through, which are people in prison, people who have come out of prison on parole, and their family members. I know I'm supposed to make this quick. It's hard to expect you to do family work. This is why I think the Department of Correctional Services contracts with us to do it, because community groups probably can and should do it. Family work is messy. But I think it is something that has to be fully included in this. Family work, in order to be done well, has to be culturally a great deal more competent than some of the other services that get provided. Families are not all the same. Families from different cultural backgrounds and different ethnic groups see family systems differently, and if you're doing this work and assume that there's only one model for family, you will run into trouble. There's a really important reason to do this, even if you were not doing it for the offender and the family and the data is out there. The number of children who have parents in prison now is through the roof. One out of seven black children in America has a parent in a Federal or State penitentiary. You cannot write people coming out of prison off in terms of parenting. You can't say, well, they abandoned their kids, they weren't taking care of them before they went to prison, they have nothing to offer. They have a lot to offer. One thing we've learned from teaching parenting in men's prisons all this time is that it is possible that men and women who were not doing what they should have been doing for their kids before they came in can make that change, do make that change, will make that change. It may be that their families and their children and access to them, visitation, support, and being reinvolved in their lives is the biggest incentive that you could put on any of the lists that you have, and if the work you do offers people coming out of prison the incentive of being able to get back into the lives of the people that they loved and continue to love, that's the greatest incentive you can provide. Thank you. [Applause.] MS. BEDELL: Hi. My name is Precious Bedell and Liz sort of covered a lot of areas that I was going to cover, but I don't think she can possibly cover the fact that I'm an ex-offender and that I spent 19 years in a correction facility in New York State, and that experience left me and my family scarred in many ways and also resilient in many ways. I was in a correctional facility that provided a very humane possibility for change, transformation, and growth. It was supervised by Elaine Lord, who sort of has the same principles and philosophies as Ms. Robinson. Some of the issues that we don't realize as people is that when we incarcerate individuals, we also incarcerate the whole entire family. I was in a prison that was nine hours away from my family, so they had to travel on an upstate bus at three o'clock in the morning to come to see me. So there were times when I didn't even want them to visit because of the hardship. But there were also times that I missed them terribly and I know that without their support, I wouldn't have been able to reenter society and become who I am today. And from the perspective of other ex-offenders, I just want to sort of like touch base on how reentry courts can play a role in the lives of the people that are most important and that is the family members. When we look at families as incentive and as resources, we're looking at several issues. We're looking at the fact that there's a strength perspective in families that the stigma has really denied them to become the people that they can be. A lot of people aren't responsible for us going to prison. Some families may have played a role in that journey to the prison door, but that does not mean that they are not the people that need the most support. We talk about, as psychologists and practitioners, we talk about the risk factors of prisoners, but very seldom at these conferences have I really heard about the resiliencies in families, particularly African-American/Latino families, which fill most of the prison systems. We have to look at_each individual family individually because we can't ignore the fact that people have committed crimes and that some people are going to come in and out of prisons constantly before they reach this point of transformation or change and that we all work in a business that expects failure, and if we don't expect failure and relapse, then we're in the wrong business again and I think that that has been spoken about. We also are in the wrong business if we don't include family members as part of the treatment process, as part of the reentry process, as part of giving them an environment that supports them and that validates them, that they are people who have issues that are not like the family next door who doesn't have a family member. And we also have to provide education to our community. A lot of people have spoken about different programs to envelop the communities, but we have to look at the communities also enveloping the family members, to provide resource centers in different places where family members are able to empower themselves by giving workshops and groups on how they feel about their family members, what experiences they've had, how to negotiate systems within the process, like the criminal justice system, the welfare system, the drug treatment courts, the drug treatment programs. How do we do this and how do we engage families to come in this process is not an answer that is easily answered. It's not a question that is easily answered, but it's something that can't be ignored because if we want a family member to become more empowered with the situation of having a family member incarcerated, we have to look at avenues and we have to address avenues to find resources within the community and to enlighten people about family members who have incarcerated family members. And I think the best approach for me and a lot of people that I've spoken to who have been incarcerated is not like we're--I'm very fortunate to be involved with an agency that knows I've been in prison, that doesn't face me with a lot of stigma, so it continues my transformation and continues my growth. But once I stepped out of the prison system, because I have some resources that some people in prison may not have, it wasn't easy. Being in prison wasn't a fair ride, or wasn't a free ride, either. College has been cut out in prison. It took me five years to raise funds for my master's, which was never paid for by a grant. So it wasn't a free ride. So when people look at people in prison and say, their family should be paying for their college education, their families pay so much money for transportation resources, so much money, as Liz talked about, for phone calls. Sometimes when you're inside there and you reach for the phone, you feel guilty about calling because for some reason, telephone calls for family members are much higher than they are for other people in the community and we have to look at that. And we have to also look at when people come out, and we're talking about reentry and transformation, we have to look at what their families can build on. What are the strength perspectives in that family situation that we can transform, and I kind of think that we can do that before people get out of prison. I think that before people come to prison, we have to look at some issues. I think that during that process of incarceration, we have to take into account how many family members come to visit, how many people in prison who don't get visits and what are the consequences. Mostly, we've come to realize that people in prison who don't get prison visits are the people who are most bitter, okay, who are most ignored, and who are very sad individuals who sort of provide fulfillments of SHU places, of mentally ill places in prison, and we have to look at how to combat those kind of issues, and again, they're very difficult. When I was coming out of prison, my first fear, I think more than anything, was that my family was going to still be continuing to be stigmatized, because now that I was out, there was a lot of news media of me being out and why are they in a position to be in a grocery store and somebody walks up to them and says, she's out, she should be out, or she's out and she doesn't deserve to be out. So those are the kind of stigma, those are the kinds of things that they are faced with constantly. Those are the kind of issues that all family members are faced with. And we all in the United States, in the world, are families. We all are units that provide support, love, and continued support throughout our kids' lives, whether they go to college, whether they get married or whatever. And these are the same people, the very same people that have families incarcerated. I was incarcerated when I was 24 years old. My family followed me through college. They followed me through being a program designer. They followed me through tears, and without that, I would not be here. So thank you, and--thank you. [Applause.] Addressing Housing Challenges MS. MUKAMAL: Good morning. It's hard to follow that, I'm going to have to say, and I'mgoing to switch gears a lot. We're going to move from family to housing, and I've heard many of you yesterday and also at the meetings that we had in April identify housing as a major issue that needs to be addressed in order to make the reentry court initiative work. This morning, I want to share some information with you that we've been gathering that will hopefully shed light on the extent of the housing barrier that is faced by people with criminal records in our communities and hopefully that information will be helpful as you continue to develop your programs. In the last few months, my office has been gathering information on the local housing policies in each of the communities that the reentry court sites are involved in. Many of your sites are working in multiple counties and we've been looking at that information in multiple counties. We're going to be providing you with that information in the next month or so. We're putting together summaries that will hopefully elucidate what the admission and eviction procedures are in communities and hopefully that will be information that you can share with the individual participants in your program as well as the other agencies that you're partnering with. I also want to call your attention to this morning we handed out summaries that are entitled, "Housing Laws that Affect Individuals with Criminal Convictions." These summaries highlight what the Federal laws are that affect public housing and how they affect people who have criminal records. In terms of highlighting the Federal laws, I think the important thing to know about the Federal laws is that they give the local housing authorities a lot of discretion to establish their own policies, admission policies and eviction policies as they relate to people who have criminal records, okay. So in saying that, I think the key is to know that it's really important to establish a good working relationship with your local housing authorities. And almost every county in your State should have a housing authority. So if you're working in different counties, you're going to have to establish a relationship with every housing authority in each county. I know that is going to create more work for people, but it's really important because the housing authorities have discretion to determine how long it is--whether or not they'll admit anyone with a criminal record, how long that time period may be that they're going to bar someone, what kind of evidence of rehabilitation a person can show in order to be admitted into the public housing, and also whether or not the whole family will be evicted if someone has committed a crime. In some cases, they'll evict the entire family even if it's a guest that has committed a crime on the premises. So it's important to establish a good working relationship with your housing authority because they may be able to--you may be able to help them understand what it is people in your programs are going through and the kinds of rehabilitation that they're undergoing that would then make them more sympathetic to allow the person to remain in public housing or to be admitted into public housing. What did we learn about what's happening out in the field? And I should tell you, when we'redoing our research, we're not only contacting the local housing authorities. We're also talking with local advocates. We're talking with legal aid offices, we're talking with community-based organizations. We're trying to get a sense of what's happening, not only what is the policy that's written down but what is actually happening. How is the policy being implemented, and if people aren't getting into public housing, where are they going instead? And hopefully, that information will also be useful to you. This is what's happening. And I'm summarizing what's happening at all of your sites, and if you want to come find me afterwards to find out what's happening individually, you can do so. Almost every housing authority is now doing a criminal record check on people who apply to get into public housing. Sometimes that criminal record check involves checking court records. Sometimes it involves doing a check with the police department. Sometimes it involves doing a credit check, which I don't know if you all know, but when someone runs a credit check, it includes criminal record information of the last seven years. Many times, and we know this in our office, criminal background checks are inaccurate. They sometimes omit information. Sometimes the disposition information is inaccurate. It's important that people have an accurate--make sure that their criminal record is accurate if that's how the housing authority is going to decide whether or not they will admit someone. For instance, in Colorado, we've heard that they do--the housing authority will run a check through the police department and then if anyone has a criminal record, it doesn't matter what is on the record. If anything comes up, they will deny housing to the person and they tell the individual client that they need to go get their criminal record themselves through the police department and then to bring it to the housing authority and if they want to dispute the accuracy, they can do that with the housing authority. Well, that creates a huge barrier for people because many people don't know how to go to the police department and get the record or they don't have the resources to do so. So that's one way that it may be that you can link with a community-based organization who can help match that link, or maybe we can work with the housing authority to say, well, can't you provide the criminal record to the individual client right there? We're also realizing that it's not just felony convictions that are creating bars for people getting into public housing. Minor crimes, as minor as a violation, can bar someone from getting into public housing. In New York City, the New York City Housing Authority will bar people who have violations on their record from getting into public housing. The same is true in central Iowa. In Delaware, we know that if you even have an arrest, they're going to bar you from housing, and then you can show rehabilitation, but that's going to be an initial bar. The bars can be very long. Even though--what it is is that the Federal housing law says that local housing authorities have the discretion to establish the length of period of time that someone is not eligible to get into public housing and it just needs to be a reasonable period of time. So some communities are translating that into very long periods of time. For instance, in Jefferson County, Kentucky, the bar is ten years for someone who has a drug trafficking conviction, so that's ten years' time that they can't get into public housing after they've completed their sentence. That also happens to be the same period of time when someone probably needs public housing assistance the most. There's permanent ineligibility for people who sell speed in Jefferson County and in central Iowa. In New York, the bars are six years for people who are convicted of felony offenses. They primarily target in New York people with drug offenses and violent felonies. Even though these bars are long periods of time, the really important thing to know is that in almost every case, the policies allow people to show rehabilitation. If they can demonstrate rehabilitation to the housing authority, the bar can be lifted, and then each housing authority also has the discretion to determine what evidence of rehabilitation is. In many cases, you can show that the person's gone through substance abuse treatment or is participating maybe in a program that's linked to some of the programs that you'll be linking with, things like that. But another barrier that we've recognized is that people aren't necessarily being told that they're allowed to demonstrate rehabilitation in order to lift that bar. Okay, we know that in New York, not everyone gets told that. The Legal Aid Society of New York is doing a really good job now of trying to, like, educate people about the fact that even though you'll initially be given a letter that you've been denied housing because you have a criminal record, if you show rehabilitation, you'll be able to lift that bar. We've seen that in Polk County, Iowa, and in Colorado, they initially--if you have any kind of criminal record, they'll initially deny you housing. They'll send you a letter saying you've been denied and then they'll tell you that you can show rehabilitation. So it's important to let people know that even though it may seem at least at face value that they're not allowed to get into public housing, they eventually will if they can bring in the right paperwork. And in terms of rehabilitation, they focus not only on participation in programs but also how long ago the crime occurred, the severity of the crime, the nature of the offense, that kind of thing. Again, we're also learning that the public housing barriers affect the entire family, as I mentioned before. They can evict an entire family for the criminal behavior of one individual, even if it's a guest. And again, the local housing authority has the discretion to decide how they want to implement that. So that's another way that you can advocate with the public housing authority to be sensible about that regulation. The other thing is that we're also learning that in some jurisdictions, there's just no public housing available, and it doesn't matter that--I mean, it's not just a barrier to people with criminal records. It's just that there's no public housing. In Newcastle, Delaware, we've learned that there's only Section 8 housing, and in Colorado, we've also heard from people, from local advocates, that there's just a shortage of housing, and soit's not that they're necessarily targeting people with criminal records, it's everyone. So I just want to close out by saying that to focus on the fact that there is this discretion that the housing authorities have and so the key is to establish a good working relationship with your local housing authorities, but you have to do it with every housing authority. Make sure you cover every housing authority if you're working in multiple jurisdictions and that you should focus on the length of the bars that they establish, what qualifies as rehabilitation, and also some of the representation issues. Sometimes you're denied housing and they don't let you know that--they may not allow you to have access to an advocate to represent you at a hearing. Thank you. [Applause.] [Break between recorded tapes.] MR. JEFFRIES: You might want to take a second to stand up and stretch your limbs. The panel's been great on time, terrific. We're going to see this video and then he's going to make some comments and then we're going to open it for discussion. That wasn't really an opportunity to run out of the room. This is a chance for you to stretch yourselves. Mr. Hazelton's going to introduce the video to us. We'll have discussion afterwards. So, again, [inaudible] for you to talk to your neighbor and make noise because we're going to have a presentation, all right? Thanks. So if you can return to your seats now. That's what I get for trying to be flexible. Really, this is really not a chance for you to talk to your tablemates. I'm sorry to be [inaudible]. So in deference to Mr. Hazelton having the floor, thank you. Meeting the Challenges of Job Training and Placement MR. HAZELTON: Good morning. My name is Todd Hazelton. I'm from STRIVE Baltimore, an employment and training placement service in the City of Baltimore, and some of the challenges that offenders face when they reenter the community are very, very real. What STRIVE does to help meet the challenges that these individuals face is we approach the individual and their challenges with a type of training that goes directly to their attitude. Some of the challenges are very real that they have, and one of the challenges that they have coming back into the community is asking for help. A lot of times, coming back into the community, offenders who may have been incarcerated for a long period of time, it's an unwritten law in prison to not ask for help. Help is associated with barter and trade in prison. So if someone is asking for help, they see themselves as either having to give something up or being weak. So we have to attack the attitude and that mindset that they have that if I ask for help, I'm weak. If I ask for help, I'm going to have to give something else up in return. Why attitudinal training? Attitudinal training stimulates self-examination. What I want to do before I go into any more of what the challenges are that these offenders face coming back into the community, I want to just share with you a little bit of what we do at STRIVE. Two years ago, FOX-45, a local television station, followed our workshop, which is a three-week training program, and they followed us for the three-week training period that we had the participants go through. I just want to show you a little bit of how we deal with the issues that they have coming into the community and the substance abuse. [A video was shown.] MR. HAZELTON: That's kind of what we do. That is what we do over at STRIVE. You know, the barriers that we face with people that have certain issues surrounding employment are very valid when it comes to offenders coming back into the community. Most of them have limited skills. Some of them have been incarcerated for a long period of time. Their skills are limited. So we have to work with them and try and see what kind of soft skills that they have so that we can transfer those skills and work with them to enhance them so that we can try to find employment for them. Also, one of the other impediments is some of them have no work history. Some of them may have sold drugs all their lives. Some of them may have robbed all of their lives and have no work history. So the attitude approach that we use is to help them to get out of that mindset that because I have this baggage, because I've been in prison, I cannot fit back into society because there's this stigma attached to me based on my history. So that attitude that they have, we try to refocus that energy and make them to understand that they can get by that baggage that's sitting in them. Yes, we do have them do the stand and deliver where they're actually stripped down and then built back up on principles that they can use and go out and be productive. It's almost like yesterday, my boss and I, we were in Union Station and I was at a conference three weeks ago and I was saying this to myself, but when we were in Union Station yesterday, I said, you know, I call him Pop, I said, you know, we're at this conference. There are judges. There are law enforcement, probation and parole, other court reps, and I feel comfortable sitting in a room in the conference with all of these people knowing that I haven't done anything wrong, because not only am I a trainer at STRIVE, I'm also a graduate. Not only am I a trainer at STRIVE and a graduate, I'm an ex-offender. So a part of the mindset also is amongst this peer group, because once the inmate feels that others perceive him a certain way, that has weight on him, because one of the things that they talk about amongst the prison population is the fact that, man, how am I going to be looked at when I come out? So that feeling of guilt actually can help the inmate to abort their own development to become a productive member of the society, and I've seen it happen. So a part of the process of them growing is to know that, yes, they have done these things. Yes, you will be looked at in a certain light. Yes, you do have to meet probation and parole obligations. But we are going to work with you to integrate you back into the community, and a part of that help has to be humane. It has to be humane enough to where the person can feel itand know that, look, I'm not conforming to this set of guidelines because I'm going to get put back in prison. I'm going to conform to this set of guidelines because these people are really trying to help me and I want to help myself. So the humanity has to be in there, and like for me personally, me feeling no sense of friction, me feeling comfortable just being in a setting with the peer group from law enforcement, from judges, from corrections, without having that feeling of friction, knowing that I have not committed a crime, makes me feel all the more better about going on forward in the march for me making progress out in this community. I feel good about it. And we can't--sometimes it's like we can't cheapen someone's attempt to make progress. So at STRIVE, as we have the graduation, we have a celebration for them. Most of them have never celebrated anything. They've celebrated when they may have committed a crime. They've celebrated after they have been involved in all types of activities. That is not productive. I think STRIVE is a very good program and the program is geared towards helping individuals with those specific issues. Another one of the challenges is interviewing. Some of these people have never been interviewed. Some of them don't know how to fill out an application. And these are realities that we have to face and a part of that is, okay, I have an attitude problem, I've never been interviewed, so I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to stop the whole process of me even trying to learn how to interview because of my attitude. So the approach is that we help the individual to get control of the attitude, help them to become not only employable but retain employment, because most of the people that come out of the institution, they get a job but they don't keep it. They get a job while they're on probation or parole but they don't keep the job. And a part of the reason why they don't keep the job is because of their attitude. So we chip away at that attitude and begin to break that attitude down and redirect it so that they won't have that mindset that keeps them going back to revert to that criminal behavior. I think this is a good thing and I'm glad that the reentry courts have this process going where they're trying to implement this thing across the board like they are. I think it would have been a good thing for me to have been involved in it, and I'm just glad--I'm excited about reentry courts and I'm excited about STRIVE and how the program we have helps individuals with issues like that. Thank you. [Applause.] Discussion MR. JEFFRIES: Thank you. We're right on time, but perhaps more importantly, I want to point to one thing before we open it up. In addition to the panelists just being just especially disciplined about time, and I really appreciate that and I'm sure the audience does, too, yesterdaywhen I opened the conference up and we began, I acknowledged that the sites were involved in innovation and complimented you for your risk taking and the courage that you were, to kind of muster to do your daily jobs, because, you know, at your work, given what you're doing, colleagues look at you funny, it's a risky thing you're involved in, you're pushing the envelope, and that's very important and necessary. In a very analogous way, I want you to recognize the courage of the people on the panel who exposed themselves to you, deliberately, without me talking to them about it, because that was important to them. So part of being a part of an innovation is not only your capacity to innovate and to be courageous, but it's also to recognize courage when it's being presented to you, and I suspect that you and your work and your colleagues would also put you in positions later on in this work where you have to kind of make that recognition. So in addition to you doing very good and difficult work, understand that the people you're working with and the people that you'll be confronted by are also being courageous and taking risk, and I know that they would kind of appreciate your kind of understanding on that score. So having said that, questions, comments to the panel? Yes? Use your mike on the table. JUDGE GRAVES: A public housing question to Debbie. Henley Graves from Delaware. Is this such a political hot button that it can't be changed, the barriers to inmates and people with criminal records being stopped at the door? We're from Delaware. We know that there are restrictions. I mean, people come out and they have to sneak in the apartments and this, that, and the other. It goes on, just some people get caught and there are horrible repercussions. MS. MUKAMAL: I think, like a lot of the country, we're seeing a range across all sectors of society that we're erecting laws that affect people who are coming out of prison, so that it's not just housing, it's public assistance, employment, voting, educational student loans, and things like that. We're on a trend towards trying to take away the rights of people who have criminal records. So I think in that way it's a political issue and that the Federal housing laws, when they changed in 1996 and 1998, the impetus for that was--the idea was, we want public housing to be free of criminal behavior. We don't want there to be drugs in public housing. We don't want there to be violent crimes in public housing. And so the laws were changed, you know, towards that goal. And I think that what wasn't taken into account is that people can change and that just because you have a criminal history doesn't mean you're going to necessarily commit crimes in the future. The focus on individual discretion, I think, is important, and the fact that the housing authorities have discretion to change their housing plans to allow for people to be able to show rehabilitation and for them to be able to consider each case on an individual basis is really important. I think that how political it is depends on the community you're in and the availability of housing in the community, because I think in a place like New York City, where there's not public housing available to anyone, I think that there's probably more--there's more political pressure tonot then allow people who have committed crimes to get into those very scarce resources. MR. JEFFRIES: Would you go to a mike, please? Thank you. And if you haven't already, let us know who you are. MR. BROWN: Yes. My name is Collie Brown. My question is directed at Dr. Wood. I know you had--I think you started touching on an issue around partnershipping with churches and I'm wondering if you could probably expand on that a little bit more because I think the importance of partnerships with faith-based communities is one that I think has been receiving increasing attention and I wonder if you could probably expand on, from a community perspective, how can those partnerships be created and maybe even expand on that "One Church, One Neighbor" concept you briefly mentioned. DR. WOOD: Yes. Thank you so much. That idea is based on the work of Father George Clements [ph.], formerly of Holy Angels in Chicago, who created the "One Church, One Child" program in our country, and as a result of that work over the last 20 years, the adoption predicament has been erased in many States. Florida is a great leader in that. In fact, the Florida legislature has created a line item in the State budget for the "One Church, One Child" program. They operate out of Tallahassee, an extraordinary program. We do have a history of faith-based cooperation in our communities. Of course, the civil rights movement is well known. Dr. Leon Sullivan is another with his OIC movement. More recently, faith-based communities have come together, usually around pain in the community. The Boston people yesterday didn't mention, but so many of us know that much of the success that they alluded to yesterday is based on work of faith-based communities in the Boston area around a ten-point coalition that grew out of a shooting at a funeral in a city church, Morningstar Baptist in Mattapan, and following that, the leadership, from Cardinal Long, Dr. Ray Hammond, others pulled together that coalition. My own sense is that faith-based communities are ready to be involved now in all communities. In fact, the predicaments that we wrestle with and that this kind of movement answers is the kind of resource that we've been waiting for a long time. I think the care is to make sure that it's interdenominational, interfaith. The era of the lone ranger church is over and the value of collaboration has been established in community after community. I will be in two months going to a meeting, there's an organization in the country called the Congress of National Black Churches that brings together the leadership of the major inner city denominations that account for 22 million constituents in the African-American community of the nation and we are happy to be available to any of the communities that might be interested. MR. JEFFRIES: Other questions, comments? Do any of the panelists want to say a little bit more? We have time. Do you want to respond to other things panelists have said that might be interesting? Sure. MS. MUKAMAL: I have something unrelated to housing to say and that's that we put oneverybody's table some information on a funding source that might prove to be helpful to you and that's taken from a project that was initiated in New York, thanks to our criminal justice director in New York State, Katie Lapp [ph.]. And if anyone has questions about that project, you can definitely come find me because we were helpful, I think, in trying to analyze just precisely why that funding stream is appropriate for the population that you're working with in the reentry courts. MS. : I have a question for Todd. One of the things that really affected me about the video was that in the group that they looked at, and they started with 200 people and dwindled down to, I think, about 19 who finally graduated, I only saw one male in that group. Have you found that it's particularly difficult to move men through the program and make sure that they make it from the beginning to the end, and if so, have you all developed particular techniques focusing on men and some of their special issues? I was really disappointed to see the guy who was--you could see it in his face that he really wanted to be able to achieve, but he apparently had gotten back into the whole cycle again and wasn't able to complete it. So are there any particular approaches that STRIVE has taken or have you found this to be an issue even? MR. HAZELTON: Yes. Actually, STRIVE is a program that is under the umbrella of CFFWD, which is Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development, headed by Joe Jones. We have--the number of participants that come into our program is about equal. That particular piece that FOX-45 did does have the variation of more women than men. Traditionally in the country, we have had more programs of help geared towards helping women traditionally. The Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development, we have a portion of our program called Men's Services that when these males do come into our program, some of them that are offenders, some of them with substance abuse, generally, we have broader issues. So we direct them to the Men's Services portion of our program, which assists them further with any type of issues and help that they need. MS. : I was going to say, relative to the connection of fathers and workforce development is an important one as it relates to families. One of the issues that are facing men related to families is that many of the people you're dealing with will have child support orders, or if they don't have them will soon have them, and so their willingness and ability to work on the books, which is going to be a regulation that you're going to have anyway, is deeply connected to their role in the families, and so I just want to point out these issues are not unrelated. I'm talking about work and family and these other issues, but they all connect and it's important. MR. JEFFRIES: Right. DR. WOOD: Before you leave that-- MR. JEFFRIES: Yes, please. DR. WOOD: Just to tag onto that for a second, I would hope that at some point, there would be a movement in the nation to forgive all those and let these people start over for this reason, that we have forgiveness. We are trying to forgive nations of debt and we know that forgiveness is a new start, and at least if we could work on an arrangement by which they would begin to assume those responsibilities on their development starting point. They start off with more energy if they've been unburdened of that, and I just wanted to tack that on and hope that somewhere in the purview of our groups, somebody would see that as an initiative that ought to be pursued, the forgiveness of those debts. MS. : I wanted to let you know that in New York, actually, we've been very progressive, which is that arrearages do not accumulate when people are incarcerated in New York and it is a step that other States could and should be taking. It's interesting, just to follow up, that the issue of forgiveness came from the reverend and it's why I think the faith-based communities have something to offer. In all of those discussions about all the rewards and sanctions, the one incentive and reward that would mean the most to people coming out of prison would be your forgiveness, and if you could bring that to this work, the possibility that as they complete this process that that would be available to them from their families and the community and from you, that would be the greatest incentive you could provide. MR. HAMMETT: Good morning. My name is Moses Hammett and I'm with the Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development, and I'm the Director of Workforce Development. And that's one of the significant challenges that we have been faced with with men and women who are coming home from the correctional system is child support and arrearages. One of the things that Maryland has also, under the new czar who have taken over child support and enforcement, they've started a special project of debt leveraging, and what they're doing, for those individuals specifically who have come above board, because one of the things with these enormous arrearages, many of these individuals who are coming out of the correctional system, it almost forces them to go underground, because when you come home and you have a $28,000, $40,000, and I've heard some outrageous ones, as much as $78,000 arrearages, you get terrified and it's, like, what am I going to do? The new czar of the child support enforcement agency in Maryland, they really have made a concerted effort to really make child support enforcement more friendly to fathers and women who have support issues, and part of the debt leveraging program is to have that individual to come into our offices, because one of the things that folks, we call it sting-itis, because child support enforcement have used some techniques to get folks in, only to be arrested when they've come in to pick up basketball tickets and baseball tickets. So what they're trying to do is to make it--and actually get community-based organizations involved to help these individuals come above board, and CFWD has been very instrumental in advocating on behalf of folks with these arrearages and part of the debt leveraging is that if thatindividual is able to show six to eight months of consistency, the State will forgive 25 percent. Then if they continue with their payment on a consistent basis, then they would reduce it to 50 percent, and then once they continue to show consistency, then they will forgive the whole arrearages. So in Maryland, I think they're trying to be creative to allow individuals, and specifically fathers that are coming out of the correctional system, to come above board so that they can address those issues because those are some of the barrier issues that keep them under that process of going underground. MR. JEFFRIES: Other comments? Would you come to a mike? MS. : I just wanted to follow up on something that Liz Gaynes said about the dilemma of families when it comes to substance abusers returning home and relapsing. There was some conversation yesterday about making communities and families monitors, but we're really not being very fair to families if we're expecting them to monitor the use or lack thereof of a drug on the part of a substance abuser. It gets families embroiled in a dilemma that they don't need, and, in fact, 12-step programs, the parallel programs AlAnon and NarAnon, recommend that families stay out of this. This is the individual's issue and it needs to stay there. MS. BAYSDEN: Good morning. My name is Jean Baysden [ph.] and my question is for Mr. Hazelton. With STRIVE, is Baltimore the only location where the program is currently operating, and if not, what other locations and are there any prospects for expansion and where? MR. : I want to give some assist to Todd, because Todd, he actually just came on board at STRIVE maybe a little less than a month ago. He didn't explain that he's worked for Coca-Cola for the last two years and he's been doing volunteer and actually working with our dropout prevention program. But STRIVE is located in about 18 States around the country and they're aggressively expanding the opportunity. One of the things that we realized is that STRIVE is an approach that it's good for some folks and it doesn't fit in some opportunities, and that's why we, at our program, we have different initiatives and STRIVE was one of the workforce initiatives that have proven to be very successful. But STRIVE have aggressively tried to integrate the model or replicated the model as a complete approach to programming, to help their workforce development programs, and others have integrated it into their existing programs. So it is an aggressive effort to expand the STRIVE model around the country. If anyone's interested, STRIVE is based in East Harlem, New York, and we'll be glad to provide you with that information if you would like to contact them. The number is 212-360-1100. MR. JEFFRIES: A.T., did you want to--you're doing great. We're going to go about five more minutes and then break and then get back at 11:30. A.T.? MR. WALL: [Inaudible.] Is this on? All right. Thank you. In many ways, the theme of our panel has been community and that's a kind of amorphous term. What does it really mean? What's the content of community? Virgil, Roberta, and I had a conversation about that subject yesterday afternoon and I found what they said helpful and thought that you might find it helpful, too. In many ways, community probably should be looked at as a series of concentric circles based on the ability of the members of that group to influence the behavior and attitudes of the people involved, and at the core of that would be the family, which is the most powerful influence, for better or for good. The next ring could be the extended family, grandparents, godparents, aunts and uncles. Then the informal networks on another concentric circle, friends, coworkers, self-help networks like AA and NA, employers. Then more formal relationships, such as mentoring programs. And then human services agencies as another part of the circle. If we break down the concept of community into those concentric circles, and it doesn't fit perfectly. Sometimes a self-help network may be more important than a family. But if we break it down into those circles, we give meaning to the term "community" and it doesn't seem quite so overwhelming when we talk about involving the community in the work that we, speaking for myself, as professionals do. Thank you. MR. JEFFRIES: Okay. We'll take one last question or comment. MR. BYNUM: Hi. My name is Torrance Bynum and my question is directed to Precious. You stated that you raised the money to go to college and get your master's. In San Francisco, we started a program called Second Chance and this program allows ex-offenders to go to college and what we do is we buy books and we give them bus tokens and we give them lunch money. This program is privately funded and we're always faced with money issues. I just want to know, are there resources out there for ex-offenders? MS. BEDELL: Todd, when I raised the money for my master's, I was still incarcerated, so I wrote to every foundation and every prominent person in the world around to sort of get money, and some people responded positively and some people didn't respond at all. And then I ran across this volunteer who came to the children's center who knew of different construction foundations and I wrote letters to them and that's where the bulk of my money came from. But I'm not sure about resources for ex-offenders, but it's something that we can look into and talk about later. MR. JEFFRIES: Yes. I guess you're allowed to say something. MS. : I just wanted to express my personal thanks to the panelists. I often get asked, where do I find people to speak on reentry. We think it's a new concept but, in fact, it isn't. I have to tell you, I just met A.T. and Roberta and Virgil Wood about a week and a half ago. I was led to them and I thought I didn't have time, but you see they were exactly what we needed. I just offer that because, as everyone says, this work, it's hard, it seems messy. Go where you'reled and you will find what you need. MR. JEFFRIES: Thank you. That was a great discussion for lots of reasons. Let me just kind of process check. Again, one of the really important metaphors that I want to point out is about how difficult it is to do complicated work, and here's a really simple example. Over the course of these past two days, you've dealt with my bad jokes and humor, et cetera, and you've also dealt with my asking people to keep to time, and we've been great and it's been working out. But just think for a second that like if I wasn't on you about the time, think about how this day would have--it's not clear to me that it would have happened. Everyone was told what time they had, myself included, speakers, participants, breaks. Everyone has a watch one. Everyone can tell time, count, add. But still, somehow, people are late. That's not adhered to and so we help one another. And I mention that to you because in some really important way, the population that you're going to be dealing with, we have to be flexible with them, too. If I have to be flexible with you, you can bet you have to be flexible with them. So the demands that you ask of yourselves and of your programs and of your participants, we've now kind of been put in the position to negotiate carefully, right, negotiate honestly about the risks that you're taking. Ultimately, things work out. We're late, but everyone agrees that late is okay. We're still on schedule. But it's really important to think about the number of different levels of coordination that this kind of work takes and this conference, I think, is at some level an expression of that. We're going to break for ten minutes and come back at 11:30. Thanks again to the panelists. Thanks. [Applause.] [Break.]
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